"But I just want to be happy!"

I shudder a little inside when I hear anyone over the age of 12 using the word "happy."  In most cases I am pretty sure they do not know what they mean when they use the word.  A better Socratic would ask them about it.  Maybe I'll get there someday.  I am as confident as I am about anything, however, that many use the word happy to describe a "steady state" to be achieved and held and when they do so they are speaking of a fantasy: there are no steady states.  One would be just as well off as to own a trained unicorn or to retain title on a rainbow than achieve happiness as the concept is commonly employed.  In recent years I've taken up the use of the word "joy" and its cognates as a form of passive resistance to this trend.

There are those, however, attempting to redeem the term and return it to useful employment and there is an audience for what they are selling.  Stoicism is a practice of living that can be undertaken within nearly any other philosophical, cultural, or religious paradigm.  It seeks to supplant rival conceptions of what it means to live happily (or joyfully).  It rejects the hedonisms of any age, whether it be the hedonism of youth which seeks happiness in experiences, the hedonism of middle age in the collection of stuff, or the hedonism of the old which is reverence.     Likewise it rejects the conception of happiness which says, "Just go along to get along" a passive avoidance of actually living life in the hope of avoiding hassles, and settling for that small accomplishment as a happiness.

What is stoicism then?  In short it is a discipline of mind that only seeks what is within one's own control.  It is a lifelong discipline as our lives are in constant flux and not only is our environment changing but so too is our brain.  This is no small task but neither is it overwhelmingly difficult.  It will neither come with reading merely one book or a "graphic novel" but neither is there is a need to lock one's self up in a monastic's cell for a decade of chanting and meditation.  Stoicism overlaps greatly with a modern approach to psychotherapy: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).  Likewise it can be thought of as a kind of Western Buddhism, while Christianity might be said to have drank stoicism's milkshake, stoicism never really went away.   If you already accept that the elusive nature of happiness might have even a small part to do with what bounces around in your own head rather than being the full and total responsibility of your circumstances, stoicism/CBT might be helpful in gaining ground on your own pursuit of happiness.

As for what a daily practice of stoicism is or might look like, I'll describe my personal practices in a later post but the disciplines of mind I seek are standard.  For a beginners approach to stoic practice, no one is doing more work helping women and men get started then Don Robertson and I'd defer to his suggested starting point with only a single recommendation: the use of writing a few short sentences every morning and evening to make the practice a little more concrete and a little less mental.  More of us remember to brush our teeth just before bed than remember to be grateful for the day for the very reason that one is concrete and the other is not.  If you want a more intense introduction, by all means check out the Live like a Stoic Week 2013 Handbook.