YouSaid · the spoken record

William Irvine

lines on the record: 74
first: 2021-11-02
most recent: 2021-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I want you to imagine that that's all you would ever see. That's it. Now here's a twist that I put into this exercise. So you don't dwell on these negative things because that would be a recipe for a disastrously suicidal life. But now in a second here, I'm going to ask you to open your eyes. But I want you to imagine that when you attempt to open them, that they are somehow glued shut. So go ahead, but their glued shot, and you realize you can never open them again. Give yourself a second to let that soak in. Now open those eyes and”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now I want you to imagine that you don't have the thing that you take for a granted. So for instance, you can imagine it can be a child in your life, it can be a spouse or partner in your life. It can be your job. So I want you to imagine. Just give yourself a flickering moment to fill in the details that that person or that job or that thing is suddenly gone. Here's something you take for advantage. This is if you're a sighted individual, and that is your eyesight. So here's a concrete way to put this. Okay, so close your eyes”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My favorite beginning technique on Stoicism is what's called negative visualization. And if it's okay, let's take two minutes to go through an actual exercise. This is two minutes that could change your life or maybe not, but we'll see. So negative visualization, step one is you think about things in your life that you rely on. Think about the things that you experience daily. And this can be the people in your life. This can be your job. This can be your health. And these are all just things that are there. And they've been there for a long time. And so you being a human, you just start taking them for granted. Okay, so negative visualization says once you found your thing to think about.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's just this incredible transformation. I can give you the reason why Stoicism is popular, and that is because it's very hackable. And I hate the word hackable, but it's hackable. It gives you specific psychological techniques that you can use to change the way you're living your life. There's a handful of these techniques. And these aren't obscure things. They're easy to learn, easy to try. So it's got a very low price of admission compared, for instance, to Zen Buddhism. So people try it, and they find it works. And then I guess the word spreads, but it shows signs of picking up speed, if anything. And it's undergone in the last 20 years is huge change in popularity.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a handful, I could find books written by the ancient Stoics, translations of those books, I could find scholarly books written about the ancient Stoics, but there were only a handful of books that were written about Stoicism for general audiences. And I think it's because people just didn't know these Stoics were out there. Most college professors wouldn't stoop to writing a book that would reach a general audience. So there were a handful of books when I published it. It got off to a very slow start, but started picking up speed. And last year I gave a talk at the Stoic Honion. There are now enough of us that we can have global conventions. And I did some research. And at present, there are books on Stoicism written for general audiences coming out at the rate of more than one per day.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. Like I said, so this would be in the 1970s. I was exposed to, I was a philosophy major, but the only place I encountered Stoicism was in a logic class. Philosophers lost interest. I mean, there were classical philosophers who didn't, but most of philosophers would have said that's just not an appropriate thing for us to be thinking about. There are more important things to be thinking about. And so it's a curious thing, but it had survived. You can find examples of philosophers starting in 300 BC all the way up to the beginning of the nineteenth century and then suddenly they drop off. So when I published a guide to the good life, I had very, very low expectations because, and these were reality-based expectations, I looked on Amazon and I could find”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And backpacks and everything else. I don't think they did that they could carry. And so it's basically what you could carry kind of on your person and in your hands. And that was the limit. And we have now just places where you can stuff them with material things. But we're wired. Once we get something, we just raise our standard. We say, okay, okay, I've got all that. And that's nice, but if I only had and then you fill in the blank however you want, then at last I would live happily ever after. So we're like thirsty people chasing mirages in a desert. We work so hard to get to that seeming pond off in the distance, only to realize it's a mirage. And then we go to the next seeming pond off in the distance.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The people who weren't in the moment, but the people who were constantly thinking about the past, about things that had happened so they could learn from them, and the future so that they could control that future in a way that would benefit them, those people who were not satisfied, who always wanted more were much more likely to survive and reproduce, and therefore much more likely to be somewhere in your family tree. So to be dissatisfied was, had survival advantage, but we live in a dramatically different world than those ancestors did. And we have food. Food is not the problem. The problem is overeating. We have the opposite problem, material possessions. Think of it. Their possessions were limited to what they could carry. And they didn't even have like big cooler chests, you know.