Stoic Journal: A Week Without Complaining?

At this point, we arrive at Week XXXI (i.e. Week 31) in Ryan Holiday’s “Stoic Journal”, which (oddly enough) corresponds this time around to a Sunday. Here, we are challenged to have a full week without complaining, but what this really means is to avoid blaming anyone but ourselves for our own errors and bad decisions. He quotes from some of the major Stoic thinkers, starting with Epictetus:

“Epictetus spoke often to his students about the need to give up blaming and complaining - in fact, he saw it as one of the primary mea­suring sticks of progress in the art of living. How much of life is wasted pointing fingers? Has complaining ever solved a single problem?”

“Marcus Aurelius would say: 'Blame yourself - or no one.'”

Then some sound advice: “This week, try constructive feedback over complaining and responsibility over blame. And if something goes wrong, spend some time reflecting on what the true causes were. Don’t waste a minute with complaints—in this jour­nal or out loud.”

“You must stop blaming God, and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret.”
—Epictetus, Discourses, 3.22.13

“For nothing outside my reasoned choice can hinder or harm it - my reasoned choice alone can do this to itself. If we would lean this way whenever we fail, and would blame only ourselves and remember that nothing but opinion is the cause of a troubled mind and uneasiness, then by God, I swear we would be making progress.”
—Epictetus, Discourses, 3.19.2-3

“But if you deem as your own only what is yours, and what belongs to others as truly not yours, then no one will ever be able to coerce or to stop you, you will find no one to blame or accuse, you will do nothing against your will, you will have no enemy, no one will harm you, because no harm can affect you.”
—Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1.3

For myself, I would have to say that this is good advice. If something goes wrong or if you have a plan that goes awry, it is unwise to blame others for it, at least unless they are actually responsible. After all, if it was your plan, something that you intended to do, and you made a boo-boo, that’s on you. It’s a stinging little reminder to be more attentive and to learn if you don’t want to make the same error again later. Experience is a great teacher, but if we try always apportioning blame, then how are we any better than a child in the elementary playground, bawling that it’s not fair, not realising that we ourselves have the power and the ability to learn and to do better? It’s part of what we call “maturity” that the accumulation of experience teaches us the virtue of patience, that we waste more time by not planning and preparing properly.

Most importantly, however, the desire to constantly blame others for failures which fall at one’s own feet is without doubt a sinister characteristic, unworthy of a dexter. Again, from my own experience, it is a person’s ability to link ideas and concepts together with bits of their experience, still learning as they do so, that sets some of us, man or woman, apart from the rest who do not and who therefore, perhaps, do not thrive as well as they might.

Such people might also lack a sense of (or an actual) purpose in life, and they need to discover this. I don’t know about you, but I try to waste as little of my personal time as possible; I am often reading, or online researching; I did a lot of online researching and reading this week, because in fact, between work and private life, I really have a variety of “purposes”. However, I also have a strong sense, especially since my parents passed, that new opportunities, or, at least, a transition to a new livelihood in what would formerly be considered years of retirement (because the world has changed somewhat since I was young), are unlikely to simply walk up to me; one thing I have learned is that, at least to some extent, an emergent opportunity for the future is something for which one has to be prepared. Only I have (and can assume) responsibility for what happens in my life; and I allow only myself to make the necessary decisions. I do not believe in governments, which I regard as unwanted parasites legitimised by the bogus process we call “democracy”; it is my wish to be a sovereign individual, and there is no place for others in my decision-making process.

We might refer here to the famous saying attributed to the French biochemist, Louis Pasteur: “Chance favours the prepared mind.” - meaning, of course, that in order to see something, perhaps for the first time, there has to be an element of expectation. In more scientific terms, if you have a good hypothesis (“good” here meaning that is has predictive power), then it should be easier to see something because you are expecting it. You cannot see such things clearly if your mind is clouded or distracted with emotions. In real life, then, we have to decide what we want and try to manipulate the reality around us so that we can realise it; in science, by a process of hypothesis testing and reformulation, we should slowly approach a state of verisimilitude.

The fundamental problem with blaming others for our errors and problems is that it is a way of absolving ourselves of responsibility; as Epictetus says in the quote above: “You must stop blaming God, and not blame any person.” Attributing your faults to a supernatural being and calling upon them (or calling their name in vain, so to speak) solves nothing; it merely allows the person concerned to shift blame away from themselves, which is a rather immature practice. It means that they have not acquired the sense that a learning opportunity has been presented to them; that the “learning process” is lifelong, and did not end when they left “school”.

Ryan, then, as well as the ancient minds from whom he quotes, has issued a challenge: try to get through the next seven days without complaining. This will entail patience as well as the withholding of negative commentary in my writings. Readers may recall that in a previous blog, I mentioned seeing a video of a blue-haired (female) person talking to viewers about not writing bad language in their “journals”, and this is partly what we are also talking about here. A journal without purpose (and without appropriate prompts, which is the whole point of Ryan’s book) is one where the writer would probably indulge in an endless (and also pointless and unproductive) screed of foul language as a means of disgorging their negative emotions, whereas the Stoic is seeking more purpose, less stress and more joy in his or her life by focusing on what they can control rather than fretting about what they cannot; part of this is also the setting and achievement of realistic goals. Perhaps they should indulge in bullet journals instead? At least they would get more done...

Our essential point then, to finish, is that in the same way that Stoics recommend that individuals should occupy their time focusing on the things that they can control rather than the things that they cannot, they also suggest that individuals should take responsibility for these things rather than being dependent (like a child) upon someone else to make decisions for them; to be more independent, and to learn from all results, good and bad. The life that results from having better understanding and control of events is then less stressful and more likely to be joyful, and that is the life towards which the Stoics aspired.