The Stoic Guide To A Happy Life - Massimo Pigliucci - #239

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends, welcome back. My guest today is none other than Modern Wisdom favorite and Stoic expert Massimo Pigliucci. His most recent book, The Stoic Guide To A Happy Life, is part of the not so small task he's attempting to update and improve the 2000 year old Stoic body of work. So today, expect to learn Massimo's favorite lessons from Stoicism, how to apply the dichotomy of control to your life, why Epictetus was so cool, why Plato might have had a big forehead and much more. Massimo is awesome. A lot of this stuff is very applicable. If you want to go and check the book out, I keep forgetting to say this. Modern Wisdom has a Amazon affiliate partnership, which means that if you buy the books and support the authors that I get on the show, by clicking the link that I always put in the show notes below, we get a little bit of a kickback and it's at no extra cost to yourself. Jeff Bezos has more than enough money. So if you fancy buying a book, just scroll down any episode ever. It's always in there along with the guests, Twitter and other stuff. If you want to check them out, scroll down, press that little button and me and Video Guideen can get some more knockout. We need to stay caffeinated. It's hard work at the moment. You know the news, what other news have I got going on? I don't know, man. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this year. We are 80,000 subscribers on YouTube, only 20 away from that big 100K title, which we've set ourselves and that play button is gonna feel so good. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Massimo Pigliucci.
Twice in a year, what a treat.

**Massimo Pigliucci** (1:58)
I know. Well, you know, it's the pandemic, it's easier to get people stuck at home.

**Chris Williamson** (2:05)
That's true. Well, we've got nothing else to do. We might as well just keep on talking about Stoicism. The Stoic Guide To A Happy Life, 53 brief lessons for living. Why'd you write this?

**Massimo Pigliucci** (2:18)
For two reasons. On the one hand, there's kind of a personal reason. The book is really ambitious, to some extent, the rewriting of the Enchiridion, which is one of the classic texts in Stoicism, in ancient Stoicism. And it wasn't written by Epictetus, but it is about Epictetus' teaching. Epictetus didn't write anything. And one of his best students, or most famous student, Ariane Nicomedia, wrote down both the discourses and the Enchiridion. To some extent, this is my personal homage to Epictetus, because he has been my steady guide throughout my stoic path. I love all of these stoics. I read Marcus Aurelius. I read Seneca. I read some of the so-called minor stoics that are not really minor. They're just minor because we don't have a hell of a lot that survived of their writings. But Epictetus has been the one that really got me into it, and it has been sort of a constant companion. So in one sense, it is just my personal homage to Epictetus. But more importantly, it is an attempt to update Stoicism, and in particular Epictetus' version of Stoicism to the 21st century. And the reason for that is that Stoicism in a sense got interrupted. It started out in the late 4th century BCE. It flourished for five or six centuries until the early 3rd century of the modern era. And then it kind of got interrupted by Christianity, just like every other Hellenistic philosophy, just like it disappeared from view. And in that sense, the Greek Roman philosophies are very different from, let's say, a number of Eastern traditions such as Buddhism or Confucianism or Taoism, which evolved and developed gradually over time in essentially uninterrupted fashion. So, for instance, if you compare Stoicism with Buddhism today, it's not even correct really to talk about Buddhism in the singular. There are many Buddhisms, right? Because there's a number of traditions that evolved over, continuously over two and a half millennia. And clearly nobody today is a Buddhist in the same sense in which somebody was a Buddhist two thousand and a half years ago. But that's not true for Stoicism because it's like after the third, the second or third centuries, like we have a lot of influence of Stoicism on other thinkers, like Christian writers throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and early modern philosophers. But then we kind of have a jump to the 20th century, essentially. And so I'm not the first one to do this kind of thing. My friend and colleague Larry Baker, who wrote A New Stoicism, did a similar thing with the entire Stoic system. However, Larry's attempt is on the one hand more comprehensive than mine because he didn't focus just on Epictetus, he just like the whole thing.