Stoicism: How To Think Like A Roman Emperor - Donald Robertson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 274

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Nobody's perfect, nobody's wise.…

   1. DRDonald Robertson0:00

      Nobody's perfect, nobody's wise. But to feel the kind of pain, in a way, of lacking wisdom, and to crave it, and to realize it's the most important thing in life, and to dedicate your life to this kind of endless journey is really what life is actually all about. (wind blowing)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:20

      You're a cognitive behavioral therapy-trained psychologist. Why are you-

   3. DRDonald Robertson0:24

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:24

      ... writing about Marcus Aurelius?

   5. DRDonald Robertson0:26

      That's a really good question. Because actually, my first love was philosophy. And, uh, I, I think I came to philosophy looking for a philosophy of life, really. You know, something that would help me, uh, feel better about life, cope with adversity. And I didn't find it at university when I was doing my philosophy degree, uh, so then I started training in psychotherapy and stuff like that. Then after that, I realized I'd missed something, which is the one school, one major school of ancient philosophy that you don't normally study in an undergraduate philosophy curriculum. Uh, so it's like the stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone, kind of thing. And so I discovered Stoicism, and I thought, "This is the thing that I was looking for the whole time I was at university and nobody ever told me about." And, uh, so I got into Stoicism and I realized it was also the philosophical inspiration for cognitive therapy. Not a lot of people know that. So the two things wedded together, and I thought, "Oh, cognitive therapists must all be really into Stoicism, then." It turned out they weren't, so I ended up writing a book about that. And I thought, "Oh, this is a nerdy, obscure subject that no one's ever gonna be interested in. I'm never gonna be talking about this on podcasts or anything like that in the future." And then it's, weirdly, it became trendy, like, a few years after I started writing about it, and I got dragged into this thing that suddenly people were getting tattooed on them and stuff like that. It kind of became a bit, uh, hip, just as I was getting a little bit old. Actually, I feel, uh, you know ...

   6. CWChris Williamson1:53

      (laughs)

   7. DRDonald Robertson1:54

      ... I'm get- I'm getting older now.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:55

      You've missed the boat.

   9. DRDonald Robertson1:56

      It's all kind of young, young kids that are into it and stuff. Uh, as I'm reliably told by the publishing industry, there is Millennials that work in the tech industry that are the, the demographic-

   10. CWChris Williamson2:06

       Okay.

   11. DRDonald Robertson2:06

       ... that are into Stoicism, mainly.

   12. CWChris Williamson2:08

       Why do you think that is?

   13. DRDonald Robertson2:10

       Well, see, the thing is, you know, I always think I'm in a very lucky position, 'cause I talk to so many people. So sometimes when I'm answering questions about Stoicism, I think, "Oh, that's easy, 'cause I've asked them and they keep telling me why it is." So I'll tell you what they've told me, basically. So they tell me that they feel overwhelmed by social media and the news media bombarding them with alarmist stuff about things that aren't under their direct control. Like, they think the media are trying to fearmonger and instill hatred, but ... Which is accurate, probably. And they, they don't know how to deal with that, and they feel that they need some kind of philosophy of life to cope with it. Um, but ... Like Nietzsche said, you know, "God is dead, um, but we're still kind of living in his shadow," so they want something that's kind of like what Christianity used to do for our, our, our grandparents and so on. Um, but a lot of people today, especially, I think, in the tech industry, are, are quite rationalist, and they, they want a secular philosophy that's based on reason rather than faith, revelation, or tradition. And so they find in Stoicism – and there are historical reasons for this, uh, why they would – a, a secular alternative to, to Christianity and a kind of secular th- They want something like CBT, but that is bigger, that's a wh- Like a Western yoga, they also say.

   14. CWChris Williamson3:35

       (laughs)

   15. DRDonald Robertson3:35

       Yeah, I'm just telling you all the stuff they tell me, man. (laughs) It's like if you ... So, like, uh, yeah, they tell me, "We want a Western yoga. It's like Buddhism, but Western." And so they want more than CBT. They want a whole way of life. And so that's what Stoicism gives them.

   16. CWChris Williamson3:50

       Yeah, I've been fascinated thinking about what went missing with-

   17. DRDonald Robertson3:54

       Uh-huh.

   18. CWChris Williamson3:55

       ... no, no consistent religion anymore now. And-

   19. DRDonald Robertson3:58

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson3:58

       ... the most recent riots at the Capitol, I think are, are part of that, this anomi, this normlessness that we've got at the moment. Tradition is out of the window. We're ... The s- science is the new god, materialist, reductionist-

   21. DRDonald Robertson4:12

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson4:12

       ... standpoints on everything are the, are the victor.

   23. DRDonald Robertson4:15

       Yeah. I just wrote an article about that yesterday. You, they, you're right on the button there, buddy, with the topical aspect of this, for sure, because that's exactly what people are asking about. And it seems odd that people would say, "Well, there's this ancient Greek philosophy that might be really relevant to the riots on Capitol Hill," so, you know ... I mean, I feel people hearing that might think that sounds really implausible. But, you know, already, loads of people are saying, "Yeah, it's anomi," like you were saying. It's disillusionment. You know, people have no sense of direction. They've lost touch with their values. And the more people are confused about their moral values, often, the more kind of rigid and dogmatic, like, you know, and, and draconian they become, uh, in trying to force their nonexistent values on other people-

   24. CWChris Williamson5:00

       Absolutely.

   25. DRDonald Robertson5:00

       ... really paradoxically. And the more reflective people are about their values, you know, and in touch with them, the more flexible they tend to be about them, strangely. Um, so I think, really, I- Paradoxically, there's a connection between the lack of deep, sincere, moral self-examination in modern society and this kind of rigid, dogmatic prejudice. And also, there's a psy- there's a really obvious psychological angle to this, and it's kind of ... It's just ... I don't know. Like, it's so strange, 'cause it's glaringly obvious and nobody ever does anything really to address it on a societal level. And that is, we know that anger biases judgment and anger is related to political prejudice and racial prejudice and religious pre- That's been known for decades.Um, and yet, we allow the media to go crazy by provoking anger and fear, uh, in social media like partly because it's very structured kind of fueling that, escalating things like crazy. And so it's no surprise that prejudices, like, begin to proliferate in society. We need to help people manage their anger, and we need to help them reflect on their values. And weirdly, those are two things that Stoicism is fundamentally interested in.

   26. CWChris Williamson6:22

       Marcus Aurelius had big problems with anger, didn't he? I think-

   27. DRDonald Robertson6:24

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson6:24

       ... based on what I know about him, that was probably the biggest vice emotion that he had.

   29. DRDonald Robertson6:29

       He, he says that. I mean, we've, we've got slender evidence really. But he says, uh, in the Meditations that he was worried that he was going to lose his temper a few times and do something that he'd regret. And he's very preoccupied with anger, but so are our Stoics. I, I think he had problems managing his own anger though. Um, on the other hand, the histories. So we have these two sides of Marcus Aurelius. We have what he writes himself in his private journal, so kind of the, the inner psychological story. And it... and by the way, there's internal evidence that's fairly convincing to most scholars that this was never intended for publication. I agree with that. I think it seems unlikely that this was meant for publication, whereas Seneca's letters are... were definitely literary devices in that they were clearly meant for publication. Um, but in private, Marcus talks about his anger. In public, the histories of his reign, um, seem to say the opposite, that he was very calm, he wasn't easily provoked. There was one time when he lost his temper and ordered the beheading of a Germanic chieftain, but then he walked it back and sent the guy into exile instead.

   30. CWChris Williamson7:38

       What? After he had his head chopped off?
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah, 'cause you can…

   1. DRDonald Robertson15:00

      of some of the things that, that Marcus is talking about.

   2. CWChris Williamson15:02

      Yeah, 'cause you can only see it in that broader context, right? I was, um ... I spent my birthday last year on the Stoa Poikile-

   3. DRDonald Robertson15:12

      Aha.

   4. CWChris Williamson15:12

      ... uh, in Athens, uh, which was like-

   5. DRDonald Robertson15:13

      You mean in the bar? Were you in the ... You mean in the, the bar beside it or?

   6. CWChris Williamson15:17

      No, on the steps-

   7. DRDonald Robertson15:18

      You have-

   8. CWChris Williamson15:18

      ... of the Painted Porch, yeah.

   9. DRDonald Robertson15:20

      No you didn't. Well, uh, no, you mean the Stoa Atalou, the, the one that's like a museum in the Agora? Like-

   10. CWChris Williamson15:26

       Yeah.

   11. DRDonald Robertson15:26

       ... it's all shiny and new.

   12. CWChris Williamson15:28

       Yeah. Well, I ... Is that not on the spot of where the other-

   13. DRDonald Robertson15:31

       No.

   14. CWChris Williamson15:31

       Oh, is it not? I ... Are you-

   15. DRDonald Robertson15:32

       No, it's-

   16. CWChris Williamson15:32

       ... gonna ruin this for me? Donald-

   17. DRDonald Robertson15:34

       Sorry.

   18. CWChris Williamson15:34

       ... that was my birthday.

   19. DRDonald Robertson15:35

       Actually, wind that back. You were really close, though. You were just across the street from it. Like, that's, uh, that's, uh, that's actually kind of a museum. It's the-

   20. CWChris Williamson15:43

       Yeah, yeah.

   21. DRDonald Robertson15:44

       ... uh, the Stoa of Attalus.

   22. CWChris Williamson15:45

       Okay.

   23. DRDonald Robertson15:45

       And so it's a replica, right? But it's beautiful. And, uh, across the road, there's this dirty hole in the ground full of garbage and graffiti and stuff with some, like, rubble in it, and a lot of cats.

   24. CWChris Williamson16:01

       (laughs)

   25. DRDonald Robertson16:01

       And that's the Stoa Poikile, which ironically used to be this ... the original Stoa Poikile, you know it means Painted Porch. Like, 'cause it was like an art gallery. It had these four huge paintings by the leading artists of the day so that the Stoics lectured in front of these works of art. It would've been as beautiful, maybe, as the, the Stoa that you were on, the Stoa, uh, the Stoa Atalou. Yeah, you were on the wrong porch, buddy. But it was still-

   26. CWChris Williamson16:24

       Why does it-

   27. DRDonald Robertson16:24

       ... it was a good porch.

   28. CWChris Williamson16:25

       I ... Google Maps needs-

   29. DRDonald Robertson16:27

       Ugh.

   30. CWChris Williamson16:27

       It's two, they told me 2,500 years to get the directions right, and obviously Google Maps has taken me to the wrong place. No, I loved it. I spent last ... the birthday before at the Vatican and around the Roman Forum and then the Agora-
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   That's interesting. I, for…

   1. DRDonald Robertson30:00

      on, on the internet. So, although people talk about self-help, and they're kind of fascinated by it in our society, it's like a huge thing. Like, uh, I'll give, and I'll give you a really clear example of that. It's my favorite subject right now, super topical, anger, right? Hardly anybody is really bothered to talk about and do anything about anger in themselves and in society. The people that talk about self-help are more likely to be talking about personal suffering, like anxiety and depression, but they're seldom really addressing feelings of anger, and there are psychological reasons for that. Um, we know that to be the case. I think anger is the royal road to self-improvement though. I think people are really missing a trick there. I think it's much easier, in some ways, to address anger first, like, and there's a huge potential there for self-improvement, if we could just kind of, as a society, encourage people to question their anger more. And the Stoics thought anger was the main thing we should be working on precisely because they said, you know, it's the, the emotion that's most obviously a threat to society. Uh, it's the most interpersonal emotion in a sense. So, I really, that's kind of one of my passions at the moment, uh, and I use that word advisedly, is that, uh, we need to get people to kind of really do self-help more on anger, like, it's a massive gap.

   2. CWChris Williamson31:23

      That's interesting. I, for better or for worse, anger is an emotion that for me is very, very, very rare. I think I'm fairly cognizant at, at knowing what's going on. The texture of my own mind is something I'm not totally ignorant to. Um, and yet over, um, the last month or so, there was a period where I got angry, and oh my God, it is such a hell of an emotion, especially when you're not necessarily attuned to it.

   3. DRDonald Robertson31:49

      Uh-huh.

   4. CWChris Williamson31:49

      There's other things that occur more frequently in my life, and it's like the devil that you know. You, you understand, okay, we're at this stage, we're at that stage, and you almost get into the rhythm of understanding how you deal with it, but anger is so all-encompassing. And when you then scale that up into crowds, these crowds can be virtual, online, in a group-

   5. DRDonald Robertson32:07

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson32:07

      ... in a, a, a Reddit thread, on a QAnon sub, sub-forum or whatever it might be, or they can be in person at a football riot or at the, the Capitol Hill, it can cause that. Um, I, I wanted to loop back to something you mentioned as well about how people are using personal development to almost stave off the different fears that they have, and I'm 100% in agreement. I've had this theory for a long time that the current longevity, biohacking, productivity movements, time management, all of these things are working on an Ear- Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, that people terrified about the fact that lives don't have any greater meaning.

   7. DRDonald Robertson32:41

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson32:41

      We've removed our connection to the wider world, to nature, to the awe of the night sky. And what are they doing? "Oh, if I live longer, if I get more done in less time, then I won't have this fear anymore."

   9. DRDonald Robertson32:51

      I can give you a long list of reasons why self-help is an avoidance strategy, like, uh, many, many reasons. Uh, here's number one. Clients come into therapy. They'll usually go, "I've got this huge library of self-help books that I've been reading for years," right? So, a lot of self-help reading just encourages what we call ruminative thinking. So, people are thinking about their problems and chewing them over and not actually doing anything to change them. A lot of self-help strategies involve emotional control or suppression, like, so using breathing techniques, visualization techniques, mantras and things are ways that people use to actually avoid engaging with their emotions and processing them naturally. Um, people use self-help as a way of getting direction from authority figures, like psychologists, rather than becoming more self-reliant to identify their own values. Like, there are many ways that, that people use self-help, uh, advice in a, a, a way that's obviously counterproductive. And the clients who are in cl- therapy will tell you that themselves, like, it's very common clients come into therapy and they say, you know, "I read all these articles and I've got this massive library of self-help books, but I'm not getting any better." Like, and, uh, you know, there are reasons for that.

   10. CWChris Williamson34:04

       I was having a look at objective representation and cognitive distancing, uh, when reading your book. And how does that relate to the Stoic work, and, and what is it, and how can people utilize it?

   11. DRDonald Robertson34:15

       Phantasia kataleptike is the, the Greek, um, and it, it's hard to translate, but it, uh, well, it actually means a, a, an impression or a representation that grasps reality, is grounded in reality. And what the Stoics appear to mean by this, so, objective representation is Pierre Hadot's kind of paraphrase of that, and it, it means describing events in a way that suspends value judgments or emotive rhetoric, right? I was gonna say a minute ago, actually, if you want to experience anger, like you were saying, you know, just go on the, the comments on YouTube or something like that for five minutes and, you know, it's like a laboratory experiment in anger exposure, like, it's hard. And even if you don't have anger, you've got to deal with other people's, right? But the internet is f- full of people using strongly emotive language, um, like, you know, rather than saying... People say things like, you know, "You shot me down in flames and tore a strip off me," when they could say, "Oh, you just expressed disagreement with part of what I said." Like, so the Stoics want is... (laughs) This is why Cicero thought the Stoics were rubbish at legal rhetoric. Like, he was like, "You guys, you, you-"

   12. CWChris Williamson35:26

       Oh, 'cause there was no drama, there was no-

   13. DRDonald Robertson35:28

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson35:28

       ... there was, there was no showmanship with it.

   15. DRDonald Robertson35:30

       Yeah. He goes, "You make everything too concise and too kind of banal," and they were like, "Well, th- like, that's to get rid of the effect of rhetoric, right?" Like, you know, like, sure, in a law court you're trying to manipulate the audience; we're trying to undo that. I call Stoicism kind of anti-rhetoric or counter-rhetoric. And, you know, in the ancient world, there were these lawyers/stroke-... self-help gurus called the Sophists. And I used to, for a long time, think we don't really have Sophists in the mo- modern world. Maybe we have, like, self-help gurus and stuff, but it's not quite the same. And then one day, it dawned on me, like, we do. We have digital Sophists. Like, Facebook is basically a massive Sophist, and so is Twitter. So, the, the Sophists would just say whatever would get a reaction out of people. Like, and Socrates was like, "This is a problem, man. You guys are just saying whatever, you know, evokes anger or what, uh, gets the cl- the crowd to applaud you or whatever, and you don't really give two hoots about the truth. Like, you're just saying whatever gets a response from people, and that just leads to distortion. It amplifies people's emotions." And then one day, it dawned on me. I thought, "Yeah, we don't have Sophists like that anymore, because now they've been taken over by algorithms." That's basically what social media and social media is, is this massive Sophist. And so we need Socrates and we need the Stoics to teach us this, how to protect ourselves against sophistry and rhetoric and the manipulation of our emotions through the use of emotive language. So, the Stoics say we should learn to re-describe things in a more down-to-earth and objective way so that we can stick to the facts, like, and not distort things and, and kind of, like, in a way that fires our emotions up.

   16. CWChris Williamson37:10

       How can people apply that cognitive distancing? Obviously, it sounds great.

   17. DRDonald Robertson37:15

       How do they do it? The Stoics just want us to prac-... Like, when we're, we feel that we're getting upset or angry about something, first of all, like, they want us just to pause, and maybe to say to ourselves it's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them. So, realizing that it's our way of thinking that's causing us to, to feel so upset, rather than the event itself. Take responsibility, basically, for our value judgments. And then to re-describe it, to say, like, what, what's actually happening here in more specific, down-to-earth, and objective language. And when we do that, the Stoics think that helps us to moderate the, the effect of our emotions. And then the other thing is to broaden our perspective, because... I mean, the Stoics were way ahead of their time, right? And if, if, if you think the Stoics were ahead of their time, my friend, like, you want to go and read some Sigmund Freud. Like, 'cause that wasn't that long ago, and people were, people still use Freud today, right? Even though that would be, like, alchemy or something. Like, you know that, like, Freud was pre-scientific psychology, right? So, I remember when I started as a psychotherapist, psychoanalytic approaches were still kind of not that rare. You know, people still took them quite seriously. Um, largely, Freudianism in its traditional form has kind of died off now. But if you compare what he was doing to what the, uh, the Stoics were doing, they were way ahead of their time. Like, they, the Stoics seem futuristic compared to Freud. Like, Freud had no idea, really, what he was talking about. Um, and, you know, m- most of regard contrary, people are gonna be shocked if I say this, but I, I think there's very little of value in Freud's writings, and I have a master's degree in psychoanalytic theory. Incidentally, I trained as a psychoanalytic counselor, um, and I had psychoanalysis myself, uh, and it was interesting.

   18. CWChris Williamson39:03

       It's just, was it not just projection? Was it not just an entire lifetime-

   19. DRDonald Robertson39:07

       It was all projection.

   20. CWChris Williamson39:07

       ... of internal projection? Yeah.

