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The Discipline of Desire (Episode 85)
823 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael
“Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself”
In this conversation, Michael and Caleb discuss the Stoic discipline of desire.
(02:05) Introduction
(10:41) Mastering Desire
(13:21) Stoic Theory of Happiness
(15:43) Beginner vs Advanced
(19:00) Love for Universal Nature
(21:00) Mindfulness
(25:37) Reinterpretation
(28:26) Amor Fati
(31:15) Attention
(38:35) Circumscribing the Present
(44:42) Challenges
(49:17) How Can You Love Fate?
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoic Conversations
00:00:00
Speaker
It's not just a matter of learning how to be a good runner. It's a matter of unlearning all these bad habits you constructed. And that's a distinct art of its own.
Podcast Structure and Episode Focus
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism.
00:00:21
Speaker
Each week we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert. In this conversation, Michael and I discuss the discipline of desire. It's one of the three stoic training disciplines.
Stoic Discipline of Desire Overview
00:00:40
Speaker
We spend the conversation highlighting what we think is most significant about this discipline, what exercises one can use to practice it, to improve in it,
00:00:50
Speaker
and finally end by talking about challenges. Before jumping into it, I have two announcements. First, our course is starting on October 23rd. If you want to learn and apply the ancient playbook for living well, namely stoicism, we're going to be spending
00:01:10
Speaker
three weeks in a live course with video calls, community interaction, a forum, readings, and a capstone project to solidify one's thoughts and learnings. All of these things are geared towards becoming more stoic. If any of that sounds good to you and you want to take part in it, do check out stomeditation.com slash course. We'd love to have you.
Understanding the Three Stoic Disciplines
00:01:38
Speaker
And then second, I'm running a free workshop on stoicism and mindfulness. It'll be live this Thursday, October 12th at 6 p.m. Eastern. To register for that, go to stomeditation.com slash workshop. All right, here is our conversation. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Montaveros. And I'm Michael Trombley.
00:02:05
Speaker
And today we are going to be talking about the discipline of desire. So this is one of the key Stoic disciplines. We also have the discipline of assent or judgment and the discipline of action. And today we're going to be talking all about desire in particular.
00:02:27
Speaker
And this is a, this is the second part in a three-part series where we're going over those three disciplines. So we have one on judgment, we're a cent before this, this is desire, and then we'll be into ethics or action after this.
Mastering Desires and Aversions
00:02:40
Speaker
For those that are still familiarizing yourself with these, these are the really the, in stoicism, the idea of the three things that you need to train yourself in or practice.
00:02:51
Speaker
to improve yourself, to become a better person, to achieve happiness, to achieve the kind of the ends, goals of Stoic philosophy. You know, a lot of times you think about ethics in this abstract way when the Stoics thought about it as something to be practiced. How do you practice it? You practice it by going through these three disciplines. And so the discipline of desire is one of those three, and it's about what you want. It's about what you
00:03:16
Speaker
what you desire out of life, what you think is good for you versus bad for you, what you want to get and what you want to avoid and what those feelings of desire and aversion as the stoics call them, but really just wanting to get things or avoid things, what you apply those to, what are the objects of those sensations and
00:03:38
Speaker
You know, what should they be? What should you apply them to? And how do you go about training yourself to apply it differently if you desire the wrong things or you're afraid of the wrong things? How do you change that so you you feel the right way about the right things?
Desire as Motivation
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. You can sort of think of these disciplines as domains. If you're aiming to be good at a particular sport or activity, you're going to break that down into different areas and you drill those distinct areas as specific practices for each one. And the three disciplines are one way to do that.
00:04:10
Speaker
project of living a happy life, having building a stoic character. And the desire in particular is focusing on, you know, that's the bit we'll focus on today. Yeah. And so that support analogy is useful. I mean, one thing we talk about a lot in consulting, oh, bear with me, I'm bringing some consulting link over to this, is something being meezy, which is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.
00:04:36
Speaker
I wouldn't say these are mutually exclusive. I think there's a lot of overlay between the different disciplines, like what you assent to is going to have a lot to do with what you end up desiring and vice versa. But they're kind of collectively exhaustive in the sense that if you're really good at one of these, but you're forgetting the other one, you're missing something very important.
Exercises for Mastering Desires
00:04:58
Speaker
When you're looking at your progress being kind of lumpy or maybe it's going well, but it's not progressing, you're not progressing the way you might like to. One thing you can do the same way an athlete might say, well, maybe my technique is good, but my cardio is bad and my cardio is excellent, but I'm not as strong as other people or my flexibility is poor. You can compartmentalize these levels of progression to pick which one to focus on or these types of progression. Same kind of thing with your stoic practice. It's helpful for breaking apart
00:05:28
Speaker
not thinking of it holistically as becoming a better person because that just makes it complicated to identify actionable steps really, right? Like when you want to action, actionable steps, you want to be specific. These disciplines are really helpful for getting specific.
00:05:45
Speaker
Yep, yep, absolutely. So we'll be grounding our discussion in a chapter from the book, The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadeau. The two of us read that before this conversation. We read it rather. And so as we reference Hadeau, that's what we'll be talking about. And then the focus, the rough structure for this is just us going to be teasing out some of what we think are the essential aspects of this discipline, the discipline of desire.
