The more I explore Stoicism, the more I realize how it provides you with arguably the most effective way to live your life and that too a good life and how it can help you become the person you truly want to be.
According to Stoicism, you should only desire what you can control and you can only control your actions, thoughts and judgments. Another important Stoic principal is that human excellence occurs in forms of different virtues. In simple words, we can only excel and progress in certain different ways. These virtues are divided into four broad categories: prudence or wisdom, fairness or justice, fortitude or courage and temperance or self-discipline.
• Prudence or wisdom comprises of excellent deliberation, good sense, good judgment and perspective.
• Fairness or justice encompasses benevolence, fair dealing, benevolence and good heartedness.
• Fortitude or courage includes perseverance, bravery, authenticity and confidence.
• Temperance or self-discipline encompasses of self-control, humility, orderliness and forgiveness.
These virtues are described as the good virtues and all the traits opposite to these are labelled as ‘bad virtues.’ So folly, cowardice, unfairness and indulgence are labelled as ‘bad virtues.’ Everything that falls in between the good and bad virtues are the indifferent things which are things you need to adopt indifference towards.
This means that health, wealth, success, fame, financial prosperity, fitness and everything else that does not fall in the category of good or bad virtues comes under the indifferent category and is the thing you need to be completely indifferent towards.
When I first came across that I was quite surprised and confused at the same. I mean I did get the good virtues and why you need to pursue them, and I also understand how pursuing the bad ones would poison you and your life; but what I did not understand was how being indifferent to the indifferent stuff helped you with your life. That was something new and perturbing at the same time.
How could one be indifferent to his/ her health or wealth if that’s what he/ she truly wanted? And how would being indifferent to that thing help on with his/ her life? How could being indifferent to your health help you achieve good health and live a meaningful life? All these questions really confused me and as I explored them, I came up with more ambiguities.
That was all really confusing and annoying for me. I took a few deep breaths, relaxed myself and then went through the first and the most rudimentary stoic principle and tried to use it as a basis to understand the principle of the good, the bad and the indifferents. Since the principle of desire served as the foundation of the Stoic philosophy, I used it to better understand why one should be indifferent to everything that doesn’t fall in the categories of the good and bad virtues.
My Findings
What I found out after researching the topic for a few hours, digging deeper into things and then analyzing real life incidents and experiences was quite astonishing and brilliant. For me, the principle of the good, the bad and indifferent started to make complete sense. It wasn’t something silly or nonsensical but something that if we apply would make our life easier, better and happier than ever. How?
Let me elaborate on that. As per the law of desire, only our thoughts and actions are under our control and according to the principle of good and bad virtues, we should pursue the good virtues and refrain from nurturing the bad ones. When we try to improve the way we think and focus on acquiring the good virtues, we will soon start to improve our actions and steer clear of the unhealthy virtues.
At the same time, we focus less on the indifferent things, we would stop worrying about things beyond our control because according to stoicism, the indifferent things are those beyond our control. If you analyze the different aspects such as wealth, success and fame, you will figure out that they involve many factors that aren’t really in your control. However, since your thoughts and actions are in your control, you can work on them and then use that control to eventually make everything work in your favor.
For instance, if you are about to give a job interview, being selected is not in your control and if you focus too much on that, you will end up losing your confidence, self-belief and calmness. What’s in your control is giving a good interview and rocking it by feeding good thoughts and encouragement to yourself so you feel confident when giving that interview and impress the interviewers to grab that position.
The same applies to health. If you think too much about not falling prey to diabetes or any other health condition, you may go crazy especially if you an ancestral history of that condition. However, what’s in your control is to think healthy and eat healthy so you can at least play your part in keeping health conditions away from you and staying physically fit and healthy.
The more I explored the principle of the virtues and the indifferents, the more I realized and accepted their importance. It also made me aware of another reason of why I lacked certain things in life. For instance, if I am not as healthy as I want to be, that’s because I focus too much on things beyond my control and pay hardly any attention to fixing my mindset and action. The same was true for not being as financially sound as I aspired to be. This showed me that I have to first work on my thoughts and actions to improve the things and areas I want to in my life to get the desired results.
Have I started doing that? Well, honestly, I was already working on a few areas such as happiness and positivity, but I have to yet work on correcting my thoughts related to my health and abundance. I am going to work on that; in fact, I have started working on them and I am sure I will start yielding good results soon too; I just need to keep moving forward and continue working on myself.
So far, stoicism is turning out to be pretty amazing and the more I read on it, the more I realize my ideology is quite similar to its principles which is why I feel so drawn towards it. Let me know what you think about it and I’d love to discuss more on the topic with you here or on any other platform.
Lots of love,
Sharoon.
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