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10% Happier with Dan Harris
Stoic Advice for Handling Setbacks, Insults, and Death | William Irvine
01:14:45
How to boost your psychological immune system, the stoic way. is the emeritus professor of philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He is the author of eight books that have been translated into more than twenty languages,...
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- [00:00]
William Irvin
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Dan Harris
This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Today, kids, we're going to talk about how to build up your psychological immune system the Stoic Way here's one thing I know about life. Setbacks, insults, illness, death. They are all inevitable. Thousands of years ago, the Stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome devised techniques for handling life's inevitable vexations. In the words of today's guest, this is a philosophy that helps you become tougher, calmer, and more resilient. Said guest is William Irvin. He's the Emeritus professor of Philosophy at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He's the author of eight books that have been translated into more than 20 languages, including guide to the Good Life, the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, and the Stoic A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient. In this conversation, we talk about how Bill first got introduced to Stoicism, a story that involves a midlife crisis and a banjo. We talk about the overlap and the differences between Stoicism and Buddhism. We talk about Stoic psychological strategies for attaining equanimity, the practice of negative visualization, Stoic approaches to handling anger and also insults, how to reframe setbacks as tests the difference between Stoicism and emotion suppression. That's a point of confusion for many people. Tools for navigating the challenges of our digital age what Stoics say about pursuing fame and status and why death is the ultimate exam Just to say I first heard of William Irvin because of his appearance on the Waking up app run by my friend Sam Harris. I'm a huge fan of Waking Up. The app has basic meditation instruction, specific courses from a variety of different meditation teachers, and also these excellent life skills courses. And there's now a four part audio series on the Buddha's Eightfold Path featuring Joseph Goldstein, the great meditation teacher, in conversation with both me and Sam. And there's a lot of wisdom in there and a lot of laughs. Now that I no longer have my own app, I have launched two projects simultaneously. As many of you know, I have my Substack community and thank you to everybody who's already signed up there. Meanwhile, for those of you who want a full on meditation app experience which I can't yet provide, please check out Waking Up. I know there's been a lot of change around here, so there's zero pressure to take any action on Waking up or substack or anything. My main priorities will remain this podcast and also my burgeoning substack community that said, if you are interested in a full on app experience, you can sign up@wakingup.com 10% that's T E n P E R C e n t wakingup.com 10% I'll put a link in the show notes just so you know. If you buy a subscription via that URL you will get a 30 day free trial and you will be supporting me and my team as well because we will get a portion of the proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say if money's an issue, Sam offers scholarships. That's the same policy that I have over on danharris.com if you can't afford it, we'll give it to you. Okay, we'll get started with William Irvin right after this. One of my favorite new sponsors of this show for very selfish reasons is Masa Chips. The selfish reason is that they've sent us a bunch of chips and they're right out on the counter and I've been eating them on the regular and they're just straight up delicious. We talk a lot on this show about not only how to take care of your mind but also your body. And of course it's all one system. And the truth is, most so called healthy snacks aren't so healthy. They're packed with seed oils and ultra processed ingredients that leave you feeling worse, not better. Masa Chips are different. They're made with just three simple organic corn, salt and beef tallow. They're crafted the way chips were meant to be. No seed oils, no fillers. Just real food that tastes incredible. It really does. I have been snacking quite frequently on two of their flavors that they sent to us. My wife has as well and we give a hearty heart hearty thumbs up. If you care about what's in your mind, you should care about what's in your food. Try Masa Chips today and taste the difference. Go to masachips.com discount happier and use the code happier for 25 off your first order. Do you ever have that experience where you're trying to get stuff done and you just can't focus? You got too many windows open, you're wasting time on Instagram, you are sending random texts, whatever. You can't focus on the thing you're supposed to be doing. There is a new product that I have found to be pretty helpful. Brain FM is an app built for anyone looking to boost productivity. They create science backed music that syncs brain patterns, helping you focus better, relax deeper and sleep easier. I'VE actually been playing some of their music while I've been working and I find it helpful. Brain FM has task specific focus modes like deep work, creatures, creative and motivation to meet your exact needs. There's also turbo mode for ADHD support. Brain FM is the only music company supported by a National Science foundation grant award to improve people's focus. Brain FM recently published a study in the Nature journal Communications Biology showing that their patented music technology increases activity in attentional networks, doubles neural synchrony at brainwave frequencies associated with focus, and improves attentional task performance in people with ADHD symptomology. Brain FM's mission is to help people around the world with a simple and accessible tool that supports focus, especially for those who need it most. Unlock your brain's full potential free for 30 days by going to Brain FM Happier that's Brain FM Happier for 30 days. Free. Bill Irvin welcome to the show.
- [06:23]
William Irvin
Dan. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [06:26]
Dan Harris
Let me just start with your origin story if you're up for it. How did you get interested in stoicism?
- [06:31]
William Irvin
Okay, longish story, but I'll try to keep it short. So when I was turning 50, I seemed to have a low grade midlife crisis. Now normally people would quit their jobs and run off and do whatever. Mine was low grade. I set certain objectives for myself. One was to learn Italian. One was to learn how to play the banjo. One was to learn how to row because I had never rowed before. You know, this is a skull, so it's not a rowboat but a racing boat. And then the last was I was going to become a Zen Buddhist. And launched off on my program of self discovery. I did acquire basic Italian, which I've subsequently forgotten. I did learn how to play the banjo, which I've subsequently forgotten. I still row, but I would regard myself as very late in my rowing career because now simply the task of carrying the boat down to the dock is becoming increasingly difficult. So the third thing, becoming a Zen Buddhist. And that kind of grew out of another project because before I I became interested in stoicism, I had written a book called On Desire. I wrote that book in part out of this decision to become a Zen Buddhist. I was college professor. I'm now retired, but it was a chance for a twofer, which means two for the price of one. So I could write a book about becoming a Zen Buddhist. And in the process of doing that I would get credit and then you can get promoted and all of that good stuff. And then in writing the book I Realized this is a book about philosophies of life, and it's a book about how to have a good life. And that to really be fair, I had to not only look into Zen Buddhism, but look into other philosophies of life. And of course, in philosophy itself, you have classic philosophies of life. One of them was Stoicism. And Stoicism wasn't new to me because I had encountered it before. So the ancient Stoics, they started with the Greeks, but we know very little about Greek Stoicism. And then the Romans took it over and ran with it. This is in the first century, well, just before the turn of the millennium, in first century ce, they developed it into its peak form, that it's only being approached again in the last few decades, in fact. So I had encountered the Stoics, but I had encountered them in logic class because the Stoics were the inventors of what's called propositional calculus. This is the calculus of words like and, and, or, and, if, then, and neither, nor, and, you know, when you think about it, that's what they need to do programming. So it's a really long stretch, but you could say that they were the ones who invented computer programming. It's a really long stretch, but it's a kind of a fun stretch to do. But I had encountered them in a logic class and didn't know anything about them except that they had been the premier logicians of the first century ce. Looking into them a little bit more, I realized that they had developed on the side. They'd done a lot of work in physics, which means something different. It's just an understanding of how the physical world works in crude forms. But they'd also developed this philosophy of life. As a philosophy major, I had not been exposed to it. Had I not had a deep interest in logic, I wouldn't have been exposed to it. I was quite shocked and kind of disturbed. Why did nobody tell me about this? And the more I looked into it, the more I realized that the Stoics and Zen Buddhists are basically barking up the same tree. They have an end goal and the end goal and lots of