00:06:13
Speaker
noting exercises, techniques for training in that discipline, and then talking about challenges that we've run into, we've seen others run into in applying this. Yeah, cool. Let's
Attention, Desire, and Aversion Techniques
00:06:27
Speaker
do it.
00:06:27
Speaker
do you want to kick us off with your first item? So the first thing that I think is really important about the discipline of desire, something important to understand about it, is the Stoics make this division that we don't really, especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, that we don't really use in contemporary
00:06:46
Speaker
I don't think we talk about it very much in the modern day, which is this division between, I would say, degrees of desire or degrees of longing or wants. And so the Stoics make this difference between desire, which is this incredible intense sensation you experience when you feel you need something to be happy. You can't live without it. Your life is ruined without it. That's desire.
00:07:12
Speaker
That's what we're talking about, this kind of full-bodied love or intense feeling. Maybe you think the first time you fall in love, maybe that was desire in the stoic sense. Or maybe the last time you've been really anxious about something or you really have felt kind of pit of your stomach fear. That's aversion, the more intense equivalent, the opposite side of desire, that kind of thing of like, I really need this not to happen.
00:07:41
Speaker
When we're talking about the discipline of desire, we're talking about that sensation, that extreme sensation. What the Stoics do
Amor Fati: Loving Fate
00:07:47
Speaker
is they make a division between desire and impulse. Impulse is a kind of a weak sensation. You can think of it like a motivation or an inclination or a preference. You can think of things like this.
00:08:03
Speaker
A desire should be, according to the Stoics, only directed towards virtue, towards being an excellent person, and towards a kind of love for nature as a whole, a love for the universe in its entirety and the way things are.
00:08:19
Speaker
impulse, this other sensation, this is relatively weak. And that's what you actually direct towards things in the external world, certain outcomes you want, you know, fulfilling your
Practical Challenges in Stoicism
00:08:32
Speaker
roles, having preferences over things outside of your control, you know, in stoicism, you can, you can have a
00:08:38
Speaker
People often think about, well, how do you, if you're a stoic, how do you act or how are you just not totally passive in the external world? And part of that is, well, you're, you're committed to being a virtuous person, but the other thing is like, you could have impulses, you can have preferences. You can say, you know, I'd like to go to the park today and you can set a plan to go to the park.
00:08:56
Speaker
And then if, if, if rain happens, you can go, Oh, my plan was foiled. Like I'm not going to go to the park today. My preference wasn't fulfilled, but at no point are you feeling desire. You're not feeling that intense sensation. So I think when we're talking about this, that is like the, that's the. First of all, it's an interesting distinction. The stokes make, we don't, I don't, I don't hear in modern language very often. And second, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about the discipline of desire is like, what do you feel that intense, that intense sensation towards?
00:09:24
Speaker
And so first thing that I think is important before we jump to do is was to make that division. Yeah, that's useful. It's sort of, you know, what's the thing that you're willing to go all in on and then how is that going to shape your life?
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, totally. And then, and then the discipline of desire is going to be a, it's going to make that distinction, but then it's going to say, well, these are the kinds of things that you should desire. Namely, you should desire virtue. You should have a kind of an appreciation, a love of the way. Um, but these things that are outside of your control, these things that are not up to you should never desire them.
00:10:03
Speaker
nor should you be fearful of them, nor should you be averse to
Influence of Society on Values and Desires
00:10:08
Speaker
them or feel, my life will be ruined if something happens. Anything outside of my control happens. It's about saying,
00:10:15
Speaker
Don't give up this desire. Don't be apathetic, but you know, focus it like a light, like a laser onto one specific thing, which is that, it's just that virtue and that love for the universe. That's the, that's the target. That's the goal. If you do that, you, if you do that, you've mastered the discipline of desire and everything else is just, everything else is just getting there. It's just, well, easier said than done. And how do you, how do you become that kind of person that only desires virtue?
00:10:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's, you know, one thing that sticks out to me in this discipline is that mastering desires and aversion is sort of like the root project or purpose of philosophy. Not just stoicism, but other philosophies as well, I think. Initially, you might think, what's required for a happy life?
00:11:04
Speaker
Well, all these external factors, it might be one common answer. Well, power, reputation, pleasure. But the Stoics will say what? We just had an episode on Buddhism as well. The Buddhists will say it's no, it's a matter of fact.
00:11:20
Speaker
Becoming happy is a matter of mastering your basic desires and aversion. And that is no easy task by any means. But on the positive side, it's what something that one has a say in. It's something that
00:11:37
Speaker
one can shape over your life as opposed to these other factors of life, wealth, power, reputation, pleasure that are just going to be up to the contingencies of chance.
Embracing Fate Without Spirituality
00:11:52
Speaker
And as you say, part of recognizing that is in fact the discipline of desire, coming to love, fate, willingly embrace whatever happens that's out of your control. And then
00:12:02
Speaker
while pointing yourself towards just, you know, just being excellent in whatever circumstances you find yourself in, whatever situations you create. Yeah. And I mean, it gets a different way of putting this sticking to the sport analogy, as I often like to do is that, you know, many sports involve strength. They might manifest strength in different ways, but it's all strength. And so there's a discipline of desire and stoicism. There's a discipline of desire in Buddhism.
