Every time I encounter the philosophy of stoicism, I hate it. Recently someone was telling me about the book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which I haven’t read and won’t read because I don’t think Roman emperors are admirable people nor do I think they have any wisdom to hand down to me in this particular place and time.
Years ago I listened to Tim Ferriss’ podcast in which he was interviewing Derek Sivers. Why was I listening to Tim Ferriss? Because Derek was a friend of mine. Unfortunately, the topic of stoicism came up. Ferriss described how he once lived off rice and beans for two weeks to prove to himself that he could survive if worst came to worst. He was undeservedly self-congratulatory for a rich dude who pretended to live like a poor dude briefly, and if you’ve ever been poor you know that a temporarily and voluntarily deprived diet is the least of your problems.
I went and Googled the episode to make sure I wasn’t being unfairly harsh on Ferriss, and honestly, I was misremembering favourably. It wasn’t even a full two weeks. Here’s his quote from the transcript:
And so, not only are you mentally preparing yourself by visualizing the worst-case
scenario, you’re actually practicing. You’re rehearsing poverty, or lack of variation. Or, in my case, no food. I’ve done this before with, say, rice and beans, for five days, and you’re like, okay, it’s cost me $2 a day to eat, and I feel fucking fine.
He also says that while recording the podcast, he’s
…unshaven, also wearing the same, mostly the same clothing. Pants, jacket, etc., all week long.
The idea of practicing poverty to prove to yourself and others that you can survive it while not in fact experiencing any kind of poverty is gross and offensive.
Also, poor people do change their clothes. Staying in the same clothes for a week proves nothing except that you have no idea what poverty is or how you would cope with it in reality. Any deficit in cleanliness that some people may have is a systematic failing, not a personal one. Such as not having access to safe housing.
Poverty is not a lack of morals or a failure of character, it’s caused by an oppressive system which is designed for only a few to thrive. The Roman emperors certainly mastered exploiting and bullshitting the lower classes for their own personal gain.
If you are one of the thriving elite attempting to simulate those who are disadvantaged by the same systems that privilege you, and using that self-initiated pretense to further bolster the view that you are somehow a better person, you are definitely not, in fact, a better person.
Being poor is never fun, but it’s manageable for a short time. True poverty is a relentless grind. What people like Ferriss don’t realise as they are smugly eating rice and beans for a few days, is how hard people have to work to pay the rent to have a kitchen to keep their rice and beans in. How they might not actually be able to pay the electricity bill to cook the rice and beans. It might only cost $2 a day to eat if you’ve already bought a house and you never have to think about the electricity bill. I would also feel “fucking fine” after a few days of a subsistence diet if I had a house and could pay the bills without worrying and if I’d had nourishing and nutritious food up until the point of deprivation. Malnourishment is a lot worse and longer-lasting than being hungry for a few days.
In the podcast, Ferriss mentions Marcus Aurelius, who is the subject of the book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. And look, I just can’t take anything these rich powerful men say seriously. This isn’t meant to be a character assassination of Ferriss (though I suspect there’d be plenty of material) because that would require researching him and his philosophy which appears to be one of those deals where you get rich by talking about how you get rich and then continue to get richer because that’s how being rich works. I just take issue with this one thing I heard him say when I had the misfortunate of listening to half of one of his podcast episodes.
Some people might say that in order to criticise someone I should really consider all their work, to which I say: no. One time I stopped dating a guy when I found out he was a fan of Jordan Peterson, and not like a casual fan, like a paid-for-VIP-tickets-to-meet-him fan. He accused me of being judgemental and I agreed that I was. He said that I should read Peterson’s work before judging him which I declined to do. He tried to make me feel bad for my rejection of him vis a vis Peterson and was irate that I wasn’t contrite in the least.
The person who was telling me about the Marcus Aurelius book said that it helped them and that’s good, I guess. They were having a rough time. They said we can’t always choose or control the situations we find ourselves in but we can choose our responses. The first bit is obviously true but the second bit is only true if the relentless grind of poverty or disability and other intersectional struggles haven’t given you brain fog or depression or put you into long-term reactive trauma mode making you unable to even figure out what a good response might be. It makes me think of Mia in Little Fires Everywhere telling Elena that she didn’t make good choices, she had good choices.
Stoicism is like the ancient version of good vibes only. It reeks of toxic positivity and repression, quite aside from the patronising and insulting implication that if you’re unhappy it’s your fault and your fault alone.
What do you think of stoicism?
Note 1: I did look Tim Ferriss up on Wikipedia just in case I was missing something and I saw that his publishing company published the book Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, which I read years ago in my neverending curiosity about how other humans create things. Aside from being heavily dominated by the habits of privileged male writers and artists, there was a chapter about Simone de Beauvoir in which Currey said that her open relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre was “weird” which was a strange and discordant thing to say in context, and he missed the really weird thing which was not only how all the men abandoned their families and expected their wives and servants to take care of everything around them and bring them their croissants in bed before taking their long contemplative walks unburdened by any practical obligations, but also that we are supposed to somehow emulate these men in their unattainable and exploitative, selfish lives.
Note 2: I realise there is more to the philosophy of stoicism than I have covered here and I’ll tell you, I don’t like any of it.