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wired to be that way, so by wired, I don't mean wired. I mean neurons, but we evolved on the savannas of Africa, you know, 200,000 to 70,000 years ago, rough numbers. And the ancestors who were alive back then who were easily satisfied dropped out of the gene pool. Imagine that you had an ancestor, and while everybody else was walking around worried about lions and worried about where the next meal was coming from, he was there on the savannahs of Africa looking at the blue sky, thinking, isn't it all just grand? I'm going to stay in the moment. Well, he stayed in the moment for a moment, and then a lion ate him. I don't know if that's how he perished. And when mealtime came, he didn't have food prepared. He didn't have food of some sort of food. So people who were eating...”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you have running water? Do you have a toilet? Do you have toilet paper? You know, from their point of view, you've got in your pocket a little device that you can order pizza in Hong Kong if you wanted to. And what do we do? Oh, you know what? I don't have the latest model of that phone. Man, if only I had the latest model, I would be happy person, but I don't. And pity me, everybody. Look at what I lack. One of the stoke insights is that much of our unhappiness is self inflicted. It's a question of your state of mind. It's a question of you framing the things that happen to you in a way that makes them not just more tolerable, but where you can actually extract the light from them.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually requires a little bit of effort on your part. I've described this in one place where I can be walking along and pick up a rock, in fact, right here where I live, found a rock, and I was freaking out because the rock was actually a fossil that was 400 million years old because the place where I now have my home used to be under an ancient sea that was the source of this fossil. So, you know, the people who are watching me freak out were thinking, well, he's got a rock. Well, you know, it can be a rock, but it can be impressively greater, just a wonderful thing compared to that. And also the things that are part of your everyday life. You know, if you look at your life from the point of view of your ancestors, you're living in heaven. You're living in a dream world. Well, what do I mean by that?”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they weren't out to stifle negative emotions, they were out to prevent them from happening in the first place and to nip them in the bud when they did start to arise, positive emotions they were connoisseurs of positive emotions. And, you know, some of the greatest emotions you can have that can be every day experiences, but you kind of got to open your mind to them. One is feelings of delight. You walk outside. There's the sky. It's blue. And it's a beautiful shade of blue that will change from hour to hour within a day and will change from day to day. And it didn't have to be that way. You can either just say, yeah, it's a sky, or you can say, no, look, see what there is. It's a sky. Same thing with feelings of awe. So you can be experience awe.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Begin with. What we normally call Stoics, these are people who don't experience emotions and when life does something brutal to them, they just suck it up and stand there and take it. I call those the lowercase S-Stoics. That's the common conception. The Stoics themselves were remarkably well adjusted people. They were known to those who they lived with as cheerful individuals because they weren't anti-emotion. What they were out to do is minimize negative emotions.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just say, oh, these people are so foolish. But the Stoics can be regarded as emotional preppers. So what were they doing? They were preparing for things to become dramatically worse. They were preparing to lose the things they value in life. And that can sound like a really negative approach to things, except that they had the insight that if you do that, then you'll be profoundly grateful for whatever it is you do have in life, because otherwise you're just going to take everything in your life for granted. But if you appreciate what you have, you can savor it, you can embrace it, and that raises the possibility of you experiencing joy in your life.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Drank. A stoic will say, Well, water is fine. It satisfies the need. But if you handed a stoic a glass of really fine wine, he would probably say, Oh, sure, I'll drink that. And then if you said, okay, no more wine, he said, okay, jab some water because I'm thirsty right now. So it's that notion that you enjoy what life has to offer. But without becoming addicted to it, without clinging to what life has to offer, you're always prepared for things to take a turn for the worst. So, you know, the people, the preppers, you know, these are the people who stockpile food and everything else in case things take a turn for the worse. They always have their day, you know, like at the start of COVID where everybody else was scrambling for toilet paper and they said, here's my supply of four years of toilet paper. And they look really good. And the rest of the time we all...”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The greatest divergence is between Musonius Rufus and either Seneca or Marcus Aurelius. So Marcus Aurelius would have been, he was the emperor. He would have been vastly wealthy, vastly powerful. Seneca was counselor to an emperor, but he was also the greatest playwright of his time. He was also the first century AD equivalent of a billionaire, and he was a Stoic. At the other end of the spectrum we find Musonius Rufus, who basically said, you know what, if you can give me a cave to live in, that'll work. That'll do it for me. So he was a minimalist kind of stoic. And you can have the whole gap in between. I guess one thing about the Stoics is Stoic will tell you, you know, what do you need to do?”