This Is the Best Stoic Lesson
What if being a decent person is enough?
I enjoy reading about stoicism. I’ve read the main works of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Even though this philosophy has its shortcomings, I find it truly helpful.
Still, I have a confession to make: I was not the biggest fan of Marcus Aurelius’ ideas. The first time I read “Meditations”, I found it OK, but nothing more than that.
However, now I am reading this famous book for the second time, and my perspective on it is completely changing.
The cool thing is that right now I am facing a challenging moment, dealing with a broken foot and other difficult situations, and against all odds this book is helping me.
The probable main enthusiast of this book, Ryan Holiday, is probably right: “Meditations” brings us so many amazing lessons that it may be worth reading it several times during our lifetime, so we can absorb more from this journal that became one of the most important books ever written.
One of these lessons is particularly interesting and peculiar: focus on being good, decent, and useful to your community. The rest doesn’t really matter.
At first glance, it can seem like a cliche, but once we stop to think about this idea, it becomes easy to notice that it’s fairly profound.
After all, nowadays we live in a society where we focus so much on things we cannot control, like politics, wars, violence, other people’s approval, in the form of closing a deal with a new client, recognition in our professions, making money in the stock market, and so on.
It seems a revolutionary idea to say that if we are decent as people, we can be happy about ourselves, we don’t need to be considered a loser just because we are not the best at “our craft” or we are not a millionaire.
I found this idea quite useful, whereby we can lift a huge weight from our shoulders, once being kind and correct to others is something totally under our control, no matter what happens to us.
This is a powerful, liberating idea, that interestingly enough is aligned with the science of happiness.
As the Stanford researcher on the topic Laurie Santos explains, everything we know about happiness, from a scientific perspective, tells us that the key to achieving it lies in an other-related approach to life.
In fact, worrying just about being decent to others may be one of the best things we can do for our mental health.
How many times have we learned that someone dealt with a serious depressive state because they feel like a loser, someone that doesn’t consider themselves successful in terms of money, status, power, etc?
As I wrote in one of my first articles here on Medium, based on the ideas of the philosopher Alain de Botton, we are insane, for we consider an ordinary life not enough, even though this very life is incredible.
We have far more than the past generations, but still, we are not satisfied, continuing to torture ourselves with unnecessary desires.
That’s why I totally agree with Vernon Howard when he says that “You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need”.
The good thing is that if we are good and kind to others, it becomes pretty much impossible for us not to obtain what we need.
Therefore, from this perspective, being successful is completely under our control. This is the good news brought to us by Marcus Aurelius.
