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William B. Irvine. (Photo: Lyndon French)
William B. Irvine. (Photo: Lyndon French)

Philosopher William B. Irvine’s journey from a youth spent in mining towns in Montana and Nevada to becoming a renowned advocate of Stoicism is a remarkable one. Beginning his academic career in a two-room schoolhouse, Irvine continued on to earn a B.A. in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Michigan, followed by an M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from U.C.L.A. He ultimately landed at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, where he taught for nearly four decades until his retirement, in 2021, when he was granted emeritus status. Along the way, his interests have evolved from “pure” philosophy to interdisciplinary subjects, including the ethics of finance, parenting, desire, and more, and he’s written books such as A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (2007), Aha!: The Moments of Insight that Shape Our World (2014), and most recently, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient (2019). Though he no longer gives classroom lectures, he continues to spread his wisdom through his writing, which aims to make philosophy accessible to the intellectually curious, no matter their academic background.

Here, Irvine discusses what led him to embrace Stoicism and how its tenets and techniques can help us navigate the complexities of the 21st century with equanimity and resilience.

You’ve embraced Stoicism as a guiding life philosophy. Were there any pivotal experiences that led you to adopt this school of thought? Or was it more like the ancient process that you describe in your book where you tried on many philosophies, and came to realize that this one fit?

When I turned 50, I seemed to be having a midlife crisis. I thought that by becoming a Zen Buddhist, I could settle a number of issues. I also decided that I could write a book about it. I knew that to write the book and get it published, I had to have a balanced approach and look at alternatives to Zen Buddhism. I came across Stoicism, and gave it a test drive. I tried its techniques, and found they worked wonderfully. It also has a much lower price tag than Zen Buddhism. To become a Zen Buddhist, you might meditate for hours a week, for decades, before having a moment of enlightenment. But over the course of one weekend, you can test Stoic techniques and know whether they’re making a difference in your life. So I tried it, I liked it, and I never looked back.

Your book emphasizes the pursuit of tranquility as a central goal of Stoicism. What are some practical strategies or exercises that one can apply in daily life to manage challenging situations?

We’re still the same human beings with the same psychological wiring as we were two thousand years ago. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is our circumstances. Today, we get annoyed when the shower water won’t get hot, or the toilet doesn’t flush. To the ancients, any such conveniences would have been a miracle. If you’re in an industrialized country, you have so much, but the problem is we take it all for granted, and we are unhappy. So the Stoics have exercises that enable us to stop taking things for granted.

One of them being negative visualization.

Yes. You simply imagine yourself not having something that you have. When I give talks, I like to use it as an exercise. I ask the audience to close their eyes and keep them that way until I say so. I let a minute go by, and then I say, “Okay, now, imagine that you’re trying to open your eyes, but they’re glued shut.” Then I let some more time go by. Finally I say, “Okay, open your eyes.”

Now, of course there are exceptions—blind people, for instance. But for most, they consciously recognize something that they’ve utterly taken for granted their entire life. They just expect it to be there. But they’re lucky that it’s there. They should very much appreciate it. And immediately after that exercise, they will. But the appreciation will wear off, and they’ll be right back to taking it for granted. So the advice is to redo the exercise, and do it with things besides eyesight. You can do it with friendships, you can do it with your job—anything can suddenly disappear from your life. When you take a few moments to imagine it being gone, you will actively appreciate its existence.

That’s absolutely something that I’ve tried to apply in my daily life after reading your book—especially when it comes to health. Or when my 2-year-old was crying, and is now not crying anymore, I try to feel grateful about it and not take it for granted.

Exactly. There will be a last time that your child sits in your lap. When you look back on these days, a big part of you will wish you could go back to this relationship, even if toddlers are so often difficult. So value it, because there will be a time when these will count as the “good old days.”

I felt that so distinctly when breastfeeding. There was a time when I decided: Okay, this is the end. After sixteen months, I’m no longer going to breastfeed. I will never breastfeed again. It was so bittersweet. I definitely thought about all of the times I complained about breastfeeding.

Imagine if you had gotten pregnant, and then had the baby, and then were told you have some condition such that you wouldn’t be able to breastfeed. Everything is always on loan, and whatever you’ve got, you’re very lucky to have it. If you go through life with that in mind, it makes things much more tolerable.

The famous Stoic Marcus Aurelius believed in self-reflection via philosophical journaling. Do you journal regularly?