words. And you have to be careful on which word you use. I think I used to use tranquility, but in a lot of people, that gives the wrong idea because they think, well, tranquilizers, that's the easy way to become tranquil. And of course, the Zen Buddhists said, no, no, no, it's through these natural means. It's through various forms of Meditation. The Stoics were aiming at the same thing though, except they had a kind of a narrower definition of what that would involve. It would involve the near absence of negative emotions from your life and it would allow for positive emotions. So what are the negative emotions? They're the ones that don't feel good. For instance, anger is a negative emotion, anxiety is a negative emotion. Envy is a negative emotions. They're the ones that feel bad. But there are also positive emotions, including feelings of love, feelings of joy, feelings of delight, feelings of appreciation. And the Stoics said, here's the trick. So what we're going to do is we're going to develop strategies that will maximize the number of positive emotions you experience and minimize the number of negative emotions that you experience. And as a result, you're going to reach a state of equanimity. And that is this state of emotional balance. You can use the word tranquility. And then the other interesting comparison was I already described them as the preeminent logicians of the first century ce, but they were also the preeminent psychologists because they developed these psychological strategies for attaining equanimity. These are strategies, psychological strategies for reducing the number of negative emotions you experience and increasing the number of positive emotions you experience. So at that point, I had an interesting choice to make. There was a fork in the road because I had two different approaches to path toward the same ultimate goal. And that is this state of peace of mind. I could take the Zen path, and if I did that now, there are lots of different forms that Zen can take, so I'm talking in monolithic terms here. But one of the things that seemed to come across was that in one version of it, I would wait for my moment of enlightenment. Okay, I'm a patient guy. When does that come? Well, maybe tomorrow or maybe in 30 years. It depends and there are no guarantees. Okay, you can correct me on any of this that you need to, because I don't pretend to be an expert on Zen. Or you can take the Stoic path. And this is my standard sales pitch. Over a three day weekend, Saturday and Sunday and a Monday off, you can learn enough about Stoicism and Stoic psychological practices to know, number one, what these strategies are, understand these strategies, and number two, to see if they're making a difference in your life. So it's a quick result, you know, and if the end of that third day you say, it's not working for me, it's doing nothing, great. Head for Zen. That would be my escape route. But what I discovered in my own life was that they were having a profound impact on my daily existence. The thought was, why did nobody tell me this? And I need to share this with the world. So the first book after On Desire, which is the book in which I kind of personally discovered Stoic psychology. The next book I wrote was Guide to the Good Life, the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. I found a publisher, Oxford University Press, that agreed to publish it. And I thought I was pulling off a fast one because I thought there's going to be no market for this book. It's going to sell a dozen copies and half of those are going to be by friends who just don't want to upset me. And then just floated it out there and it took off now to put things into perspective. So this would have been 2008, 2009. At that time, there were maybe half a dozen books on Stoicism written for a general audience. There was a lot of stuff written by the Stoics themselves, which was still being printed. There was stuff by scholars that took a scholarly approach to Stoicism, but maybe a half dozen books written for the general public. My book joined those. I checked this morning before our talk, I did an advanced search on Amazon. Last year there were 600 books published with stoicism in the title. 600. So it has taken off and it has gone viral in a curious kind of way. This will sound a little bit self congratulating, but I like to consider myself to be a fire starter. Basically, I'm a teacher. That's what I am. So what do I do? I explore the world, I learn new things and then I share what I've learned. And in this case it turns out to have been a very useful thing because I get emails from people, people send me stuff. So it's a very strange thing for an academic to be in that mode. And yet I feel very useful in a way that I didn't oftentimes in the classroom because it's affecting people's lives.
- [16:30]
Dan Harris
That's a great story. You mentioned the psychological techniques of the Stoics. I'd love to spend quite a bit of time on those. I'll set aside my thoughts on Buddhism for maybe later in the conversation. I'm certainly not an expert in Zen. I know a little bit about Theravada Buddhism, which is old school Buddhism. But I digress. Let's talk about the Stoic psychological techniques because you've written about them in a very compelling fashion. I'm just going to go through some of them. And I'll start with negative visualization. And maybe you could describe what that is and how it's helpful.
- [17:06]
William Irvin
Okay. Negative visualization has a negative name, but it's designed to help you deal with the negative things, the setbacks that life has to offer. So what it involves, in simple terms, is you imagine yourself not having something that you do have. That's where the negativity is. So you take a moment and you just think about. You can even visualize what it would be like to lose something that's very important to you. And then you fill in the blank. What is it that's very important to you? So for me, there are things that are very important to me. I mean, my life's very important to me. So one of the things that I will do in the course of an afternoon, I'll be sitting back here in my office, writing, working. Middle of the afternoon, she'll hear me yelling out from the back room, love you. And she will know from experience, oh, Bill has been negatively visualizing. So that involves me, number one, thinking about what would my life be like if she disappeared. And it happens. You know, it happens. People get sick. People have accidents. People leave you, all sorts of things. And then the realization that none of those bad things has happened, happened to me. And it's really amazing because after you do that little maneuver, that little thought experiment, then it comes rushing in of how lucky you are. You're no different than you were before. You still have what you have. It's just that you appreciate what you have. Sometimes when I do talk before an audience, I'll do an audience experiment, and I'll tell the audience members to close their eyes. And they close their eyes, and I say, okay, now I want you to imagine, just for a minute here, what it would be like if this is how your life was going to be forever. And, you know, some people, this is all their life has been. They were born blind. But I just want you to imagine what it would be like to lose the ability to see. And then after a minute, you know, you judge the audience. You don't want to lose an audience. You judge them, and then you say, okay, now open your eyes. And when they open them, it's an amazing thing, because for a moment there, you realize this is absolutely incredible. It's not only all these people, all these faces, but it's in color as well. It's just absolutely incredible. And that will last for a while. You will appreciate this thing that you had taken for granted all your life, assuming that you weren't born blind, but you had taken it for granted. And yet you lose it. And this is an artificial way of losing it, but you lose it for a minute and then it just comes rushing in. This is really incredible. The life I'm currently living is absolutely amazing. And this ability that I've taken for granted is amazing. So, personal thing, last summer I had cataract surgery. In the process of doing it, I guess my old cataracts were cloudy and colored and everything else, and they removed them. And it was just this incredible thing of being able to see colors. I would walk into the produce section of the grocery store and just be amazed. Look at how red these peppers are, all of the colors. So it's this feeling of, well, there I actually had been missing something, and then when it came back, just appreciating it. So it's this whole notion about taking the life that you're currently living and what that life is doing for you, and then realizing you're lucky to be living that life. So, number one, negative visualization is not that you sit around for hours thinking about how bad things are. It's a momentary exercise where you just imagine for a few seconds losing something important to you that you've already got. And then you'll feel that bounce when you get it back now, that will wear off in an hour. Later you'll be right back to your taking things for granted, because that's how we humans are. But this is like a medication. On the label, it says apply as needed. So you can do this multiple times in the course of the day. You can do it about a variety of different things. If you take stock of your life, you'll realize there's a bunch of stuff that you take utterly for granted. Covid was a blessing in disguise because it didn't just remind us of the things we took for granted, it showed us what we took for granted. Like having face to face conversations with our friends, like going into crowded theaters. And it sort of said, hey, people, we're taking this away from you. And then you realize, oh, those were really important things. And I did take them for granted. Problem is, now Covid's in ancient history now, so we've moved on. We're back to taking things for granted.