00:12:28
Speaker
There's a discipline of desire and Epicureanism, right? Epicureanism is about ancient Greek philosophy of maximizing pleasure. And it was saying, you know, if you go around and you want these kinds of, all these kinds of things, you're going to suffer a lot, right? You got to get your desire under control. Same thing I think about Plato's Republic. Plato's Republic is about achieving happiness by having
00:12:47
Speaker
the part of these desiring parts of the self, the part that desires pleasure, the part that desires honor, the part that desires rationality, getting those in the correct order. So the part that desires pleasure isn't dominating the other parts. So this, I think, yeah, you could kind of, to build on what you're saying, you could kind of expand out a discipline of desire as a fundamental part of, if not all philosophies, at least many philosophies.
00:13:10
Speaker
then it's going to look a little bit different
Wrap-up and Reflection
00:13:12
Speaker
in stoicism, but it's that key piece of happiness, at least in ancient philosophy, that unifies a lot of different schools.
00:13:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I think this is where the Stoic theory of value, Stoic theory of happiness needs to come into play because this is one theme that so many Stoics hammer on is the thought that what we want is not aligned with what, in fact, is good for us. And indeed, sometimes we're averse to what is good for us. So you have Epictetus always exhorting his students
00:13:49
Speaker
to improve their attention on what is up to them, realize what roles they are in, and live accordingly without being distracted by all those sorts of things they tend to get distracted from. And we're in a similar situation today, of course. So I think that in
00:14:14
Speaker
what you you know you have this idea okay you need to master your desires and the question is okay what should you want and the stoic answer is you should want to be uh an excellent person live the life of virtue and you know explain exactly what that is is you know something we we've aimed to do that's anxious so exciting to
Engaging with the Stoic Community
00:14:35
Speaker
do but at the very least you want to be pointed at that at that target
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah, because you could have a discipline, and this is important to differentiate, because when you say discipline of desires, it's not just this view of like, well, become apathetic or shrink away from the external world, like it might sound when you talk about Buddhism or Puritanism and Stoicism. You could have this discipline of desire that says,
00:14:57
Speaker
Well, look, you shouldn't desire to be rich and famous and cool. You should desire to have a great family or you shouldn't desire, you know, you shouldn't desire a external thing. You should desire be external thing. And that's what most lots of people are going to be talking about desire all the time about like focus your life towards a certain direction. If you want this instead, you'll be happy.
00:15:18
Speaker
and so on and so forth. But what stoicism does, its unique twist really is to shrink the things that are deserving of desire into the self. Or really, it's both just in the self and then the entirety of the universe at the same time to the kind of an appreciation for the world as it is and a focus on improving yourself as a part of that world. Right, right.
00:15:44
Speaker
When you discuss the discipline of judgment, you brought up how it has both the sort of basic and advanced aspects to it, the discipline of judgment. And I think the discipline of desire is similar where you have, it's one of the first things Epitetus, it is the first discipline that Epitetus tells the students to focus on.
00:16:06
Speaker
and in particular to focus on abstaining from those desires and aversions that don't point at what's fundamentally valuable. So there's that point, you know, it's one thing to aim your desire at virtue, it's another to work on just not desiring what is of no value.
00:16:26
Speaker
And that's a basic point, but also it's a discipline, some real depth to it, especially I think when you get to these, the aspects of adding more detail to the picture of what the virtuous life looks like and ensuring that you want that with all your being. And then also thinking about this aspect of loving fate, embracing the universal nature, which that aspect is, I would say,
00:16:57
Speaker
probably more on the advanced side of things. Yeah, if I had to make a, off the top of my head here, if I had to make the division between what is a beginner in advance, I would say the beginner is kind of a negative. The beginner is remove your desire from things that don't deserve it. And I would say the advanced is about the actual expansion of desire.
00:17:18
Speaker
the increasing of desire towards the things that do deserve it. Because I think when most beginners learn about the dichotomy of control, it's this thing of like, oh, I shouldn't care about that. Wow, what a great insight. Oh, that doesn't matter. Oh, I'm upset because I'm worried about what other people think of me. And it's all about removing desire and aversion from things that don't deserve it.
00:17:39
Speaker
And then I think the more advanced practice, as you said, is either toward the self or towards love of fate in the universe. Actually, let's ramp the dial on desire back up. So you're the kind of person who's getting access to the motivational power of that emotion and the importance of that emotion, but doing it is an advanced technique because it's a very dangerous thing.
00:17:59
Speaker
Right? This is one thing that Stoics talk about is that Epictetus emphasizes this, that all of our passions, so all of our extreme negative emotions, those come from frustrated desire and aversion. I feel extreme negative emotion when I want something and I don't get it, or I want to avoid something and it happens to me. So I only, somebody who's totally apathetic.
00:18:23
Speaker
And kind of a literal sense, I guess they don't feel passions would be the kind of person who doesn't care much about things. Right. So the, there's this kind of beginner position to abstain from desire and aversion, be very empathetic, calm down, basically stop caring as much. And then the advances like, well, how do I turn that back on? How do I, how do I open the faucet to those strong feelings in a way that doesn't come back to bite me? That's, I think the more advanced practice.
