The Power of Family Stories

There’s a tradition around many Thanksgiving dinner tables that’s as consistent as pumpkin pie: the family stories that get told year after year. Sometimes these stories are funny; sometimes they make us roll our eyes. No matter how we feel about them, we rarely pause to consider how these stories shape who we are and how we view the world. This week, we revisit a favorite 2024 conversation about family storytelling with psychologist Robyn Fivush. Then, in a new installment of "Your Questions Answered," Massimo Pigliucci answers listener questions about Stoicism, and why this ancient philosophy continues to resonate today.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many years ago, when I was a child, my mother told me a family story.

• 0:11Shankar Vedantam?

  It had to do with her brother, my uncle. He was an extremely creative man with varied interests in books and music and art. He could also be a little, how shall I put this, disorganized.

• 0:26Shankar Vedantam?

  My uncle was the kind of person who was always ready to reminisce, and he was an amazing storyteller. He could spin the tiniest events into funny stories that had you laughing until you cried.

• 0:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Anyway, the story my mother told me had to do with my uncle's wedding day. On his way to the wedding venue, my uncle suddenly remembered he had forgotten to invite a dear friend and fellow storyteller: his barber.

• 0:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So he took a detour and went to the barber shop to make sure his friend came to the wedding.

• 1:00Shankar Vedantam?

  When he got to the shop, the barber was busy with his customers and asked my uncle to wait while he finished. My uncle happily settled down, and he and the barber traded funny stories as the scissors went snip-snip.

• 1:16Shankar Vedantam?

  All this time, of course, the guests at the wedding and the prospective bride were getting increasingly alarmed. Had something happened to the groom? Had he gotten cold feet? Was the marriage called off? When my uncle finally showed up, his barber triumphantly in tow, he had no idea why everyone was upset.

• 1:39Shankar Vedantam?

  I've always loved that story because it perfectly captured my uncle's attitude toward life: "Live in the moment, be present. Deadlines and appointments can wait."

• 1:53Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the world of family stories, how these stories shape who we become, and the fascinating science that demonstrates why telling certain kinds of stories can make us happier, healthier, and better people.

• 2:24Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:08Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Cultures around the world have occasions that are designed for people to gather, chat, and reminisce. This can happen on birthdays, on anniversaries, and at funerals. Family members remind each other about the ties that bind them together. Disputes break out over half-remembered events from decades ago. At Emory University, psychologist Robin Fivush studies the psychological effects these stories can have on our lives. Robin Fivush, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm so privileged to be here. I really am looking forward to this interview.

• 4:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Robin, when you were very young, your family was struck by two terrible tragedies more or less simultaneously. It changed the course of your life. Can you tell me what happened?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Well, my father died when I was quite young and my mother was in a very, a very bad car accident. She went through the passenger side window of the windshield, was thrown out of the car, and she was actually in a coma for six weeks. So she was in a coma when my father died.

• 4:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Oh, my God.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  And she had a lot of bodily fractures, as you might imagine.

• 4:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  She was in a body cast, but she also had a lot of cognitive damage and was essentially in and out of hospitals for a number of years. So my grandparents raised me and my sister for most of my childhood. And during that time, we spent, frankly, quite a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and not spending time doing many of the typical activities of childhood.

• 5:25Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. If I could ask you, what happened to your dad? How did he come to pass away at an early age?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  He died of cancer.

• 5:32Shankar Vedantam?

  I see. And how old were you at the time, Robin?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  I was three years old.

• 5:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Oh, so you were very young. You probably have very few memories of your dad.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  You know, it's interesting. It's one of the things that actually got me interested in studying memory, is I was very young, and most people can't remember things that happened before they were about three or three and a half. That's a very strong research finding. When you ask adults to recall their earliest childhood memories, they almost never remember anything that happened before they were three.

• 6:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  But I have this unfortunate marker in my childhood. I know if I remember my father, it had to be something that happened before I was three. And I actually have two memories of my father. They are very strong images and sense perceptions of being with him.

• 6:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you tell me what those two memories are?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  One is actually, we were visiting caverns, underground caverns in upstate New York. I believe they're called house caverns. My sister is about three years older than me. This is my mother, my father, and I was on my father's shoulders. And I remember the feeling of being on his shoulders. And then suddenly, things going very dark.

• 6:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Uh huh.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Because they turned off all the lights in the cave. And feeling safe. And that's it. That's the whole memory.

• 7:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Huh. And you felt safe, of course, because you were sitting on your father's shoulders.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  I was sitting on his shoulders.

• 7:11Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  And of course, obviously, that's a super meaningful memory to me because I have so little of my father, so little of that security of having my father there to protect me and support me. The other memory is much more mundane. I remember him giving me a bath.

