A Guide to the Good Life

by William Braxton Irvine

For them, Stoicism sounds like a philosophy for losers, and they aren’t losers. In extreme cases, these young people harbor a profound sense of entitlement. They think it is life’s job to unroll a red carpet ahead of them, down whatever path they choose to take. When life fails to do this—when the path they have chosen gets bumpy and rutted, or even becomes impassible—they are astonished. This isn’t how things are supposed to be! Surely someone, somewhere, has made a terrible mistake!

  As the years go by, though, these twentysomethings come to realize that life will present them with obstacles, and they start developing skill at overcoming those obstacles. In particular, when the world does not hand them fame and fortune on a silver platter, they realize that they must work to get it, and so they do. Often, the world rewards their efforts, and as a result, they find that when they are in their thirties, their external circumstances, although not quite what they had hoped they would be when they were twenty, are nevertheless tolerable.

  At this point, they often redouble their efforts to improve their external circumstances in the belief that this will somehow gain them the perfect life they dream of having. After trying this strategy for another decade, though, it might dawn on them that they aren’t gaining any ground.

  They are getting paid twenty times more than they once were, they are living in a four-bedroom house instead of a studio apartment, and they are the subject of adulatory articles in the newspaper, but they are no closer to happiness than they used to be. Indeed, thanks to the complexity of their schemes for gaining happiness, they find themselves experiencing anxiety, anger, and frustration. They also discover that their success has a downside: They have become the target of other people’s envy. It is at this stage that many people who were formerly oblivious to philosophy start getting philosophical. “Is this all life has to offer?” they wonder. “Is this the life I want to live?” Sometimes this period of philosophical speculation triggers what, in our culture, we call a midlife crisis. The person experiencing the crisis might sensibly conclude that his unhappiness is the result of wanting the wrong things. In all too many cases, though, he doesn’t draw this conclusion; instead, he concludes that he is unhappy as the result of making certain short-term sacrifices to attain various long-term goals. He therefore decides to stop making these short-term sacrifices: He buys a new car, or abandons his wife and takes on a lover. After a time, though, it becomes apparent to him that this strategy for gaining happiness is no better and is in many ways worse than his previous strategy.

  He might, at this point, turn his attention back to meaning-of-life questions. And if this isn’t sufficient to make him take up such questions, the aging process—and along with it, the prospect of death drawing ever nearer—probably will. As a result of contemplating these questions, he might find that Stoicism, which held no appeal whatsoever for him when he was young, now seems plausible as a philosophy of life.

  Wh e n w e w e r e yo u n g, we might have wondered what it would be like to be old. And if we are Stoics, we might, in our practice of negative visualization, have imagined what it would be like. Unless death intervenes, though, a day will come when we won’t need to wonder or imagine what it would be like to be old; we will know full well. The abilities we once took for granted will have departed. We used to run for miles; now we get winded walking down the hallway. We used to handle the finances of a corporation; now we can’t even balance our checkbook. We used to be the person who knew when everyone’s birthday was; now we can’t even remember our own.

  The loss of these abilities means we can no longer fend for ourselves, and as a result we might find ourselves banished to a nursing home. The home in question will not, to be sure, be a desolate island like the one to which Musonius was banished.

  Indeed, it will be physically quite comfortable, with regular meals and someone to do our laundry, clean our room, and maybe even help us bathe. But although our new environment is physically comfortable, it is likely to be quite challenging socially. We will find ourselves surrounded by people not of our choosing. We might, as a result, have to interact, each and every day, over breakfast and before we have had our coffee, with the same ornery individuals. We might find that despite having enjoyed a high degree of social status in our prime, we are now low man on the nursing home’s status totem pole; it might turn out, for example, that there is a “cool table” in the nursing home’s dining room, and we have not been invited to sit there.

  Living in a nursing home resembles, in many respects, being in high school. Cliques form, and their members spend considerable amounts of time talking down the members of rival cliques. In other respects, it resembles living in a college dorm: You are in a single room that opens onto a communal corridor; you can either stay in your room and stare at the four walls, or venture out of your room into an environment you might find socially challenging.

  Living in a nursing home also resembles living in a time of plague: You watch as the ambulance pulls up a few times each month—or, in a large home, a few times each week—to haul away the bodies of those who did not survive the night. If you don’t live in a nursing home, you will be spared these recurring ambulances, but you probably won’t be spared learning of the deaths of long-time friends, brothers and sisters, and perhaps even your own children.

  A twenty-year-old might reject Stoicism in the belief that the world is going to be her oyster; an eighty-year-old knows full well that the world isn’t her oyster and that her situation is only going to worsen with the passing years. Although she may have believed she was immortal when she was twenty, her own mortality is now painfully obvious to her. Faced with death, she might finally be willing to settle for “mere tranquility,” and she might, as a result, be ripe for Stoicism.

  Having said this, I should add that it is entirely possible to grow old without becoming ripe for Stoicism or any other philosophy of life. Indeed, many people go through life repeatedly making the same mistakes and are no closer to happiness in their eighties than they were in their twenties. These individuals, rather than enjoying their life, will have been embit-tered by it, and now, near the end of their life, they live to complain—about their circumstances, their relatives, the food, the weather, in short, about absolutely everything.

  Such cases are tragic inasmuch as these people had it in their power—and, indeed, still have it in their power—to experience joy, but they either chose the wrong goals in living, or chose the right goals but adopted a defective strategy to attain those goals. This is the downside of failing to develop an effective philosophy of life: You end up wasting the one life you have.

  Old age, Seneca argues, has its benefits: “Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.” Indeed, he claims that the most delightful time of life is “when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.” He adds that even the time of “abrupt decline” has pleasures of its own. Most significantly, as one loses the ability to experience certain pleasures, one loses the desire to experience them: “How comforting it is,” he says, “to have tired out one’s appetites, and to have done with them!”1

  Consider lust, the desire for sexual gratification. Lust is, for many people—and for males in particular, I think—a major distraction in daily living. We might be able to control whether or not we act on lustful feelings, but the feelings themselves seem to be hardwired into us. (If we lacked such feelings or could easily extinguish them, it is unlikely that we would have survived as a species.) Because they distract us, feelings of lust have a significant impact on how we spend our days.

  As we age, though, our feelings of lust and the state of distraction that accompanies them diminish. Some would argue that this is a bad thing, that it is yet another example of one of the pleasures of youth that is lost to us. But the Greek dramatist Sophocles offered another viewpoint. When he had grown old and someone asked whether, despite his years, he could still make love to a woman, he replied, “I am very glad to have escape
d from this, like a slave who has escaped from a mad and cruel master.”2

  Seneca points out that by causing our bodies to deteriorate, old age causes our vices and their accessories to decay. The same aging process, though, needn’t cause our mind to decay; indeed, Seneca remarks that despite his age, his mind “is strong and rejoices that it has but slight connexion with the body.” He is also thankful that his mind has thereby “laid aside the greater part of its load.”3

  One downside of being old is that we live in the knowledge that our death is in some sense imminent. In our youth, we delude ourselves into thinking death is for other people. By our middle years, we understand that we are going to die, but we also expect to live for decades before we do. When we are old, we know full well that we will die—maybe not tomorrow but soon. For many people, this knowledge makes old age a depressing stage of life.

  The Stoics, however, thought the prospect of death, rather than depressing us, could make our days far more enjoyable than would otherwise be the case. We examined this seeming paradox back in chapter 4. We saw that by imagining how our days could go worse—and in particular, by contemplating our own death—we could increase our chance of experiencing joy.

  In our youth, it takes effort to contemplate our own death; in our later years, it takes effort to avoid contemplating it. Old age therefore has a way of making us do something that, according to the Stoics, we should have been doing all along.

  Thus, the proximity of death, rather than depressing us, can be turned to our advantage. In our youth, because we assumed that we would live forever, we took our days for granted and as a result wasted many of them. In our old age, however, waking up each morning can be a cause for celebration. As Seneca notes, “If God is pleased to add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts.”4 And after celebrating having been given another day to live, we can fill that day with appreciative living. It is entirely possible for an octogenarian to be more joyful than her twenty-year-old grandchild, particularly if the octogenarian, in part because of her failing health, takes nothing for granted, while the grandchild, in part because of her perfect health, takes everything for granted and has therefore decided that life is a bore.

  Among the various philosophies of life, Stoicism is particularly well suited to our later years. For most people, old age will be the most challenging time of life. A primary objective of Stoicism, though, is to teach us not only to meet life’s challenges but to retain our tranquility as we do. In addition, old people are more likely than young people to value the tranquility offered by the Stoics. A young person might find it baffling that someone would be willing to settle for “mere tranquility”; an octogenarian will probably not only appreciate how precious a thing tranquility is but will realize how few people manage, over the course of a lifetime, to attain it.

  It is in part for this reason that Musonius counsels us to take up Stoicism while we are young: It is, he thinks, the best way to prepare for old age. Someone who has acted on this advice will be unlikely, as he gets older, to complain about the loss of youth and its pleasures, his body growing weak, his failing health, or being neglected by his relatives, since he would have “an effective antidote against all these things in his own intelligence and in the education he possesses.”5

  If someone neglected to study Stoicism in his youth, though, he can always take it up later in life. The aging process might prevent us from, say, boxing or solving differential equations, but only rarely will it prevent us from practicing Stoicism. Even those who are old and feeble can read the Stoics and reflect on their writings. They can also engage in negative visualization and refuse to worry about things that are beyond their control.

  And perhaps most important, they can take a fatalistic attitude toward their life and refuse to spend their final years wishing, pointlessly, that it could have been different than it was.

  * * *

  E I G H T E E N

  Dying

  On a Good End to a Good Life

  What makes old age a miserable thing, Musonius says, usually isn’t the frailty or sickness that accompanies it; rather, it is the prospect of dying.1 And why are people, both young and old, disturbed by the prospect of dying? Some are disturbed because they fear what might come after death.

