by Ryan Holiday
Today, we might call Diogenes a bum or a loser (or a crazy person), and in some sense he was those things. But on the few occasions when Diogenes met Alexander the Great, then the most powerful man in the world, it was Diogenes who observers came away thinking was the more impressive. Because Alexander, as much as he tried, could neither tempt Diogenes with any favors nor deprive him of anything that he had not already willingly tossed aside.
There was nothing but a shirt between the Stoics and the Cynics, joked the poet Juvenal, meaning the Stoics were sensible enough to wear clothes (and refrain from bodily functions in public), unlike the Cynics. This is a pretty reasonable concession. We don’t need to get rid of all our possessions, but we should constantly question what we own, why we own it, and whether we could do without.
Have you ever seen a house torn down? A lifetime of earning and savings, countless hours of decorating and accumulating until it was arranged just right, the place of so much living—and in the end it is reduced to a couple dumpsters full of debris. Even the incredibly wealthy, even the heads of state showered with gifts throughout their life, would only fill a few more bins.
Yet how many of us collect and acquire as if the metric tonnage of our possessions is a comment on our worth as individuals? Just as every hoarder becomes trapped by their own garbage, so too are we tied down by what we own. Every piece of expensive jewelry comes with an insurance bill, every mansion with a staff of groundskeepers, every investment with obligations and monthly statements to review, every exotic pet and plant with a set of responsibilities. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the rich are different than us, and his novels portray them as free and without care.
That’s not quite right.
Mo’ money, mo’ problems, and also mo’ stuff, less freedom.
John Boyd, a sort of warrior-monk who revolutionized Western military strategy in the latter half of the twentieth century, refused to take checks from defense contractors and deliberately lived in a small condo even as he advised presidents and generals. “If a man can reduce his needs to zero,” he said, “he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.” To that we would add, “And he or she can also be still.”
No one dogged by creditors is free. Living outside your means—as Churchill could attest—is not glamorous. Behind the appearances, it’s exhausting.
It’s also dangerous. The person who is afraid to lose their stuff, who has their identity wrapped up in their things, gives their enemies an opening. They make themselves extra vulnerable to fate.
The playwright Tennessee Williams spoke of luxury as the “wolf at the door.” It wasn’t the possessions that were the problem, he said, but the dependency. He called it the catastrophe of success, the way that we become less and less able to do things ourselves, the more and more we cannot be without a certain level of service. Not only is all your stuff a mess, but you need to pay someone to come clean it up.
There is also what we can term “comfort creep.” We get so used to a certain level of convenience and luxury that it becomes almost inconceivable that we used to live without it. As wealth grows, so does our sense of “normal.” But just a few years ago we were fine without this bounty. We had no problem eating ramen or squeezing into a small apartment. But now that we have more, our mind begins to lie to us. You need this. Be anxious that you might lose it. Protect it. Don’t share.
It’s toxic and scary.
Which is why philosophers have always advocated reducing our needs and limiting our possessions. Monks and priests take vows of poverty because it will mean fewer distractions, and more room (literally) for the spiritual pursuit to which they have committed. No one is saying we have to go that far, but the more we own, the more we oversee, the less room we have to move and, ironically, the less still we become.
Start by walking around your house and filling up trash bags and boxes with everything you don’t use. Think of it as clearing more room for your mind and your body. Give yourself space. Give your mind a rest. Want to have less to be mad about? Less to covet or be triggered by? Give more away.
The best car is not the one that turns the most heads, but the one you have to worry about the least. The best clothes are the ones that are the most comfortable, that require you to spend the least amount of time shopping—regardless of what the magazines say. The best house for you is the one that feels the most like home. Don’t use your money to purchase loneliness, or headaches, or status anxiety.
Your grandmother did not give you that brooch so that you would constantly worry about losing it. The artist who produced the painting on your wall was not working hard so that you might one day fear that a guest would damage it. Nor is the memory of that beautiful summer in Anguilla actually contained in that carved statue or the love you share with your spouse limited to the photograph of the two of you at your wedding. The memory is what’s important. The experience itself is what matters. You can access that anytime you want, and no thief can ever deprive you of it.
You will hear people say they don’t have room for a relationship in their life . . . and they’re right. Their stuff is taking up too much space. They’re in love with possessions instead of people.
The family who never see each other because the two parents are working late to pay off the extra bedrooms they never use? The fame that keeps someone on the road so much they’re a stranger to their kids? The supposed “technology” that is a pain in the ass to figure out, that’s always breaking? The fragile, fancy possessions that we’re constantly cleaning, buffing, protecting, and trying to find ways to slyly mention in conversation?
This is not a rich life. There is no peace in this.
Take action. Get out from under all your stuff. Get rid of it. Give away what you don’t need.
