Think Like a Stoic summary

Stoics are known for making bold claims. Epictetus, for instance, insists that we remain free even when our bodies are in chains. It’s a striking idea – especially coming from someone born into slavery, who was only freed around 80 CE, by which time he was already middle-aged. He spent the next four decades teaching others how to achieve a different kind of liberation: not from external constraints, but from inner tyranny.

Like most Stoic claims, this argument builds on the theory of dependence. This time, we’re looking at emotions. Contrary to the common cliché, stoics aren’t buttoned-up or repressed when it comes to feelings. What they object to is emotional rule. 

If we want to think rationally, the Stoics argue, we have to see things as they actually are. One reason human beings are so often unhappy, they suggest, is that we can’t stop smuggling value judgments into how we perceive the world. We don’t just see things, we immediately interpret and embellish them.

Take something as simple as a chocolate cake. Viewed plainly, it is what it is: a mixture of fat, sugar, and flour that produces a pleasant sensation on the tongue. But once judgment enters the picture, this ordinary dessert takes on exaggerated significance. It begins to promise decadence, comfort, indulgence – even happiness itself. No wonder clear thinking becomes difficult.

Tolstoy claims that all happy families are alike while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Is this also true of individuals? It’s clear that there are many paths to misery – we’ve glimpsed a few of them. Aesop’s fox set off down one; Marcus Aurelius had to remind himself to keep off another. But are all happy people alike? 

At first glance, the contented seem as varied as the discontented: history knows both serene slaves and tormented kings (and vice versa). Look more closely, though, and a pattern begins to emerge. Stoicism’s theory of dependence can help us discern its shape. 

Death supposedly comes like a thief in the night. Stoics disagree. As Epictetus said after a burglar swiped his lamp, we only lose what’s ours. But our lives don’t belong to us; they were lent to us. Sleep is the interest we pay on the loan; death, the principal. To live in accord with nature is to accept her highest law: everything that comes into being returns to its source. 

Life, in other words, is a brief intermission between infinitely longer spans of non-existence. Its shortness is a standard Stoic subject and supplies the theme and the title for Seneca’s essay On the Brevity of Life. Seneca foregrounds death and our limited time in order to call us to our senses. We turn over pennies, he says, and squander what actually matters: our time.