How Stoicism Helped Me Find Myself

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

My journey with Self-development started 7 years ago when I was still in High School. When I share this information with people, they tend to think that I should have a lot of things figured out by now. But It’s far from that.

From working on my mental health to finding ways to deal with studies, work, and relationships.

Reading the title, you’ll typically assume that I found myself thanks to finally sticking to Stoicism. (If you still haven’t heard about this life philosophy, I highly recommend this video) However, that’s not it. I found myself in trying different philosophies, especially the combination of these 3: Minimalism, Stoicism and Essentialism.

I’ll break down in the following sections how each is affecting various areas of my life:

I. Minimalism Frees You from the Material World

Ever since I was a kid, I always tend to have fewer items in the family. I couldn’t handle too much clutter. It felt like whatever was in sight would occupy as much space in my mind. Now, the thing about minimalism is that we are likely to think about it as an extreme way of living. But it doesn’t have to be. Minimalism is about getting rid of what causes you to stress to make a place for what matters.

The key two lessons I learned, and still apply are as follows:

1. Practice detachment from material items. We are all guilty of hoarding things, whether because they were passed down through generations or because we might need them “Just in case”. I certainly own more than thirty items, but I have no attachment whatsoever to most of them. Imperfect as it sounds, I keep holding on to some specific things for their emotional value, and the rest is replaceable.
2. Automate things and reduce choices to help with decision fatigue. One of the biggest things that minimalism helped me with is reducing time spent on making repetitive decisions. I talk about this in-depth in a previous article. But to keep things short, look at your daily life and the things you spend lots of time deciding on which eventually leads you to tiredness: What should I eat today? What should I wear? Where do I find my important e-mails amongst all these newsletters? The abundance of choices we are faced with daily is overwhelming. When making a choice, we have two ways: automatic and instinctive, or rational evaluation. First, we take quick and often impulsive decisions using our intuition. Second, is a more conscious and deliberate system where we take decisions after long thinking. By adopting minimalism, or some aspect of it, we simplify our lives and, we can quickly reduce our number of decisions in the day. This preserves our rational-thinking fuel and reduces the risk of decision fatigue.

II. Stoicism Makes You Question What Really Matters

Our lives are hectic, to say the least. Dealing with each aspect takes a lot of energy, and filtering what should get a reaction from what shouldn’t isn’t the easiest task. When I was introduced to stoicism, I found solace in the idea that it’s humbling, it reminded me of the most obvious thing, in this mere existence, my actions and reactions are affecting me first before it gets to the world. And from that, I started finding strength within.

Stoicism is mostly referred to as the Art of Not Caring. A lot of people disagree with this approach to living since it makes one appear nonchalant and heartless.

However, the key learning stoicism teaches us is that our focus should be on the things that we can control.

1. Control your thoughts. When we start from within, the first thing we oversee is the voice in our head. Our thoughts are generated by the things we consume, the more we are exposed to overwhelming information to negative thoughts, the more anxious we become and the more our view of the world changes. The more we spend time with people with no ambitions or dreams, the more we become like them and start adopting the same thinking patterns. The key takeaway here is that we are in control of the quality of our thoughts, and this directly impacts our happiness.
2. Do not react to everything. Not everything happening outside should get a reaction from us, whether it’s on the globe or in your friends' circle or family. Again, it’s all about control. Can you do something about it? Act. If not, try to move on. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”
3. Embrace the facts, not the hopes. By nature, we always have expectations, and in most cases, they could lead to disappointment. Stoicism taught me to do my part, for example applying for jobs, but do not want one. It could be confusing; how can you do things and not expect a reward? The idea isn’t to not expect the outcome, but not to build your hopes and dreams around something where you aren’t the one deciding. To want nothing makes one invincible, because nothing lies outside your control. And a question that helped me assess this aspect every time goes as follows: When it comes to your goals and what you strive for, ask yourself am I in control of them or are they in control of me?

III. Essentialism Makes You Pursue Less

Now onto the last and the most confusing one for me, because it sounds a lot like minimalism, and I do still confuse them. Much like the previous, essentialism pushes you to focus on what matters, it helped me in the process of setting boundaries for myself and creating space and time for the people and the things that matter.

1. If it’s not a HELL YES, then say no. Figuring out what brings you joy can be challenging and time-consuming, but it’s also tempting to try on new things and accept plans with friends because of FOMO. Now the tricky part here is, we are always believing that the other options and other paths that our choices would’ve resulted in are better. It could be the case, but now saying no to things you know are not for you gives you time and energy to focus on strengthening your relationships and working on yourself.
2. Dealing with repeated stress and learned helplessness. Now that’s an interesting concept I discovered in the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown, for a detailed understanding I recommend this article. But in short, it’s when people or animals feel helpless to avoid negative situations. The psychologist Martin Seligman first observed learned helplessness when he was doing experiments on dogs. He noticed that the dogs didn’t try to escape the shocks if they had been conditioned to believe that they couldn’t escape. Bringing that to real-life scenarios when you think about your studies or jobs, we have been conditioned to do things in a certain way which could eventually lead us to a miserable state of life if it’s not aligning with what we want. The action we could take is to question our way of doing things and adapt it so we can escape from the imposed stress.
3. The 80/20 Principle, or the 90/10. A rule that applies to our lives, without us even noticing, is how not every effort we make yield the best results. In fact, it could go as up as 90% of our highest hits result from 10% of what we do with our time. Figuring out what deserves attention and action from our side is key to maintaining long-term benefits.

One’s self-development journey does never end for there are always new things to improve, and that’s the beauty of human nature. Now, I said that I found myself in combining learnings from Minimalism, Stoicism, and Essentialism. I’m far from describing myself as one of each of these philosophies and I could even read this article later in life and think those were just the buzzwords of the era. But right now, it is the mix of these learnings and others that is helping me in my day-to-day and aligning with my values.