   21. DRDonald Robertson39:08

       Freud, um... I, I'm very interested in Freud's biography, actually. Freud's father died, and then he had a lot of dreams about, uh, that were traumatic for him, and he decided to interpret his own dreams. And he, he believed that he unconsciously was attracted sexually to his own mother, um, and frightened of his father, uh, and there was this kind of love triangle. And then he just assumed that that applied to everybody else, which is obviously crazy, right? Because he'd hardly seen any clients. He'd seen about five or six clients, I think, by the time he'd already decided that this was true of everyone. And Freud hated therapy. Like, he, he really didn't like doing it. If you look at his collected writings, you know, there's, whatever, 12 volumes or something, I think there's only one volume actually about therapy. And the rest of it's all this crazy theory and him doing psychoanalysis on Leonardo da Vinci and Moses and, like, weird speculative anthropology and stuff. He, he just wanted to be a kind of armchair, like, uh, you know, theorist or whatever, really.

   22. CWChris Williamson40:10

       Is, is that not the, the biggest distinction between what he did and what the Stoics did, that it was a philosophy of action born in the crucible of real life?

   23. DRDonald Robertson40:19

       Yeah, and Stoicism lasted a lot longer. I mean, Freudian psychoanalysis was trendy for, like, I don't know, like, 60 years or 70 years or whatever. And then, it's, it's pretty much dead in the water now, you know. It's, it's like, like I say, it's like a few, a bit like alchemy now or something. Um, but Stoicism flourished in the ancient world for five centuries. Like, and that meant, you know, but to Marcus Aurelius, Socrates was ancient history. Like, Socrates died, uh, 500 years before, uh, before Marcus Aurelius, um, was even born. And, uh, you know, that person is like, like I was talking about, somebody in the late medieval period, right? So, they're like, "We've been doing this for a long time." Uh, and so a lot of people in Greece and Rome and all over, like, the known world had been practicing Stoicism. We know of 80, uh, Stoic philosophers from antiquity. Uh, the names of authors or teachers, like, there were loads of them. Um, so, like, it was something that they developed over a very long period of time. And I, I'm still puzzled by it and impressed by it, like how much of it is, is relevant and is confirmed by modern research in psychology. So, the one, the one I was gonna mention is we know now that when people get angry or depressed, they, they... there's a narrowing in the scope of attention. So, people can normally pay attention to, like, maybe five or six things at once. So, you could be driving your car and listening to the radio and, and maybe thinking about what you're gonna have for dinner, and also kind of, like, telling your kids in the back seat to keep the noise down or whatever, right? So, you can walk and chew gum. Like, you can do more than one thing at a time, you can multi-... a task, or whatever, except when you're under stress. Like, so when people, like, become very emotionally distressed, their scope of attention narrows and they're less capable to think about multiple things at once, right? And we do this thing called threat monitoring, where we tend to really zero in, put under a magnifying glass, the, the things that we see as threatening or upsetting. And the Stoics realized that we did that. Like Freud has no concept really that's equivalent to this. He thinks what you should really be doing is trying to figure out whether it symbolizes castration in your dreams or something like that.

   24. CWChris Williamson42:25

       (laughs)

   25. DRDonald Robertson42:25

       Like, which nobody, nobody thinks is helpful today.

   26. CWChris Williamson42:29

       Sigmund, for the love of God, leave it alone.

   27. DRDonald Robertson42:31

       Freud literally tho- like, Freud literally thought all f- he says all forms of anxiety are disguised castration anxiety. Like, all forms of anxiety. Like, that's how crazy Freud's theory was. Anyway, the, um, the Stoics were like, "No, like, I mean, anxiety is caused by your value judgments," like you'd think, like, most people might assume, right? So if you think something is really, really bad and it's about to happen, then you're probably gonna feel anxious, right? So it's got to do with the value that you invest in external events, uh, especially if they're n- they're, you know, they're not directly under your control, it's gonna feel more anxiety provoking. That, that's common sense in a way. And so the Stoics think also we narrow our attention down onto things, and they realize if you broaden the scope of your attention, it will tend to dilute the emotional response. So you might have said something that annoys me on Twitter, right? And maybe I don't know anything about you and I haven't seen what your day's been like. All I know is that you just said something c- that could be taken in a slightly offensive way, like... So now taking that one remark in isolation, I'm gonna focus my attention narrowly on it and have this kind of intense emotional reaction to it. Whereas if I broadened my attention, like, I might, you know, if I did know more about you, I might think, "Oh, maybe you do a lot of good things. You know, maybe you've had a bad day, like, you know, maybe you gave money to charity yesterday." Like, so there would be a more rounded picture of you. That's really one of the things that's lacking in modern society. We react to these little slices of people's character or behavior rather than viewing their personality in a rounded way. Socrates talks about this problem explicitly, um, actually in relation to his own wife, Xanthippe. So people say, "Oh my God, how can you stand to live with that woman?" 'Cause she had a notoriously bad temper, right? And Socrates was like, "But she's a really good wife and a good m- she just shouts at me occasionally. Yes, she threw a bucket of water over me once, but, like, I try and interpret her behavior in a rounded... She's also, like, a really awesome person." Like, so Socrates has this whole dialogue about it, where he says, you know, you've got to view people, you've got to go past the appearance and get to the reality, and that means, like, focusing in a more broad way on somebody's character as a whole. And we don't do that today, we narrow our attention down. Social media, by its very nature, potentially encourages us to do that, 'cause it speeds up communication by abstracting little pieces of information

4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   What would Marcus Aurelius…

   1. DRDonald Robertson45:00

      out, but that prevents us really from getting to know people properly. And, you know, to u- to understand all this, to forgive all, the saying goes, well, you know, I don't know if we could take that literally, but certainly the more we know about people, the less likely we are to have knee-jerk emotional responses to the, the things that we do. Especially if we make an effort, like to maintain that rounded perspective on things. 'Cause on the one hand I can see the nasty thing that you said, and I have, uh, maybe I still have an emotional reaction to that, but when my attention has broadened, I'm also seeing and remembering other nice things that you did, and so that compensates or it balances it out. So I can still disapprove of the thing that you did, but not be completely emotionally overwhelmed by it, 'cause I'm adopting a more balanced perspective.

   2. CWChris Williamson45:45

      What would Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics have to say about facing adversity?

   3. DRDonald Robertson45:51

      They think it's a good thing, like, which seems like a truism, but there were other people that thought it was a bad thing. Like, there were other philosophers in the ancient world that thought you'd be better off going and living in a commune and avoiding c- like... Allegedly, Epicureans will get upset if I say this, 'cause there's some disagreement about it, but in the ancient world people thought the Stoics and the Epicureans were almost polar opposites. And Epicurus l- lived in this little private garden on the, uh, uh, outside, uh, Athens, uh, surrounded by a circle of his friends in relative obscurity. And allegedly he said it's better not to marry or have children or get involved in public life. Like li- you know, basically live like a monk or live like a, in a hippie commune or whatever, like all peace and love and, and try and keep it tranquil, like, whereas the Stoics wanted to get right in the middle of the fray, like, they were where you were, right in the agora, like, you know, just like f- you know, the, the Stoic face the agora. Same as Socrates would go and do philosophy in the street and at his friends' houses. And so the, so the downside of that is that people would be really abusive to them. People, um, used to beat Socrates up in the street, like they'd threaten him, they'd shout abuse at him, because he was asking too many questions and rocking the boat. But Socrates was famous for apatheia, like, which is, you know, a term that we use in Stoic philosophy. We're told that it was really Socrates that made this concept famous. He was unruffled, he was as cool as a cucumber and as unruffled as a tortoise. Just, like, that's pretty unruffled. Like, he wouldn't let anything bo- Have you ever seen a tortoise that looked ruffled?

   4. CWChris Williamson47:28

      (laughs) No.

   5. DRDonald Robertson47:29

      Exactly, right? So that's, uh, Socrates. He wasn't easily fazed. But the thing, when we talk about temperance and self-control in Ancient philosophy, like one of the most obvious ways that's manifested is in being able to have conversations without losing your temper. And Socrates was famous for that. Epictetus, the Stoic teacher, loves Socrates. Goes on and on and on about him. He tells his students that they should emulate Socrates.... but then he says something really weird that I think should freak out modern readers of Plato. He says, "You know the most important thing that you could learn from Socrates is that he never got in quarrels." It wasn't even the things he said. It was the way that he said them. It was the fact that he was always good-humored and artfully polite, and even when people got angry with him, like, he was able to defuse it. Like, he never, ever lost his temper with other people. Like, so talking to people about really sensitive subjects, like religion and politics and stuff like that, you know, often it just degenerates out ... you see it all the time on the internet. But Socrates didn't avoid these discussions, and he also didn't let them spiral out of control. So, he, his adversity was facing argumentative people, bad-tempered people. Now, in the end, he did get executed partly for that and, and for other things that he did along the way, right? But throughout his life, he was known for this magical ability, this paranormal ability to be able to talk to people about really sensitive subjects and interrogate them about it. And for the m- for the most part, not to punch them in the face.

   6. CWChris Williamson49:03

      What if the adversity isn't so easily, cerebrally sort of explained away? It's not just the sort of thing that you can have a discourse about?

   7. DRDonald Robertson49:12

      For example?

   8. CWChris Williamson49:13

      A pandemic.

   9. DRDonald Robertson49:15

      Oh, the pandemic. I mean, funnily enough, Socrates lived through a, a plague. And Marcus Aurelius, you, you know, lived through the, the Antonine Plague. Um, I mean, you know, like books on Stoicism have shot through the roof in terms of sales since the beginning of the pandemic, so I think instinctively, a lot of people have felt that Stoicism could help them deal with the adversity of the pandemic. Not just 'cause of the historical connection, but they kind of have this visceral feeling that Stoicism is relevant to dealing with this situation. The, the ancient Stoics write a lot about how to cope with being sent into exile, and I used to think, "That doesn't seem that relevant to me in my life." Then the pandemic happened, like, we had quarantining and all that, and I thought, "All that stuff I read in Seneca about exile suddenly seems really relevant now." (laughs) It's basically the same thing. Like, I mean, I wasn't sent into exile by the Emperor Nero or whatever, but, like, I might as well have been.

   10. CWChris Williamson50:10

       (laughs)

   11. DRDonald Robertson50:10

       You know? Like, I'm not allowed to leave my house except to go out for groceries. Like ... and, uh, I think it, it suddenly seems relevant to people. But I, I don't ... I feel like I almost don't need to persuade people of that 'cause it seems like everyone has figured that out for themselves. They're all reading the Stoics since the beginning of the pandemic. I think a big ... there are many aspects that are relevant, and one of them is, um, I think ... I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this, but ... well, there's a couple of things. First of all, a lot of people have had to simplify their lifestyle during lockdown and so on. I feel like when ... you know, there are several ways in which we're not going back to normal after this. Uh, you never go back. Like, so after this pandemic ends, I wonder how many people are gonna think, "I s- maybe I don't need to go back to eating out in expensive restaurants all the time." Like, you know, m- the amou- the amount of money that people blew on entertainment in the city where I lived, in Toronto, that's, you know, it's full of expensive bars and restaurants and stuff.

   12. CWChris Williamson51:12

       Well, you won't ... You may not know this, but my industry of 14 years, I've been a club promoter, one of the biggest in the UK-

   13. DRDonald Robertson51:18

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson51:18

       ... um, and this is something that I am- I'm concerned about for our industry. People s- used to go out to the same venue on the same night of the week-

   15. DRDonald Robertson51:26

       (sighs)

   16. CWChris Williamson51:26

       ... and then a different venue on a different night of the week-

   17. DRDonald Robertson51:28

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson51:28

       ... every single week, and that's where we made our money.

   19. DRDonald Robertson51:31

       It's not so good for you. Like, maybe it's a bit, but it's ... can also breaking that, it's a habit, right? For a lot of people.

   20. CWChris Williamson51:36

       Correct.

   21. DRDonald Robertson51:36

       Like, it's just what they do-

   22. CWChris Williamson51:37

       100% correct.

   23. DRDonald Robertson51:38

       ... they get, get a bit agitated if it gets to Friday night or whatever, and they're like, they're stuck at home, they start pacing up and down. Like ... but, uh, once the habit is broken, like after a few months, they might think, "Well, I don't like, don't need to go out as often." I mean, it might not take some people that long to get back into it, but I think some people, like, will reevaluate their expenditure and reevaluate their lifestyle. I mean, I've spoken ... you must have met a lot of people who ... everyone's changed their daily routine, so a lot of people are suddenly doing yoga and going for walks in the park and all that, and I think a lot of people might think, "Maybe I'll carry on doing yoga and going for walks in the park even after the, the pandemic is finished." You know, 'cause maybe they, they realized that it's healthier than what they were doing before, and maybe they're actually ... a lot of people are happier. Not everyone. Some people are really struggling psychologically, but a lot of people actually feel that they're better off. Like, it's, you know, it's improved their mental health having to do with the lockdown. And, again, one of the paradoxical aspects of that is coming to terms with your own mortality. You know? The, the thing that, again, isn't really talked about that much in self-help art- life hack articles and, uh, whatnot. Um, I wrote an article about this recently where I thought, "I'm gonna do the opposite and just really get into the guts of this whole 'Everyone is gonna die' thing." Like, 'cause I, I really believe it's, it's liberating. When I was a young guy, I was quite reckless, and, uh, you know, a couple of times, I, I got into situations where I thought, "Oh, geez. Maybe my, my time is up. This is it, buddy." Um, you know, just 'cause I did stupid things when I was a teenager, and then, and, you know, maybe people have health scares and stuff. I gave a talk once when asked, "How many people in the audience, put your hand up, have ever had a brush with death, either through health scare or a dangerous situation?" And it was about two-thirds of the audience. Like, which kind of surprised me. And I said, "Was it what you thought it was gonna be like? Like, were you scared?" And a lot of people, they had a bit of a chat about it, and what, what emerged was a lot of people said, "Well, in a- in an emergency, often you don't really have time to feel scared." You, you're more just kind of, like, focused on getting out of there or, or dealing with the situation or whatever, and sometimes you feel incredibly calm when you, you think, like, "Maybe this is it." It's not what people imagine it to be necessarily. Uh, I think it's just different for everyone, but, um, for me, also being bereaved and losing someone close to you can have a similar effect, I think, of making you reappraise your values.... and think, look back on your- 'cause it makes you look at your life, if you have time, right, and, and think, "Oh, geez, you know, like, was it worth it?" Like, you know, "If, if I, if I, if I dodge this bullet and I get another chance, should I go right back on Facebook or watch another season of Friends or whatever?" Like... And so, it makes you really think, "Those things I was doing, were they just like ways of killing time, or were they actually kind of meaningful and fulfilling things?" One of the things we learned from modern psychotherapy, evidence-based psychotherapy, cutting edge-

   24. CWChris Williamson54:37

       Mm-hmm.

   25. DRDonald Robertson54:37

       ... of evidence-based psychotherapy for clinical depression, we used to think, uh, people with clinical depression weren't doing enough enjoyable things. (clicks tongue) So A- Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, his big innovation was, uh, part of it was to, uh, do activity scheduling and get people to do more pleasurable activities during the day. Actually, like he didn't invent that technique. It was a guy called Peter Lewinson that doesn't get credit for it, that, that invented that technique. But Beck was wrong anyway. So we, we now know that that's slightly off. It's not pleasurable activities that, that help people with depression. It's meaningful activities. Like, there's a subtle difference between something that makes you feel happy, like it gives you a kind of warm glow, and something that actually makes you feel fulfilled in a deeper sense, right? So maybe eating a chocolate, you know, or having sex, or watching a, a comedy kind of makes you feel good, but, like, it's not necessarily gonna make you a more fulfilled person in the long term, like, if the rest of your life is kind of pointless, like, and you don't feel that you've got any direction. And so, what really seems to emerge pretty quickly, just once you start asking people the right questions, is that again, where we started, buddy, is people don't know what their values are. And so, if you don't know what your real values are in life, then how do you know what it is that you should be doing all day long every day? And, you know, a sudden brush with the grim reaper might be what it takes, like, for people to suddenly think, "Maybe I need to figure out what I actually value in life," right? What... You know, no one has ever had on their tombstone, engraved, "I wish I'd spent more time on Facebook," or, "I wish I'd watched more Netflix," right?

   26. CWChris Williamson56:24

       Mm-hmm.

   27. DRDonald Robertson56:24

       So, I think the pandemic has forced a lot of people to have that existential crisis-

   28. CWChris Williamson56:29

       (dog barks)

   29. DRDonald Robertson56:29

       ... and, uh, reappraise our values. And, you know, we need to... I think we should- need to push people further in that direction, you know, to question those values, and then start actually putting them into practice more. And then maybe we wouldn't have as many riots and stuff.

   30. CWChris Williamson56:43

       One of my favorite passages, in fact probably my favorite passage from the entire book, I'm just gonna read it out here, "Looking back, it seems more obvious to me now than ever before that the lives of most men are tragedies of their own making. Men let themselves either get puffed up with pride or tormented by grievances. Everything they concern themselves with is fragile, trivial, and fleeting. We're left with nowhere to stand firm amidst the torrent of things rushing past, there's nothing secure in which we can invest our hopes." What's that mean?
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Yeah. …

   1. CWChris Williamson1:00:00

      what do I want to want? What are the things that I hold so dear that I'm prepared to sacrifice the things-"

   2. DRDonald Robertson1:00:06

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:00:06

      "... that are easy in order to get them?"

   4. DRDonald Robertson1:00:09

      ... the Cynic and Stoic philosophers who have a name for it, they call it pthoss or pthos, depending on how you want to pronounce it. And it means, like, m- smoke or mist, um, like, uh, 􏰀maia, like the veil of illusion, except they think it comes from people's opinions. So, it's like the prevailing values of society. They say it's all smoke and mirrors. Like, so that we live in this world where we come out, we're thrown into the world as babies. Like, we grow up, we look around, we copy the adults around us. We don't know what we're supposed to be doing. We're like a blank slate in a sense, and we see everyone else running around like crazy, uh, trying to maintain their reputation and accumulate wealth and property. So, we're growing up, inevitably we think, "I guess that's what you're supposed to do." Like, I g- I guess we're meant to try and get a better car than other people and, like, you know, get the best job, and i- it's really awful if you, if you, if you don't get a promotion and pass all your exams and stuff like that. And so we get indoctrinated generation after generation after generation since the dawn of history into pursuing external extrinsic goals because, maybe because the very, very ways our society and our brains are built and the way our language works. And then, uh, maybe we get a shock, a brush with death or a bereavement or something makes us think more deeply, um, and we start to think, "Is this really making me happy? Maybe, maybe it's all BS." Like, may- maybe it doesn't really make you happy. Like, and the pandemic, maybe for some people it's gone like, "Maybe my job wasn't making me happy." Do you know as a therapist one of the main adversities that I deal with, two of the main ones are relationship breakups and redundancy, right? And, you know, of course, it seems like a trauma to many people that their marriage ends or their relationship ends or they get sacked or made redundant or whatever, but very often, like, six months later, might turn out to be for the best. Like, maybe they've gone on to a better relationship or a better... There are many people that leave their jobs, like, in middle age, let's say, and then go on to do something that they actually want to do. Like, it's the f- you know, maybe the worst thing that can happen to somebody in life is that they never lose their job, like, you know, 'cause then maybe they're stuck doing whatever it was that they just started to stumble into doing in life. I think there are many people that are just doing a job that they s- you know, that they ended up doing 'cause it was convenient and, but maybe it's not fulfilling to them.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:02:37

      One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is the term "it was meant to be" when used retrospectively. So, a lot of the time a situation will occur, perhaps an adversity or perhaps even a good thing or whatever it might be, and then out the back of that, however many weeks or months later, someone says, "Well, it was meant to be because look at where I am now." And to me-

   6. DRDonald Robertson1:02:58

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:02:59

      ... with my particular metaphysical view of the world, that seems to rob all of the beauty and agency from how that person's dealt with the situation. How about the causation runs in the opposite direction, that a thing happened and you made it work, that you lost your job, had a bereavement-

   8. DRDonald Robertson1:03:16

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:03:16

      ... broke up with your partner, and the outcome of that, you were so capable, you had so much upward mobility that you made, you wrangled the world into the outcome that you wanted. It wasn't meant to be, you made it be.

   10. DRDonald Robertson1:03:31

       Yeah. The, I mean, the Stoics... uh, you mentioned facing adversity earlier, which is really what this is all about. You know, the Stoics think by nature we kind of avoid adversity, um, but they think the paradox is we should undertake voluntary hardship. Like, we should go out of our comfort zone and seek out challenges 'cause we're probably better at coping in a sense than, than we assume. We're survivors, generally speaking. The Stoics think we have to be careful. This is something that people miss about Stoicism. When we face adversity, we've got to judge whether we're going to be overwhelmed by it or whether it... And the analogy would be choosing, like, a sparring partner, um, in ancient wrestling or in a martial art. So, you don't pick someone who's really easy and not a challenge, but you don't pick some guy that's twice the size of you who's just gonna-

   11. CWChris Williamson1:04:17

       (laughs)

   12. DRDonald Robertson1:04:17

       ... flatten you into a pulp, right? So, obviously, you kind of gauge it, and you pick something that's going to be challenging but not overwhelming. And so that's what the Stoics have to say about adversity. Epictetus pretty much says exactly that to his students. Um, he says, "You'll only know from your own experience what you can actually handle." Like, but you should always be kind of pushing yourself to take on challenges so that you can, you know, trust in your coping ability and strengthen your coping ability, but obviously don't bite off more than you can chew. Um, I, you know, I, I think people are too timid in a sense. Um, Epictetus also said to his students, they love Hercules, um, Hercules is the favorite demigod or, or god, um, of the Stoics in Greek mythology, and, uh, they love the, the myth of the, the 12 Labors of Hercules. And Epictetus says to his students, "But you guys are always telling me how you're kind of, like, trying to avoid problems in life and stuff." He said, "Let me ask you a question. If Hercules had lain in bed under the covers and been attended on by other men and he'd never wandered the earth in poverty, persecuted by other people, facing one monster after another, like, do you honestly think that you would still admire him? He wouldn't even be worthy of the name Hercules," he says. So, the only reason that you admire him is because he got hammered, like, with adversity, like, and he stood up to it through self-discipline and courage. Like, he persevered. Like, he had, one of... The, the idea of the 12 Labors is that Hercules had, like, the toughest life ever. Like, he was constantly kind of battling and struggling. He was per- he was being persecuted by the goddess Hera, like, so he made enemies in, in high places as it were. And so that's what he kind of represents. Um, so Epictetus said, "Surely, but you guys think the opposite. You, you know, you just want to avoid trouble."... like, and have an easy life. But then you'll die, like, you'll be on your deathbed and you'll look back at it and you'll think, "Geez, I spent a lot of time in bed just kind of, like-"

   13. CWChris Williamson1:06:21

       (laughs)

   14. DRDonald Robertson1:06:21

       "... watching TV and stuff." Like, you know, trust me, when, you know, when your time's up and you look back, you know, it's all the kind of challenges that you faced and that you overcame are the things that you're most likely to have some kind of sense of satisfaction from. You know, it's the times when you pushed yourself and went out of your comfort zone, like, that makes your life meaningful. Um, you know, you won't even remember... I challenge you to remember what happens in most of the episodes of Friends or whatever, you know? Like, uh, the amount of TV that people watch in our society, just think about how much of it can they actually remember? Like, so then what was the point of it? It was just a way of killing time. As Marcus Aurelius says, quoting Heraclitus, you know, we, we're, we're like men asleep, like in a, a dream or something like that, you know, walking about in a trance. And the Stoics want us to snap out of that, you know, to wake up, like, contemplation of death is one way of doing that. But really it's kind of an existential crisis that they want to evoke in us, like, to, to, you know, really rethink everything dramatically, to turn our life upside down. The Cynics used to symbolize that by walking backwards. Um, it always reminds me, you know that video with the Verve, with Richard Ash- Ashcroft, or whatever his name is?

   15. CWChris Williamson1:07:33

       He's putting the jacket on and... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   16. DRDonald Robertson1:07:35

       He's what, with his feet, he's bumping into all these people and all that. That's... He's a, he's a Cynic philosopher, buddy. Like, that's exactly what they did, right? And, uh, they'd wait until everybody was coming out the theater and then walk into the crowd and bump into them all. And people would say to Diogenes, "Why are you doing that?" You know, "You're going the wrong way." And, uh, he'd say, "I'm just practicing for something that I do my whole life long, why I am training myself." He goes, "Because I'm swimming against the current, funly, existentially, throughout my whole life. You know, I'm going against the prevailing values of Athenian society, you know, and you've got to toughen yourself up to do that. People are going to laugh at me, like, tell me I'm, I'm doing everything back to front, like..." But when you're surrounded by smoke and mirrors, by... And all the BS of society and hedonism, narcissism, celebrity culture, consumerism, Santa Claus - you know, all that Coca-Cola, like, you know, all that kind of stuff. Like, people are gonna think you're crazy if you reject it, like, try and rise above it. And the Cynics were like, "You're gonna have to practice what they called shamelessness." Or we call them... We do a similar thing in therapy today, we call it shame attacking, to toughen up, like, so you don't really care if everybody laughs at you. Um, because you're going to have to be laughed at if you're gonna, you know, strike out on your own and, uh, you know, have the courage to do things differently.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:09:01

       Is that an inevitability now, even in the modern world? Because I think it's easy to hear about these ancient times and think, "Yeah, yeah, but that wer-... You know, they were, they were totally uncivilized and they were th- these sort of ridiculous individuals, and maybe there's a little bit of drama and artistic license being used." And we presume that because it's so- such a civilized civilization now, that we shouldn't be being ostracized for the things that we say, we shouldn't be being out on a limb, we shouldn't be going into exile and walking backwards outside of the theater. It sounds like... It sounds ridiculous now. Is that still the case for someone who wants the consciously designed life? I- uh, is that an inevitable price to pay?