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, excellent. Is there anything else you want to shout out in terms of sort of significant or essential aspects of the discipline before you move on to exercises? I mean, one that Hiddo does a good job here, which I probably don't emphasize enough, but is an important part of stoicism. But I don't think I emphasize as much of my own practice as Hiddo in his book talks a lot about the kind of the love for the universal nature.
00:19:16
Speaker
the appreciation for the world around us and the kind of focusing the desire towards that. It's really easy, I think, to focus the desire on the individual, becoming a better person, the virtue, but it is this part of stoicism to also, you know, love the universe, love your place within it, love things as they happen. And I think that's an important part, at least of if you're going to practice ancient stoicism in a kind of robust, in a robust spiritual way.
00:19:46
Speaker
expanding that desire outside of yourself is an important part of the discipline as well.
00:19:52
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think something we've been talking about a little bit more than usual, this aspect of the universal nature, loving fate, more than our previous conversations, just because it is something that is important to Hadeau in particular, and of course it's important to the ancient Stoics and not something that we spend as much time on in most of our conversations.
00:20:22
Speaker
But I would say there are different readings one can have on what exactly that means. Does that just mean embracing the facts in sort of a secular, non-spiritual interpretation? Or does that mean not acknowledging a deeper sort of purpose, almost at what the ancients would call teleology to the world?
00:20:51
Speaker
do you have anything else to add to that? No, let's jump into some exercises about how- All right. Enough talking. Yeah, let's- Talk down to practice. One of the first practices that comes to mind for the discipline of desire, I think this is a
00:21:09
Speaker
an excellent way to introduce mindfulness techniques. So we have a line from sites from Marcus Aurelius. The proper characteristic of the good man is to love and greet joyfully all those events which he encounters and which are linked to him by destiny.
00:21:34
Speaker
And that idea, I think, of greeting whatever occurs is something one can work on in an isolated way through mindfulness meditation, just by paying attention to any sensations that arise and noting how we tend to have these
00:21:55
Speaker
desires about, you know, thinking particular sensations are good, particular sensations are bad, and coming to sort of shape ourselves to instead of immediately reacting to, oh, this is some amount of discomfort I might be experiencing while meditating, instead of immediately reacting to that and accepting, yes, this is discomfort, it's something I should be averse to, it's bad, we can just see it as a sensation.
00:22:21
Speaker
and shape ourselves in the kind of person who's receptive to that feeling, almost open to whatever sensation arises. And that's something that can be practiced, I think, by mindfulness meditation.
00:22:36
Speaker
in an isolated way, focusing on the sensations that arise in your body, thoughts that are occurring, and then one can move from those sorts of mental moves that one has while sitting to applying that to other events in one's day. Well, one more thing about this, I'm interested in what you think about this Caleb, is this idea that like,
00:22:58
Speaker
Maybe we almost have like a habitual response to certain things or like a, a default response to some things of like, oh, this sensation of.
00:23:08
Speaker
This, this is frustrating to me. It becomes a kind of habit or, you know, this physical sensation is a negative one becomes just a typical way, like situation A occurs and we just like interpret it in response B automatically. And so mindfulness and mindfulness is this way of like intentionally reflecting upon the stimulus and then introducing a different response or opening up a different response.
00:23:35
Speaker
So it's like it doesn't have to be a negative one. You can re-interrogate that sensation or that experience, but to create a different kind of reaction, a different A to B has to just be intentional, right? That's where the mindfulness comes in. Is that what you mean? Yeah, exactly. I think you're reprogramming yourself in particular. We have these
00:23:59
Speaker
the way desires show up for us is just we notice some stimulus, some impression, and are immediately averse to it, or are immediately cling on to it as a good thing, whatever it is. I think, sorry to interrupt you, but I think that like, I think of something even as simple as like country music, you know? And I might just have a thought in my mind, like, I don't like country music. And some country music comes on, I go, oh, country music. Sorry for all the country fans.
00:24:29
Speaker
But then this there's this idea of just being like, well, I'm actually going to listen to this song. I'm actually present with this. I do this a lot with like pop artists sometimes is I'll be like, well, that's like just some popular music. Like that's I don't like that person or, you know, I let's say, you know, I don't like Taylor Swift or something. But then you sit and you're actually present and listen to the song and you go, well, you know, this is actually this is actually pretty good. Or there's something here that I was missing out on.
00:24:53
Speaker
I mean, it's kind of a silly example, but just this idea of reopening yourself up to a reinterpretation instead of just going through your life of like, that's the kind of thing I don't like. That's the kind of thing I avoid. You know, some, some kid who's like, I don't like Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts is a bad example. You get kids who are like, I don't like tomatoes or something. That's like a little bit innocuous. And they're like, they just decided they didn't like tomatoes when they were five. Now they're 10 and they get built up around it. And they're just like, no, just actually eat that thing. Sit and like sit in the moment with it.
00:25:21
Speaker
and see if you can't pull any joy out of it. That's something that I'm trying to do more and more of just being like, you know, I knew I checked like spicy foods. I knew I didn't like spicy foods. I'm going to see if I can, if I can reprogram my engagement with this thing and change my opinion about it and just get more joy out of life.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think reinterpretation is another way to think about this, reinterpreting events. And if you want to put that into a meditation context, one of my favorite exercises from acceptance commitment therapy is
00:25:56
Speaker
where you just hold your breath for as long as you can, 20 seconds, 40 seconds, whatever it is, until it gets uncomfortable and experience that and then do the exact same thing. But this time, imagine you are willing the uncomfortable sensations into existence and
00:26:17
Speaker
In that way, I think you're sort of all approaching the state that, you know, the Stoic Sage Hado talks about is in, where they realize, you know, I made these decisions that put me into this circumstance and I can embrace whatever comes my way because either it's a result of my choice or something that was not up to me at all. And I think you can find when you do this exercise, you do in fact have the power to
00:26:45
Speaker
shape how you experience those uncomfortable sensations. Of course, those sensations are uncomfortable and their information, namely that you need to breathe soon so that, you know, it needs to happen and that's something you need to recognize, of course, and will be forced to recognize. But I think that's a good exercise to get a sense of the actual power of interpretation one has and also maybe getting a sense of that's a micro picture of
00:27:13
Speaker
what the sage might have towards uncomfortable events that arise in ordinary life. Yeah, exactly. To put it one way, that's a descriptive example of the power that controlling your desire can have. And then it's like, okay, and now in the Stoic framework, you apply it to where it should be applied, which is that idea of virtue or a love for nature.
00:27:34
Speaker
The one, you know, we've got some other exercises here, but one last thing I want to say about this is Viktor Frankl and his book, Man's Search for Meaning, has this, there's this part at the end where he talks about his work as a psychologist and has a bunch of examples, just like the one you gave Caleb, where
00:27:49
Speaker
You know, he has someone in the person has anxiety and starts sweating when they get anxious. And it's just like, Oh, like I, I'm so embarrassed and it causes me to sweat more. And it's just terrible. It's ruining his life. And Viktor Frankl's advice is basically like, I want you to will the sweat. I want you to go into that switch situation and be like, I'm going to be the sweatiest person here. I'm going to out sweat everybody else. And that ironically, you know, really calms the anxiety and actually.
00:28:13
Speaker
causes them to sweat less and breaks this like negative cycle. So it's just this power of willing as an exercise is a valuable exercise. Yeah, yep. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. What else do you have?
00:28:26
Speaker
Well, I see, looking at our notes here, I see you have it as well, but there's a more fatty, which is a very famous exercise. The, you know, love of fate. Hado points out that it actually comes from Nietzsche, the phrase itself. And certainly it's a Latin phrase, so it wouldn't be a Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. But as far as we're aware, it doesn't even show up in Latin in the Stoics, but it is something that they promote, you know, the idea behind this.
00:28:55
Speaker
This is a pretty common exercise. Most people listening are probably familiar with it. It's just this idea of loving things as they happen, known as you want them to happen. It's something Epictetus talks about. But I want to reframe this exercise in the context of desire because I think often we frame a more fatty, or I do it as an exercise of acceptance, as an exercise that kind of beginner negative exercise of like, I don't want this to happen. Okay. I will accept that it happens because it's part of fate.
00:29:23
Speaker
But what Hadeau pushes and the Stoics push for, but Hadeau pulls our attention to intelligently is that, no, this is loving fate. This is desiring fate. This is not just, I will not feel a negative reaction when these things happen, but it's like, I love them as they happen. I desire them as they happen.
00:29:42
Speaker
So I wanted to call attention to that and reframe it that way for people who have maybe practiced this exercise for a while or thought about it. This really emphasized, say intentionally, I'm practicing the discipline of desire and I'm going to practice this, not just to willful acceptance, but willing desire of things as they happen and see how that changes the framing or changes your experience of them.
00:30:07
Speaker
in sport there's a phrase or an exercise that's used which is this idea of changing I have to, do I get to and that's that acceptance and there's almost that step farther of like I'm I love this or I love that I'm able to. I thought that was an important idea and I wanted to pull attention to that distinction of a more fatty is not just acceptance but loving.
00:30:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's huge. Acceptance, commitment, therapy introduces this term, willing acceptance, to try to capture the same thing. Of course, it's entitled acceptance, commitment, therapy, but you want to say it's not just accepting, not merely tolerating or acting without judgments, but approaching things with a sense of willingness, embracing reality, not just tolerating it.
00:30:57
Speaker
And I think it also brings to mind the line from the hymn of Cleanthes that fate guides the willing and then drags the unwilling behind it, which I love. Excellent. One other exercise that I have here is
00:31:19
Speaker
Thinking about how you cultivate your attention and noting how that's related to desire and aversion. So I have a passage from the discourses here from Epictetus, book four.
00:31:35
Speaker
with on attention. First then we ought to have these rules and readiness and to do nothing without them. And we ought to keep the soul directed to this mark to pursue nothing external and nothing which belongs to others or is in the power of others. But to do as he has appointed who has the power, we ought to pursue altogether the things which are in the power of the will and all other things as it is permitted.
00:32:05
Speaker
And here Epictetus is talking about one of the first principles to always attend to. And I think this is related to desire and aversion, going back to this point about habituation, just because our attention both, I think, reflects
00:32:26
Speaker
our desires, how we use our attention, and also shapes our desires. And we can have these either positive or negative feedback loops around what we attend to. And I think the person who wants to be that excellent competitor in running, they pay a lot of attention to
00:32:54
Speaker
running if they paid less attention to that, that would probably shape their desire as well as reflect it. And I think people who might be paranoid of course are accurately stereotyped as like the kind of person who is always thinking about that thing that they're averse to. So the reminder here, the exercise here is to
00:33:16
Speaker
keep in mind this rule, and here now we're talking about this, the positive aspects of the discipline of desire. What should you desire? You're having the soul directed to everything that is internal, that's up to you, being excellent in your judgments and decisions, and that's something that one should just always be attending to.