• 7:41Shankar Vedantam?

  The twin tragedies of her father's death and her mother's injuries devastated the family. Of course, Robin was too young to fully understand what was happening.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  I'm sure it was devastating. You know, I was three. So my experience was just, my life was yanked out. But I didn't have a full cognitive understanding of the context and what was going on. And so my memories from that period are very fragmentary and really not very coherent in the way, and frankly, my family, their way of dealing with it was just never to talk about it.

• 8:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I can imagine at one level, this must have been so painful. And even recollecting these events must have been so painful. And perhaps they were worried that you were very small. And talking to you about something that was painful might have hurt you. So I can imagine that those might have been the impulses that caused people to say, "Let's not talk about it."

• 8:44Speaker 02

  I think that is part of it, and I want to come back to that. I think for my family, that was definitely part of it. The other part of it was just, frankly, my grandmother's personality. So she went through a lot of hard times. And her way of dealing with it, with all of it, was, "Let's, we just don't revisit that. We just don't go back there. It's not worth revisiting." Quite frankly, when I would ask her questions about her past, my past, my family's past, the answer was always, "Why do you need to know that? It's over. It's past."

• 9:21Shankar Vedantam?

  In time, Robin would come to study the role that family stories play in the psychological well-being of both children and their caregivers. But that was much later. As a child, Robin wasn't comparing what happened in her family to what happened in other families.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  I didn't really notice it until... I didn't notice it until I met my first husband's family. And I started to spend a lot of time with them. And they were a huge family, a family story-telling family. They told stories, like many, many families, all the time. But they had all the kinds of family stories. They had the everyday, "Tell me about your day-to-day, what happened." Sharing their home, "Remember this is like when we went to the beach last summer." And they had the big, iconic stories. Every Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving, the story about how...

• 10:22Speaker 02

  One of the uncles crashed the car through the trees when he was a teenager, had to get told. And it had to get told the same way, with the same punchlines, every year. And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family.

• 10:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah. Yes, it's not the information in that uncle car crash story that was important, because everybody knew the facts already.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Everybody knew every detail of the story. If you told it the wrong way, everybody would correct you.

• 11:04Shankar Vedantam?

  And what went through your heart when you saw that? I mean, you must have been happy to be part of this family that had this rich family lore. But was there a part of you that sort of said, that noticed that you didn't have that? I mean, is that how you... was that made aware to you?

• 11:19Speaker 02

  I think it was obvious. I mean, it was such a contrast that it was so different than the way my family interacted.

• 11:35Shankar Vedantam?

  As Robin became a researcher, she was to learn that family stories are not just family stories. They are much more than dinner table conversation or fodder for Thanksgiving table punchlines. Family stories turn out to play a crucial role in the mental health of the people who tell the stories and the mental health of the people who listen to the stories. They can serve as anchors for identity and self-esteem. Told right, they can change the direction of our lives.

• 12:06Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 13:52Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Robin Fiversh is a psychologist at Emory University who studies the way parents and children communicate. Early on in her career, she spent extended amounts of time with families, listening to how parents talked with children.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I was interested in how families, particularly mothers, talked with their three, four, five-year-old children about the events of the child's life. So we did a lot of work where we would visit families in their homes and hang out with them. And then we would explicitly ask mothers to sit down with their child and talk about some things that have happened, some special occurrences. We gave them very few instructions. And we looked at how the past got reconstructed.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  And we discovered that this was really an important part of children learning how to narrate their own past. And also that it actually helped children increase their ability to remember the past. We found that different mothers do this in different ways. And it has a lot of consequences, not only for how children remember things, but how they feel about themselves. So mothers and children who are more elaborate and detailed in these kinds of early memory conversations have children who have higher self-esteem, even very early in development.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  They also have higher emotional understanding, because so many of the events that we talk about are emotional. So I was talking with my colleague, Marshall Duke, talking about the power of these early conversations and how important it was for children to build up their own narrative story, the story of who they are. Marshall's a clinical psychologist. And he said, yeah, that's totally important. But I bet that what's equally important is how families talk about the family past, the family history. Coming from the family I did, I was like, I don't think that matters as much. I really think that that's not as important.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  So we had this conversation. And we were part of a big funded research program. We had the means to do this. We said, let's use our resources to figure this out.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  So that's when we decided to just tape record families talking over the dinner table, to see what they talk about. So we tape recorded these families. And we simply asked them to just tape record a few dinnertime conversations. We were not there. We just, this is old technology. It was literally a physical tape recorder, one of those cassette recorders.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Families tell stories all the time. Some reference to a past event occurs every five minutes in a typical Tuesday night spaghetti dinner.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  And we know from other research that forty percent of all human conversation is referring to past experiences. So that's what human beings do. We talk about what happened to us and we ask other people what happened to them. We tell stories, we listen to stories all the time. Most of the stories, and we're talking about, you know, a thirty-five, forty-minute dinnertime conversation, most of the stories are what are called today I stories. So most of these table conversations were four, five people. So you're coming back together at the end of the day and you want to weave yourself back together as a family. So a lot of it is, tell me about your day, what happened?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  And, you know, we got what we expected. How was your math test? Did, you know, did you make up with Jenny after your fight yesterday? But what also surprised us is that the parents also talked about their day with their children. They talked about what happened at work or what happened in their social life. So they're starting to open up the world for their teenagers. This is what an adult world looks like. This is, this is the world you're going to be developing into, right? It's not just your perspective on the world, I'm telling you stories about my world. So it's really opening the world up for them. So that's a lot of it.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  But then about a third of the stories are these family stories where the family is talking about, something is said and somebody says, and it's just as frequently the child as the parent. That's like when we went to grandma's last Thanksgiving and then they start talking about that. Or that's like when we went to see Jaws. And embedded in those conversations, you get family history where parents will start talking about when they were children or their grandparents' lives.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  And then it turns out the families that told more of these everyday stories were in fact doing better. But what really predicted good functioning, both for the family and for the child, were the family stories.

