Where to begin?

Initially considering practicing Stoicism in everyday life, it proves a bit difficult for me to decide what particular topic to start with. There are myriad possibilities, both in the common situations we face in our ordinary day-to-day living, and with the many Stoic principles or practices applicable to those situations. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and when mulling over what specifically to drill down into, I’ll admit I felt a bit of what we nowadays call “decision paralysis." When there are too many good options, and selecting one rules the others out, one might dither, procrastinate, or just draw a blank.

In talking that predicament over with a good friend and colleague, a solution emerged, partly at their suggestion, and partly through a realization on my own part during the conversation. That issue itself is one of the characteristic challenges of modern everyday life, not necessarily for everyone, but one faced by many, and never fully resolved but rather repeating from time to time.

Choosing between two "right" things and between two "bad" things

A significant part of our everyday life, as adults ( though children sometimes face this as well ) involves framing decisions, making choices, following through on or reexamining commitments. Generally we do this not only with imperfect knowledge about options and likely outcomes we are working with, but also with what can feel like too many competing or even conflicting possibilities presenting themselves to us.

Two discussions by authors central to Stoic ethics come to mind for me at this point.

The first occurs at the very beginning of Cicero’s On Duties, where he notes that the Stoic Panaetius’ treatise on that subject, while excellent in what it does cover, overlooks two important matters.

We often find ourselves in situations where we have to determine, between two morally right or good things, which of them is better. We even have to do this with things that are just useful or expedient, determine which of them we ought to prefer (1.3). This holds equally about having to choose between two bad things or two inconveniences, about which we have to make day-to-day decisions. We might also point out that sometimes this requirement to prioritize or prefer isn’t just one over another, but between still more alternatives.

How we use our time

Seneca, in On The Shortness Of Life, helpfully introduces another factor, that of our time and what we do with it. We only get so much of this resource, and yet many people willingly waste the time they have, squandering it a variety of different matters as if they possessed an infinite amount (3). We cannot do it all, so we need to decide what we will spend time on carefully, thoughtfully, and prudently (7). He also suggests we give proper value to the intervals of leisure we get, rather than busying ourselves into “preoccupation” (12) or spending time excessively on projection and planning (9).

Using prudence

So then, what bearing do these two discussions have on practicing Stoicism in everyday life? If we focus on the fact that, at least for many of us, our daily existence requires us to make tricky decisions between incompatible options, to prioritize between possibilities and commitments, where we rarely have complete enough knowledge, and where we always have new matters to resolve ( or old ones to reconsider ) , that’s precisely the sort of situation where Cicero recognized a philosophical perspective is helpful. That’s where we develop and deploy the virtue of prudence. That’s our normal and inescapable condition, and it will likely continue our entire adult lives.

All sorts of factors in our current culture might contribute to making us feel like we have to always be making the best decisions, and devoting just the right amount of time to them. Some people labour under the false judgement or opinion that if they’re not maximizing, optimizing, getting things just right, they’re not good Stoics. But not only can you not do it all, you can’t even generally do the best in real life. Good enough, or the better than the worse, is indeed good.

Whatever plans or priorities we establish, some things always consume more time than we allotted, or get in the way of realizing some other goods we had in mind. Seneca would remind us that so long as we are making thoughtful, reasonably prudent use of our time, we don’t need to feel bad about how things pan out imperfectly. We don’t make things any better by preoccupying ourselves with plans for perfect uses of our time. So perhaps reminding ourselves of these factors can take some unnecessary psychic weight off our shoulders, and thereby enable us to do better with practicing Stoicism in a realistic way in everyday life.

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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