In the city of Cyprus. In the year three hundred BC. A very
wealthy merchant named Zenón lived. While traveling from Phoenicia to Piraeus, his ship
sank along with all its cargo due to that one event, an event that
was completely out of Zeno' s control or anyone else' s control.
This very rich man suddenly became poor in an instant. Imagine that you are
eno how you would react if your whole life' s work faded away by
the mere force of nature. What would be the right reaction. You'
d be angry, you' d be sad, you' d feel like
life had cheated on you. For most of us, these would all be
normal reactions, but not for Zeno. The father of stoicism, a small
change lasts an eternity and a small rethinking of your mentality can trigger bigger and
more shocking changes later. The core of stoicism is the very definition of acceptance
and indifference. After reading the works of Socrates and other great philosophers, they
were created and taught stoicism according to Zen. Although we do not have much
control over what happens to us, if we have control over how it affects
us and we must use this control for great effect, instead of crying over
the spilled milk or, in this case, the drowned goods. Senón focused
on maintaining composure in the face of the situation, remaining calm and neutral despite
his predicament. Nowadays people inadvertently see the Stoics as people who cannot be broken,
people who do not usually fall into emotional extremes, going through things like
anger attacks or episodes of anxiety. But the original idea behind stoicism was much
more than that. Instead of being just a way of describing people who are
insensitive, stoicism was a way of seeing, describing and understanding the world.
It was a way of life and that way of life has lasted for centuries.
Stoic philosophy can be applied to situations today in the same way it was
applied thousands of years ago, and its benefits are just as shocking. Stoicism
allows us to process these negative emotions from negative experiences and turn them into thoughts
that give us a unique perspective on the world. The perspective is everything,
and each person in the world has different experiences and therefore different perspectives on things.
Since the Stoics met, discussed and taught philosophy in a public place,
their general philosophy was widely known. They believed that stoic principles could greatly benefit
anyone and everyone, so it made no sense for them to hide that knowledge
behind the four walls of a school or the courtyards of the palace. As
a result, everyone, from slaves to emperors, could learn and become stoic,
and so they did. Some of the most notable Stoics in the world.
Sennn even flee to epictate, whose name means acquired, as he was
once a Seneca slave, who was a well- known statesman and Marcus Aurelius,
a Roman emperor and one of the most powerful men ever existed. The
early Stoics practiced what they preached, avoiding all forms of segregation and leading the
fight against inequality. They even invented the cosmopolitan word, which literally means citizen
of the world when people hear that word. Now we think of cities like
New York, Toronto, Dubai and London, because of how diverse they are.
This was the kind of unity and camaraderie that the Stoics preached at the
time of the foundation of stoicism. Women are not allowed to study philosophy,
but the Stoics did not agree with that at all. Musonio Rufo, the
epictet master once said not only men possess the desire and natural inclination towards virtue,
but also women. Women are pleased no less than men with noble and
righteous acts and reject the opposite of such actions, being so because it is
appropriate for men to seek and examine how they can live well, that is,
practice philosophy, but not women. Even at a time when it was
not popular, women were allowed to learn freely about stoicism and become stoic.
So why so many people adopt stoicism as a way of life In a world
full of twists, unexpected events, our emotions can understand how to stand in
the way of things. Actually, don' t we get sad because bad
things happen to us? We get sad because bad things happen to us?
Unexpected. Rain is a good thing. It helps water our plants, provides
water for livestock and keeps the temperature cool and humid. But the truth is,
when that dark cloud catches you out of homes without umbrellas, it'
s never a good experience. Then why don' t we start crying once
it starts raining. It is because, although the situation is bad, we
have learned to wait. Rain is something that is inevitable. We can'
t control the weather. Even if it stinks, the rain passes and the
light returns. Stoicism will enter us that in the same way we should expect
that all the bad that can happen will happen. Imagine the worst result and
feel happy knowing it could happen. One of the stoic exercises is known as
voluntary comfort, an exercise aimed at increasing feelings of gratitude, sleeping on the
floor of your kitchen, taking cold showers when you normally take hot ones,
eating only potatoes for a few days, things like that. This exercise helps
you understand that no matter how hard it gets, you will survive and,
potentially, thrive if your mindset is right. By being able to endure these
uncomfortable situations, we indirectly prepare our minds for future misfortunes. With the present
state of the world, where announcements are constantly imposed on us, we are
made to believe that if we do not have the latest, we do not
look a certain way or we do not earn a certain amount of money.
We' ll never be happy. This message is more important now that we
never enter the world without knowing much about anything. We grow up learning things
at home, at school, and watching the world for ourselves. The problem
is that many times the three sources of knowledge teach us in different ways.
The question is we need to internalize all this knowledge. If we do,
we might be setting unrealistic expectations for our lives, leaving us finally disappointed and
dissatisfied. In the end. That' s not a way to live.
