You can change, if you choose to

One of the most liberating insights that I’ve seen many people come to would seem to be self-evident, or at least common sense, but which turns out to be realized less often than one would think, is very simple. A person can change, if they choose to. 

There are many people out there who have been given a message that is clearly false about human beings, that people can’t and don’t change. They are what they are. They’re fated to be a certain way. What character they have is fixed. Whether they’re basically good or bad, whether they have certain qualities or not, whether they’re this type or that, they’re set for life. And if that applies to human beings in general, it would apply to one’s own self as well.  

But is this common dogma actually true? Does it have any real grounding? Is it confirmed by actual experience and experiment? Or is it something, in all of its variants, that too many people uncritically accept? Or to put it in more formally Stoic terms, is it an appearance or impression that a person foolishly gives assent to, rather than testing?

Thinking, feeling, and choosing

As an ancient philosophy of life, Stoicism makes virtue and vice central to its ethics. Virtue ethics evaluate human beings in light of the structures of thinking, feeling, choosing, and acting established as habits, good or bad, within their souls. By the time we become aware of the importance of these habits, we are far from blank slates. We have experienced and undergone years of other people and our broader culture giving us examples, telling us how to behave and what we should believe, training and disciplining us (or the opposite), which leave their imprints upon our psyches. 

Our routine behaviour does not imply that we cannot change

But the fact that we have well-established characters, customs, routines, enough that other people who pay close enough attention can often predict our emotional responses, our thought-processes, our choices and actions, doesn’t negate the equally true fact that as human beings, endowed with rationality and a faculty of choice, we can make changes in, about, and applying to ourselves.

We do, of course, have to be realistic about this. No real Stoics believe or teach the sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, you-can-just-will-yourself-different nonsense that some people preach. Nor do they buy into new-agey claptrap about positive thinking, manifesting, or the like. Stoics know that while we always have the potential to change ourselves for the better, and while we can choose a new path for ourselves, that’s not a decision we can make effectively for ourselves once and for all. 

But true commitment is essential

We can make commitments, but what those really amount to are a decision and desire to subsequently make an entire, and seemingly endless, series of sequential choices. In order to make and maintain progress, we have to commit and recommit. We have to persevere in making the same kind of choices, often against our inclinations. But that is something that is, to use Epictetus’ preferred term, up to us (ep’hńmon), or as Seneca would say, in our power (in nostra potestate).

Stoicism provides the necessary tools

The texts and thinkers of ancient Stoic philosophy we possess provide us with a veritable toolbox of resources, articulated and applied over the course of centuries, for progressively producing these sorts of moral changes within ourselves. Imagine what we would have at our disposal if even a portion of the lost works whose titles we know were available to us. As it is, however, we certainly have more than enough to guide us, if we determine that it is time for us to change.

Developing contrary habits

I’ll close here by just highlighting one particular sets of insights I’ve found useful in my own life. 
If it is habit which annoys us, we must try to seek aid against habit. What aid then can we find against habit? The contrary habit. - Discourses, 1.27

Habits (ethń) are not set in stone inside of us. But they are not easily broken once we have them. How do we use a contrary habit that doesn’t even exist as an aid or ally against the habit we want to change? We have to choose and commit to building it over time. We start, as he tells us, by “practicing with little things, and then proceed to greater things” (1.18). We effect small changes, and then, over time, we can build upon those to change who and what we are in greater and more lasting ways.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPA-certified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design

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