Marcus Aurelius had what he called the Meditations, but it was actually just his diary; it was not intended for public distribution. He would write down things that had annoyed him that day. He did gain insights as a result, [and] he’s the primary example of an ancient Stoic who did that. The Stoics who led schools and had students didn’t write things down; they simply spoke in front of groups of people.

Seneca says there’s something very much like journaling that he recommends we do, and it’s called the bedtime meditation. You don’t even have to write anything. Before you fall asleep at night, just take a minute or two to think about your day, about the choices you made and the opportunities you had. Did you make wise choices? For instance, were there opportunities to be kind to other people, and did you take advantage of them? Did you allow yourself to become annoyed by some trivial thing? What can you do differently tomorrow to avoid having that happen?

I feel like Stoicism is having a renaissance in part because it’s just so practical. I’ve been practicing Tibetan Buddhism, and it’s constant work, and therefore not that appealing all the time even to me, a practicing Buddhist.

Yes, Stoicism has a low price of admission. What do you have to do? Well, you might want to read a book. My Guide to the Good Life is intended for readers who not only don’t know anything about Stoicism, but likely have the wrong idea about it. It explains some of the basic psychological techniques and encourages you to put those to work in your life. As we said before, in the course of a weekend you can do a lot, and by Monday morning you’ll know whether it’s working for you. It’s kind of astonishing. When I first stumbled across Stoicism, I thought, This is wonderful, I’ve got to share this with the world. That was back in the early 2000s, when there were only a handful of books on the subject. Now, the last time I looked, there’s practically a new one every day. And that’s absolutely wonderful. I think the world needs it.

Other than your book, what texts or other media should folks seek out?

Ryan Holiday is the best-selling person doing Stoicism. He tends to write books where you read a page a day, two pages a day, and put that into practice. And he apparently does it very effectively, because he has a huge audience. Donald J. Robertson has written a book on—if you’re interested in journaling—Marcus Aurelius. There is a movie on Seneca that I know exists, that I’ve been trying to figure out how to watch because Seneca was an incredible person. He was the equivalent of a billionaire, the leading playwright of his time, one of the top four Stoic philosophers, and a counselor to Emperor Nero. And I can recommend the author and podcaster Sam Harris’s book Waking Up, and his podcast, Making Sense.

Modern Western society generally values material success and external achievements, and Stoicism can help individuals reevaluate their definitions of success and happiness to focus more on inner well-being. Was this perceived as a particular advantage of Stoicism, as opposed to other life philosophies, in ancient times?

Well, it’s a mistake to think of the ancient Stoics as all being the same. The four great Roman Stoics were Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and [Gaius] Musonius Rufus, and if you read them, you’ll realize they’re all doing Stoicism, but they have different ideas. Seneca had a very lavish lifestyle, and yet was a Stoic. Marcus Aurelius was the Roman emperor and lived in a palace, yet he was a Stoic. At the other end, you have Musonius Rufus. He didn’t write a lot, but he had a student who took very good notes, and I published a translation of them. If you asked him about a good place to live, he would have said, “Hey, caves work.”

But I think one thing the Stoics would have agreed on, and Zen Buddhists as well, is that when it comes to our notions about what we want, and what we should do with the desires we experience, we assume that just because we find a desire in us, it’s “what we want,” when in fact desires are insidious things. They can implant themselves in your mind without your actually wanting the thing. When you discover yourself wanting something, you should say, “Wait a minute, is this what I want? Or is this just one of these desires that got into my head?”

Another thing about desires is that we’re on what psychologists call a “hedonic treadmill.” We think, and it seems like wonderful logic, that if we can just get the thing we want, we’ll live happily ever after. So we detect in ourselves a desire, we work very hard to get the thing we want, and for a while we can celebrate. A job, a raise, whatever your goal was. But it wears off in a very short period of time.

To finish, what, to you, is the good life?

The good life is one with as few negative emotions and as many positive emotions as you can experience. The positive emotions will take small forms—moments of delight; moments of joy; the experience of awe about the wonderful world in which we live; an appreciation of whatever it is I’ve got; and an ability, if my circumstances change, to go with the flow. As far as I can tell, that’s as good as it gets. It isn’t measured in material terms. It isn’t even measured in health terms. It’s measured in psychological terms. A lot of people want physical success, and that’s nice, but it’s not the key thing.

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The Future Library Forest. (Photo: Rio Gandara. Courtesy Helsingin Sanomat)

“A forest in Norway is growing.” So begins the cryptic text printed on a certificate for the Future Library, or Framtidsbiblioteket, an artwork by Scottish artist Katie Paterson that, over the span of a century, cumulatively builds a collection of wri

Sound installation by Devon Turnbull. (Courtesy Lisson Gallery)

At New York’s Lisson Gallery, an unfettered approach to sculpture is the driving force behind a new group exhibition. OnThe Odds Are Good, The Goods Are Odd” presents the work of 11 groundbreaking New York City–based contemporary artists. In the exhibition, sculptures are a m

“Windy” spins on New York’s High Line. (Courtesy Meriem Bennani, High Line Art, and Audemars Piguet)

Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirliWindy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewilderi

Baratunde Thurston at the Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley National Park. (Courtesy Twin Cities PBS/Part2 Pictures)

“We think we invent things and create things and define ourselves by ourselves, but that’s not the whole story,” BaratunAmerica Outdoors, a six-part travel series that premiered last week on PBS. Thurston—a writer, comedian, and podcaster who has advised tThe Daily Show, and authored the best-selling memoir How To Be Black—has a knack for navigating nuanced conversations around race, culture, politics, and technology, framing these discussi

Cover of “Rocky Mountain Modern” by John Gendall

The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains is too beautiful to mar. Yet over the years, developers and builders have manageBuckminster Fuller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliot Noyes, and Eero Saarinen completed commissions in the Western United States, transforming it into a hub for architectural modRocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes (Monacelli Press).

Alexandra Lange. (Photo: Mark Wickens)

A recurring theme in design critic Alexandra Lange’s work is unpacking how—and for whom—objects and spaces are designed.The Dot-Com City, and surveyed how kids’ toys and physical environments impact their development in her 2018 book, The Design of Childhood. The ways in which outdoor public spaces, with their basketball courts, playgrounds, and skate parks, fail teen girls wa story she wrote for Bloomberg CityLab—one of many publications she has contributed to over the past two-plus decades.

A still from Kandis Williams’s multiscreen work “Triadic Ballet” (2021). (Courtesy the artist and the Rosenkranz Collection.)

Time standards are one of the many seemingly invisible societal constructs we interact with every day but seldom ponder.Mountain / Time,” the show is a nod to both the local time zone in Aspen, Mountain Standard Time (MST)—which the writer and critic Kylehas hailed for its “apartness” and “sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation”—and the conceptual d

Installation view of the “Hermès in the Making” exhibition in Troy, Michigan. (Photo: William Jess Laird)

Detroit is a city of craft. Of carmakers and Carhartt. Of Motown Records and Eminem. Of iconic midcentury design (Isamu Noguchi’s Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain, buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Heidelberg Project. So it’s fitting that, following previous iterations in Copenhagen, last fall, and in Turin, Italy, last month, the Freits latest “Hermès in the Making” exhibition (through June 15). A playful, Willy Wonka factory–like presentation of the company’s know-how, the display offers “an o not to smile while walking through it. Divided into four sections—”A Culture of Traditional Craftsmanship,” “High-Quality Msecret!” Beyond, stations feature artisans in saddle-stitching, porcelain painting, gemstone setting, glove-making, leather wor

Photo: Carlo Banfi. (Courtesy Flos)

Emerging from the pandemic, the design industry, like most of us, has changed. The past two and a half years, which havean increasingly pressing climate crisis, have formed a solemn backdrop. In March 2020, almost at once, in the locked-down lives of many, the notion of “home” a

Maria Cristina Didero. (Photo: Stefan Giftthaler)

The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa

Cover of “The Trayvon Generation” by Elizabeth Alexander

How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences

Installation view of “Plastic: Remaking Our World.” (Photo: Bettina Matthiessen)

In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea

Rendering of Drift’s indoor drone performance, “Social Sacrifice” (2022). (Courtesy Drift and Aorist)

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.

“Between the Mountain and the Sky” by Maggie Doyne

At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of

A ramen bowl by Taku Satoh. (Photo: Hiroshi Tsujitani. Courtesy Nacasa & Partners Inc.)

Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.

Anicka Yi’s “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), on view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. (Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca.)

Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)

Installation view of “David Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic.” (Courtesy Pace Gallery)

Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.

Skyscraper Page website

With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs