Read an extract from Reasons Not to Worry by Brigid Delaney.
Stoicism is, above all, a practical philosophy. It’s extraordinarily useful in almost every situation—from missing a flight or having someone cut in front of you in traffic to getting a scary medical diagnosis or being dumped by your partner.
Stoicism has something to say about our relationships with all kinds of people, from our closest intimates to our worst enemies. It also addresses our relationship with nature and the cosmos.
And Stoicism provides tools for dealing with your own inner life. How do we navigate the storms, the darkness, the desires and the disappointments that haunt all of us? How do we cope with loss and grief? How do we live with ourselves when we have acted badly and are wrestling with our own failures and shortcomings? How do we love the life we have and the people we have surrounded ourselves with?
Stoicism has it all covered. But first, let’s start at the end.
How to… Be mortal
‘Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.’ —Marcus Aurelius
‘People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.’ —Seneca
I was 29 when I was first viscerally struck by the inevitability of my own death (I had also been viscerally struck in the head). I was in the back of an ambulance, covered in blood, a stranger in a strange city, going to which hospital I did not know, all alone, with an uncertain outcome, and a great gashing, gushing wound to the skull.
I’d suffered a head injury after being mugged for my wallet in the back streets of Barcelona’s port district, coming back from a club around 5 a.m. Foolishly I chased the mugger, almost caught him, when he pushed me away and into a wall that had a jagged exterior (was it a Gaudi? It felt like a Gaudi). My skull took the brunt, splitting open above my right temple.
There were a string of half-lit, dreamy moments: dawn; in the ambulance and racing down La Rambla in a daze; revellers going home, lurching across roads, slumped on benches; and the paper stand sellers and flower stall merchants, full of purpose, setting up for the day ahead. What else? Soft rain on the windshield, a smear of colour, Barrio Gótico, Plaza de Cataluna, a fountain, a corner turned, the streets widening, everything grey and golden and beautiful. I was full of love. I was detached.
I thought that I would likely die, even though there was so much more to do with my life and I was kinda still mostly young. Yet the certainty that I would die didn’t really trouble me—I felt curiously relaxed. It was nothing personal, I understood. It was okay to die now. I’d had a good run, I was 29, almost 30, I’d not done it all, but I’d done enough . . .
As it turns out, I didn’t die. I was lucky. Instead I ended up with a bunch of stitches (and later, and currently, a scar) and heightened levels of anxiety. Turning corners into unfamiliar streets, the dark places between the pools of streetlights, the quickening of footsteps behind me at night—these things scared me for a while until, at some barely perceptible point, I got out of the woods.
After a month or so, I stopped thinking about the assault itself and started interrogating my reaction in the back of the ambulance. Why was I so relaxed about dying? And would I feel the same way now that I’m older? There was only one way of knowing, and I didn’t want to get as close to the edge again just to satisfy an intellectual curiosity.
But I knew that I certainly didn’t feel relaxed or detached when people close to me died.
A few years after that time in Barcelona, an old friend died of an accidental overdose. It was a shock. That she could be so suddenly and arbitrarily removed from the world caused me and those she loved a lot of pain. But more than that—anger. To die young seemed terribly unjust. The natural order of things had been upended; an implied contract had been broken. You take a drug, but you always wake up . . . don’t you?
My friend’s death affected me much more deeply than my own glimpse of mortality. It provoked the first intimations that the universe is not a benevolent entity, is not a forever home—but more like a video game where players are summarily eliminated and the game keeps going. Or a chess game where pieces around you are taken and taken and taken and taken until it is your turn to be removed . . . Or the universe itself not being round but flat and someone can walk too close to the edge and just fall off, just slip away and you can’t catch them (you didn’t even see them fall!)—you can’t bring them back. And the permanence of it! She was gone forever.
At her Catholic burial the family priest said we would all meet again in heaven, but I didn’t believe that anymore. Doubt and consolation were with each other, that night, at the pub. I drank too much and the anger came spilling out and the only place to take it out on the street was with a nearby rubbish bin.
Furious, I started high kicking this metal rubbish bin, high-heeled feet creating a semi-satisfying impact, howling ‘fuck you’ over and over until two policewomen came out of nowhere and told me to stop. ‘You’ve had too much chardonnay,’ said one, which felt both damning and weirdly specific. Chardonnay? My grief, which felt large, unique, terrible, formal and Shakespearean, was witnessed by outsiders as the rantings of a woman who had had too much oaky wine.
