People are looking for deeper answers than the modern world can provide.
People are looking for deeper answers than the modern world can provide.
O liver Burkeman has been styled “the self-help guru for people who hate self-help.” In his 2021 best seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, he spurned productivity tips and an obsessive focus on “getting things done” and instead explored how readers might direct their lives in the light of life’s limits, especially its ultimate limit — death. His new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, picks up the theme. A recent author profile in the Atlantic is bluntly titled, “You Are Going to Die.”
Although he draws on a variety of sources, Burkeman does not mention in his latest book that his core insight (that a truly human life must be lived in full awareness and appreciation of its finitude) is an old one: Burkeman has rediscovered, or reinvented, the ancient spiritual practice of attending regularly to one’s mortality, or Memento mori: “Remember, you shall die!”
Ancient wisdom is, as it happens, à la mode presently. Stephen Covey and Dale Carnegie are out; Pliny and Seneca are in.
This revival did not begin with, but owes much of its impetus to, marketing maven Ryan Holiday, who has repackaged and resold Stoic philosophy as a 21st-century program of “life hacks” in books such as The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Obstacles into Triumph and The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. (Holiday says that he took his initial inspiration from — who else? — talk-show host Dr. Drew.) But the fact that Holiday is a better self-promoter than exegete does not account for the whole of his success. Like any sensitive marketer, he spied an unmet desire, which is now being met by more-sophisticated and thoughtful offerings.
Examples abound. Princeton University Press’s “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series offers new translations of ancient texts, presented with catchy “how-to” titles: How to Be Content (Horace), How to Do the Right Thing (Seneca), How to Have Willpower (Prudentius and Plutarch), How to Get Over a Breakup (Ovid). Jordan Peterson has lately turned his attention to the Old Testament, delivering lecture series on the Pentateuch. Last year, University of Georgia historian Jamie Kreiner published The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (which one could accompany with Princeton’s How to Focus, courtesy of John Cassian). This year, Andrew V. Abela, a professor at the Catholic University of America’s Busch School of Business, released Superhabits: The Universal System for a Successful Life, which recasts the virtue ethics of the great classical expositors, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
And, of course, there is Marcus Aurelius. Some 1,800 years after his death on campaign in the eastern reaches of his empire, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher is the go-to guru of Silicon Valley executives, professional football players, Special Operations forces, and Bill Clinton. Gregory Hays’s 2002 translation of the Meditations became a best seller. It has been followed by five additional translations, most recently the annotated edition by classicist Robin Waterfield.
These efforts — some richly, some poorly — aim to bring the resources of ancient (or medieval) authors to bear on contemporary discontents. What is one to make of this trend? On one hand, such a phenomenon is a reminder that self-help remains one of the few publishing niches that reliably sells. It’s in publishers’ and authors’ interest to figure out how they can get any piece of a steadily growing multi-billion-dollar industry. (James Clear’s Atomic Habits has been on Amazon’s weekly “Twenty Most Sold” list for five and a half years.) Yet these volumes also suggest that there is a restlessness with respect to self-help’s more familiar offerings. They do not meet the moment.
Philosophies emerge, in part, in response to historical conditions. Many of the Roman Stoics (Cato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius) found themselves faced with tremendous social and personal upheaval: civil unrest, slavery, exile, war. They sought for disciplines of body and spirit that would help them find stability amid calamitous situations.
Philosophies tend to flourish again when their inspiring conditions return. The sense of upheaval in contemporary America is manifest. Widespread drug abuse, a mental-health crisis, declining marriage and fertility rates, political violence — all of it points to the loss of something fundamental, something essential that has drained out of the world that many people inhabit.
We like to think that the modern world is one of unceasing advance, of pushing back the borders of understanding, of steady material and moral progress. But perhaps it is the case that the modern world is equally one of forgetting. What we gain in certain kinds of technical know-how, we lose in the more elusive form of knowing that we call wisdom. It is one thing to know how to rise in the world; it is another entirely to know how to live a contented life. Many are asking again: Where shall wisdom be found?
Perhaps ancient voices are calling to us.