You were born free—free of stuff, free of burden. But since the first time they measured your tiny body for clothes, people have been foisting stuff upon you. And you’ve been adding links to the pile of chains yourself ever since.
SEEK SOLITUDE
A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion.
—JOHN GRAVES
It was a habit of Leonardo da Vinci’s to write little fables to himself in his notebooks. One tells the story of a good-sized stone that rested in a pleasant grove, surrounded by flowers, perched above a busy country road. Despite this peaceful existence, the stone grew restless. “What am I doing among these herbs?” he asked. “I want to live in the company of my fellow stones.”
Unhappy and alone, the stone contrived to roll itself down the hill onto the road, where it would be surrounded by countless other stones. But the change was not quite as wonderful as expected. Down in the dirt, the stone was trod on by horses, driven over by wagons, and stepped on by people. It was alternately covered in mud and feces, and chipped at and jostled and moved—painful moments made all the more painful by the occasional sight the stone was given of its old home, and the solitary peace it had left behind.
Not content to leave the story at that, Leonardo felt the need to put a fine point on it. “This is what happens,” he wrote to himself and every one of us, “to those who leave the solitary and contemplative life and choose to live in cities among people full of countless evils.”
Of course, Leonardo’s biographers were quick to point out that the author didn’t always follow the lesson of this fable. He spent most of his life in Florence and Milan and Rome. He painted in a busy studio and attended many spectacles and parties. Even his last years were spent not in secluded retirement but in the bustling court of King Francis I of France.
His occupation required this. As do many of ours.
Which makes cultivating moments of solitude all the more essential. To find solitude, the way Eugen Herrigel said that the Buddhist does, “not in far-off, quiet places; he creates it out of himself, spreads it a
round him wherever he may be, because he loves it.”
While Leonardo was working on The Last Supper, he would get up early and arrive at the monastery before any of his assistants or spectators, so he could be alone, in silence, with his thoughts and the mammoth creative challenge in front of him. He was also notorious for leaving his studio and going for long walks by himself, carrying a notebook and simply looking and watching and really seeing what was happening around him. He loved to visit his uncle’s farm for inspiration and solitude.
It is difficult to think clearly in rooms filled with other people. It’s difficult to understand yourself if you are never by yourself. It’s difficult to have much in the way of clarity and insight if your life is a constant party and your home is a construction site.
Sometimes you have to disconnect in order to better connect with yourself and with the people you serve and love.
“If I was to sum up the single biggest problem of senior leadership in the Information Age,” four-star Marine Corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis has said, “it’s lack of reflection. Solitude allows you to reflect while others are reacting. We need solitude to refocus on prospective decision-making, rather than just reacting to problems as they arise.”
People don’t have enough silence in their lives because they don’t have enough solitude. And they don’t get enough solitude because they don’t seek out or cultivate silence. It’s a vicious cycle that prevents stillness and reflection, and then stymies good ideas, which are almost always hatched in solitude.
Breakthroughs seem to happen with stunning regularity in the shower or on a long hike. Where don’t they happen? Shouting to be heard in a bar. Three hours into a television binge. Nobody realizes just how much they love someone while they’re booking back-to back-to-back meetings.
If solitude is the school of genius, as the historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.
Who isn’t stiller in the morning, or when they’re up before the house stirs, before the phone rings or the commutes have begun? Who isn’t better equipped to notice the meaning of the moment when it’s quiet, when your personal space is being respected? In solitude time slows down, and while we might find that speed hard to bear at first, we will ultimately go crazy without this check on the busyness of life and work. And if not driven crazy, we will certainly miss out.
Solitude is not just for hermits, but for healthy, functioning people. Although there is a thing or two we can learn about solitude from the people who turned pro at it.
In 1941, then just twenty-six years old, Thomas Merton reported to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky, and began his first of many journeys into monkish solitude that would go on, in various forms, for the next twenty-seven years. His solitude was hardly indolent repose. It was instead an active exploration of himself, of religion, of human nature, and later, into solving serious societal problems like inequality, war, and injustice. In his beautiful journals, we find insights into the human experience that would have been impossible if Merton had spent his time in a newspaper bullpen or even on a university campus.
He would come to call solitude his vocation. As he wrote:
To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.
In a more emulatable form of Merton’s retreat, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has, twice a year for many years now, taken what he calls a “think week.” He spends seven days alone in a cabin in the forest. There, physically removing himself from the daily interruptions of his work, he can really sit down and think.
He might be alone there, but he is hardly lonely. Gates reads—sometimes hundreds of papers—quietly for hours at a time, sometimes in print, sometimes off computer monitors that look out over the water. He reads books too, in a library adorned with a portrait of the author Victor Hugo. He writes long memos to people across his organization. The only breaks he takes are a few minutes to play bridge or go for a walk. In those solitary days in that cabin, Gates is the picture of Thomas à Kempis’s line In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro—“Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.”
Do not mistake this for some kind of vacation. It is hard work—long days, some without sleep. It is wrestling with complex topics, contradictory ideas, and identity-challenging concepts. But despite this struggle, Gates emerges recharged and refocused. He can see further into the distance. He knows what he wants to prioritize, what to assign his people to work on. He carries the quiet stillness of the woods back to the complicated world he has to navigate as a businessman and philanthropic leader.
Each of us needs to put ourselves, physically, in the position to do that kind of deep work. We need to give our bodies, as Virginia Woolf put it, a room of our own—even if only for a few stolen hours—where we can think and have quiet and solitude. Buddha needed seclusion in his search for enlightenment. He had to step away from the world, go off by himself, and sit.
Don’t you think you would benefit from that too?
It’s hard to make that time. It’s hard (and expensive) to get away. We have responsibilities. But they will be better for our temporary disappearance. We will carry back with us the stillness from our solitude in the form of patience, understanding, gratitude, and insight.
In Leonardo’s fable, the stone abandoned the peaceful solitude of the meadow for the road and came to regret it. Merton, for his part, came to occasionally regret his complete solitude. Was there more he could do as a man of the world? Could he have a bigger impact if he abandoned his solitude?
Indeed, very few of us are willing or able to make it the totality of our existence, nor should we. (The dancer Twyla Tharp points out that “solitude without purpose” is a killer of creativity.) Even in Merton’s case, he was given special privileges from his church superior to communicate with the outside world through letters and writing, and eventually began to travel and speak to large crowds. Because his work was too important and the insights he discovered were too essential to remain locked up in a tiny brick house on the edge of the woods in Kentucky.
Merton eventually came to understand that after so much time by himself in the woods, he now possessed solitude inside himself—and could access it anytime he liked. The wise and busy also learn that solitude and stillness are there in pockets, if we look for them. The few minutes before going onstage for a talk or sitting in your hotel room before a meeting. The morning before the rest of the house wakes up. Or late in the evening after the world has gone to sleep.
Grab these moments. Schedule them. Cultivate them.
BE A HUMAN BEING
Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that.
—ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
Compared with most royal couples, Queen Victoria and Prince Consort Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha were exceptional. They actually loved each other and they actually worked at, and took seriously, their jobs as heads of state. This was all very good.
But it could also be argued that any positive trait—even hard work—taken to excess becomes a vice.
In both their cases, as a couple for whom, by the nature of their profession, even the idea of “work/life balance” was impossible, the virtue of their self-discipline and dedication became a fatal vice.
Albert, a Bavarian prince who married into the British royal family, was a hard worker from the day he married Victoria. He brought much-needed order and routine to the life of his queen. He streamline
d processes and took up a share of the burdens that had previously fallen on Victoria alone. Indeed, many of the so-called Victorian traits of the era originated with him. He was disciplined, fastidious, ambitious, conservative.
Under his pressing, their schedule became one meeting, dispatch, and social event after another. Albert was almost constantly busy, working so much that he occasionally vomited from stress. Never shirking a responsibility or an opportunity, he took on every bit of the burden of power his wife was willing to share, and in turn, together they seized every formal and informal bit of influence the monarchy had in the British Empire at that time. They were a pair of workaholics and proud of it.
As Albert wrote to an advisor, he spent hours a day reading newspapers in German, French, and English. “One can let nothing pass,” he said, “without losing the connection and coming in consequence to wrong conclusions.” He was right, the stakes were certainly high. For instance, his expert understanding of geopolitics helped Britain avoid being drawn into the U.S. Civil War.
But the truth was, Albert threw himself equally hard into projects of much less importance. Organizing the Great Exhibition of 1851, a nearly six-month-long carnival that showed off the wonders of the British Empire, consumed years of his life. A few days before it opened, he wrote to his stepmother, “I am more dead than alive from overwork.” It was, to be certain, a beautiful and memorable event, but his health never recovered.
He was like Winston Churchill, only he and his wife knew no moderation and had little fun. “I go on working at my treadmill, as life seems to me,” Albert said. It’s not a bad description of the exhausting and repetitive life he and Victoria led. Starting in 1840, Victoria bore nine children in seventeen years, four of whom were born in consecutive years. In a time when women still regularly died during childbirth (anesthesia—chloroform— became available only for her eighth pregnancy), Victoria, who was a mere five feet tall, was constantly pregnant. Even with the benefits of limitless household help, she bore an enormous physical burden on top of her duties as queen. Upon her death, it was found that she was suffering from a prolapsed uterus and a hernia that must have caused her incredible and constant pain.
