Review:
Reasons Not to Worry, by Brigid Delaney
| Publisher: |
Harper |
| Copyright: |
2022 |
| Printing: |
October 2023 |
| ISBN: |
0-06-331484-3 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
295 |
Reasons Not to Worry is a self-help non-fiction book about
stoicism, focusing specifically on quotes from Seneca, Epictetus, and
Marcus Aurelius. Brigid Delaney is a long-time
Guardian columnist
who has written on a huge variety of topics, including (somewhat
relevantly to this book) her personal experiences trying weird fads.
Stoicism is having a moment among the sort of men who give people life
advice in podcast form. Ryan Holiday, a former marketing executive, has
made a career out of being the face of stoicism in everyone's podcast feed
(and, of course, hosting his own). He is far from alone. If you pay
attention to anyone in the male self-help space right now (Cal Newport, in
my case), you have probably heard something vague about the "wisdom of the
stoics."
Given that the core of stoicism is easily interpreted as a strategy for
overcoming your emotions with logic, this isn't surprising. Philosophies
that lean heavily on college dorm room logic, discount emotion, and argue
that society is full of obvious flaws that can be analyzed and debunked by
one dude with some blog software and a free afternoon have been very
popular in tech circles for the past ten to fifteen years, and have spread
to some extent into popular culture. Intriguingly, though, stoicism is a
system of
virtue
ethics, which means it is historically in opposition to consequentialist
philosophies like utilitarianism, the ethical philosophy behind
effective altruism and other
related Silicon Valley fads.
I am pretty exhausted with the whole genre of men talking to each other
about how to live a better life Cal Newport by himself more than
satisfies the amount of that I want to absorb but I was still mildly
curious about stoicism. My education didn't provide me with a satisfying
grounding in major historical philosophical movements, so I occasionally
look around for good introductions. Stoicism also has some reputation as
an anxiety-reduction technique, and I could use more of those. When I saw
a Discord recommendation for
Reasons Not to Worry that specifically
mentioned its lack of bro perspective, I figured I'd give it a shot.
Reasons Not to Worry is indeed not a bro book, although I would
have preferred fewer appearances of the author's friend Andrew, whose
opinions on stoicism I could not possibly care less about. What it is,
though, is a shallow and credulous book that falls squarely in the middle
of the lightweight self-help genre. Delaney is here to explain why
stoicism is awesome and to convince you that a school of Greek and Roman
philosophers knew exactly how you should think about your life today. If
this sounds quasi-religious, well, I'll get to that.
Delaney does provide a solid introduction to stoicism that I think is a
bit more approachable than reading the relevant Wikipedia article. In her
presentation, the core of stoicism is the practice of four virtues:
wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. The modern definition of
"stoic" as someone who is impassive in the presence of pleasure or pain is
somewhat misleading, but Delaney does emphasize a goal of
ataraxia, or tranquility of mind. By making that the goal rather
than joy or pleasure, stoicism tries to avoid the trap of the
hedonic treadmill
in favor of a more achievable persistent contentment.
As an aside, some quick Internet research makes me doubt Delaney's summary
here. Other material about stoicism I found focuses on apatheia
and associates ataraxia with Epicureanism instead. But I won't
start quibbling with Delaney's definitions; I'm not qualified and this
review is already too long.
The key to ataraxia, in Delaney's summary of stoicism, is to
focus only on those parts of life we can control. She summarizes those as
our character, how we treat others, and our actions and reactions.
Everything else wealth, the esteem of our colleagues, good health, good
fortune is at least partly outside of our control, and therefore we
should enjoy it when we have it but try to be indifferent to whether it
will last. Attempting to control things that are outside of our control
is doomed to failure and will disturb our tranquility. Essentially all of
this book is elaborations and variations on this theme, specialized to
some specific area of life like social media, anxiety, or grief and
written in the style of a breezy memoir.
If you're familiar with modern psychological treatment frameworks like
cognitive behavioral therapy or
acceptance and commitment therapy, this summary of stoicism may sound
familiar. (Apparently this is not an accident; the predecessor to CBT
used stoicism as a philosophical basis.) Stoicism, like those treatment
approaches, tries to refocus your attention on the things that you can
improve and de-emphasizes the things outside of your control. This is a
lot of the appeal, at least to me (and I think to Delaney as well).
Hearing that definition, you may have some questions. Why those virtues
specifically? They sound good, but all virtues sound good almost by
definition. Is there any measure of your success in following those
virtues outside your subjective feeling of ataraxia? Does the
focus on only things you can control lead to ignoring problems only mostly
outside of your control, where your actions would matter but only to a
small degree? Doesn't this whole philosophy sound a little self-centered?
What do non-stoic virtue ethics look like, and why do they differ from
stoicism? What is the consequentialist critique of stoicism?
This is where the shortcomings of this book become clear: Delaney is not
very interested in questions like this. There are sections on some of
those topics, particularly the relationship between stoicism and social
justice, but her treatment is highly unsatisfying. She raises the
question, talks about her doubts about stoicism's applicability, and then
says that, after further thought, she decided stoicism is entirely
consistent with social justice and the stoics were right after all. There
is a little bit more explanation than that, but not much. Stoicism can
apparently never be wrong; it can only be incompletely understood.
Self-help books often fall short here, and I suspect this may be what the
audience wants. Part of the appeal of the self-help genre is artificial
certainty. Becoming a better manager, starting a business, becoming more
productive, or working out an entire life philosophy are not problems
amenable to a highly approachable and undemanding book. We all know that
at some level, but the seductive allure of the self-help genre is the
promise of simplifying complex problems down to a few approachable bullet
points. Here is a life philosophy in a neatly packaged form, and if you
just think deeply about its core principles, you will find they can be
applied to any situation and any doubts you were harboring will turn out
to be incorrect.
I am all too familiar with this pattern because it's also how
fundamentalist Christianity works. The second time Delaney talked about
her doubts about the applicability of stoicism and then claimed a few
pages later that those doubts disappeared with additional thought and
discussion, my radar went off. This book was sounding less like a
thoughtful examination of one specific philosophy out of many and more
like the soothing adoption of religious certainty by a convert. I was
therefore entirely unsurprised when Delaney all but says outright in the
epilogue that she's adopted stoicism as her religion and approaches it
with the same dedicated practice that she used to bring to Catholicism. I
think this is where a lot of self-help books end up, although most of them
don't admit it.
There's nothing wrong with this, to be clear. It sounds like she was
looking for a non-theistic religion, found one that she liked, and is
excited to tell other people about it. But it's a profound mismatch with
what I was looking for in an introduction to stoicism. I wanted context,
history, and a frank discussion of the problems with adopting philosophy
to everyday issues. I also wanted some acknowledgment that it is highly
unlikely that a few men who lived 2000 years ago in a wildly different
social context, and with drastically limited information about cultures
other than their own, figured out a foolproof recipe for how to approach
life. The subsequent two millennia of philosophical debates prove that
stoicism didn't end the argument, and that a lot of other philosophers
thought that stoicism got a few things wrong. You would never know that
from this book.
What I wanted is outside the scope of this sort of undemanding self-help
book, though, and this is the problem that I keep having with philosophy.
The books I happen across are either nigh-incomprehensibly dense and
academic, or they're simplified into catechism. This was the latter.
That's probably more the fault of my reading selection than it is the
fault of the book, but it was still annoying.
What I will say for this book, and what I suspect may be the most useful
property of self-help books in general, is that it prompts you to think
about basic stoic principles without getting in the way of your thoughts.
It's like background music for the brain: nothing Delaney wrote was very
thorny or engaging, but she kept quietly and persistently repeating the
basic stoic formula and turning my thoughts back to it. Some of those
thoughts may have been useful? As a source of prompts for me to ponder,
Reasons Not to Worry was therefore somewhat successful. The
concept of not trying to control things outside of my control is simple
but valid, and it probably didn't hurt me to spend a week thinking about
it.
"It kind of works as an undemanding meditation aid" is not a good enough
reason for me to recommend this book, but maybe that's what someone else
is looking for.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Our Debian User Group met on November 2nd after a somewhat longer summer hiatus
than normal. It was lovely to see a bunch of people again and to be able to
dedicate a whole day to hacking :)
Here is what we did:
lavamind:
