305 — Q & A: Friendship, Religion, Purpose, and Arguments
Transcript:
Hello friends, my name is Erick Cloward and welcome to the Stoic Coffee Break. The Stoic Coffee Break is a weekly podcast where I take aspects of Stoicism and do my best to break them down to the most important points. I share my thoughts on Stoic philosophy and share my experiences, both my successes and my failures, and hope that you can learn something from them all within the space of a coffee break.
So this week’s episode is another Q & A episode, and part of the reason behind that was because I came down with COVID last week and it completely wiped me out. I didn’t even get a podcast episode out because I was just absolutely exhausted and had so much congestion and phlegm that my voice was, was all kind of scratchy and raw.
And so, I’m feeling a bit better this week. Still feel under the weather. I took a test yesterday and it still came up pretty positive. So hopefully I’m on the mend. I feel like I am, but yeah, this is my first time having COVID. I’ve been pretty lucky of avoiding that so far. But I knew the odds were not in my favor that I would stay forever free from COVID.
So this one doesn’t seem as bad as what other people had. And I seem to be recovering fairly well. So let’s get on with today’s episode. So a number of these questions I got from listeners from different comments. One of my listeners I had a conversation with yesterday over Zoom. And I just wanted to kind of pick a few questions that people have posted on social media.
If you have any questions about Stoic philosophy that you would like me to answer, you can find this video on YouTube and post a comment underneath and I will use one of your questions in my upcoming Q& A episodes or you can just find me on social media and respond to one of my posts and ask a question, send me a DM, whatever you like.
So, let’s get on with the questions for today. So, the first question that, that I kind of want to address, it was more of a comment that was on one of my previous episodes where I talked about friendship. And somebody had mentioned, you know, well, who has time for friendship? You know, as if it’s a luxury to have friendship.
And I responded back trying to be direct, but not, not, not trying to be rude, but simply just saying, well, you have time for it. It is your choice what you do with your time. And if you want to, if you don’t want to spend that on friendship, that, that’s really your choice. But I think that, you know, It’s probably kind of a bigger thing in that we do have very busy lives.
But with that, we also spend a lot of time doing things by ourselves that we could do with other people. That we could spend time with them instead of watching Netflix or, you know, scrolling endlessly on our phone. What if rather than, you know, sitting around at lunch on your phone, you called up a friend and said, Hey, let’s go grab some lunch.
Or, you know, After work, you know, you meet up for drinks somewhere. There’s always time for friendship. And friendship is one of the most important things that we need to have in our lives. They’ve shown through different studies that the more friends you have over your lifetime, the close friendships that you have, the longer you live.
So, I was watching a podcast, it was a Diary of a CEO, which has become one of my favorite ones with Stephen Bartlett. And he was interviewing Simon Sinek, and they were talking a lot about friendship. And he gave some really good advice on that. And one of the most important things that happens to us is that we don’t make time for our friends, oftentimes because we don’t feel like we’re that close to our friends.
And, you know, we want to have close friendships. But the best way to have close friendships is to be a great friend. And I think that’s something that’s really missing in this. You know, it’s, it’s, everybody thinks that friendship is hard to do, and having close friends is hard to do, but we’re all starved for friendship.
So I really think that, think about what you would like for, a friend, what you would like in a friend, and try to be that for somebody else. And a lot of it is just being authentically you, and finding people that you can be yourself around. But go out there, make that effort, because friendship is what makes life great.
And if you don’t have time for friends, then you really need to make time, because you are, if you are too busy to have friends, then I think the priorities in your life are probably a little bit skewed, and maybe you’re spending too much time at work, or on things that you know that aren’t inclusive of other people.
Next question. Can you be stoic and be religious? Yes, plain, plainly put. Yes, you can be stoic and you can be religious. Stoicism is not a religion. Stoicism is a set of principles. It’s a philosophy. It’s a way to live your life in such a way that really can be adaptable to almost any religion if you want.
And stoics themselves had a theology and as I’ve been working on my book, I’ve, I’ve learned a bit more about this and they have this idea, that there was a great creative and animating force within the universe that kind of managed all of the circumstances of our lives. And it’s called the Logos. And this is what created the universe and what kind of keeps, you know, the stars moving.
It is what creates the events that happen in our lives. And the idea behind the Logos is that it’s deterministic. It has a big plan for what is happening in the world, that everything that happens, happens for a reason. But within that, you have free will to make choices with the deterministic things that come your way.
So when life circumstances happen, when events happen, natural disasters, whatever you want to consider circumstances and events, you have free will within that realm to be able to make choices about what you want to do to respond to those things. You may not be able to control them, but you can decide how you want to respond to them.
And for me, I’m not a religious person anymore, and like I said, I’ve talked about it many times on my podcast that I grew up Mormon and found that it just didn’t fit me. I found that there were just a lot of things in religion that simply weren’t true because the founder of the church made a lot of things up.
And so for me, it was, it was challenging leaving that because I’ve been taught my whole life. This is the truth. And this is how the way, you know, this is how life works, and that God would punish me if I, if I left the church. But I found that, for me, it didn’t really jive with the type of person that I wanted to be.
And so, I don’t practice any particular religious faith. Do I believe in a God? I’m not sure. I would say that I’m agnostic at this point. I don’t have any proof that there, that there is a God, but there are so many unanswered questions in the cosmos that I, I’m simply withholding judgment until I have better information.
And so I can kind of follow along with the idea of the Logos with the Stoics because there is something. I mean, the fact that we have matter versus not having matter you know, the fact that life tends to build towards creation, even though there is also entropy, meaning that things over time lose, lose energy and decay.
So there’s this interesting balance of, well, why does life naturally self-organize and come into creation? How do, how do we have consciousness? What makes consciousness? There’s so many questions that I don’t know and don’t understand, but believing in something larger than myself, that there is some type of creative force within universe is something that, that I think I could be okay with.
But, from what I’ve seen, and having grown up very religious, and not being it, stoicism doesn’t really conflict with any religion. It’s about being a good person no matter what. And its core principles are the core principles of many of the world’s religions. So, for me, I don’t see them as being in conflict at all.
So, yes, in my opinion, you can be religious and be stoic.
All right. Next question. How do I find my purpose in life? Now, this is, this is always a hard thing, and I, I think that young people probably struggle with this the most, but I think even people my age struggle with it. That’s something that I’ve been working on, and I’ve been, as I’ve been working on changing my career into becoming an executive coach, it’s something that I think we’re constantly doing throughout our lives, and we should be doing throughout our lives, is what is our purpose?
And I think that it’s going to change over time. But I think that there’s this feeling that people feel like that once they discover their purpose, then they’ll know what to do with their life. And they will be able to just head towards that, that one goal, and they will be happy. But the thing is, is it doesn’t really work that way.
At least in my opinion, I think that part of your purpose in life is to find the things in life that bring value to your life, that you want to do. So there’s nothing wrong with setting out in a direction to try and figure out what that is. In fact, that’s part of the whole journey, is to discover what your purpose is.
And I know it’s frustrating because you want somebody to, you know, just give you a test, or to come up to you and have a conversation with you and tell you, You know what? This is what you should do with your life. And that, for me, kind of robs you of the experience and the exploration and the discovery process of getting in there and figuring out what it is that really works for you.
And sometimes you’ll be surprised. Sometimes you may do something where you have some type of aptitude and find that you hate doing that. You might be great at math, but you don’t want to be a math professor or you don’t want to program computers because it’s, it’s not anything that is exciting for you. It doesn’t, it doesn’t get you excited about doing anything, but sitting down and being a therapist, you know, might be the thing that does it for you.
So don’t be afraid to go out and try and discover this because there’s not a real process, at least I don’t see it, That you just follow steps A, B, C, and D, and voila, you know what your purpose is in life. Part of it is to go out and actually discover that purpose. And I know that that’s probably not what you want to hear, but I think that if you don’t allow yourself the time, the space, the opportunities to go out and discover what it is that you want to do, and to try a whole bunch of different things, Then you’re kind of shortchanging yourself of the experience of life.
Because again, you’ll never know where things will turn up for you. I mean, for me, I studied marketing when I was in college. I was planning on being in marketing and when I was getting my degree, but I worked in tech while I was in college because it was an easy job and I figured I could learn about computers.
And when I went to find a job after I was getting my degree, nobody would hire me in marketing because I had no experience. So I was like, okay, what do I do? I, well, I’ve been working in tech a little bit. I know how to build some web pages. So I looked for a tech job and I had a job within two weeks. So I decided I would try that path for a while.
And that ended up being my career. I had no idea before that. I mean, when I, like I said, when I graduated from college, I was just planning on getting into marketing. And when I started college, I was a musical theater major, but I was kind of afraid that I wouldn’t be able to make it in that. I didn’t have the self confidence to be able to pursue that as a career.
And so, which is why I turned to marketing and now after creating this podcast, you know, I I’m turning into a coach and creating courses and doing my best to help other people in a way that, that is very outside the world of being a software developer or a CTO that I’d done for the last 25 years. So you never know where life is going to take you.
So just really, it’s about being open and exploring.
All right. Last question. This was a question that one of my listeners, Christine we had a conversation yesterday over Zoom and she’s dealing with some, some tough situations at work. And mostly again, the most problems that you find in in work and at home are relationship problems.
So they’re dealing with other people and how do you deal with them better? And her question was, how do you deal with hardships with a sense of rationality instead of anger? And again, in regards to dealing with other people. And I did a few, an episode a couple of weeks ago I think about anger. And I talked about why, why I used to be so angry all the time and how I really have worked hard on overcoming that so this will be a little bit of a rehash on that. But in our conversation when we were talking about this we also had you know kind of came up some ideas on our own.
So I wanted to share this with you probably one of the most important things you can do and this is what the Stoics teach us is focus on when you are in a tough situation on living according to virtue. That you really lean into your principles and in any situation you need to ask yourself, Am I acting with wisdom with this person?
Am I treating them well? Am I being courageous and saying what needs to be said? Am I practicing temperance? Am I practicing self discipline and not, not allowing myself to get inflamed by this other person? And the Stoics talk about you know, looking at things as objectively as possible. And when we’re in an angry situation like that, it is incredibly hard not to let the emotions that the other person is feeling trigger our emotions.
And so the more that we can practice that objectivity, and a lot of this is, it takes time to practice that. It takes time of thinking about that, and in a way, kind of rehearsing in your mind how you would deal with those situations. So the Stoics have a practice called Premeditatio Malorum, which is that you imagine the worst possible scenarios so that when they do arise that they’re much easier to deal with because you’ve already prepared for them.
If you, I mean, I know this may sound bad, but if you can imagine the worst thing that could happen when you’re having an argument with another person, you know, what is the worst thing that they could say? And how would you respond to that? And if you, if you are able to kind of think through those things and rehearse those things, then when they actually say those things, you know what to do about that, rather than, you know, taking offense at what the other person said. And this is again where that objectivity comes in because you can only be offended if you choose to be offended. Meaning when somebody says something to you, if you broke it down to just purely objective, you know, like the Stoics like to do of breaking things down to their purely constituent components, like the smallest thing.
When somebody says something to you, it simply sounds coming out of their throat. It’s the interpretation in your mind that you have, that is creating the emotion that you feel about it. It’s that story that you feel. And this is something that’s hard for a lot of people to understand. They just think that emotions are something that just happen to you.
But emotions are a result of the thoughts that you have in your head. And if you don’t believe me, that emotions are a result of the thoughts in your head. Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say that you had a friend in high school that you were very close to, and you hadn’t talked to this friend in 10 years and, but you, you were super close to them before, but you just kind of lost touch and five years ago they died, but you didn’t hear about it.
And so after 10 years, you finally hear that this person had died. And you are heartbroken, and you feel upset, you feel sad, you feel that kind of grief. But the thing is, is if emotions were simply caused by the events outside of us, then when your friend died, you should have immediately felt sad, you should have grieved, all of those kind of things.
It wasn’t until you found out about it, and you had thoughts about it, you had a story that was going on in your head about your friend who died, that created the emotions in your body. And so every emotion that you feel, besides the, just the core visceral emotions, like, you know, if, if a car is coming towards you, there’s, it’s more of an instinctual motion, emotion.
But emotions are caused by the thoughts in our head. And so, by making sure that you know what is going on in your head when you’re in an argument. What are you thinking? What are you interpreting from the other person? And what are you thinking about that other person? During this argument and if you can start to be more aware of your thoughts about it, then you can actually make some changes on that.
And one thing that Simon Sinek did he gave this really cool exercise about how one time he was fighting with his partner and they were both, you know saying well you did this and you did that and they were you know, laying out facts but they were fighting emotionally, and finally he had the wherewithal to kind of say stop and say wait, you know what, we’re just throwing these things at each other and you’re, you’re spending all this time telling me where I’m wrong and you’re right and I’m doing the same thing to you, why don’t we switch that up?
I will tell you everything that you are doing right and everything that I am doing wrong. And by flipping the situation, it allowed them to kind of, recognize some of the thoughts and things that were going on in their heads about each other, and by flipping it to where they were only allowed to say what the other person was saying that was correct, then it really diffused the whole situation.
So that, that’s one exercise to get to the, the nitty gritty of what you’re actually arguing about, and to make the other person feel heard. Because what you’re doing is you’re saying, this is what you said, and this is right. This is what I said, and this is, this was wrong. And by, and he said that after he had done that in, in one certain situation, it was like five minutes later, they were laughing and, and really having a good discussion about that, because he was willing to take a moment, be objective, and recognize that this situation wasn’t working well and wasn’t good for either of them.
So that stoic objectivity of being able to take a step back, try and look at the situation as objectively as possible, and choose a course of action rather than simply being reactive. It’s probably one of the best things that you can do, and this is why meditation, this is why constantly thinking about stoic ideas, journaling about these ideas, and again, practicing that kind of premeditatio malorum.
What would you say, or how would you feel if this other person you were arguing with said something really mean and nasty to you? Could you give yourself kind of an objective break and not take what they said personally? By practicing those types of things, I think that those really help you to move forward in making sure that you can turn the situation around, and not be so argumentative with this other person and maybe end up having a much closer and more productive relationship.
So that’s the end of this week’s Stoic Coffee Break. As always, be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and thanks for listening. I also wanted to mention if you’re not following me on social media, I would appreciate it if you would do so.
You can find me on YouTube and LinkedIn and Facebook and TikTok at Stoic Coffee, all one word, And you can find me on Instagram and threads at stoic. coffee. Thanks again for listening.
Visit the Stoic Coffee Break website for more episodes, transcripts, and merch.
Find out more about the Leadership Mastermind.
Find me on linkedIn, instagram, twitter, or threads.
Thanks again for listening!