  Many more, though, are disturbed because they fear that they have mislived—that they have, that is, lived without having attained the things in life that are truly valuable. Death, of course, will make it impossible for them ever to attain these things.

  It may seem paradoxical, but having a coherent philosophy of life, whether it be Stoicism or some other philosophy, can make us more accepting of death. Someone with a coherent philosophy of life will know what in life is worth attaining, and because this person has spent time trying to attain the thing in life he believed to be worth attaining, he has probably attained it, to the extent that it was possible for him to do so. Consequently, when it comes time for him to die, he will not feel cheated. To the contrary, he will, in the words of Musonius, “be set free from the fear of death.”2

  Consider, by way of illustration, the last days of the Stoic philosopher Julius Canus. When Caligula, whom Canus had angered, ordered his death, Canus retained his composure:

  “Most excellent prince,” he said, “I tender you my thanks.” Ten days later, when a centurion came to take him to be executed, Canus was playing a board game. Rather than complaining bitterly about his fate or begging the centurion to spare his life, Canus simply pointed out to the centurion that he, Canus, was one piece ahead in the game—meaning that his opponent would be lying if he subsequently claimed to have won. On the way to his execution, when someone asked about his state of mind, Canus replied that he was preparing himself to observe the moment of death in order to learn whether, in that moment, the spirit is aware that it is leaving the body. “Here,” says Seneca approvingly, “is tranquility in the very midst of the storm.” He adds that “no one has ever played the philosopher longer.”3

  Those who have lived without a coherent philosophy of life, though, will desperately want to delay death. They might want the delay so that they can get the thing that—at last!—they have discovered to be of value. (It is unfortunate that this dawned on them so late in life, but, as Seneca observes, “what you have done in the past will be manifest only at the time when you draw your last breath.”)4 Or they might want the delay because their improvised philosophy of life has convinced them that what is worth having in life is more of everything, and they cannot get more of everything if they die.

  At this point, readers might conclude that the Stoics were obsessed with death. They counsel us, as we have seen, to contemplate our own death. They tell us to live each day as if it were our last. They tell us to practice Stoicism in part so we will not fear death.

  Besides being seemingly fixated on death while alive, the Stoics had an unfortunate tendency to die in an unnatural manner. The Greek Stoics Zeno and Cleanthes apparently committed suicide,5 and Cato unquestionably did so. It isn’t clear how Musonius died, but while alive, he was an advocate of suicide. In particular, he advised old people to “choose to die well while you can; wait too long, and it might become impossible to do so.” He added, “It is better to die with distinction than to live long.”6

  Furthermore, many of those Stoics who did not commit suicide outright did things that hastened their death. When it seemed that death was near, Marcus refused to eat. Seneca behaved in a manner that brought on a death sentence when he could have avoided doing so, as did the Stoics Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus. After hearing about how these Stoics met their end, readers might conclude that anyone who loves life and wants to die a natural death would do well to avoid Stoicism.

  In response to this concern, let me point out, to begin with, that it is unclear that the rate of unnatural deaths among the Stoics was unusually high for ancient times. Furthermore, in many of the cases in which the Stoics did things to hasten their death, it is understandable why they d
id so. In particular, it is possible that Zeno and Cleanthes, who lived to an advanced age, didn’t so much “commit suicide” as self- euthanize: They might have been incurably ill and might therefore have taken steps to hasten death. (This is what Marcus had done.) And although it is true that Cato committed suicide while in his prime, he did so not because he was indifferent to life but because he knew that his staying alive would have been politically advantageous to Julius Caesar, the dictator he was trying to overthrow. What we don’t find, when we examine the lives of the Stoics, is individuals who committed suicide on a whim or out of boredom with life, the way a nihilist might.

  Furthermore, when Stoics contemplate their own death, it is not because they long for death but because they want to get the most out of life. As we have seen, someone who thinks he will live forever is far more likely to waste his days than someone who fully understands that his days are numbered, and one way to gain this understanding is periodically to contemplate his own death. Likewise, when the Stoics live each day as if it were their last, it is not because they plan to take steps to make that day their last; rather, it is so they can extract the full value of that day—and, hopefully, the days that follow it. And when the Stoics teach us not to fear death, they are simply giving us advice on how to avoid a negative emotion.

  We are all going to die, after all, and it is better that our death not be marred by fear. It is also important to keep in mind that the Stoics thought suicide was permissible only under certain circumstances.

  Musonius tells us, for example, that it is wrong for us to choose to die if our living “is helpful to many.”7 Inasmuch as Stoics, in doing what they take to be their social duty, will be helpful to many, they will rarely find themselves in these circumstances.

  Along these lines, let us reconsider Musonius’s comment that old people who know death to be near should consider suicide. This is a case that seems to meet the condition just described: It is unlikely, after all, that others would depend for their well-being on an old and sickly individual. Furthermore, in such cases the question isn’t whether the person will soon die; the question is whether hers will be a good death at her own hands or a pointlessly painful death through natural processes. Besides counseling us to live a good life, Musonius counsels us to end that good life with a good death, when it is possible to do so.