How to Live a Happy Life in Hard Times According to the Stoics and a Medal of Honor Recipient
Why Shame is Your Greatest Adversary
For his heroic endurance, and the leadership of his men in the Hanoi torture camp of North Vietnam, James Stockdale (1923–2005) received the Congressional Medal of Honor. The outlook that he directly credits with his ability to endure and survive that situation is Stoicism.
My purpose is to explain the core of Stockdale’s philosophy. In a line, it holds that shame is your greatest adversary in life. Not other people. Not wins or losses. Not pain. Not death.
According to one memorial essay, as his plane crashed down and he ejected over enemy territory he thought:
“Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus” (7).
Epictetus (50–135 CE) was the Stoic philosopher of classical Greek antiquity who was born a slave, became a free man, a philosopher, an exile, and a teacher. His closest student wrote eight books that compiled his spoken wisdom on how to live a good life. It is this brand of Stoicism that Stockdale took with him as his A-4 plane crashed down.
Because Stoicism is a philosophy that flourishes even today, you might reasonably imagine that there are different “flavors” of the outlook. The one that predominates is a gentler Stoicism. It draws lessons from ordinary life to address concerns about anger, anxiety, and wealth.
Hard Stoicism has a different flavor. I call it “hard” because its lessons come from the hardest of times. It draws from experiences that most of us will hopefully never have to face, and it teaches us how to live a good life — a “happy” one in our colloquial sense — even in those situations.
To put the point memorably, Hard Stoicism focuses on the only sort of invulnerability vulnerable creatures like us — humans — can have. For Stockdale, that means mastering your sources of shame by learning to recognize what is enough in life.
In developing Stockdale’s insights for this piece, I’m going to defend the three principal points of Hard Stoicism. That’s my philosophical purpose. My practical purpose is to show you how to implement these insights in your own life. Let’s start with the basics.
Some Things Are Under Your Control, Others Not
Stoic ethics begins with the insight that opens Epictetus’ Handbook:
Some things are under our control, while others are not. Under our control are conception, choice, desire, aversion, and in a word, everything that is our performance; not under our control are our body, our property, reputation, station in life, and, in a word, everything that is not our performance (1, translation modified).
The promise of Stoic ethics is that if you restrict your concerns, your worries, anxieties, desires, and actions to what is under your control, then you will finally be freed to enjoy life, to be happy.
A related insight, then, is that those things that are not under your control aren’t valuable to your life in the same way that your own actions are. Driving a new car, for example, is nice, but we all recognize that the experience doesn’t make you better as a human being.
How to Practice This
This is tremendously more difficult than it sounds, mostly because we habitually fall into the practice of thinking that more is under our control than actually is. As Epictetus writes:
“It is not the things themselves that disturb humans, but their judgments about them” (5).
Let me explain with a story where I didn’t quite live up to this ideal.
It was just a little over two years after the 2008–2009 financial crash and I had just graduated with my PhD. It was winter and I was on the job market looking for a position somewhere in the United States. The financial melt-down had a delayed effect on universities, draining their funds, initially, and then depleting the cash people had for donations afterward. As a result, the pool for jobs was at historically small numbers.
To make matters worse, first-round interviews were held in Boston and a large snowstorm had descended onto the area. All but one of my interviews had been canceled, as a result, and my wife and I were stranded at an airport trying to fly back (just after Christmas) to make it for my single remaining prospect.
I could feel my future slip away. There is a precedent in our discipline that newly minted PhDs are given preference over others, who are seen as less good if they do not place their first time on the job market. “Years of life wasted by hedge funds and a snowstorm,” I thought.
Fortunately, my wife was in a different frame of mind.
She spoke with an agent at the desk and explained our situation, then we practiced mock interviews while we waited. Eventually, because that agent took pity on our situation, we were bumped into first class so that we made the last flight into Boston that night. As a result of kindness and preparation, I did get the job.
The Stoic lesson, however, is that I should have been able to accept the outcome either way. If the airline agent had decided differently, our lives might have changed dramatically, but worrying about that possibility was not going to do me (or my wife) any good.
It was my judgment about the situation that disturbed me; reality was going to be what it was. My wife’s calmer head is what got us through.
Stoicism has thus always proved to be a demanding brand of philosophy. But maybe one reason why people could be living better, “happier,” lives is that a good life takes unusual effort. With that in mind, let’s turn to what distinguishes Hard Stoicism in particular.
Even The Toughest Are Fragile
In writing about his experience in the Hanoi camps, Stockdale recalls the point that we are all fragile beings, but that we easily forget this in ordinary life. In hard situations, Stockdale recalls
[1] you can be reduced by wind and rain and ice and seawater or men to a helpless, sobbing wreck … in a matter of minutes. [2] And, more than even that, you’re going to face fragilities you never before let yourself believe you could have. … [This includes harm to] the trustworthy, self-respecting, well-behaved person within you (8–9).
The fragility that Stockdale outlines is double. The first point addresses your bodily fragility, and the second, your personal fragility — what he calls “Stoic Harm.” Of the two sorts of fragility, Stockdale unequivocally holds that the second is more important.
All the men in the camp were introduced to it through a simple process: after torture, where they would be made to confess, they would be put in isolation, which Stockdale calls a “cold soak,” to contemplate their betrayal of their country and fellow men.
The isolation is what brought on the Stoic harm.
How to Beat This
There is a view of Stoicism that holds that the ideal Stoic will be unaffected by fortune, but that’s not what hard circumstances show. In Stockdale’s own words:
When put into a regular cell block, hardly an American came out of that experience without responding something like this when he first whispered to a fellow prisoner next door: “You don’t want to talk to me; I am a traitor.”
That is the experience of shame at the heart of the problem. I’ve addressed it in a different context in the hardest daily Stoic “spiritual exercise.” At base, the line of thought goes something like this.
I am an X.
Xs are people who do y.
But I’m failing at y.
Therefore, I’m failing as an X.
Therefore, I am a failure.
That slide from what you do (or fail to do) to what you are is the slide that breaks your will — it transforms your pain and anxiety into depression and self-loathing.
But Stockdale tells you how they beat this spiral in the camp. It starts with forgiveness. Continuing the quote from above he writes:
And because we were all equally fragile, it seemed to catch on that we all replied something like this:
“Listen, pal, there are no virgins in here. You should have heard the kind of statement I made. Snap out of it. We’re all in this together. What’s your name? Tell me about yourself.” To hear that last was, for most new prisoners … a turning point in their lives (13).
That’s right. They forgave each other for betraying their country under duress. That’s how a community in the hardest of circumstances survived.
There is a complication, of course. Other people can forgive you, but if you really want to get beyond that shame spiral you need to be ok with the past yourself.
Don’t go all the way to transvaluing the past. Don’t go from viewing yourself as a failure to claiming of your experience that “it made me better, stronger, happier than I ever would have been.” That’s still holding onto the shame at the heart of it (in a negative mode).
Just be ok with it and accept forgiveness when it’s offered. That’s how you rejoin the ranks of humanity. We’re all fragile, even the toughest among us.
Identify What is Enough
There is one final lesson in Stockdale’s sequence — it’s the one that allowed him to act as a leader behind enemy lines, the one that empowered him to save countless lives: know what is enough.
In order for his men not to “eat their hearts out” with shame, Stockdale realized that he was going to have to give them a new set of ideals by which to measure their actions (19). He was going to have to order them to suffer by picking which of the enemy’s rules they would refuse to follow.
I put a lot of thought into what those first orders would be. They would be orders that could be obeyed, not a “cover your ass” move of reiterating some U.S. Government policy like “name, rank, serial number, and date of birth,” which had no chance of standing up in the torture room (15).
The order he gave was expressed in the form of an acronym: BACK US — don’t Bow in public, stay off the Air, admit no Crimes, never Kiss them goodbye, and Unity over Self.
If his men were able to accomplish that much, then it would be enough. Knowing this, and being able to act on it stopped the shame spiral. It also maintained group cohesion and kept countless numbers of them alive.
How to Practice This
After forgiveness, after recognizing that what happened is “ok”, you need to recognize what is enough. Of course, knowing how much is enough is never a simple matter, because you don’t want to fall into a trap of self-deception.
Ordinary sources of shame in our society divide among gender lines — and the Stoics were keen on that. Women, you tend to be judged by your “beauty.” To give but one example, a female friend of mine, D., became so concerned with her looks that she would not leave her house to check the mail on her front lawn unless she had done her hair and put on makeup. She didn’t want anyone to think she was ugly.
Men, you tend to be judged by “accomplishments.” To give another example, a male friend of mine, P., felt so bad about his student debt and his inability to pay his bills on his own, after losing a job, that he wouldn’t even consider dating. He didn’t think he was worthy of anyone’s affection.
Both of those standards are arbitrary and include hefty doses of pernicious ideas (beyond jamming everyone into a binary gender). My friend D. was (and is) attractive by conventional standards, has loads of followers, and is a best-selling author. My friend P. served a tour in Iraq, is an accomplished musician, a student of philosophy, and a network administrator (presently with a full-time job in that field). Yet they both think that they are are not enough.
Now, I can’t tell you what will be enough, as Stockdale did for his men, because you need to accept those criteria for yourself. But I can give you a way to think about what is enough. Let me start with two proposals.
- You are beautiful enough if you honestly take care to be well-groomed and to stay healthy. As you age, you only need to age gracefully.
- You are successful enough if you are making an earnest effort to take care of yourself and your loved ones by honest means.
If you are not satisfied with these as goals, then what is your motivation? What beyond shame and a sense that you are not enough is driving you?
You may have a reason, so spell it out. If you do not have a sound reason, then shame is probably driving you to act. In that case, rather than focus on being more, and reading one more article on productivity, instead address why whatever you have is insufficient. Why can’t you be ok with yourself?
How This Wisdom Will Shift Your Life
Stoic philosophy has recently witnessed a surge in its adherents to the point that it’s become a genuine movement. Some significant degree of that success is a direct result of Ryan Holiday’s work. He found a way to make Stoicism connect with people.
As one might expect, Holiday’s revival of Stoicism has been perceived by some in the community as forgetting central lessons. I’m not convinced that’s right, and I defended him in one of my earliest essays for Medium on Happiness and Stoicism. Nevertheless, I take Holiday seriously enough to point out that his lessons often draw from ordinary times.
The Stoic lessons informed by living through the hardest of times is “Hard Stoicism.” The wisdom it offers is the path to real invulnerability: the path to maintaining that “trustworthy, self-respecting, and well-behaved individual within you.”
If you can maintain that, then you’ll live a good life, be “happy” in the colloquial sense of that word, even in the midst of trouble.
The first step on this path is to recognize that some things are not under our control. Even if those things include a career position for which you’ve spent a lifetime preparing.
The next step concerns forgiveness. It involves recognizing that the past is “ok.” Nothing fixes the past except being “ok” with it. You don’t have to love it, but you do need to make peace with it. This is the step that reconnects you to humanity.
Finally, you must come to recognize what is “enough.” This is the step that opens you up to serving others. Otherwise, you’ll always be focused on living up to the standard that “they” set, however arbitrary and pointless.
A student once asked Epictetus “What is the fruit of your doctrines?” And he responded “Tranquility, fearlessness, and freedom.” To explain the value of taking these steps, the value of tranquility, consider the following thought experiment.
Suppose that you have some friends who convince you to obtain a Tarot card reading. After a preliminary reading on your present state, hopes, and fears, the next cards to be drawn concern the nature of your life’s future prospects. Regardless of the outcome, which reading would you prefer:
- A future of success in social reputation and wealth, but also one in which you live in anxiety, worrying about what others might think.
- A future such that, regardless of external circumstances, including wealth and reputation, you retain an inner calm.
I think most of us realize that the goal in 2 is the only real goal on offer. That means that Stoic tranquility is worth more than millions of dollars and millions of followers.
I’ll leave you with a final quotation from Stockdale’s wisdom, even if he was not the one to write it. After crashing down in enemy territory, he was immediately attacked. As a result, Stockdale entered camp with a broken leg that never healed well. The day after their fortunes shifted and the men would eventually get to leave, Stockdale found a note that his friend left for him as a way of encouragement. It read:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged the punishment of the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Thank you for reading and I hope you learned something.
For more philosophy as a way of life, using all of the world’s traditions, join my newsletter.
Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.