In both cases—when I was injured and when my friend died—my reaction to mortality was instinctive, deeply primal and unadulterated by anything outside myself. My reactions were not tempered, measured or filtered through rationality, religion or philosophy. They came from the gut and felt ancient and universal. How could people bear this, to see death up close over and over and over again?
We all go through it sooner or later—that first shocking death of a friend or family member. And we all have our first brush with our own mortality. When we do, something shifts—like being told a terrible secret that we’re all in on, in the end.
It is both the most shocking and the most natural of things to know that we—and everyone we love—are going to die.
But why does the first death feel like being let in on a secret?
Perhaps because for the most part we are not living in reality. Instead we are living in a society that likes to pretend we will never die, or grow sick and old. The real secret is not that we are going to die, but that we live in a culture that pretends we won’t.
Our culture and these times runs on the algorithm of youth, a torrent of constantly moving images in our social media feeds that glorify the trivial, the next, the silly, the surface, the hot take, the meme, the shocking, the zeitgeist. I love the times we live in—they are not dull—but this constant fresh content, the constant refreshing of the page, each take hotter than the last, has its downside: that is, our culture is too immature to square up to death.
This lack of squaring up (looking life in the face) is everywhere. In our society we no longer have ritual or language or ways of being comfortable with death. Our screens are drenched in representations of violence, in actual violence, surrounded by death, yet we don’t have the mechanisms (or the ritual or the poetry) to process our own mortality. One of the most perfect examples of this was when people started dying of Covid in large numbers in America, and President Trump spoke with a kind of incredulity that death was—like—a thing: ‘I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have death,’ he said with a kind of stunned innocence. Wasn’t that all of us?
We fight for a few extra years at the back end of life, throwing money, technology and medicine at buying more time, when, in fact, we do not appreciate the years we have while we are actually living them.
I often think of the excellent Kazuo Ishiguro book, Never Let Me Go. It’s ostensibly about cloning and organ donation, but I read it as a parable of our own death denial (we had the greatest economy that we’ve ever had, and we didn’t have death). The tragedy of Never Let Me Go is that the characters were created to die. And when they, and we the reader, find out this knowledge had been hidden from them in their childhood, the effect on the reader is a terrible melancholy. They will all meet their end. Why can’t they just be allowed to live? And then—mic drop—there is the second realisation, more shocking than the first. This is our fate too, the fate of the reader! We too are born to die, at a time not of our choosing. Why can’t we just be allowed to live on and on?
In a review of the book for The Telegraph, Theo Tait, wrote: ‘Gradually, it dawns on the reader that Never Let Me Go is a parable about mortality. The horribly indoctrinated voices of the Hailsham students who tell each other pathetic little stories to ward off the grisly truth about the future—they belong to us; we’ve been told that we’re all going to die, but we’ve not really understood.’
We’ve not really understood—but the Stoics spent their lives attempting to understand that they would die.
And then there’s grief. We grieve alone, and often deeply, unsupported except for Facebook in memoriam sites and the GP’s offer of antidepressants. How to do this thing, to deal with this pain—these shards of glass, this wall of fire, this icy steppe—that we all must pass through? The Stoics thought deeply about the question of mortality and grief—and wrote some of their most enduring works on it. Seneca put it like this in his book On the Shortness of Life: ‘Learning how to live takes a whole life, and . . . It takes a whole life to learn how to die.’
What we can do is prepare for death. We can face reality. That sometimes grim, sometimes liberating task of preparing for death has always been available to us and yet we turn away. We do not want to prepare. There is still a superstition that runs deep into the marrow, that if we prepare, we are calling forth death ourselves, somehow willing it—a dark version of a vision board. We don’t prepare, because in our magical thinking, we believe if we don’t face death then no one we love, including ourselves, will die.
But prepare we must. For death is already happening to us in each passing moment. It’s happening as I write these words, to all of us. Every day we are dying.
Awareness of the shortness of life, of our own and others’ mortality is a keystone of Stoic philosophy. It is also crucial in taming some of the chaos that comes with grief, sudden losses and squaring with our own mortality.
So that is where we will start.
Extracted from Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in chaotic times by Brigid Delaney
Reasons Not to Worry
by Brigid Delaney
An accessible introduction to Stoic principles of virtue, moderation and self-discipline, adapting this ancient knowledge to inspire practical advice for everyday life.
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