The Aztecs and Stoics Explain How to Gain in Happiness (Even While Losing Daily Joys)
The Key Is To Interrupt Your Thoughts
Not long ago, happiness researchers stumbled onto a paradox. It goes like this.
Suppose that after visiting your doctor for a physical check-up, you learn that you have a progressive medical condition. It erodes your ability to see, to hear, and even to think clearly. You will be unable to participate in many of your favorite physical activities and your body will begin to ache during routine affairs. Despite all that, you are likely to be happier.
Even without a medical degree, you could probably guess that the condition described is old age.
The paradox, for researchers, is this: why would the loss of so many daily joys make you happier?
According to researchers, the key is that those of advanced age (usually) have learned to interrupt their thoughts better than the young.
They focus on those things that make life pleasant, on what they can achieve, and what makes their lives valuable without comparing themselves to others. They have, in short, rediscovered the wisdom of Stoic and Aztec philosophy.
Stoicism, born from classical Greek antiquity around 300 BCE, commends an inward path to happiness. At base, their approach is to learn to control your inner, mental life. You do this by interrupting bad thoughts and putting your mind back on track.
The Aztecs instead followed the outward path. For them, your mind is constantly out of balance, and you must introduce balance by interrupting its natural process with help from your outward surroundings and relationships.
Practically, I aim to show you how to coordinate both these paths. Philosophically, I forward the claim that these two paths stem from different ways of thinking about thinking. At base, the Aztecs held that our cognition was significantly more complex than the Stoics did. As a result, they put less emphasis on the inward path than the Stoics, not none.
Two notes of context prove useful. First, while Aztec philosophy is still relatively unknown, it flourished in what is now central Mexico during the centuries before the arrival of European powers around 1520. Because Spanish clergymen fastidiously recorded what they could of the civilization, we have volumes and volumes of their philosophy, written in Nahuatl (the Aztec language). To make a long story short, these materials have been ignored for about 500 years until a small group of us decided to change that.
Second, there are still many myths about Aztec society. I’d ask that you set those aside. If you are interested in the recent historical scholarship that has debunked much of it, however, read chapter 3 of Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma Met Cortes.
With these points in mind, we’ll begin with the more familiar Stoic view.
The Stoics’ Inward Path
One way to think about thinking is to divide it into parts, like reason and emotion. The difficulty with that approach is that it doesn’t help you learn how to fix anything. Usually, emotion just comes off as the bad guy and the only life advice to follow is: don’t be so emotional!
Instead, the Stoics, like the Buddhists, divided human cognition into stages. In his Handbook, Epictetus (50–135 CE) puts it this way:
It is not the things themselves that disturb humans, but their judgements about these things. For example, death is nothing dreadful … but the judgement that death is dreadful, this is the dreadful thing (5).
A story might help to explain.
My wife and I both attended graduate school in Boston, Massachusetts. One night we returned home late, slowed by the snow and ice. My wife led in her car, since we had gone to work separately, and just as I pulled into our driveway I was struck by the car behind me.
It was a long driveway that steeped downward so that my car hit one tree, bounced off that and hit another on the opposite side. Disoriented, I got out of my car only to see the driver of the car who had hit me start to pull away. I decided to run after them as they sped off into the night. After sprinting about 100 yards, I gave up.
My initial impression (1) was anger at having been struck. While I was fine physically, I was disoriented enough to seek justice for the events — that was my judgement (2). In turn, this led to my action (3), namely my attempt to chase after a car by running. There are, then, at least three stages in our cognition that range between our initial impressions to our actions.
The key to living a better life, for the Stoics, is to learn how to intervene at the point where your mind responds to an impression, at (2).
Just as the elderly have learned to ignore the pain from their joints and instead direct their thoughts to happier matters, you can learn to ignore the uncontrollable sources of your anxiety and focus on something beneficial.
The Stoic practice for intervening in the stages of your cognition has a name: attention, prosochē, and they gave us detailed instructions for applying it.
How to Apply This
The Stoic approach to developing your attention is not Buddhist meditation (though that’s not a bad idea). Instead, in the generation after Epictetus, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE) pioneered a path of self-monitoring. We have evidence of his practice in his Meditations.
What Aurelius wrote down in his daily “journal” were three topics: what he had learned from others, what troubles he might expect in the day, and how he had fared in addressing his difficulties. As an example of this last, he writes the following about ageing:
We ought not to think only upon the fact that our life each day is waning … [but] that even if life be prolonged, yet it is uncertain whether the mind will be equally fitted (3.1).
In short, he monitored himself to express gratitude, to set his expectations, and to reflect on past successes and failures.
You can do this too. In the morning, or at night, just answer these three questions:
- What am I grateful for today?
- What reasonable expectations do I have for the coming day?
- What can I learn from the previous day(s)?
Aurelius was the last of Rome’s great emperors, and while we’re not all in charge of so much, this little practice can help us just as it did him.
The problem you’ll find is that it’s still hard to keep focus in the moment of fear or temptation. The Aztecs have an answer to that problem.
The Aztecs’ Outward Path
Contemporary sociological evidence shows us that the collaborative traits of people with Mexican and Guatemalan heritage are often better than those for people with European heritage. What has been preserved of Aztec philosophy explains the origin of these cultural practices.
Rather than divide our minds simply between a reasonable part and an emotional part, the Aztecs had many, many parts. They held that each part of our body was a “mind” in its own way. Your eyes thought in one way, your ears in another. Even your skin “thought” in its own way. Taken together, there seem to have been 13 major centers of thinking — 13 different “minds” — that each one of us has.
Our conscious experience, as a result, is a constant pushing and pulling of different desires, thoughts, and drives. To live a happy life, it follows that you need to learn how to balance each. Using a unique metaphor, they called this process gaining a “face.”
Here is a father speaking to his infant son in one of the Discourses of the Elders.
My blood, my color, we have forged you, given you form. And now I am charged to take care of you. [Although you are precious,] may you not be only like precious metal … For you have come to the earth without judgment, but perhaps you discover your face (H 57, 334).
You can see in this passage that the Aztecs held that infants are just a bundle of desires and that they need to learn to acquire judgement, a “face.”
The psychologist Johnathan Haidt has recently argued that the human psyche is not like a rider on a horse, but a rider on an elephant. His reason is that the things that are out of our control are more numerous than we used to think.
The Aztecs would reply that he has not gone far enough. Our psyche is really more like a jazz band. All of the players are doing their own thing, and when they coordinate well, it’s a beautiful performance. But when certain portions of our mind go off and do their own thing, you get the screeching typical of junior high beginners.
The Aztecs’ main insight for how to live well, then, consists in developing ways to coordinate your many minds with your surroundings and other people in your life.
- Start with the outside world — your environment.
- Then address your relationships.
- Then focus on your body.
- Then focus on your mind.
In short, go from the outside in.
How To Apply This
In another article, I outlined the Aztec way to improve without becoming better. Here, I’ll discuss another “outward path” practice that I use regularly: the Aztec decision circle.
The Aztecs thought that making good decisions was something best done in good groups. In one passage a group of merchants gather to discuss travel to another town. The text reads:
And when [the host] had thus spoken to them, then the principle merchants of all the neighborhoods … responded to his words. … [And] they sat in order by rank. At one side, by the wall on the right, were the principal merchants; and on the other side, starting on the left, sat the other sorts of merchants …. Capping the ends were the youths (FC 9.3, 12–13).
So some people, those with more experience (usually the elderly) had a privileged place, but even the young children would be included. They deliberated about road plans, weather, foreign customs, and courage. The trick is that they gave more weight to those who had a good track record.
In the “West,” the idea of a “mastermind” group has been around since Napoleon Hill popularized it in 1937. But the Aztecs aren’t talking about associating with the right people or finding a Tribe of Mentors. It’s a specific process for answering hard questions.
You can also do this in two different ways: for a big decision, like whether to major in engineering, or for a persistent problem, like how to advance in a certain career.
I’ll illustrate the persistent problem approach with my own, rather ordinary, career path planning in the United States university system.
First, find at least three people who have a proven track record for success on your chosen topic.
- These need to be people you can talk to freely. This isn’t one-time celebrity advice.
- Include people from different backgrounds, because you want to draw from their collective wisdom.
In my group, I eventually gathered three university presidents, many vice presidents, and several Chief Diversity Officers. Each one is successful in their own way.
One unexpected benefit from this process is that I now have very specific reasons for why I admire and think well of people.
Next, ask your prospective circle members about something and test out their advice.
One university president gave me the following advice: if you want to be a president at a research university, you must be a professor at one. You can always move down in research prestige, but you can’t move up.
I tested that by asking another person in my group what she thought since she is a provost who moved up without ever becoming a professor in the first place. Her answer: there are exceptions to that rule. She then outlined how she made her way around the normal process (incidentally, she didn’t lean in, since that requires quite a bit of privilege to begin with).
Third, if you have conflicting advice among your people, give the most weight to those people with the most experience.
In my case, I had to decide. Do I go with the advice of the person who has been a university president for 17 years, or with the person who skipped the process entirely?
I asked other members in my group what they thought. Their reply was to stick to the traditional path if possible. The new approach might be replicable, but it could be an outlier case.
Incidentally, I’ve coached my students in forming their own Aztec Decision Circles. Invariably, they find that they’ve already been doing it— just haphazardly.
The advantage of the Aztec practice, then, is that it allows you to act more consistently towards your goals. It’s also but one way to organize your life from the outside in.
On The Value of These Two Paths
The Stoic inward path develops “spiritual exercises” that allow you to intervene in the stages of your mind’s thoughts. The Aztec outward path develops shared practices that allow you to keep balance among the competing parts of your mind by using other people for help.
These different approaches to happiness— one inward, another outward — follow from their different views about how human cognition works. But there is nothing, either theoretically or practically, that should stop you from using both paths.
To explain the value of the insight on offer, let me recall a story.
Viktor Frankl, the holocaust survivor and psychiatrist of the best selling Man’s Search for Meaning, once treated a client with what can only be described as a Stoic exercise.
The story goes that an elderly doctor entered Frankl’s office and conveyed that he had been inconsolable following his wife’s death for two years. Frankl asked him whether his wife would have mourned his loss, had he died first. And he said that she would have been equally distraught.
Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her” (135).
The man said nothing in reply, but calmly shook Frankl’s hand and left. He had been “cured” after only five minutes by reframing his suffering as something meaningful.
What would you pay to move from sorrow to tranquility? Is it worth $10,000, or $100,000, or more even?
Philosophy is valuable for life in this intangible sort of way. It reframes your view on what you thought you could and should be doing. In presenting the Aztec and Stoic views on living well, this essay has aimed to reframe your own pursuit of happiness.
I’ll leave you with a final quote by Marcus Aurelius on flexibility in life.
Remember that to change your mind and to follow someone’s correction are consistent with a free will. For the action is yours alone — to fulfill its purpose in keeping with your impulse and judgment, and yes, with your intelligence (Meditations 8.16).
I hope you learned something and thank you for reading.
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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.
