PNTV: A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine (#106)

Hey guys, this is Brian with another Philosopher's Notes TV episode. I hope to give you more wisdom and less time. Less than 10 minutes. We're going to take a quick tour of another one of my favorite books. This one is a guide to the Good the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. It's by William B. Irvine, who's a professor of philosophy and a great guy, super passionate about Stoicism. And he wrote this book wondering why, what would the classic Stoics write about if they were writing to a 21st century audience, what would that look like? So he kind of distills their wisdom into a Guidebook for the 21st Century. Really, really cool. So quick background on Stoicism. It's one of my favorite philosophies. And the primary philosophers and teachers of Stoicism include the emperor philosopher Marcus Aurelius Epictetus, who was a former slave turned philosopher, and Seneca, who was Nero's tutor and lived around Jesus time and was kind of second in command of the Roman Empire as well. So Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Stoicism equals. Awesome. Great stuff. And this book does a great job of breaking down their core tenets. So let's take a look at a few of my favorite big ideas. We'll talk about the art of living Stoic style. We'll talk about Stoic virtue, which is arete something we talk about a lot in these videos. We'll talk about negative visualization. It's a positive thing when you imagine things you love not being part of your life, you appreciate them more. We'll talk about that projective visualization where you imagine that something that's happening to you is happening to someone else. It takes the burn out of a lot of pain when you realize that these things happen. And we'll talk about that. Then we'll talk about the fact we live in a dream world and it's time to appreciate it and some other important choices we're making in our lives to choose our own thoughts, et cetera. Now, the underlying theme of Stoicism is to give us a philosophy of life. And Stoicism was actually kind of the leading thought form. It wasn't really a religion, but it was essentially what most people, kind of the educated people in the Roman Empire followed pretty pre Christianity. So Stoicism was huge for centuries and they were all about giving us a philosophy of life. And that's what this book aims to do and to help us in the art of living. So here's a great quote from Epictetus. He tells Us, the primary concern of philosophy should be the art of living. Just as wood is the medium of the carpenter and bronze is the medium of the sculptor, your life is. Is the medium on which you practice the art of living. Amazing. Your life is the medium on which you practice the art of living. It's extraordinary. And it's echoed by all the great teachers. We've got a couple of other great passages here. Seneca tells us another Stoic. He tells us the philosopher, he or she alone knows how to live for herself. She is the one, in fact, who knows the fundamental thing, how to live. So the philosopher's main purpose in life is to discover how to live optimally. It's not about esoteric ideas and pedantic distinctions. It's about loving wisdom. Philosopher comes from two words. We talk about this, but Philo Sophia, lover of wisdom. And wisdom is knowledge of life. So the true philosopher is one who's passionate about how to live optimally. And that passage reminds me of one from the Buddha who tells us, as irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds and as a result, their lives. So we want to focus on how to live. And if you're listening to this and you've watched more than one of these, my hunch is you are a lover of wisdom, you are a fellow philosopher, and it's time to rebrand that whole idea of what it means. Philosopher. What's cooler than that to love wisdom so much? You dedicate your life to understanding how to live optimally. So to do that, we need to embrace Stoic virtue. Now, we talk about this a lot, Arete the concept of doing our best, moment to moment to moment, striving to do what we're capable of doing. This is what we're capable of doing. This is what we're actually doing. This virtue, living in integrity, with our highest ideals, is all about closing that gap. So what we are capable of doing is what we're actually doing. We go off on that in the Note, and Jonathan Haidt, a leading research scientist, talks about it as well. The classic idea of virtue and living with excellence, it's what it's all about. I've got a video on that. I'll put a link to that in the little area below this video so you can check that out. We talk about hedonic adaptation, the fact that we get used to things that are great in our lives and we always want the next best thing. And one way to avoid doing that is to practice something called negative visualization. And Irvine likes it so much. He says this is the single most valuable technique in the Stoics psychological toolkit. Negative visualization, he calls it. And that's basically, he says, where we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value. Negative visualization, right? So all those things in your vision board that you want, the positive visualization. Imagine losing everything you currently have. Your wife or your husband, your children, the job that you have, all these things that you have in your life. And you may or may not love your job. Hopefully you do. And hopefully you love your wife and spouse and kids. But imagine losing those things you. It provides us with a deeper appreciation of what we have. Negative visualization. It's amazing. It's not necessarily fun to do, but it's really, really powerful. And I'll do that often. I'll imagine our little baby, wow, what would happen if we didn't have him? And it puts everything in perspective. And your love just deepens right in that moment. So go ahead and practice that negative visualization. Imagine losing what's most important to you in your life. And you may want to press pause and just imagine that now, or when you're meditating or journaling or whatever, and then appreciate how amazing it is that you are blessed to have all these extraordinary things in your life now. So there you go. Negative visualization. Another little visualization practice that Irvine tells us about is something called projective visualization. So Epictetus talks about the fact that, you know, we have a lot easier time dealing with other people's misfortunes sometimes. So if you happen to be at a friend's house and he uses the example of a servant breaking a cup, right? But let's just say someone accidentally drops a glass, and your friend kind of loses a glass. Now you look at it and you're like, well, that's a bummer. But you know what? Those things happen. I'm really sorry that that happened, but, you know, it happens. And now it's easy for you to say that when it's someone else's cup or glass that breaks, right? Or a car that breaks down, a relationship that's going through challenges, but it's an entirely different thing when it's happening to us. And what the Stoics tell us we need to project. And imagine that when we're facing something that's happening to us, imagine that it's happening to someone else. How would we respond then? What advice would we give our friends? Well, we'd tell them Even if they lost something dear to them or someone dear to them, we would know and we would advise with compassion. Well, those things are inherent to life. We all know that we're going to lose things in our life. And when we approach it from that perspective, this projective visualization, it kind of takes the edge off of the pain. It's an amazing way to kind of get out of being. It's just about you to this witness perspective where you can actually see yourself experiencing something almost as if it's happening to someone else. That's the witness perspective that we cultivate in meditation. It's one of the things we want to be able to do, because when we get locked into this one perspective is when we suffer longer conversation. Moving on. We've got this idea of living in a dream world. I'm going to recommend you watch the Louis CK Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy video. I will link to that as well. Remember, we live in a dream world. Things that we take for granted. Today, you know, we talk it into cell phone. I'm recording this on an iPhone. I'm going to click a button. It's going to go up to YouTube and you can watch it five, maybe 10 minutes later. That is a miracle. Now I can take it for granted. When my Internet's slow, I can become a pain and complain about it. But that's insanity. What we can do is so remarkable. And we need to remember we live in a dream world. And I can give you a hundred examples of all the different ways that our world is a dream. And it's something that I try to come back to again and again in my life. So we're running out of time here. But another core idea of stoicism is impermanence. Everything is changing. All always. When we embrace that, we know that this too shall pass. The Buddhists call it Anita. Everything passes. We gotta truly contemplate that if we want to be alive. And then the final idea here is one of the other really important things of stoicism is the fact that our thoughts ultimately control the quality of our life experience. Aurelius says, your mind will be like its habitual thoughts, for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. Soak it then in such trains of thought as, for example, where life is possible at all, a right life is possible. There you go. Whirlwind tour of a guide to the Good Life. Remember the art of living Stoic style. Live with virtue, negative and projective visualizations and control your own thoughts. There you go. Hope you enjoyed look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.