How to become a Stoic and stop suffering

What Is Stoicism?

Stoicism is getting quite popular and misunderstood at the same time.

A lot of people are searching for a way to cope with life’s hardest blows, and as it turns out, the Stoics found it more than 2,000 years ago.

As opposed to most philosophy, this one is actually helpful. It can bring us some relief in times of distress and anxiousness.

Stoicism is the inspiration of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), it even works similarly, focusing on our negative thoughts and emotions, becoming aware of them and the fact that they pass.

Our reaction to everything happening around us isn’t based on the event itself but our perception of it.

Say your house burns down (an extreme example but bear with me), you could react in one of two ways, the negative being the most obvious one, constantly reminding yourself of everything that got destroyed with it, or the positive stoic approach, accepting the reality and moving on.

Now, this may seem a bit difficult to do, but if you practice your mindset, it will in time become easier.

Take Thomas Eddison as an example. The man was obsessed with his work. It meant a lot to him. On the evening of December 10th, 1914, an enormous explosion set fire to ten buildings that made up half of Eddison’s plant and covered them in flames.

The reaction of the famous inventor was a real demonstration of stoicism. He said to his son: “go get your mother and all her friends. They’ll never see a fire like this again.”

He knew that nothing could be done about it, and just stood there to watch the show, his hard work slowly turning into ashes. When his son objected, he said: “It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.”

Zeno of Cyprus founded the Stoic school of thought in Athens. After losing everything he had in a shipwreck and being stranded from home, the once-wealthy merchant bumped into a book store and started turning pages in a few philosophy books, which resulted in him becoming intrigued about Socrates’ work, among others.

Zeno proceeds to ask where he could find one of these so-called philosophers, and someone instantly pointed one passing through the streets, since at the time, around 300 BC, Athens was flooded with philosophers, there were several schools of thought getting noticed by many.

Zeno then started to seek knowledge and wisdom through the study of philosophy, having a few tutors considered the city’s most well-known philosophers.

After a while, he created his way of thinking called Stoicism and began to teach his students.

This philosophy has changed a bit since its conception in ancient Greece. Many great thinkers wrote about it from their perspective, but the core principles are still the same.

Stoics use logic and reason as a tool to deal with the “bad stuff” that happens from time to time to all of us.

They believed that everything occurs due to cause and effect, which results in a rational universe or LOGOS. You could think of this as a soft or mild Determinism.

SURRENDER TO UNCERTAINTY AND GIVE UP CONTROL (TO AN EXTENT)

One of the principle ideas of Stoicism is that we can’t control everything; there are things just far from our reach.

You can control how you behave, most of your actions, the effort that you put into your work, but you cannot control the storm that resulted in slow, heavy traffic in the city, making you late for work.

In the same way you can assume responsibility, provide your children with everything they need, yet you cannot control how they will turn out in life, their thinking, or actions. While you can influence other people, you can’t fully control them.

By accepting this simple, rough reality, we can become peaceful, make everything possible so that things go right, but if they fail at least we know we did everything we could, and it was not our fault, it was bound to happen.

STOP HOPING FOR THINGS TO CHANGE OR GET BETTER

In Stoicism, faith is a horrible thing. It is like a drug, when someone is in pain or suffering, in an attempt to relieve them of such state, people tend to say things like “it’ll be alright” or “everything is going to be fine.” While this may be reassuring, it only lifts us up and makes the eventual fall even more painful.

We continuously need little doses of it to feel good, to escape the current reality, replacing it with a far fetched possibility. Instead, we should prepare for the worst and hope for nothing.

If you assume that the worst possible case scenario is going to happen, it’ll be predictable, unsurprising, familiar, and won’t affect us as much as it could.

The reality is that we can survive most of the situations that make us suffer, but we hold on so hard that a part of us goes down with them.

As Marcus Aurelius said: “We are each of us stronger than we think.”

WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE SOME DAY

One of the hardest truths to accept is the fact that we are going to perish one day. Philosophers have been trying to make sense of this for ages. Death can make us uneasy, to say the least, a lot of us start wondering about it from a young age, and end up with a terrible existential crisis.

Say a loved one is on the verge of dying. All the odds are against them. The doctors told you it looks bad and probably won’t make it out of that one.

That’s some hard news to hear for sure, and it can be challenging to accept it. If you hold on to hope and death claims your loved one, you’ll be destroyed, it is unexpected, you were expecting a miracle.

Stoicism is influenced by the views of the natural world, Pantheism being one of them, stoics believe that death is a natural part of life, they don’t run away from it. Instead, they embrace it.

By embracing death, making your peace with it, and accepting that we are all going to die, you won’t see it as a tragedy anymore, but a common eventuality.

By expecting the worst, we get to be surprised by the best and make ‘the worst” powerless. By accepting death, we stop fearing it and start living life with the obvious possibility of dying at any moment. “Live like if you were going to die tomorrow,” they say.