00:33:39
Speaker
reminding yourself of and, uh, cultivating that attention is going to help and also reflect the degree of, I think, desire that you have for living the stoic life. Yeah. I mean, this is as simple as advertisement, right? Like advertisement is an attempt to steal some of our attention to try to get to some of our desire. Right. That's what marketing is. And I think of.
00:34:09
Speaker
There's two ways you can approach this exercise. This idea of attention is one, you can do it by controlling the external. And this is something I do. Like, you know, I make sure what's on my phone is productive or I make sure that I, you know, don't spend a lot of time on websites that I find or decrease my mental health or anything like this. And then the flip side of this is also controlling the internal. So practicing what you direct your attention towards.
00:34:32
Speaker
So there's the, that there's that internal and external part, but that relationship on attention and desire. And I think that comes back to like that discipline of judgment and the interrelation of these disciplines, right? Like judgment, what you think about how you think about it is obviously going to be influencing your desires.
00:34:51
Speaker
But this is something I do. I like carefully cultivate, I'm not sure your own practice about this in terms of attention, but I cultivate certainly, you know, what I read about, what I, what kind of media that I consume, because I'm very aware of the relationship that has on myself. And then that's the kind of external control. And then internally, it's like Epictetus is two handles thing, like there's always two ways to approach a situation. There's always an aspect of a situation that's beneficial that you can pay attention to.
00:35:20
Speaker
working on developing that kind of reflex or strength is important. Right, right. What do you do for this? Well, the external internal division is very, very good. I think externally noting the kinds of
00:35:37
Speaker
media you consume, of course, having time limits on social media if that's something you're drawn to or some other form of activity that might be less than ideal. I know that it would probably be better for the two of us in a sense if we spent more productive time on Twitter, but I think that both of us don't find it
00:35:59
Speaker
as a kind of place that pulls our attention on what really matters. This could be an entirely different episode, but just the art of AI algorithms, and I'm speaking outside my wheelhouse, you might have a better knowledge of this, but this attention game, this rage-baiting, what has the most interactions, regardless of the quality of that interactions, getting prioritized in this kind of spaces, and how that produces a negative feedback loop in the people consuming it.
00:36:28
Speaker
I think that's all that all ties into this idea of the interconnection between attention and desire. Right, right. I think even just one other time you have this sort of in cognitive behavioral therapy and also in mindfulness, of course, this practice of labeling your thoughts, your sensations as they occur. But you can also label things, thoughts by whether they're up to you or not. And that
00:36:55
Speaker
doing, you know, performing that either in a meditation or maybe even at the end of the day, thinking about, or these are some of my key desires and noting, were they up to you? Were they not? And thinking about how, you know, how can you move more of your thoughts into the sorts of things that were up to you, uh, and become like the kind of person who slowly moves in that, in that direction. Yeah, because it's very rewarding.
00:37:23
Speaker
I think stoicism can sound kind of lame sometimes and in many ways, I mean, it's not this life of wild hedonism in one respect, but it is very rewarding once you start to have the kind of life where you desire things that are up to you. You know, where you place more and more of your desires on things that you have control over. That is actually, there's a great sense of agency and empowerment in that kind of life.
00:37:44
Speaker
It sounds opposite. It sounds like, oh, it's like Nietzsche's criticism, right? It sounds like stoicism is the life deniers, the people who are not doing anything or like afraid of engaging. I find myself, when I get in the kind of life where I'm like, where all I'm worried about is, you know, doing my best against these set of tasks I've, you know, that are within my control. I find those kinds of lives, the days where I feel most alive, because I feel like I have the most amount of agency in them and the most amount of
00:38:12
Speaker
input, I'm not a passive observer. I'm not somebody like waiting for my slot machine to come up positive or negative. I'm the decider, you know, and then those kinds of days are really impactful. Like it's a big difference when you start to pull, pull your desire over into that side, it's a more enjoyable, it's more enjoyable thing to desire is the point. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
00:38:35
Speaker
And speaking of that building on that, I mean, the last exercise that I have that Hadeau talks about a lot, which I think I'd never heard it. I haven't heard that people really talk about this much in modern Stoicism, but Hadeau, I think rightly points out this is a huge thing for Marcus Aurelius and something that I'll start to think about more active.
00:38:54
Speaker
actively is this idea of circumscribing the present. So it's just this idea of really it's this idea of living in the moment, this idea of focusing on the current moment. There's a quote from Marcus here that Hadeau provides, which is, don't trouble yourself by representing to yourself the totality of life in advance.
00:39:14
Speaker
Don't try to go over in your mind all the painful hardships in all their varying intensity and number, which might possibly happen. Rather, when each of them occurs, ask yourself, what is there about the situation that is unbearable or intolerable? For you will be ashamed if you answer affirmatively. In addition, remind yourself that it's not the future nor the past which weighs upon you.
