The Stoic diet

The Stoics didn't have diet advice. Not really. They didn't have the same problems. But, using their ideas, I want to put forward an idea of what they may advice for our present troubles.

Obesity has always been around as long as animals have been, but only lately has human obesity reached epidemic proportions. My theory on why this is involves only a human weakness and capitalism.

The human weakness is based on evolution. We're programmed to fill our belly. On evolutionary time scales, the short term gain of eating as much as possible outweighed the long term risk of obesity and its diseases.

Food companies want to make a profit, and keep the company growing. They do this by cutting costs and expanding sales. To really make cheap food you have to use cheap, industrially manufactured ingredients. And to expand, you have to tailor the food to appeal to our base desires. Sugars, fats, salt and of course quantity.  Our stomachs are fixed in size to some degree, but they can be expanded, slowly, which gives a greater market cap to the food industry as a whole.

All these forces are conspiring against us. We can't control the food industry. We can control ourselves, although it isn't easy.

As usual, practice can help. Perhaps it is the only thing that can help. We need to practice being the kind of people that do not overeat.

One concept that the Stoics talk about is hunger. We avoid hunger as a way of life. But, as the Stoics say, hunger is not so bad. It makes any food taste good, and we rarely have to put up with it for long.

My advice is this. Practice being hungry. Eat just enough so that you are hungry at the start of the next meal. To accomplish this, you will have to practice not eating. If you aren't hungry, don't eat.  If it is mealtime and you aren't hungry, you've lost this round, eat a small meal and try again with the next meal. This stuff sounds easy, but we've been practicing our bad eating habits our entire lives, and all our most basic programing is against us. It will take work, but so does every skill worth having.

From Epictetus:

Let the measure to you of all food and drink be the first satisfying of the desire; and let the food and the pleasure be the appetite itself: and you will neither take more than necessary, nor will you want cooks, and you will be satisfied with the drink that comes in the way.

Make your manner of eating neither luxurious nor gloomy, but lively and frugal, that the soul may not be perturbed, through being deceived by the pleasures of the body, and that it may despise them; and that the soul may not be injured by the enjoyment of present luxury, and the body may not afterwards suffer from disease.

Take care that the food which you put into the stomach does not fatten (nourish) you, but the cheerfulness of the mind: for the food is changed into excrement, and ejected, and the urine also flows out at the same time; but the cheerfulness, even if the soul be separated, remains always uncorrupted. 

Enjoy your meal, in other words.  Satisfy your hunger and your thirst (this is why you need to be hungry), and let that be your pleasure.  Don't take too much pleasure in the food itself, for it will soon be eaten and expelled from your body,.  You may not always have such nice food, but you can always have pleasure in your meals by following this advice.

Happiness, and whether to pursue it

In a recent article on happiness, Shirley S. Wang of the Wall Street Journal writes that

Happiness research, a field known as "positive psychology," is exploding. Some of the newest evidence suggests that people who focus on living with a sense of purpose as they age are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live longer than people who focus on achieving feelings of happiness.

She then goes on to talk about Eudaimonia,

"Eudaimonia" is a Greek word associated with Aristotle and often mistranslated as "happiness"—which has contributed to misunderstandings about what happiness is. Some experts say Aristotle meant "well-being" when he wrote that humans can attain eudaimonia by fulfilling their potential. 

The point of the article is trying to be happy is not the point, leading a fulfilling life that in turn makes you happy is the point.  Reading it, I wondered what the Stoic take on this would be.

I think the Stoics would have mixed feelings about this article.  A "sense of purpose" is usually a good thing, because that phrase carries a moral connotation.  Getting rich, sleeping with hot chicks, winning fame would not normally be considered a sense of purpose.  Making the world a better place in some specific way is, I think, what a sense of purpose is all about.  We have to be careful, though, lest the pursuit of the sense of purpose devolve into meaningless goals.  Coincidentally, the xkcd webcomic had a similar point to make last week:

The relevant point is actually in the hover-text:

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

These are all good points.  Stoicism doesn't really stress having a focussed sense of purpose, but knowing how you want to make the world a better place can only be helpful for your own happiness and the world itself.

The Talent Code

Fundamentally, this blog is about self-improvement. I'm not a philosopher, I'm only somewhat interested in debating the finer points of various philosophical theories, but I'm primarily interested in Stoicism from a practical standpoint. I want to be a better person.

In furtherance of that goal, last Friday I picked up The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. I came across Coyle's blog a few months ago and found it especially engrossing. The book didn't disappoint.

While this book mentions Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Stoicism near the end, it is not the focus of this book.  Coyle is writing fundamentally all about practice. Practice is one of those prosaic acts that gets more amazing the more you look at it. We get better at something merely by doing it. Yes, you have to put in effort to perform something many times, but the improvement just happens, as if by magic.

There's a few really great insights I got out of this book. One is that effective practice has to be at the boundaries of our talent, where we are straining and making mistakes. If we aren't spending time at that uncomfortable zone, then we aren't improving as fast as we otherwise could. So, stop reading self-improvement books, leave your distractions behind, and to improve yourself, put yourself in uncomfortable situations.  Start making mistakes, and then correct them.

I'm still thinking about whether there is anything particularly relevant to Stoicism.  They seemed to be big fans of self-improvement, though, and correcting our faults.  Doing the "deep practice" that Coyle writes about seems like the most efficient way to achieve those goals.

Advantage

Things that we cannot control, we must accept, and one of the core Stoic principles is that we can control nothing outside ourselves. A corollary of this is that there is no point in seeking to gain an advantage in controlling the outside world, since it is by nature uncontrollable.

Epictetus writes:

But show me that he who has the inferior principles overpower him to who is superior in principles. You will never show this, nor come near showing it; for this is the law of nature and of God that the superior shall always overpower the inferior. In what? In that in which it is superior. One body is stronger than another: many are stronger than one: the thief is stronger than he who is not a thief. This is the reason why I also lost my lamp, because in wakefulness the thief was superior to me. But the man bought the lamp at this price: for a lamp he became a thief, a faithless fellow, and like a wild beast. This seemed to him a good bargain. Be it so. But a man has seized me by the cloak, and is drawing me to the public place: then others bawl out, Philosopher, what has been the use of your opinions? See you are dragged to prison, you are going to be beheaded. And what system of philosophy could I have made so that, if a stronger man should have laid hold of my cloak, I should not be dragged off; that if ten men should have laid hold of me and cast me into prison, I should not be cast in? Have I learned nothing else then? I have learned to see that every thing which happens, if it be independent of my will, is nothing to me. I may ask, if you have not gained by this. Why then do you seek advantage in any thing else than in that in which you have learned that advantage is?

I think this overstates the point. We can control external events, at least to some extent. I may not be able to ensure I never get physically attacked, for example, but I can be alert, have martial art training, carry a weapon, or do whatever else may be necessary to protect myself. It's not a guarantee, but it helps. I think it therefore helps to try and gain advantages that pertain to the external world. But we need to heed the Stoic's warning, and judge those advantages carefully.

Sick

I've been sick with a cold these past few days. While at the worst of the cold, I wondered if I could really be "sick, and happy" as Epictetus put it. I thought about my happiness, and even though I was sick, I realized that I wasn't unhappy. I wasn't stressed. I was just unwell, and had to spend lots of time in my bed. I did feel bad, and it wasn't purely a physical ailment. Feeling so crappy, I wasn't able to concentrate, and couldn't really do much work. But, I still wasn't unhappy. In fact, there were a few things that happened during my sickness to make me pretty happy, at least briefly.

The last time I had a cold was just a few months ago, and I speculated that I couldn't be happy while being sick. I thought that to be sick was to be miserable. Now I realize that this is true, but it's not the whole story, since I conflated the sensations of my body and mind with my happiness. The sickness only makes you feel miserable, but happiness is not directly related to just how well you feel. These are almost different dimensions of feeling, except they are only partially independent.

The Stoics seem to be right in that you can be sick and happy at the same time, and I'm happier realizing that my happiness is not subordinate to my health.

Skepticism versus skepticism

As I've mentioned before, I've been reading about Skepticism, the classic Greek philosophy that advises you to hold off of judgements. This is generally good advice, but I think the philosophy on the whole is quite dangerous.

The Skeptical philosophy reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson's philosophy of never thinking you know the answer to anything. Does God exist? Wilson didn't know. Do magic spells exist? Wilson didn't know, although he liked to dabble in such things. I admire Robert Anton Wilson quite a bit. He co-wrote the Illuminati Trilogy, as well as many other great books. He's one of my favorite people.

I'd like to compare Wilson against someone else I admire: James "The Amazing" Randi. Randi doesn't hesitate. Does God exist? No. Does magic exist? No. And not just no, but Randi is clearly willing to bet his money and reputation on it. Compared to Randi, Wilson seems too susceptible to bullshit, and his refusal to take sides seems like intellectual cowardice.

Robert Anton Wilson seems like the Greek-style Skeptic. James "The Amazing" Randi is the prototypical example of the modern-day skeptic. I like the modern version better. It's simply more useful.

Let's take as an example: Global Warming. This is the crisis of our time. Scientists know it, and they've tried to warn us. But it's just too easy to sow doubt and confusion, and the public no longer knows what to believe. Who would the Greek-style Skeptics side with? Probably no one. I know who the modern skeptics would side with: the scientists. I don't know about you, but I'm going to support the philosophy that would try to save the world.

Stoicism & Atheism

I'm an atheist. It's a little bit hard to make it through some Stoic writings, since they tend to reference God quite a bit. Sometimes, though, they make it apparent that even if you don't believe, Stoicism can still make sense. Marcus Aurelius writes

If Providence watches over all and may be inclined to mercy, render thyself worthy of celestial aid. But if leaderless chaos be all, rest content that in the midst of this storm-swept sea Reason still dwells and rules within three. And if the tide swirl thee away, let it take thy flesh and spirit, with all the rest; for Reason it cannot take.

I appreciate these little tidbits for the atheists. Since Marcus Aurelius wrote these meditations for himself, perhaps he himself was not quite sure of the true nature of things. It may be that sometimes he lost faith the divine powers, but with this line of logic, he can be sure that he still proceed according to reason. Or maybe he was just hedging his bets. He personally believed, but allowed for the possibility that he might not be right.