- [22:23]
Dan Harris
You talk about gratitude or not taking things for granted as the benefit for negative visualization, but I would imagine there's another benefit which is preparing the mind for the inevitability of loss.
- [22:36]
William Irvin
Yes. So the whole notion of becoming resilient is very big with the Stoics. So it's this idea of bouncing back. So in my book Stoic Challenge, I describe cases. Well, I refer to them as setbacks. This is people in the course of living have experienced a setback. And the Stoics realized that if you're a functional human being, you will experience setbacks. Some of them will be tiny. Oh, there's no coffee. I'm out of coffee today. That's a setback. And some are really big. You get a terrible diagnosis from your doctor. Those are setbacks. Breaking an arm is a setback. The question is what you do with the setback. Stoics had a double plan. Number one is how to bounce back from a setback, and number two is how to prepare yourself for a setback. So they thought you should engage in stoic training where you purposely put yourself in difficult situations just so you can practice bouncing back from them. And here's an analogy. You have a biological immune system, and for the immune system to be healthy, the important thing is that you expose it to germs. That sounds counterintuitive. If I want to be healthy, I should avoid germs. Well, yeah, but if you do 100% job of that, your immune system, your biological immune system will get weak. And then when germs come along, they won't be able to fight those germs. So I have a relative who's a pediatric intensive care doctor, and I was talking to him about kids because we were with him, and one of his kids went over and sucked the leg of a table. You know, at a certain age, kids taste everything and then went over and licked the dog. You know, and I'm thinking, is this healthy for the kid? And he said, well, what we were taught is a kid should eat a pound of dirt. I said, what? And he said, well, you know, not just any dirt and not in one sitting, but a steady exposure to things that are going to challenge their immune system. It's very important if they're going to be healthy, if they're going to grow up healthy and strong and have an immune system that can handle the outside world. So there's a psychological equivalent of that. And that is if you are raised in an environment in which you never have to experience setbacks, your ability to deal with those setbacks is going to atrophy. You're not going to be able to deal with them. Even the tiniest little setback for you will seem like a catastrophe. So the Stoics said, you got to keep your psychological immune system healthy. How do you do that? You go out of your way to do things that are going to be uncomfortable. You go out of your way to do things that are going to involve setbacks. You do things where there's a risk of failure. And that sounds like a loser's kind of strategy. Why should I risk failure? Ah, because you'll. Number one, you'll learn how to bounce back from failure. And number two, you're more likely to be successful by developing your ability to experience failure. Failure. The evidence for that being, look at the most successful people on the planet. They were risk takers who typically had numerous failures before they reached success. They had failure after failure. They were able to bounce back. Key thing, they were able to learn from their failures and go on to make what I call new, better failures. So when I was still teaching, I'd tell my students that I had for them a formula, a rule that if they followed it, they would never fail. And the rule is, just don't do anything hard. Just don't do anything hard. Do only easy things. But then of course, the follow on for that is, oh, by the way, you will never have an incredible success either. So that idea of toughening yourself up, of doing things that are uncomfortable, how come? Because they're uncomfortable. And that way I will expand my comfort zone. Whereas other people are saying, oh, this is just intolerable, this discomfort. You'll say, oh, I guess I've got that same discomfort. But you know what, I'm okay with that because I paid the price. I've built up, I've expanded my comfort zone.
- [27:08]
Dan Harris
How do you get in the habit of doing that? Very practically. How do we turn this into a practice?
- [27:15]
William Irvin
Well, for instance, when we're done talking, I'm going to go lift weights. They're not going to be really heavy weights, but there's going to be enough to make me sore, physically sore. And the question is, why would any sensible human of my age want to be sore? And the answer is, because I can stay strong. And because by staying strong, I can avoid the kinds of falls that can typically take out a person as old as I am. So I'm going to stay strong, but you're going to be sore. Yeah, it's just part of the price. So tomorrow morning I'll do a different kind of exercise. So I have some friends, we get together, we do ergs. These are these indoor rowing machines, and we do interval training. And what does that involve? Well, we go like our pants are on fire for like two minutes, and then we get to rest for three minutes. And then we do it again, and we do eight of those. And at the end of any one of those, it's like my brain is screaming, you gotta stop. You gotta stop. And then you do stop. You rest for a bit, and then you do it again. And the interesting thing is it accomplishes two things. Number one is it lets me wrestle with this creature that I call Lazy Bill. That's my lazy side. It is such a slacker. And when I'm doing these intervals and getting truly exhausted, it will come up with reasons for why I should just quit. It's very seductive. And it'll say, you know how much better you would feel if you skipped today's workout or if you just stopped. So what I'm doing is developing my ability to tell that voice in my head to just shut up and get out of here because I'm busy right now. And basically to learn the ability to take one more stroke. So you're doing all of these strokes. Take one more stroke. That ability, if you've developed it, can get you very far in life. If you were in a physically challenging situation, you just keep pushing on. There are people who, as soon as it feels a little bit uncomfortable, they say, my body is telling me to quit. Yeah, your body is giving you signals, but you don't have to listen to those signals. The biggest thing is you've got this voice in your head that wants you to be a couch potato. And you know, if you want to, if that's where you think you want to be end up, then you should listen to that voice. Otherwise, that voice is your enemy.
- [29:57]
Dan Harris
How do you distinguish between the wise inner voices and the Lazy Bill type of voices? The siren song of laziness or anything else not super constructive?
- [30:12]
William Irvin
I've got a whole bunch of different voices, so they come out at different times. And so I know whenever I'm going to do something difficult, then it'll be Lazy Bill. As far as I can tell, he hangs out in the back bedroom of my mind. He probably plays video games. I don't know, because, you know, I don't have much to do with him. But when he sees I'm exercising, he comes out and gives me his two cents on what I'm doing. I have other voices. If I wake up in the middle of the night, you know, I have to be very careful. My brain wants to think. But in the middle of the night, these other voices will drift in and they'll remind me of what could be perceived as social slights that I've experienced. They Will try to annoy me. It's like having these strangers march into your house in the middle of the night and say, here's something you should be upset about. And then I guess meditation, a key thing is learning how to take those voices. It's a different kind of thing than Lazy Bill, than that voice. They're different voices. They can get under your skin, and they are obsessive. You know, they just keep saying the same thing over and over. And you can tell them to go away now. And that's a case where meditation will come in handy in the sense that you can develop your ability to just say, oh, you're here, you're back. Okay, I dismiss you, move on. And you can get better at doing that. So you're building up that skill by meditating.
- [31:43]
Dan Harris
So when you were talking about meditation, now are you talking about it within a Buddhist context or. I believe in Stoicism, there's also forms of meditation.
- [31:52]
William Irvin
Yeah, none of the forms of meditation in stoicism resembles what your doing. So meditation, like most words, has many different meanings. So for instance, there's the bedtime meditation. And what does that involve? It involves actual thinking. So you're actually thinking about something. You're thinking about the events of the day, and you're just kind of mulling over against the Stoics ideal. How did you do? Did you get angry about something? Ah, well, points off for that, because that means somebody you know, you're responsible for you being angry. Someone else can insult you or can do something, and you can't control that because people are going to be people. But you do have a fair amount of control over how you respond to what they do. So points off for that one. But then there'll be another case where you realize that you did exactly what stoic practice suggests you should do. So somebody insulted you, and what did you do? You just ignored them and carried on as if they said nothing at all. Why is that good? Because their goal is to upset you. And if they don't, you win, they lose. And it's very frustrating for them. And the Stoics devoted, and it struck me as kind of unusual, but they spent a lot of time thinking about insults and the impact they could have on our life and techniques we can use to avoid them having that impact. That'll be a meditation. So in your bedtime meditation, you think about your stoic practice. So it isn't sort of like you're. You're trying to remove thoughts from your. Your mind, you're actively thinking. So meditation in a different sense.
- [33:40]
Dan Harris
Coming up, William Irvin talks about stoic practices for dealing with insults and anger, how to resist our evolutionary habits that no longer serve us, the difference between stoicism and suppressing your emotions, and some tools for navigating tumultuous times which we happen to be in One of my favorite new sponsors of this show for very selfish reasons is Masa Chips. The selfish reason is that they sent us a bunch of chips and they're right out on the counter and I've been eating them on the regular and they're just straight up delicious. We talk a lot on this show about not only how to take care of your mind, but also your body. And of course it's all one system. And the truth is, most so called healthy snacks aren't so healthy. They're packed with seed oils and ultra processed ingredients that leave you feeling worse, not better. Masa chips are different. They're made with just three simple ingredients, organic corn, salt and beef tallow. They're crafted the way chips were meant to be. No seed oils, no fillers, just real food that tastes incredible. It really does. I have been snacking quite frequently on two of their flavors that they sent to us. My wife has as well and we give a hearty, hearty thumbs up. If you care about what's in your mind, you should care about what's in your food. Try Masa chips today and taste the difference. Go to masachips.com discount/happier and use the code happier for 25% off your first order. You ever have that experience where you're trying to get stuff done and you just can't focus? You've got too many windows open, you're wasting time on Instagram, you are sending random texts, whatever. You can't focus on the thing you're supposed to be doing. There is a new product that I have found to be pretty helpful. Brain FM is an app built for anyone looking to boost productivity. They create science backed music that syncs brain patterns helping you focus better, relax deeper and sleep easier. I've actually been playing some of their music while I've been working and I find it helpful. Brain FM has task specific focus modes like deep work, creative and motivation to meet your exact needs. There's also turbo mode for ADHD support Report Brain FM is the only music company supported by a National Science foundation grant award to improve people's focus. Brain FM recently published a study in the Nature journal Communications Biology showing that their patented music technology increases activity in attentional networks, doubles neural synchrony at brainwave frequencies associated with focus and improves attentional task performance in people with ADHD symptomology. Brain FM's mission is to help people around the world with a simple and accessible tool that supports focus, especially for those who need it most. Unlock your brain's full potential. Free for 30 days by going to Brain FM Happier. That's Brain FM Happier for 30 days. Free. You talked about anger and also insults, which are related topics. But let me. Let me start with insults, because I know you actually wrote a whole book about insults, and there's a lot in there about stoic practices for handling insults. And you referenced that the stoics expended a lot of calories on this subject. So I'll be curious. What are the stoic techniques for dealing with insults specifically? I heard you say something like, well, ignore it and move on. And I think a lot of people, myself included, respond to that by saying, easier said than done.
- [37:14]
William Irvin
Yep, all of these things are acquired skills, but the first trick in acquiring them is to know that they're out there, to know that they're tools. There's you having in a toolbox your tools, and there's you knowing how to skillfully use those tools. But the first step is just knowing what they are. And so this one approach to insults is to simply ignore them. They say it, and they expect, because this is their experience in life, that you're going to be devastated by what they said. And you just listen to them and then you carry on with whatever the conversation was going. When I was writing this book, by the way, one thing I came to realize is how rarely anybody insults me. I don't know, maybe it's just where I live or, you know, my social position or something. But the people who do insult me tend to be close friends and so. And particular guy friends. So that seems to be something we guys do. We don't know why we do it. We're guys. So it just kind of. Kind of comes naturally to us. So the whole notion of these insults, when you are insulted, so one thing you do is you just carry on as if they'd said nothing. And the interesting thing is they might. This is just out of their experience. And they might say, didn't you hear what I just said? In which case the reply is, yeah. And then you just go on as if nothing had happened. Now think of it from their point of view. They hit you with their best shot and you shrugged it off. Okay, so it's got to be devastating for the insulter. Another thing that's easy because it's easy to say nothing. I mean, it's emotionally difficult maybe, but it's physically easy to say nothing. One level up from that is you turn the insult into a joke. Requires more thinking on your part, more skill. But one thing the stoics suggested is you respond with something along these lines. Well, if you think that's my worst shortcoming, then it's clear you don't know me well enough in order to, to insult me. So you are really not qualified if that's the best you can come up with. And again, they don't see that coming. Now I routinely. Now I might be deceiving myself here, but I'm a big fan of self deprecating humor. I'm okay with it. Of turning myself into the butt of a joke that works for me. Didn't always. I think it's something about you reaching a certain level in life. So that makes it easier if someone does insult you. And like I said, the guy friends I have, this is just one of the ways we relate to each other. It's very puzzling, very interesting. I'm not sure why, but it's a good sign. The fact that your friends are insulting you, that's good. That means you're part of the game.
- [40:16]
Dan Harris
Yeah, verbal abuse is definitely my love language and I use it on everybody I like the most. But I think of that ribbing somebody as different from straight up insulting because the spirit of that kind of banter is not to hurt. Whereas I think of an insult as like trying to hurt somebody.
