LLM Book Knowledgebase

Stoic Training and Voluntary Hardship

5 min read

Stoic Training and Voluntary Hardship

Scope: The Stoic case, as presented in The Daily Stoic’s second-half entries, that fortitude is trained in advance through deliberate discomfort, preparation and the willingness to be hurt by philosophy. Negative Visualization covers the imaginative exercise; this article covers the physical and attitudinal training.

Train Before the Crisis

Seneca’s prescription is to rehearse hardship in good times:

“It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead, for when Fortune is kind the soul can build defenses against her ravages. So it is that soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight and exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes they won’t grow tired.”

The practice itself: “take part of a week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantly in shabby clothes, and ask yourself if this is really the worst that you feared.” Holiday’s modern version: “What if you spent one day a month experiencing the effects of poverty, hunger, complete isolation, or any other thing you might fear? After the initial culture shock, it would start to feel normal and no longer quite so scary.”

Seneca also recommends living smaller on purpose (“to getting clothes only for their real purpose, and to living in more modest quarters”), and Holiday draws a financial lesson: “One way to protect yourself from the swings of fate—and from the emotional vertigo that can result—is by living within your means now.”

Epictetus frames the same idea as a season: “We must undergo a hard winter training and not rush into things for which we haven’t prepared.” The commentary: “We can’t do this life thing halfheartedly. There’s no time off. There aren’t even weekends.”

Fear Is the Thing to Fear

“But there is no reason to live and no limit to our miseries if we let our fears predominate.”

Holiday pairs Seneca with Franklin Roosevelt’s line that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” adding: “The things we fear pale in comparison to the damage we do to ourselves and others when we unthinkingly scramble to avoid them.” Training is how fear is made familiar. See also Courage and the Fear Threshold.

Misfortune as Evidence of Capacity

“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”

The benefit: “Having experienced and survived it, we walk away with a better understanding of our own capacity and inner strength.” Holiday links it to Nietzsche’s “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” The easy life is not admirable: “Anyone can get lucky.” This is the Stoic root of the idea in Antifragility and Desirable Difficulty and Adversity.

Philosophy Is Supposed to Hurt

Epictetus: “Men, the philosopher’s lecture-hall is a hospital—you shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you aren’t well when you enter it.” Holiday’s gloss: “It turns out that healing hurts.” and “Some observations or exercises will touch one of your pressure points. It’s nothing personal. It’s supposed to hurt.” (See the classroom-as-hospital image in Epictetus.)

Cato is the exemplar of training: “Cato was training his soul to be strong and resilient,” so that “His training prepared him for any conditions, any kind of luck.”

Wrestling, Not Dancing, and the Adaptable Will

“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.”

The qualifier: “The point is not to have an iron will, but an adaptable will—a will that makes full use of reason to clarify perception, impulse, and judgment to act effectively for the right purpose.” Changing course is not defeat: “It’s not weak to change and adapt. Flexibility is its own kind of strength.” Marcus on recovery: “Don’t be locked out of the rhythm any longer than necessary. You’ll be able to keep the beat if you are constantly returning to it.”

Practice Quietly, and Do the Work

“First practice not letting people know who you are—keep your philosophy to yourself for a bit.”

Epictetus uses the seed image: showing fruit too soon means “the winter will kill you.” Holiday warns against the shortcut of agreement: “Just because you agree with the philosophy doesn’t mean…” (the highlight is cut off in the source) and “The seeds of Stoicism are long underground. Do the work required to nurture and tend to them.”

Hope is not a strategy

Holiday’s critique of failed self-improvement (“Hope is not a strategy!”) matches the training logic: people repeat the same routine and hope; the Stoic changes the routine. “Learning from failure, on the other hand, is optional. We have to choose to learn.”

Giving Up What We Call Good

Training also means subtracting. Seneca: “We must give up many things to which we are addicted, considering them to be good. Otherwise, courage will vanish, which should continually test itself. Greatness of soul will be lost, which can’t stand out unless it disdains as petty what the mob regards as most desirable.” (Moral Letters, 74.12b–13). The same argument underlies practicing poverty: comforts that have become compulsions erode the capacity they were supposed to serve.

Indulgence drifts toward addiction. Holiday’s case for abstaining on purpose: “What we consider to be harmless indulgences can easily become full-blown addictions.” Voluntary subtraction is the cheap insurance against that drift.

Backlinks