Instead, we should focus on improving ourselves, for ourselves. We should do
things for ourselves and just for that reason. Attaching any external hope or secondary
expectations to the actions we take almost always leads to disappointment. Most of the
time we end up trying to fill that void with external things. We spend
all our money on a fancy car, a house or even started a family.
Sometimes we do all these things for their external value and not for their
internal value. But stoicism teaches us that if you approach life in this way,
you place your happiness in the hands of external forces, forces that can
always fail cars. They almost always break down. Natural disasters, raze entire
cities and Southern divorce cups see more and more each year. But even free
things in life have a cost, the cost of space, both physical and
mental. As Seneca once wrote, learning to live with less will create space
in your life for the things you really care about. Instead, we must
place our happiness in our intrinsic value as humans and in nothing that we have
or can physically acquire. We must choose to do our best to keep calm,
regardless of what life throws at us, because regardless of what we want,
at the end of the day we have no control over most of the
things that happen to us, but we do have full control over how we
react to those things. That is the dichotomy of control, the most important
principle in philosophy. Stoica, in the words of epicte, the main task
in life is simply to identify and separate matters so that you can tell me
clearly which are external ones that are not under my control and which have to
do with the choices that I really control. Stoics teach that we must learn
to separate what we can control from what we cannot control. We need to
determine our value not by things that we cannot control, but by things that
we can. Striving to achieve goals is a good feature, but falling apart
when things don' t go the way you want is, from the point
of view of a useless stoic. Making episodes is good, much easier than
being a Roman emperor, but it can still be challenging Sometimes. First you
must form your idea, which leads to an eternity then investigate that idea.
Discard it because it sucks to start again writing the episode, creating the episode,
editing it, putting the title and everything else before pressing it all up
to the point where you click on the upload button depends on you. However,
once you click on the upload button, the power moves to the podcast
algorithm. Still, many people judge the success of their podcast channel based on
how many visitors and subscribers or followers have metrics that are mostly out of their
control. Stoics teach that instead, you must judge the success of your work
according to the amount of effort you put in and not the result of your
external hopes. Trust the process. Living with less means getting rid of the
social wives you' ve essentially put on think of a person who' s
been working hard on his work for the past six months. Now he feels
he deserves a promotion. So he approaches his boss with his performance report,
the boss says thank you, doesn' t give him promotion and goes home
thinking he must be lousy at his job. He does not consider that the
boss could simply have woken up angry, that another person might have been better
qualified at the time, or that the company was simply losing money and could
not afford it. He does not know the reason, but he continues to
moy do if he simply placed his value in the quality of the performance report
he delivered, he would continue to do what he was doing to win the
promotion he wanted could have been much happier. In general, with the right
perspective, your goal would not have been diminished, but simply postponed this rethinking
of your mentality is crucial. A true stoic does not see his successes based
on the financial benefit of his companies, but rather he consoles himself with the
fact that he can live a comfortable life without all the things that money can
buy. There are the four main virtues of stoicism wisdom, courage, temperance
and justice. Wisdom is the ability to separate between what is internal and what
is external, and the ability to choose our reaction to the things that happen
to us. As Victor Frankl said, between stimulus and response there is a
space. In that space is our power to choose our answer courage two words.
Persist and resist. Temperance or moderation is what I just did there.
Do more with less, say more with less words. While Jeff Kisses and
Elon Musk fight at the top of the phorms list, the Stoics believe that
the limit of wealth should be simply having the essentials and then having enough.
Justice is the most important of all virtues. It instructs that no one should
harm another, because we were all born for one another, to do good,
to one another and not to ourselves. Nelson Mandela was one of the
most famous African leaders in the world. While fighting the apparthde he was sentenced
to life imprisonment, where he remained for 27 years before finally being released.
When he was released from prison, he was elected President of South Africa and
so many people thought he would brutally punish all people who had something to do
with the alien or his imprisonment. But, of course, he didn'
t. During his time in prison, Mandela read the works of Marco Aurelio
and learned many of the fundamental values of stoicism, all of which he practiced
throughout his life. Instead of asking for the head of the guilty, Nelson,
Mandela urged his people to seek the opposite, to relax and rebuild suffer
me that the past was already out of their control and that all they could
do was find a way forward and build a better nation This is the path
of the Stoic. It' s a process, like everything else, we
have to reconfigure the way we think, out the old inside the new to
solve our problems with happiness. We must practice self- esteem. By redirecting
our definition of value to the things we can control, we can stop obsessing
about things we cannot control and, in general, we can lead a much
happier and satisfying life. Stoicism helps us navigate through past and present storms into
calmer and peaceful waters. And if our ship goes down and we all drown,
we can find peace in the fact that we live a good life,
although not as long as we had hoped, because remember everything has an end