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hybrid that's got some logic in it, got some advice for living in it, this whole notion of being able to communicate well, got some science in it, this whole batch, and I can have my own school. So he started a school. If this was in Greece, and unfortunately most of the things he wrote and his subsequent Greek Stoics wrote have been lost. But the Romans took it on and put their own spin on it. So the people you normally think of as Stoics are Roman Stoics most famously top four Seneca, who's currently my favorite but ask me next week and I might have a different favorite Seneca, Marcus Auryglius, Epictetus, and Musonius Rufus. And the interesting thing is if you say, well, what did the Stoics say? Well, I've just named four of them and they actually can have. Have interestingly different spins on the questions you ask. So it's”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stoicism is philosophy, ancient philosophers. First Stoic was a guy named Zeno of Sitium who lived in three hundred BC. He wanted to become a philosopher and back then there was no such thing as academic philosophy. So what you would do is you would create a philosophical school and then you would have students in that school. And presumably, you know, it was like a school of martial arts. You attracted students and they were paying students and that's how you made your living. He also did what a modern martial arts schools do, and that is you can have a pure style of martial arts, but you can mix together different schools and come up with your own version. So Zeno of Sidium did basically that. He tried a few schools on his own, and then he thought, you know, I think I can get this interesting.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I imagined would sell maybe twelve copies total, you know, with six being purchased by friends who might or might not actually read it, but it turned out that we're in the midst of a stoic renaissance, and I caught it in the early stages so the world has changed on that. And I think that's a change for the better.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reduce the number of negative emotions you experience, but it's a long term project because when is that going to happen? Well, maybe tomorrow, or maybe in thirty years, you know, it could go either way. The Stoics said, well, we've got some basic psychological strategies you can put to your work in your life. And these aren't obscure things we can explain them to you in a matter of minutes. You can test drive them with no one being any the wiser. And if they make a difference, great they can transform your life. And if they don't make a difference, well, then go back to Zen Buddhism. Research project. I went in thinking I was going to come out as Zen Buddhist and came out a Stoic instead. Then, thinking, this is wonderful stuff. I've got to share this with the world I decided to write a book Guide to the Good Life.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“topics were about, but if you want, you can study their logic, and they were in first century AD, they were the prime logicians of their time, and they were very good at propositional logic, which is what makes modern computers and your cell phone work. So it dawned on me once I found out more about Stoicism that I actually first surprised was they are headed at approximately the same grand goal in living, and that is a life that's full of to the extent possible of positive emotions like delight and even joy. And relatively without negative emotions like anger and anxiety and regret. But where they differed is they had two radically different strategies for pursuing that goal. So if you want to become a Zen Buddhist, you spend a lot of time meditating. As a result of that, you can...”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the alternatives were to Zen Buddhism. So Zen Buddhism in one way you can construe it, it's a philosophy of life. What is the grand goal in living and how best to attain that goal? And so I thought, well, what are some other viewpoints on that? Stoics offered one, and I started looking into them. I had actually encountered the Stoics, but doing logic back in college, not in the philosophy classes I took back then. This would be in the 1970s because my professors said, no, it's not the proper business of a philosopher to concern himself with how to live a good life. It's about all these timeless issues that we've been talking about for two thousand years. And you know what? We're so close to the final breakthrough when we finally figure this out. So that's not what the story.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, long story, but here's a short version of it apparently when I turned fifty I was having a mild grade midlife crisis and I decided I was going to become a Zen Buddhist so I mean I got to Stoicism through Zen Buddhism which sounds like paradox but I started reading about Zen Buddhism and it dawned on me that I could actually not only satisfy my curiosity and deal with this midlife crisis but at the same time I could get a publication out of it you know and it being a college professor you always try to get to for the price of one so if I could get a publication that would be great so I decided to extend this into the book that ultimately became the book on desire why we want what we want but to be complete I needed to show”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Self discipline a lot of people undervalue self discipline. You know, you're so straight and always doing what you want to do, but when you think about it in a different sense, self-discipline means what? It means you are controlling the one life that you have to live. And then the follow-up question is, so if you're not controlling that life, who or what is? And why would you allow something else to control the one life you have to live? What a waste.”
2021-11-02 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #123 William Irvine: How To Live a Stoic Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT