Are We Being Stoic Enough?

Navigating the balance between striving for excellence and mentally exhausting ourselves can be challenging. In this week's edition, I'll be answering a question from a listener of the podcast, Graham, who shares his struggle with anxiety as it relates to the perceived pressures of maintaining a Stoic practice. He wonders how to reconcile his high standards with the inevitable frustrations that come when he falls short, and whether this pursuit of perfection might be a double-edged sword.

Graham, a member of my podcast community, asked the following:

What Graham is confronting is common. Very common.

Graham is struggling with something every contemporary Stoic either struggles with or has struggled with in the past: the ease in conflating “Stoicism done well” with sagehood.

How do we know if we’ve done Stoicism well, today for example?

The answer isn’t “if we’ve done it perfectly.” 

Instead, it’s “if we know we tried our best to do it perfectly.”

The only way to do Stoicism perfectly is to be a sage. Are we sages?

We’re not, of course, and we know this.

Knowing this means we must also know that it’s an unreasonable and inappropriate expectation (to have of ourselves) that anyone should get Stoicism perfectly right before attaining sagehood.

Yet here so many of us are, judging our practice as “poor” or “not good enough” because we’ve not done it perfectly – even though we know, as we’ve just read, that we are not capable of doing it perfectly because we are not sages.

Imagine we decided to start getting in shape after years of ignoring our health.

We arrive at the gym on our first day of this new effort, and we give it our best shot.

We’re miserable afterward, of course, and absolutely haggard.

When we get home, we start judging ourselves for how poor our form was on the bench, while squatting, while doing overhead rows, while running on the treadmill for the first time in ten years, and every other exercise we performed.

No, we couldn’t have – and no we aren’t; even though, yes, technically, we are.

It’s not possible to start anything new and do it perfectly the first time (outside of flukes or savants). So, of course, in a way, we’re shit at every new thing we try doing. But us being shit is exactly what is appropriate given our present point in the journey.

Expertise and mastery take thousands of hours of practice.

If we did anything perfectly the first time, it would mean we already had the knowledge and experience necessary to do it – but how could we have this expertise and knowledge if we’ve never done the task before?

The entire proposition is illogical, which makes it un-Stoic.

We cannot master anything immediately; mastery takes time. A lot of time. For some things, it takes nearly our entire lives.

So how do we know if we’re doing Stoicism well?

I answered it at the outset, and the answer hasn’t changed.

Do we know that we gave it exactly the amount of effort we were capable of giving it? Not that we could have given it if we were more capable, but that we gave it what we were, at our present stage, capable of giving it?

Is the answer yes?

Then we’ve done Stoicism well today.

Is the answer no?

Congratulations, we’re no worse off than we would have been had the answer been yes. Because in the case of both answers, we’re still not a sage; we’re still making progress, and still falling short like every non-sage does every day of their lives.

It is morally appropriate, both normative and Just, to be less than perfect until we’re perfect.

Caveat: That doesn’t mean we can murder someone tomorrow and say, “Hey, I’m just not perfect yet!” because you do have to try – that’s the one requirement of Stoicism: that we make an honest effort.

And yes, Graham, absolutely 100% Stoicism does require you to be critical of yourself, but not in a negative judgment capacity! Instead, in an accurate assessment capacity.

Assess yourself honestly, and accept an honest performance.

Try harder tomorrow if you can.

If you can’t, then the way you act and choose will necessarily be the only way you (presently) know how to act and choose… and that’s A-OKAY. Progress, not perfection. Practice, not sagehood.

Thanks for reading.