- [40:37]
William Irvin
Yeah, it's a different thing. And that notion of hurting somebody, here's just another kind of line. When I wrote on desire, that was when I discovered I was late to discover it because it was already well known, is just the extent to which we humans are wired by our evolutionary past. And so we basically are wired to respond to stimuli the way that our recent ancestors. What counts as recent ancestors? Oh, you know, the last few million years. So our distant ancestors on the savannas of Africa. If you think about what it took to survive under those circumstances, one is your standing in the social hierarchy. So you became very concerned with that because if you were the low person, you might not have eaten, you might not have made it. And if you didn't mate, of course your genes drop out of the gene pool. So we were wired to care very much about our social status. Now the thing is, we're not in that environment. We aren't on the savannas of Africa, we're in cities and now. But yet we have the same wiring. So I will find myself in these two in the morning thoughts thinking about, oh, does somebody still like me or dislike me? And then I have this other thing, this other handle. And that is, oh, I'm wired to have these thoughts, but they're silly thoughts because even if somebody doesn't like me, I'm still going to eat. I might even overeat. It's not going to be an issue. And yet there's this part of my brain that obsesses over it on that same line, by the way, and this is in meditation. This whole notion of the goal should be to live in the moment. On the savannas of Africa, somebody who did that probably didn't last very long. You know, this is sitting on a rock, you know, in the sun. And all of the humans around him were saying, aren't you going to come with us and gather some more food? Because you never know when. And. And he says, I'm just going to live in the moment here, sit on this rock and whoops. Along comes the lion, and there he go, he's gone. So we're also wired. We have these incredibly active minds. So in meditation you become very aware of this, that these ideas just drift into your mind or they break down the door and get into your mind and sometimes they stay there and just won't go. And you can give a kind of an evolutionary explanation for that. The ideal strategy back then is to live not in the present, but in the past and the future. Live in the past, Remember what's happened to you so you can avoid it in the future. Live in the future to prepare yourself, to increase your chances of surviving and reproducing in the future. Living in the present. No upside in that at all. So we're this curious kind of hybrid being. We have this power to reason, but it didn't displace our emotional side, it moved in alongside. It took up residence in our brain right next door. And it's still there, still active. But first thing is to understand that it's there. And then second thing is develop strategies to keep it in its proper place.
- [43:59]
Dan Harris
So one of those strategies, in fact, I think everything we're talking about today fits into that category of strategies to keep aspects of our evolutionary repertoire in their right place. I've heard you describe stoicism, and I would put many aspects of Buddhism in this same category as counter programming against evolution. We've talked about insults. Another thing that we talked about earlier is anger. What are the stoic recipes for handling anger.
- [44:30]
William Irvin
Okay, so anger is. There's just no upside to anger. Seneca said sometimes there's an upside to pretending to be angry, but if you're actually angry, you're shooting yourself in the foot. So what's the upside of pretending to be angry? Well, if you're dealing with somebody really, really slow who has trouble comprehending things, it's a jolt. If he thinks, oh, I've made so and so angry, then I better do the job. So and so is paying me to do so. Seneca says, yeah, yeah, that's okay. That's understandable. But what's not okay is if you're actually angry because it's a negative emotion and it's an emotion you can avoid. The other thing about anger is that once it starts, it's self sustaining. In my book Stoic Challenge, I describe what I think I called the five second rule. There's this rule, if you drop something on the floor and you pick it up within five seconds, it's okay to eat it. Well, that's not the case. You know, it depends on what's on the floor when you drop it. But that is this kind of urban legend. But with anger, when you realize that a situation has come up where anger is appropriate, it's important that you nip it in the bud. That you realize, oh, here is something I could easily get angry about. So I have to now, while my rational mind is still in control, I have to tell myself, I'm not going to be bothered by this. And it's really interesting because once it gets going, once the fire starts, it's really hard to extinguish. So one stoic strategy is, well, you don't let it start. You can't control things that happen to you that could make you angry. But once they do, you have to be on alert. So it's like a fireman, the first sign of a flame, you know, ah, you extinguish it, because if you don't, it's going to get big. And when it gets big, it will consume you. And that's the thing about anger.
- [46:32]
Dan Harris
Can I jump in on that?
- [46:34]
William Irvin
Go ahead.
- [46:35]
Dan Harris
What you're describing there sounds like emotional suppression, which seems maybe, if not impossible, unwise.
- [46:45]
William Irvin
Okay, so the standard view of the Stoics is that they suppressed their emotions. So when I wrote A Guide to the Good life, I gave it a capital S. I said, okay, look up stoic in the dictionary, a lowercase S stoic. And it'll be somebody who suppresses emotions, who just stands there and grimly Takes whatever life can throw his way. That's not what I mean. By the way, the same is true if you look up Epicurean, skeptic and so on. All of these ancient schools, what we now think they are, were wrong. They were something different. The Epicureans were not party boys, for instance, but they did have a philosophy of life. So what are Stoics about? They're about not suppressing emotions. They're about not even letting them emerge. Now it sounds like suppressing. So for instance, with anger. So I'm not saying that you will let yourself get angry and then you bottle it up and fight against doing anything about it. No, the strategy is you nip it in the bud so you don't have anything to suppress. See, that's the beautiful thing. There's nothing to suppress. Now, other emotions, the positive emotions, you're encouraging them. You're doing things to increase your chance of getting them. So to say he was a happy stoic is not an oxymoron. Why was he happy? Because he developed his ability to appreciate the life he happened to be living, to appreciate the components of that life. And how did they get to that? Ah, it's these psychological ploys, these psychological techniques. You want to be happier right now? Oh, just imagine all the ways you could be unhappier. Don't dwell on them because that will make you unhappy. But allow that thought to creep into your mind. You want to experience more awe. Learn more about the world you know, because then you'll realize that it's an incredible world. If you're bored, it's on you. You're living in the most amazing universe ever. If you're bored, then you need to learn more about that universe because the more you know, the more incredible it will become.
- [49:00]
Dan Harris
Part of what you're saying makes sense to me. The cultivation of positive mind states like awe and gratitude. I'm down with all that. Where I'm getting confused and I'm curious actually, to learn more is this idea of not suppressing anger but not letting it arise. Can you say more about how very tactically and practically how one would do that, given that there are so many objectively infuriating things popping off in this universe.
- [49:26]
William Irvin
Yeah. So suppose you are going to a certain parking space that you think is rightfully yours. Okay. You're going to do a back in parallel park. And while you're in the course of doing that, another car, the nose goes in and takes the space so you can't back in. And then you're there. At a deadlock, you know, should you give in, should you wait for them to give in? And it's very easy at that point to say, ah, my dignity as a human being depends on me getting this case. And that's an evil person and he's trying to rip me off and so on. But the voice of sanity would be, yeah, you know, I could do that, I could fight that fight. But fighting that fight, would it be worth it? It's a stupid parking space and I can find another parking space. And if I'm interested in what's good for me, give him the space. Right, give him the space and I'll work around that. That's an example. You have this choice, a problem. It's a situation that you wish were different. If you wish it was different, it counts as a problem. If you don't wish it was different for you, it's not a problem. Maybe a problem for other people, but it's not a problem for you. So with respect to the things that make you angry or upset, there are going to be people who say, you know, you should be upset about that. And then you can think, well, yeah, I couldn't be upset about that, I suppose, but isn't it wonderful that I'm not upset about that? Doesn't that count for something? And then, you know, there's a concern that comes in, well, aren't you going to be a pushover? Aren't people going to start taking advantage of you because they know you just take whatever you get? And that could be an issue. But remember we talked before about if you're really dealing with a slow witted, self absorbed person, to fake anger is one thing you can do, but once you actually get angry, it doesn't have any more impact on them than faking anger, but it has an impact on you personally. And you can see the anger. You can see the grudges that last a lifetime. The grudges that are inherited by the children of the people who were wronged and their children. And it seems like just such a, such a terrible, terrible way to live. There is another choice also. You know, when, when you're angry at somebody, when somebody's done something bad, there's this other thing, and that is consider the perspective. Look at the world from their point of view. Why are they doing that? Could be that something bad has happened, they had a difficult childhood, could be they're having a difficult day. So it's magnanimous of me to do this, but hey, okay, when it comes to my bedtime, Meditation, I can pat myself on the back. And I said, you know, I could have blown up, made a big deal over that. And I didn't. Good for me. I'm making progress as a human being.
- [52:35]
Dan Harris
We're living in tumultuous political times. People often ask me what do I do about all the anger I'm feeling at the other side. And I often say, like, well, don't make the anger bad, meaning it's a natural emotion, it comes and goes. But what you don't want to do is feed it and make it the default mode of your mind. So that makes sense to me. And one way to not feed it is to take somebody else's perspective. I think that's very helpful. I still am getting stuck a little bit though, on this, preventing it from arising because I, I think the mind moves so fast and the world moves so fast that I'm having a hard time imagining cultivating a life and a mind where it just never comes up.
- [53:26]
William Irvin
It will come up. I do get angry. I do become obsessively angry. So what am I? I'm a work in progress. I'm a stoic in training. So the stoics throw, throw out this idea of the stoic sage that's the perfect stoic, the one who just nails it every time, you know, hits the ball out of the park every single time. And you hear them make reference to that. Well, no one has ever existed who was a perfect sage, a stoic sage. So why put it up? Because it's a target to aim at. And you should say, I'm never going to make that target, I'm never going to reach it. But I should model myself after it. I should try to become as close as I can. Now you say recent events trouble you. That must mean you read the news because it really is awful. But then the follow up question is, okay, so you getting angry, how's that going to help the world and how's that going to hurt you? Will you being actually angry and waking up in the middle of the night angry, will that actually make a difference on the situation or is it better for you? Because you can come up with the things to pursue, things to do and then you avoid all of that hassle and at the same time you're making what difference you can. And the truth of the matter is, at present there's a few people who can make a big difference. A whole bunch of people who can't make a big difference. Yeah, I'm very, very reluctant to get angry. I am watching a number of things very carefully. But I'm careful not to get angry at the same time. Also, look what happens when people do get angry. Remember the storming of the Capitol on January 6th? So those were people who felt the anger and they let it go. So you end up with an angry mob and the angry mob does not think the angry mob reacts. So, you know, and if these were people who just said, well, we lost the election and you know, we have other elections to look forward to. But once the anger, now, of course there were forces stoking that anger, saying you should be angry, you should be upset. Well, I don't know. I don't know because I can live with this. So anger. And there are people in positions of power who know that's a key to manipulating people is to trigger their anger. And it hurts you and it hurts the world you live in as well.
- [56:11]
Dan Harris
Coming up, Bill talks more about how stoicism can help us navigate the challenges of this digital age. What the stoics say about pursuing fame, clout and status. Status. How to reframe setbacks as tests and why death is the ultimate test, the ultimate exam. One of my favorite new sponsors of this show for very selfish reasons is Masa Chips. The selfish reason is that they've sent us a bunch of chips and they're right out on the counter and I've been eating them on the regular and they're just straight up delicious. We talk a lot on this show about not only how to take care of your mind, but also your body. And of course, it's all one system. And the truth is, most so called healthy snacks aren't so healthy. They're packed with seed oils and ultra processed ingredients that leave you feeling worse, not better. Masa chips are different. They're made with just three simple organic corn, salt and beef tallow. They're crafted the way chips were meant to be. No seed oils, no fillers, just real food. That tastes incredible. It really does. I have been snacking quite frequently on two of their flavors that they sent to us. My wife has as well and we give a hearty, hearty thumbs up. If you care about what's in your mind, you should care about what's in your food. Try Masa Chips today and taste the difference. Go to masachips.com discount happier and use the code happier for 25% off your first order. Do you ever have that experience where you're trying to get stuff done and you just can't focus? You got too many windows open, you're wasting time on Instagram, you are sending random texts, whatever. You can't focus on the thing you're supposed to be doing. There is a new product that I have found to be pretty helpful. Brain FM is an app built for anyone looking to boost productivity. They create science backed music that syncs brain patterns, helping you focus better, relax deeper and sleep easier. I've actually been playing some of their music while I've been working and I find it helpful. Brain FM has task specific focus modes like deep work, creative and motivation to meet your exact needs. There's also turbo mode for ADHD support. Brain FM is the only music company supported by a National Science foundation grant award to improve people's focus. Brain FM recently published a study in the Nature journal Communications Biology showing that their patented music technology increases activity in attentional networks, doubles neural synchrony at brainwave frequencies associated with focus, and improves attentional task performance in people with ADHD symptomology. Brain FM's mission is to help people around the world with a simple and accessible tool that supports supports focus, especially for those who need it most. Unlock your brain's full potential. Free for 30 days by going to Brain FM Happier. That's Brain FM. Happier for 30 days. Free. Speaking of power, the Stoics had a lot to say about pursuing fame, pursuing clout. Can you teach us a little bit about what the Stoics said? And just, I'll just note as we dive into this part of the conversation that we live in an era, you know, in social media where we're encouraged to want this and pursue it perhaps more than at any point in human history. So I'm curious to hear what the Stoics had to say on this score.
- [59:44]
William Irvin
Yeah, the Stoics did not see the coming of social media, understandably. And then of course the other thing that's going to make things even worse is AI. The coming of AI. So these are things I've devoted a fair amount of thought to recently. Social media. So this is current research project, but just imagine that the year is 2000 and there's this guy, you know him, he's a relative that you would encounter at big family events and he would go on at length about his own pet peeves. He would complain about any number of pets, of political things and oh, did I tell you he was a racist and he's anti Semitic. He would be one of a kind and he would be off in his own little world and he would send letters to the editor and they would get rejected because they're just rants, you know, he would offer to be on television shows and he would be rejected because the guy's a crackpot. Okay, so what did social media do? It handed everybody crackpots, included a megaphone, let them communicate not just with their family members, not just with their neighbors, but with millions, potentially millions of people, and do so in an anonymous fashion. And as a result of that, the people who shared those beliefs could link up, could find each other. And just imagine the sense of relief when you say, I'm not alone, there are other people who believe like I do. And then you get this forming of tribes that is very disturbing. And they also have a degree of anonymity. And so it's stoics simply did not see that coming. So it seems to take some of the worst aspects of human nature that we had somewhat under control and now those are off the hook and AI is going to exacerbate that situation, which if you ask me, what do I worry about? That's currently what I'm worried about. Am I worried about the political situation? Yep, but longer term. So I've been around for many years now, it just feels like things have changed in an important way. And in saying that, I know I'm talking like an old man, because that's what old people always said, not like when I was a kid, things have changed. But I want to say this time they really have in an important way. But then the follow up is that's what old men always say. And I want to say, but this time it's different. To which the reply is, that's what old men always say. So it's a challenge. And so what we've done is we are wired to survive on the savannas of Africa. And now we are in a radically, radically different situation than that. And it's just not clear how this is going to turn out.
- [62:45]
Dan Harris
What about this desire for status, influence and fame that many of us feel? What would the stoics say about that?
- [62:52]
William Irvin
Think about social media. I'm pretty much free of social media, but think about what that involves. And that involves you trying to impress other people. How come? Well, there's the ego issue. You know, it's fun to have a lot of followers, but you can also make it pay. You can make a very good living if you have enough followers. And then what you get is what's called audience capture. So instead of you sharing your ideas, your pure ideas with the audience, what you do is you start thinking in terms of what will get me a bigger audience. What if I believe and say it will get me a bigger audience. And then you're trapped. You've got to progress in. In that direction. So you end up with people who are out to say things that will impress. Now, let's see. Who are they trying to impress? Are they trying to impress really smart, intelligent, wise people? No, they're out to impress complete strangers who, for all they know, have different values than they do, have different groundings in reality than they do. And it seems strange that you would take your life and say, I'm going to live this, the one life that I have to live. Impressing complete strangers, it's built in. They give you a metric so you can see how well you're doing. Oh, look, I picked up 10 new followers, or I picked up 100,000 new followers. And then you get that little burst of dopamine, you know, it says, good boy, you're doing good. And again, on the savannas of Africa, for you to have social standing made a big difference in whether you would survive and reproduce, whether you would have the next meal even. But those days are gone. So am I out to impress other people? Yes. Who am I out to impress? It's a very selective group of people. I'm out to impress my wife, for instance. I'm out to impress my friends in the sense that I want to come across as a true friend, somebody who's there for them. I want to impress my children. I want to impress stoics long dead, you know. So when I do something, I think, okay, what I just did, what would Seneca have to say about that? One of the famous Roman Stoics. I am interested in impressing people, but it's not complete strangers. It's people who are wise and people who, you know, it really makes a difference to me. So social media just says, hey, here's what success is. It's impressing a whole bunch of complete strangers. Okay, you got one life to live. If you want to spend it doing that, that's too bad. Also, wealth is just another way of gaining a kind of fame. And it's curious. Envy is a negative emotion. And yet, why do we flaunt our wealth? We would love to encourage envy in other people. Feels terrible for them, but it feels so good for us to think they're out there envying me. And that's sick and twisted and terrible. And of course, the people who are experiencing the envy, what's the alternative to that? We'll just say, well, he's got a really great car, and that's apparently Important to him. So good for him because that's not so important for me. We're both getting what we want.
- [66:25]
Dan Harris
Yeah. As you say that, the phrase easier said than done is coming to my mind yet again.
- [66:30]
William Irvin
Takes practice. Takes conscious practice. So two things. First, the realization that it's there, then working on it, of saying, okay, so I'm in kind of a corner here. How can I back out of this corner? What can I do to back out of this? You know, your namesake, Sam Harris, infamously or famously or whatever, gave up his Twitter account with vast numbers of people because he realized what Twitter was doing to him. So is he better off for doing that? Oh, yeah. But now he has no followers. Actually, he has a whole bunch of followers in the sense of people who listen and learn from him. But those followers, what were they worth? They're numbers on a computer screen. So you got one life. You get to decide your values, what you're going to try to maximize, what your metrics should be, and then you live with the results of that.
- [67:29]
Dan Harris
You mentioned Sam, Somebody. I absolutely adore you, Bill. Have some great lessons up on Sam's Waking up app and I'll put a link if people want to go. Listen to those in our remaining time. Let me just ask you about a couple of other stoic techniques. One is, I'd be curious. You know, we've talked a lot about setbacks and how to handle setbacks. What do the stoics say about handling success?
- [67:55]
William Irvin
Not as much. First thing is what counts as success. And for them, they would have a reduced notion of success. So we talked a little bit about failure before. So for them, success means what it means. Did you do what you could with what you had? So I don't have any tattoos. Public confession, but if I did get one, it would be the saying, do what you can with what you've got where you are. Because the stoics actually didn't say that. It's attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, but I think he stole it from someone else. So. But that notion, do what you can with what you've got where you are, that is the ultimate stoic definition of success. That you found yourself in a circumstance, you had options, you had things you could do, so what did you do? You gave it careful thought and you did the best you could with what you had, where you were. Under those circumstances, I think by some measures I would count as a success. I would attribute it probably 80% to luck. Don't get me wrong, I work hard. I think I work hard. I think I worked hard to get that success. But, you know, if I'd been born to different parents, if I had been born at a different time, there are little single. If I had been born with some kind of terrible birth defect. You go through the whole list. Luck has played a huge role in whatever success that I've enjoyed. So the Stoics would say, thinking of success, they're metrics. Remember a minute ago I said, choose your metric. How much money do you have? That could be success. How much weight can you lift? That would be success. How many wives have you had? You can go through the list. The Stoics would say, the fact that you took the setbacks that came your way and you dealt with those setbacks and you did the steps you could to thrive in the one life that you had to live. So you made the choices that were going to increase equanimity. So did you have a peaceful mind? You can have billions and billions of dollars and still be a miserable human being who's doing what at night? Oh, that's right. Getting into Twitter wars or X wars or doing that well, when does this person sleep? Well, we don't know, really. There are just metrics that are going to be opposed. If you want to increase those metrics, then you're going to pay a price in terms of equanimity. You're not going to be a happy camper, you're going to be on edge, you're going to be angry, you're going to be envious. And is that the life you want to live? Which is better? To be the richest man on earth and the most powerful man and absolutely miserable and worried that somebody's going to murder you at any minute, or to be the poorest man, but to live a humble life and to have your needs satisfied and you have control over your needs, yes, there are biological needs, but beyond that, if you're satisfied with a certain size, house, car, whatever, good for you, you're satisfied. And if you say, but you shouldn't be satisfied, that's crazy talk.
- [71:23]
Dan Harris
Last question. And this is a stereotypical in some way. When you get a Buddhist interviewing a stoic, this question is stereotypically morose, although it's actually not properly understood. You write in the Stoic Challenge, one of your books, about something you call death as the ultimate examination. Can you hold forth on that?
- [71:45]
William Irvin
Yeah. So for a true Stoic, life presents you with all sorts of exams. And in that same book, I develop this notion that one way to deal with the setbacks of life is to imagine that they are tests imposed on us by what I refer to as the stoic gods. I don't believe such gods actually exist, but I think they're a useful psychological strategy to assume their existence and to assume that they're responsible for the setbacks that we experience. And here's the thinking behind that. So what they do is they want us. So imagine a coach, okay, so what's a coach going to do? A coach who wants the people being coached to become good athletes. Does the coach baby themselves? No. Does the coach say, ah, you look tired, skip the workout today? No. What does the coach do? The coach challenges them, takes them to their limits so they can exceed those limits. Why? To make them stronger. So imagine these stoic gods, imaginary stoic gods are playing the role of coach. So what are they doing? They're presenting you with. With these setbacks. How come? To make you stronger. So you get better at dealing with the setbacks. So you get better at bouncing back from the setbacks. You get better at learning from the setbacks so you can avoid them happening again in the future. So you have this whole notion that life is in this ongoing test. For instance, before we went on the air here, I think before you came in, we were still doing the tech checks, and we had a number of technical issues to work through. And in my own mind, I was doing my best, stay calm. And one of the things I did is I said, oh, it's the stoic gods. They know a lot about how computers work and they know how to mess with things. So it doesn't quite work. And so once you do that, then you're thinking in terms, you're framing it. Oh, it's a test. So let's see. I want to get a good grade on this test. So what does that involve? Two things. Number one, staying calm, cool and collected. Number two, coming up with a workaround for the setback. That's good. So as far as life goes, life is a series. If you have a normal life, it'll be lots of setbacks. The ultimate setback is death. It's there. So we have other stoic strategies. One is the last time meditation. When you do something, you imagine that it's the last time you're going to do it. I don't think we have time to go into a bunch of more. But there will be a last time you do everything that you do in your life. There'll be a last time you eat a hamburger. There will be a last time you lay your head on a pillow. There will be a last breath you take. There's a last time for everything. And that's because you're going to die. You're going to die someday. And I hate to break the news to you, but me too. I'm going to die someday. You can think of that as all of these others. These other setbacks are. Quizzes are midterm exams if it's a bigger setback. But the exit exam, it's literally the exit exam is your own death. So you're going to die. And then the interesting thing is you may not control the circumstances of how you die, but you can control how you respond to those circumstances. So, for instance, you look at the Stoics themselves. The Stoics tended to get in trouble with the powers that be. And they were exiled and they were executed. They have all sorts of bad things happen. Seneca had a bad ending. The emperor said, I'm tired of you. You're going to be executed. You have two choices. You can either will send in a centurion to do it, or you can do it yourself. And he realized that for a Stoic, death is showtime. It's the ultimate exam. It's the thing you've been preparing for all of your life. So he said, oh, well, I'll do it myself. And on an appointed day, he gathered together his family and his friends. He said, well, you know, today is my going away day, so I want you to be here. And he was cheering them up before his own death. They were sad and disconsolate and crying about his parting. And he was doing his best to cheer them up, which is a remarkable thing to think about. And then it also turned out that killing himself was a lot harder than he imagined it would be because of his age, because of a variety of things. He slit his wrists. Not enough blood came out. He took poison, didn't take effect. Finally had to resort to more extreme measures in order to die. And yet, what a beautiful death to experience. Better than a death where you're crying and you're saying, I don't want to go. I don't want to go, because you're going to have to go. And there are better ways than others. And let me add one thing in. It's kind of a natural takeoff from this. And that is suppose various religions are right. Suppose that after those religions, you really do go to heaven. Okay, so here's a claim, a slightly outrageous claim, but okay, here goes. And that is that if when you go to heaven, if you get to take your personality with you, and your approach to life with you, you're probably going to be as miserable in heaven as you were on earth. Because you get to heaven and you'll say, oh great, I'm in heaven. I get to be with all my relatives. Wait a minute. You couldn't even stand to be with them for the course of a Thanksgiving dinner. And now you get to be with them for how long? That's right, for an eternity. Oh, no. And then you're also going to start experiencing envy. The envy, for instance, oh, I thought I got to sit by the right hand of Jesus, but this other guy is sitting there and I wish I could sit there. And you're going to end up just as miserable on earth. And if you say, oh, well, when I get to heaven, I'm going to shape up and I'm going to start appreciating things. And then the answer is, well, if you can do it in heaven, tell you what, try doing it on earth. Heaven's not a sure thing. Maybe there'll be one, maybe there won't. Earth is for sure. So if you have that power to clean up your act that way, do it while you're still alive.
- [78:46]
Dan Harris
Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the names of your books and any other resources you've put out into the universe that we should be aware of?
- [78:55]
William Irvin
Okay. You can find everything at my website. That's William bervin.comb as in boy. Williamburvin.com has everything listed. The pre stoic book is called On Desire, why We Want what We Want from Oxford University Press. Then there's Guide to the Good Life. So Guide to the Good Life is the best selling of my books and it seems to have opened a lot of people's eyes to stoicism. So it's a great book to start with. There's a book called Slap in the Face, which is about insults. So it's sort of applied stoicism. And there's Stoic Challenge, which is also applied stoicism. So it's talk about setbacks and how people have dealt with setbacks. I do have another book that should be out later this year, but I've taken a change. So we talked about how I regard myself as a fire starter with respect to stoicism. And now there's just a ton of stoic stuff out there. So publishers are all saying you should write another book about stoicism. And I'm saying, no, no, it's kind of stuffed. We got that covered. But we live in a time that's uniquely irrational. So that's where I can best devote my effort. So I should have a book coming out later this year, title of which will probably be how to Think Being Rational in Irrational Times. And this would be from Oxford University Press. Once again, love it.
- [80:30]
Dan Harris
Bill Irvin, thank you very much for coming on.
- [80:32]
William Irvin
Oh, thank you for chatting with me.
- [80:37]
Dan Harris
Thanks again to William Irvin. Great to have him on the show. Show. Don't forget, if you want to hear more from him, you can go to Waking up, the app run by my friend Sam Harris. I'm a huge fan of that app. As I mentioned earlier, they have basic meditation instruction over there, specific courses from a variety of meditation teachers, also life skills courses and the four part series that Sam and I recorded with Joseph Goldstein on the Buddha's Eightfold Path, which is eight hours of audience audio, tons of wisdom, a lot of laughs, and guided meditations from Joseph to help you pound the learnings into your neuron. I know there's been a lot of changes around here, so zero pressure to sign up for any of this. As I said earlier, my main priorities remain this podcast and my burgeoning substack community. However, if you do want to sign up for Waking up, which I heartily recommend, you can sign up@wakingup.com 1040 10% that's T E N P E R C e n t wakingup.com 10% as I mentioned earlier, I put a link in the show notes and just a reminder, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you'll get 30 days free and you will be doing me and my team a solid because we will get a portion of any proceeds from the subscriptions that are generated through that link. And as I said said earlier, if money's an issue, don't worry about it. You can go to the Waking it Up website and ask for a scholarship. That's the same policy I have over@danharris.com if you can't afford it, we'll hook you up. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
- [82:46]
William Irvin
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C
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