The art of living is the main focus of stoicism as it tries to answer the ultimate question of how does someone try to live a good life? It is a question that everyone should try to answer but is crucial for us in recovery. Wrong living led us down our journey to addiction so as we try to change our lives in sobriety what is right living? In this article, I will give an overview of the Stoic view for the path to the good life and how a person can be the best that they can be.
Living the good life is something that everyone seeks and the world that we live in will give us many ideas for how to reach that life. It could be through success in a career, money in the bank, a nice car or house, married and maybe even having children. If none of those work, we are bombarded with advertisements that will gladly tell us what we need for the good life. But there are a number of us who have suffered from addiction that might have had one or all of these at certain times and still felt as if something was lacking, as if there was a hole inside of us that still needed to be filled. At one point I had the house, car, career and family and still felt like life was not fulfilling, which led me to destroying all of those things in my life. This isn’t something new to humanity right now, it has been a plague for us throughout the ages. The Stoics felt that the answer to living a good fulfilling life had to be possible whether you were rich or poor, married or single, working your dream job or not. There had to be an answer that would allow someone to be living the good life no matter what situation they found themselves in. And whether you are a follower of the 12 steps or taking your own path in sobriety, the answer and guide that they gave could be useful to anyone in recovery.
Virtue and Character
Be good with your inner spirit, live in harmony with your highest self.
The Little Book of Stoicism – Jonas Salzberg
Stoics feel that there is this desire inside of us to live to our best potential, and they are not talking about our potential to make money, buy a lot of things, or be able to get any job we want. These things are nice to have but not the most valuable thing in life. This highest potential is more about living a life that is virtuous or seeks excellence of character. Some Stoics view this inner spirit to be put inside of us by God or a Higher Power and others see it as a result of evolution, which is why this philosophy can work with any belief system. But for those of us in recovery, our addictions may have led us to doing things that are not in line with the person we know we can be. We can think of those bad characteristics we showed (lying, stealing, cheating, etc.) and it was killing us inside. Therefore in recovery, living in harmony with our highest self should be an obvious goal to help us maintain our sobriety.
Stoic philosophy is filled with guidance on how to reach this ideal self with the main focus on implementing the “Four Cardinal Virtues” (Justice, Wisdom, Temperance, and Courage) in your day-to-day life. Temperance focuses on the need of self-control and balance in our actions and emotions, justice is doing the right thing selflessly all the time thinking of the greater good of humanity, wisdom is having the knowledge of healthy judgement and perspective to act and feel appropriately, and courage is living this higher self and applying the other virtues no matter what situation you find yourself in (these are just brief descriptions but reading the philosophy will show that there are many parts to each one of these). The idea is that if you can live by these four virtues you can gain excellence of character and have a good life.
Basically, as you begin to live this way you can sleep well at night knowing that you made the most of your day, lived it the best way that you could, and no matter what situation you are in you were doing the right thing. One beautiful side effect of this path to life is that you should feel at peace and have tranquility each day for living the right way…think of it as you basically are stacking up on good karma. And the beauty is, this is something that nobody can ever take from you. You can lose the car, the family, the job and money due to things outside of your control, but having good character can only be lost by your choosing. Side note – Stoics definitely believe in the recovery view of progress not perfection, they realize that it is hard to live all these perfectly all that matters is we get better at it.
Human societies that have developed philosophies of life have repeatedly come up with remarkably similar lists of what we call virtues.
How to be a Stoic – Massimo Pigliucci
One of the main reasons why stoicism is being found to still be as applicable today as it was when it was created over two thousand years ago, is that this core concept is timeless. We all know the value of good character and we celebrate people who show that. Think about movies, books and the stories we tell where the good guy although possible flawed shows some of these virtues. And as Massimo Pigluicci was saying above, the four cardinal virtues have been found to be in some form or another in cultures all across the planet throughout history. So we as humans have always known the value of this, look up to people who show it, and struggle when we battle against these. Why do you think we feel so low when we first get into recovery, we often times see the characteristics that our addictions brought us to and they often are in conflict with the ones mentioned above and the person deep inside that we want to be.
What Gets in the Way of Good Character?
The problem with reaching this excellence of character is that we are often confronted with things in life that get in the way of us reaching it. Count the amount of people you know that show excellence of character. And now count the amount of people you know that do not. It isn’t that people are bad or horrible, they just may not know any different because the world does not really do a good job of teaching us how to learn this. It is why the studying of a philosophy of life helps because that is what it is specifically trying to do…teach how can we get there because having excellence of character and being a good person is a lot easier said then done.
Are you not ashamed that you care for having as much money as possible, and reputation, and honor, but that you neither care for nor give thought to prudence, and truth, and how your soul will be the best possible?
Socrates – From Plato’s Apology
Socrates was a major influence on Stoic philosophy and is looked at by many of the ancient Stoics as living the life that should be aimed for. In this quote he explains one major thing that gets in the way of achieving good character. We put so much value into things that are less important in the big picture of life. Is it good to have wealth and popularity if you have to sell your soul in the process? It is fine to pursue these things in life but the main focus of our lives needs to be this excellence of character since that will give us fulfillment. Besides, some of us have already found that those others things which we place high value on could still leave us feeling empty inside once we have them.
One of the other major impediments in our lives can be negative emotions. Stoics noticed how when we are stuck in our negative emotions, we will have less thought on the present moment and the actions that we are taking and if we are overtaken by emotions like anger we might make actions that totally contradict those of good character. Throughout much of Stoic philosophy, you will find tips and techniques in how to handle negative emotions in your life and reduce their impact so you can stay in pursuit of reaching your highest self, which is probably one of the main reasons why stoicism was a major influence on the development of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. I will say that since I have began to practice stoicism I have seen a huge reduction in negative emotions in my life and when I do experience them they do not last as long. Besides, many of us can relate to how our addictions are often times not only fueled by that emptiness inside but also by negative emotions. Therefore, reducing these emotions in our lives is essential for maintaining our sobriety. One hint – Stoics were talking about the Serenity Prayer long before it was written and this is one of the keys to this…although when you read Stoic philosophy you will gain a huge and deeply profound understanding of the things we control and do not control (which is why I wrote a three part series of articles just on the Serenity Prayer).
This article was just an introduction into the big picture of stoicism and the path that it discusses. You can read further articles on my site where I look deeper into the path or you can find a number of books out there that can enlighten you even further. As with anything I write, I am open to any questions you may have and you can contact me on my site or through any of my social media.
If you enjoyed this article feel free to leave any feedback or comments. If you want to keep informed on when the other articles in this series on the Serenity Prayer come out be sure to either subscribe to The Sober Stoic on social media at the links above or join the email list below.
Derek Castleman: The Sober Stoic 