Why Stoic Philosophy is the Secret Ingredient for Happiness During the Holidays
4 Spiritual Exercises in Friendship, Gratitude and Indulgence
Stoicism has been misunderstood as the philosophy of killjoys since nearly its inception in 300 BCE in ancient Greece. Yet its goal isn’t to take away life’s pleasures, so much as aid your selection of the right ones.
Seneca the Younger (4–65 CE), a Roman Stoic who lived during Nero’s reign, puts the point straightforwardly:
I do not maintain that the body is not to be indulged at all; but I maintain that we must not be slaves to it (Epistle 14).
Thanksgiving is a time for gratitude and indulgence — as are most other holidays. What Stoicism offers us is a toolbox to do these activities well.
In this piece, my practical purpose is to explain the top four Stoic “spiritual exercises” to help you along.
My philosophical purpose is to show that even professionals have missed these Stoic practices for indulgence because they haven’t recognized the way in which good company is crucial for our best pleasures.
To make that ideal initially plausible, consider the results of an experiment that I have students perform every time I teach a course on happiness. To help them in distinguishing among the kinds of pleasures we experience I have them perform three tasks.
- Go eat a helping of your favorite ice cream or frozen yogurt. Do it alone.
- Go do something you enjoy with friends.
- Reflect on how long the pleasure of each lasts.
Invariably, when I read their reports, the answers go like this (these are slightly edited).
“I was really looking forward to the ice cream and bought my favorite: cookie dough. But I was happy only until the last bite. After that I wasn’t any happier than normal.”
That is the experience of a simple pleasure. Any simple pleasure lasts about as long as the physical sensation does. Another student wrote this about his time with friends.
“We decided to go out and climb trees like we used to do as kids. It was like a 30 minute activity, but it put me in a good mood for all day.”
That’s what doing something gratifying feels like. Some students watch documentaries and others play with puppies, but the experience lifts their mood because it involves more than simple pleasures.
At its core, the Stoic criticism of pleasures (voluptas in Latin) is a criticism of the simpler sort. Their point is that focusing on those activities is a mistake. Instead, they urge that you should favor the better sort of pleasure, which they call joy (gaudium) and repose (quies).
In what follows, I’ll be using Seneca’s Letters. He’s a controversial figure among the Stoics because he fell short of living an ideally Stoic life — even according to his own lights. But his struggle to resist simple indulgences, especially food and opulence, makes him relatable. And what no one disputes is that he articulated the Stoic point of view well, even if he couldn’t walk his talk.
With these points in mind, let’s start with the most obvious practice for most holidays, especially Thanksgiving.
1 How to Be Thankful
The essential problem with gratitude, as the Stoics see the matter, is that we forget what we have and believe instead that happiness comes from getting more than we need. Seneca rebukes this notion — in part to remind himself — writing:
The things that we need are free for all, or else cheap; nature craves only bread and water. … When anyone has limited his desires within these bounds, they can challenge the happiness of Jupiter himself (Epistle 25).
This is part of the Stoic practice of detachment, which is widely misunderstood. It’s not so much the activity of not caring about things or people, but rather detaching from what is harmful. What Seneca is urging here is that we detach from desires that ask more than what we really need, and attach to what is valuable about what we already have.
How to Apply This
There is a wealth of psychological evidence that supports the view that simply expressing gratitude boosts your happiness.
Here are the two key features — with a bonus.
- Count what you are grateful for. Count out at least three things.
- Do so every day. It is the consistency of your actions that makes you happier.
- The bonus is to do it with someone since shared gratitude amplifies the experience.
While simple, these actions will have the effect of keeping you focused on what you really need in life, which is Seneca’s rule. And evidence suggests that it’ll additionally lift your mood in a sustainable way.
2 How to Indulge Intelligently
While “giving thanks” is in the title of the American Thanksgiving holiday, it is the cornucopia of food that occupies our attention. Eating food is almost paradigmatically a simple, physical pleasure. So it poses a problem for the Stoic: how can you indulge in something like this without stumbling into a vice?
And to be clear, Seneca makes the point explicit:
We Stoics hold that pleasure (voluptatem) is a vice (409).
There would seem to be no way out of this dilemma. A good Stoic just shouldn’t overeat apparently.
But the Latin voluptas isn’t exactly the English “pleasure.” As the Stoics use it, voluptas is really the habit of giving into a pleasure. Seneca doesn’t have in mind the Saturnalia, likely the closest thing the Romans had to the American Thanksgiving. What he does have in mind is the daily eating and drinking that he witnessed in Nero’s court.
Moreover, he makes clear that the problem with voluptas is that its joy is not true because it is easily corruptible (Epistle 61). If you drink alcohol, you might overdrink, and that’s no fun. Eating too much can likewise induce discomfort. Doing either steadily leads to diminished health.
The better pleasures, gaudium (joy) and quies (repose), don’t lead to such corruptibility.
How to Apply This
There are two basic rules to follow when indulging in simple pleasures: don’t overdo it, and don’t do it regularly.
At our wedding, my wife’s grandmother decided to “let loose” in a way that’s appropriate. She was in her 80s but wanted to celebrate. So she had two glasses of champagne, enough to become inebriated and enjoy herself. When dancing with one of the groomsmen, she remarked “I’m floating!”
At a certain point, she went to the lady’s room and her absence was eventually noticed. Nothing terrible had happened, though perhaps the alcohol was a little to blame: she locked herself in the stall and couldn’t unlock it. My wife (still in her wedding dress), her mother, and her aunt eventually managed to get her out of the stall. Now, the incident is still good for a laugh.
The point is that all of that would be fine for the Stoics. The drinking was not terribly excessive and it was confined to a specifically designated event. That’s how you do smart indulgence.
3 How to Relax
The above activities, though centered on simple pleasures, all involve other people, especially our friends, in the ideal case. Seneca astutely points out that there is a feeling at the heart of friendship that makes you feel relaxed, feel at home. That’s the feeling of repose (quies).
But repose isn’t just doing nothing. Seneca envisages it as a sort of mean between extremes.
For love of bustle is not industry — it is only the restlessness of a haunted mind. And true repose [quies] does not consist in condemning all activity as merely vexation — that kind of “repose” is slackness and inertia (Epistle 3).
Relaxation lies in the middle between busyness and languishing idleness. You need to be doing something in an engaged way, but not for the sake of merely doing things.
Contemporary social science puts a more granular spin on Seneca’s point. The real reason you shouldn’t just be relaxing, say by just flopping on the couch after a big meal, is that when you relax without controlling your thoughts, you’ll probably ruminate. And rumination usually leads to (and accompanies) anxiety.
How to Apply This
So if you are going to relax with friends, do something together. Even better, arrange to do something memorable. Seneca actually recommends traveling if possible (Epistle 28) and social science supports that claim. The reason is that your memory of the event will be something that lasts much longer than the actions themselves.
The thing you remember, however, may not be the one that you anticipate. A year before the pandemic, my wife and I went on a trip to Hawaii with my two best friends and their partners. We split a large house that we arranged over Airbnb.
While we did many of the things people do on a Hawaii trip, including scuba diving, a luau, and eating at nice restaurants, the things that I remember most fondly are the meals that one friend grilled on the porch, and the breakfasts we had at sunrise.
These were simple activities, just making meals with friends that we could have done anywhere, but they’re precisely the ones that hit that sense of friendship that make our lives feel right.
4 How to Be Supportive
These points about friendship are likely to dampen the enthusiasm many might have at this year’s Thanksgiving. For Americans, at the very least, the pandemic and the current political climate have introduced real challenges. Even some of our friends might have taken to the “other side.” How are you to enjoy your time with such people?
It is likely that Seneca, because his life was consumed with the intrigues of the royal court in Rome, had occasion to sharpen his views about what makes for real friends. Unlike Plato or Aristotle of classical Greece, Seneca puts trust at the foundation of friendship:
But if you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means (Epistle 3).
Even if affection, the sense of enjoying our time with another, is what begins our relationship with them, it is trust that founds any lasting friendship.
But, of course, our friends may also fall on hard times. Seneca urges us to help them when they do — correcting them if appropriate. In a letter to another friend, Seneca writes:
With regard to these two friends of ours, we must proceed along different lines; the faults of the one are to be corrected, the other’s are to be excised (Epistle 25).
In one case, Seneca recommends an honest talk to correct them, but in the other, he recommends what we would call an “intervention.” Neither of these activities will be easy, but it’s the hard things that make human relationships go well.
Enemies, not friends, tell people only what they want to hear.
Yet in some cases, our friends slip off in a way that is nearly irrecoverable. In Seneca’s words:
Some shrink into dark corners to such a degree that they see darkly by day (Epistle 3).
My wife recently lost a dear friend, whom she had known since very early childhood, to the Qanon conspiracy cult. The friend refused to believe that our other family members had become ill with COVID-19. One of our family lost sight in one eye, another died. The one-time friend could only rant about how the virus was a hoax.
For cases like these, Seneca says that you can still support them, by waiting.
How to Apply This
Seneca recommends three ways to support your friends when they go wrong in life, as they inevitably will (and mind that you will too at some point!).
At a first stage, for the more ordinary problem, just be honest and have a discussion. Let them know what went wrong and how it affected you. Don’t expect your friends to be mind-readers.
For longer-standing problems, at a second stage of difficulty, you may need to orchestrate something like an intervention. This might be the case if your friend has developed a drinking or gambling problem, or if they have a persistent issue that is preventing them from growing. One of our friends, for example, suffered a collapse in self-worth. In these cases, you’ll probably do best if you get them into therapy.
At a third stage, some of your friends or family may have slipped beyond your grasp to help them. If that’s the case, give them time. Good friends are hard to lose, and rather than cutting them out of your life, Seneca recommends a gentler path. Just cut ties for a time. Give them a couple of years to turn their lives around.
Often, they don’t. But I have had the experience of one friend coming back from the beyond.
He was a friend from university and his wife cheated on him in a particularly awful affair. They divorced, but he spiraled out of control all the same. He went from a straight-laced banker to a wild party-goer, who hooked up with strippers. Then he suddenly moved across the country and we lost touch for about eight years. Yet one day, he found my wife on Facebook and reconnected.
When we asked what happened, he said that he needed the space to reinvent himself after that episode. You can’t force friendships that slip away, then, but you can try to be supportive.
How to Live With Tranquility
In one of my very first articles for Medium, I explained that while Stoic philosophy does aim at happiness (eudaimonia), it’s really much closer to what we call tranquility. What a “happy” life feels like is a low-intensity “flow.” It’s not so much the presence of elation but the absence of interruptions.
What these four practices give you is a way to reconnect meaningfully with the people that matter in your life. For Stoics, you should seek pleasure by:
- Expressing gratitude and counting those items specifically,
- Choosing pleasures that are longer lasting and less prone to corruption,
- Relaxing with friends doing memorable things, and
- Supporting our friends when they stray, as we inevitably will also do.
This is really the Stoic formula for living a happy, tranquil life. It just has particular relevance for Thanksgiving as a holiday where friends and family cross paths and sometimes collide in that crossing.
The value of these practices can be expressed as an exchange: intense and unreliable experiences for steady, milder ones. You do not need extraordinary wealth or international fame to be happy. It is within your grasp to plan a life that will secure elevated (if not intense) emotional states that will involve you in meaningful activities.
Seneca compresses this idea into a motto, which I’ll use as a final, closing statement:
What Fortune does not give, she cannot take away. / Quod non dedit Fortuna, non eripit (Epistle 60).
Thank you for reading and I hope you learned something.
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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.