00:39:37
Speaker
but always the present. And this present will seem smaller to you if you circumscribe it by defining and isolating it. And if you make your reflective faculty ashamed, the fact that it cannot put up with such a small, isolated little matter. Again, I think about this in sport, this idea of like walking up a mountain is just a series of steps and every step is manageable.
00:40:00
Speaker
So there's a lot there to unpack, but it's this idea of really focusing on the present moment, asking yourself, you know, in this present moment, is there anything that I can't handle or do well in? And as Marcus says, you might be ashamed at the answer because it's usually always that you can handle just this moment. And really what weighs down on us is when our attention extends either into the past or into the future.
00:40:25
Speaker
And I think what I like about this, not only is this, I think just a really good rule of thumb for like happiness, but I think it also connects with this idea of desire, which is that when you start desiring things in the past or the future, that's really when you run into trouble.
00:40:42
Speaker
When your desire extends, well, I wish I'd done something differently. I wish this person hadn't been so mean to me. I wish this person had liked me back. I wish I'd gone for that opportunity when I had the chance. When you start desiring things that, you know, that they happened five years ago, 10 years ago.
00:41:00
Speaker
You're in a bad way, and likewise in the future when you say, well, I hope this goes a certain way that I want it to, or I'm afraid it will go a bad way or a way I don't want it to, you start applying that to the future. So there's this idea of wanting the right things.
00:41:18
Speaker
But then there's this also idea of this kind of temporal idea of not wanting things or desiring things in the future or in the past and focusing that desire exclusively on the present. And I like that because it almost seems different to me. Like it almost seems like if you're having trouble desiring the wrong category of things.
00:41:39
Speaker
At the very least, you can focus on desiring the wrong category of things in the present moment, right? Like you can, if you're having trouble switching the type of object, well, you can switch the time. And so again, with that athlete analogy, you know, it's like, if you're having trouble with your cardio, you can build your strength. It almost seems to me like a different way of attacking the discipline of desire, but just as an impactful way, if you get it right.
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah, there's another line from Marcus Aurelius. All the happiness you are seeking by such long roundabout ways. You can have it all right now. I mean, if you just leave all of the past behind you, if you abandon the future to providence, and if you arrange the present in accordance with piety and justice.
00:42:25
Speaker
We've talked about, just started to interrupt there, but like, I'm not a huge Marcus Aurelius fan. I mean, I love Marcus Aurelius, but he's not my favorite stoic, but this kind of stuff, these kind of quotes, I get the kind of the shivers when we're reading they're like, Oh, this is good. This is, this is meaningful. And I should, I should pay more attention to this. I think this is, I think this is some good Marcus right here.
00:42:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, this is top tier Marcus Aurelius. But just going back to that point of noting yourself in the present and perhaps there's an additional
00:42:58
Speaker
thought here, which is that you can note, is this something that's a matter of justice? Namely, is there something that's up to me here? Is there a right action here that I can get excited about, that I can get motivated to do? Or is this perhaps more of a matter where things are out of my control, where when Marcus Aurelius says piety, it has to do with
00:43:25
Speaker
this note of loving what's outside of your control, loving whatever nature throws your way. So there's, you can think of it almost as two handles here. And if you master those two handles, uh, state circumscribe your experience to the present, uh, that's all you need as Marcus says. Yeah. And that's the thing of like,
00:43:52
Speaker
That's that idea I was talking about at the start about turning that tap back on of desire, right? Of like wanting things.
00:43:58
Speaker
in the real stoic, the sage wants very badly. They've just managed to focus on the correct things in the correct time. And if you want the correct thing, but you wanted to have been a good person 10 years ago, well, now you're going to run into trouble, right? Because again, that's something outside your control. If you feel all this regret about a time you were a shitty 10 years ago, that's not, that's what you've, you've turned on the desire, but it's gone. It's gone.
00:44:23
Speaker
the wrong way, right? Or if you want something in the future, you know, if you're, well, I, I, I've started to practice stoicism and I really want to get this right. I want to be, you know, super, super.
00:44:34
Speaker
perfect person five years from now or whatever, you know, you're getting it wrong, right? Because you're, you're starting to expand beyond. So that's why it's so difficult to kind of tell. Right, right. Well, I think we're ready to move on to challenges now. Is there anything else you want to touch on or? No, that's great. Okay, cool. Yeah. So as far as challenges, a barren number here, but the main one I want to highlight is just that.
00:44:55
Speaker
changing what you value is a difficult matter. So we've given a number of different strategies strategies we tried to use. And of course, it's something the two of us are still working on quite a lot. And that's just the name of the game, as it were. So with that,
00:45:17
Speaker
Just to emphasize that it's difficult, it's difficult because we are imperfect creatures who have all these evolutionary machinery, which is not geared towards desiring what fundamentally matters, because we grow up in societies that, as Austoics would say, are literally insane. Both ourselves and the people who surround us have
00:45:44
Speaker
promoted all these messages about what's needed for a happy life, what's actually valuable. And we've ingrained a number of those. So that being said, it's always important to be ambitious, but be realistic in terms of shaping yourself and noting that it's not just a matter of snapping one's fingers, but always investing in that incremental movement towards becoming more stoic.
00:46:14
Speaker
And I think by doing so, you're sort of recognizing the shape of reality, as it were. Maybe that's a bit too abstract, but by noting, I think, that it is difficult. That is part of embracing the way things are. And I think there's some solace in that.
00:46:34
Speaker
Yeah, if you took the opposite, if you were frustrated the difficulty of the things, that would be you failing the discipline of desire. That would be you putting yourself at friction with the nature of the world, which is that self-transformation requires effort and it's kind of slow. I do like that we, I do like that we talked for 50 minutes about this and we're like, challenge number one, it is hard. Oops, we could have said that at the start. Everybody got invested in it. It was like, uh-oh, this is actually really difficult.
00:47:03
Speaker
Uh-huh, but you know, most difficult things are, are, you know, important or maybe not most of the most important things are difficult. Let me say that there's plenty of difficult things that are unimportant. Don't do them, but do the difficult ones that are important. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, and a reason I think that it's difficult is because it is the source of the motivation. Right. So if I feel a strong motivation to become an excellent runner.
00:47:33
Speaker
Then it's almost like a knowledge issue, like it's almost like I'm just going to go and I'm going to practice and become a better runner. But what do you do when you're almost always having conflicting desires? Because let's say, you know, you desire reputation and fame, but you also desire to be a good person in a stoic sense.
00:47:54
Speaker
If you didn't desire fame, there's always this desire pushing back because that's why you're failing the discipline of desire. That's why you're having a problem. So it's like you're always, you're not battling against knowledge or circumstances or just time. You're battling desire against desire, right? Which in the stoic view is you're battling beliefs, beliefs that you've internalized, that you've been socialized into against what you've learned and practiced through your philosophy and your mindfulness.
00:48:20
Speaker
And so that's hard because there is a strong motivational force the opposite. It's not just difficult in that it's externally hard to achieve. There's a part of you that's fighting against this whenever you're trying to change your desires.
00:48:34
Speaker
Right, right. It's not just a matter of, you know, learning how to be a good runner. It's a matter of unlearning all these bad habits. Yeah, exactly. And that's a distinct art of its own. But then you also have to add that those bad habits you have are something you, in a sense, value, and you have those for a reason that probably claims some purpose in your life that you also need to work through.
00:49:01
Speaker
And I hope some of the techniques we've mentioned are useful for that and are essential. It's a matter of a lifetime of work rather than a day, of course.
00:49:18
Speaker
One of the other challenges that I wanted to identify, this is going to be a bit more abstract, but it's this idea of loving fate and nature. And I guess my question is, if we're not a full spiritual Stoics, people are wrestling with the spiritual aspect of Stoics, this idea of the universe as a providential God, as a divine principle that imbues all of nature.
00:49:43
Speaker
If fate is not providential, if the universe is not, which is to say, not just deterministic, but deterministic with a goal, moving towards something and moving towards something good, you know, if that's not the case, if it's just, then why should I desire fate? Why should I, not, like not, there's a reason to accept fate, but why should I love, you accept fate because you can't control it, right? But why should I love fate?
00:50:10
Speaker
Um, I understand design virtue. We desire virtue because virtue benefits who is an individual to be virtuous means to live well as a human. We, you desire it because it helps you. Um, but why, why this love for fate? Is it just because it's psychologically beneficial or is there a way to ground that stronger sense of a more fatty, even if we don't accept the bigger picture stoic God.
00:50:36
Speaker
Yeah, but there's sort of two different ways to approach it. One is to offer that grounding in nature. Like there's something that's worth loving about nature. Perhaps it's not, you can't, if you don't have the full on spiritual stoic view, it's not the view that there's some fundamental providence behind the world, but there is still a sense of providence in the sense that
00:50:59
Speaker
nature provides all you need to live a good life. And perhaps that is sufficient for the right attitude. And of course, nature is beautiful. There are many exceptionally valuable aspects of the world. So perhaps when you say things like love, fate, or embracing the world, what you're really doing is embracing certain aspects of it, not all of it, and aspects that are always present.
00:51:27
Speaker
I think that's one response. The other kind of response is just thinking about, well, who lives the better life? Going back to Nietzsche again, is it that person who tolerates every moment or notes, just sort of observes every moment as they are, or is it the person who says, yeah, Nietzsche says, offers that yes to every moment and says, I'd be happy to live this life over again and again because of
00:51:56
Speaker
what I chose and because of what happened. And that's, I think that's not, that's not a, I think there's perhaps that's not an explicit argument, but I think there's something compelling to that. Yeah, great. I mean, I think that's a good spot to leave it. Nice. All right. Thanks for that conversation.
00:52:16
Speaker
Yeah. I hope that was helpful for everyone. I think it, I think it's fun to think about desire separately and something we sometimes lose in the discussion of stoicism because it's such a, has such a focus on reason, such a focus on the intellect and our judgments and our beliefs, but the important role desire still plays in that school in this, in the school of thought, regardless. Absolutely. Great. Excellent.
00:52:42
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to Stoa Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to practice stoicism with Michael and I as well as others walking the stoic path, we are running our three-week course on stoicism applied. It'll be live with
00:53:08
Speaker
a forum, interactive calls, that I think will be an excellent way for a group of people to become more stoic together. So do check that out at stomeditation.com slash course. And if that's not to your fancy, you can find links to the Stoa app as well as the Stoa letter, our newsletter on stoic theory and practice at stomeditation.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.