   18. DRDonald Robertson1:09:41

       Yeah, I thought... I'm hoping when I go back to Toronto next actually that I see people doing that. Like, there's a lot of people that are into Stoicism in Tor-... So I want to see that on the streets of Toronto, anyone that's listening, like, out there in Canada, like, or anywhere really, all the major cities. I'd like to see people doing that now if they're into Stoicism. No, I... Look, in modern society, it's just the same. You know, your family are going to think you're a weirdo. Like, you know, your girlfriend's gonna think you've gone crazy. You know, people at work are gonna think you're nuts. Like, if you, you know... Like, like I said earlier, like, when I was a kid, I don't know, I was kind of lucky in some ways that, um... The first job I had when I... I, I was, uh, kicked out of school when I was a kid, um, because I was a bit of a tearaway and I got in a lot of trouble with local cops and stuff. So I had a kind of bad start and it was, like, the best thing that ever happened to me, um, because it made me kind of, you know, rethink things. And, uh, you know... What was I gonna say? They, uh... It made me, it made me realize, you know, that I had to kind of find a sense of, uh, direction and purpose in life. And I was lucky because I found a... I stumbled into a pretty well paid job in the tech industry, um, and I walked out on it to go and do a degree in philosophy.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:10:59

       Mm-hmm.

   20. DRDonald Robertson1:11:00

       And, Pete, I remember at the time people saying, "Are you crazy?" Like, "If you do a philosophy degree, like, how are you going to get a job at the end of it? You've got a really sweet... You've landed on your feet here, buddy," they said. Like, and, "Are you nuts?" Like, "People would give their right arm, like, to be where you..." I was only 19 or something like that, uh, and I thought... I remember thinking at the time, saying, "Well, I think, I think this is meaningless. I don't want to just, like, sit in this office, even if I'm getting paid well for it." I thought, "Do I want to do this for the rest of my life? Like, sit in an office and kind of shuffle paper and draw diagrams and stuff?" Like, so I walked out on it. But I remember as a young guy, that feeling of everybody around me look- looking at me like I'd lost my mind and thinking that, you know, I was abandoning something that they thought was really valuable, but they were all wrong. Like, it's... It was all the BS and smoke and mirrors of society. It was a great job. It was like a prison sentence, like Plato's Cave or something like that. You know, I got paid a kind of comfortable amount of money for doing something that to me was like, would be like sitting in a prison cell all day, you know? Well, am I gonna do that for the rest of my life? You know, I'd rather be broke, like, and have the freedom to sit around and, and talk.... and nonsense to strangers about, uh, ancient Greeks like we're doing now.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:12:18

       (laughs)

   22. DRDonald Robertson1:12:18

       What you and I are doing here. You know, I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for that, and you wouldn't be able to enjoy the, the pleasure of my company.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:12:24

       How can people overcome that inertia? Societal norms-

   24. DRDonald Robertson1:12:29

       They-

   25. CWChris Williamson1:12:29

       ... societal norms are strong, you know, the desire to be-

   26. DRDonald Robertson1:12:32

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:12:32

       ... wanted and liked and accepted is, is important. And someone thinks, "Hey, that sounds like me. Donald, you're talking to me. I don't feel fulfilled in my life. I don't know my values, my meaning."

   28. DRDonald Robertson1:12:40

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:12:40

       "But I'm also shit scared of leaving this cushy job and what will my friends say?" How do they get over the inertia?

   30. DRDonald Robertson1:12:47

       I think you have to practice in a number of ways. I mean, the Stoics give us a whole barrage of techniques to toughen ourselves up. I re- like I'm gonna go straight for the jugular and say that I think contemplating mortality is, uh, of, you know, like the, the nuclear option in stores, so it's the most powerful technique. Now, I don't think that psychologically is for everyone. If someone suffers from clinical depression and they're suicidal, then I'm not gonna say, "Contemplate your own morti-" Probably not, right? But if someone's fairly resilient and they think they can cope with it... Seneca used to say to himself every night when he went to bed, "I'm not gonna wake up in the morning." Like, and he'd try and imagine that that was it, his time was up, like he was gonna go to sleep and, and, and not wake up the next morning. And, uh, y- and he would ask himself, "Am I, am I good with that? Like, can I look back on my life and, and think, yeah, you know, I can, you know, I can rest easy with this, I'm satisfied with how it's been so far? Or if not, like what am I gonna do differently?" Marcus Aurelius says, "Imagine that you're already dead, but you've got an extension. You're on, like, you've got, you're in, uh, penalty time or whatever. Like, you've got, you've got some extra time, right?" Like, he goes further than, uh, saying, "Imagine that you've only got a day left," or whatever. He says, "Imagine you're already toast, like, but they've, they've decided to be generous and give you an extension." (laughs) So that, I think, is a powerful technique.
6. 1:15:00 – 1:16:21

   What, he got like…

   1. DRDonald Robertson1:15:00

      Um, he's very charming, he's witty, like, and that ma- that makes him come across as a more rounded and, uh, emotional person. And the Stoics wrote books. Like, the Stoics wrote satires. We have a bunch of Stoic satires from Persius, the, uh, he was a friend of Seneca. And, uh, Seneca has a, we've got a stupid satire that, that Seneca wrote called The Pumpkinification of Claudius that still survives today. And, uh, Chrysippus, uh, the third head of the Stoa, wrote about jokes, and he actually died laughing at one of his own jokes about a donkey. Which also reminds me-

   2. CWChris Williamson1:15:40

      What, he got like a, a heart attack or something?

   3. DRDonald Robertson1:15:42

      Yeah. Like, it's like, have you seen that Monty Python sketch about the joke in the First World War, like, that's so funny that everybody that hears it dies?

   4. CWChris Williamson1:15:51

      (laughs)

   5. DRDonald Robertson1:15:51

      Have you never seen that? Everybody s-... Uh, you, right, you need to look that up a-

   6. CWChris Williamson1:15:54

      Everyone else will have done. I'm getting abuse-

   7. DRDonald Robertson1:15:56

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:15:56

      ... in the comments for that one, yeah.

   9. DRDonald Robertson1:15:57

      So the, the, the government, the British government in the First World War, they say, "Well, it's so dangerous, we had to translate it into German. But we, we'd only give each person one word so that nobody knew the whole joke, like, because if they heard it, they would die laughing at it." And then they started, they trained these guys, like they're, you know, like they're, they're, they're, they're putting, um, earplugs in and they're shouting it out, uh, uh, like along the trenches at the Germans. So dead- like it's a deadly weapon-

Episode duration: 1:32:37