• 19:35Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, can you talk a little bit about that? When you say that the children were doing better, they had better well-being. How so?

• 19:42Speaker 02

  So families that tell more stories show more trust and community within the family. Then specific to the child, children within families that tell more of these stories, and particularly tell them in a certain way, and I do want to come back to that, have higher self-esteem, they have higher academic competence, are doing better in school, they have higher social competence, they are more socially skilled. And in later research, because of course we followed up on this first study with lots and lots of research, as they get older and you can start to assess more mature aspects

• 20:26Speaker 02

  of well-being, like a sense of agency, a sense of maturity, a sense of meaning and purpose in life, all of that is higher for children and adolescents and young adults who know more of these family stories.

• 20:53Shankar Vedantam?

  So as you were probing the relationship between these family stories and well-being, including long-term well-being, you and a colleague created an instrument called the Do You Know Scale. What does this tool do, Robin? And what are some of the kinds of questions you have on it?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  The Do You Know scale is a 20 item yes/no questionnaire that Marshall Duke and I developed, simply to assess as a very, very rough index the extent to which families talk about their shared and family history. We ask adolescents and young adults, do you know where your parents met? Do you know where your mother went to school? Do you know what sports your father played in high school? Do you know where your grandmother grew up? Do you know what school your grandmother went to? Do you know how your grandparents met? So we're not getting stories. We're just getting yes/no. But in order to answer yes to a question like that,

• 21:55Speaker 02

  we're making the assumption you must have been told these stories. And it turns out it's a pretty good assessment of it in two ways. One, this very simple 20 questions, yes/no, is a good index. It relates to self-esteem, agency, meaning and purpose in life, emotional competence. So there's something that this is tapping into that's meaningful.

• 22:26Shankar Vedantam?

  There was one question on the Do You Know scale that I found very striking. It's, do you know about a relative whose face froze in a grumpy position because he or she did not smile enough? What was the point of asking that question, Robyn?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  That was, Marshall and I are both of Jewish heritage. And this, I think, is something that is culturally Jewish. We both grew up with caregivers, parents or grandparents, who would say to us when we would cry or scowl, be careful, your Aunt Linda cried all the time and her face froze in that position.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  And we both had that story. So when we were thinking about family stories, we would just, it was kind of an inside joke, to be honest. So we ended up just tagging it on to the end of the questionnaire. But we get asked about that question more than any other question.

• 23:33Shankar Vedantam?

  So one of the things that you pointed out, and I think is important to underline, is that the key here is not just the knowing of stories in an informational sense, but you discovered there was something powerful about the process of family storytelling. Can you talk about this idea, Rob, in that what happens, that the important thing here is not the facts, but in some ways, the process by which those facts are arrived at?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely. The key here is storytelling, not just stories. So yes, it's important that we know the stories, but the process of learning those stories, hearing those stories, sharing those stories, constructing those stories together is what really is important in terms of this positive youth outcome.

• 24:17Shankar Vedantam?

  So when telling family stories, you say that adults might be modeling the regulation and modulation of emotion. And in some ways, children are learning from this. How so, Rob?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  I think both when we're constructing stories, helping children understand their own experiences or when we're talking with children about our experiences, the way that we talk about our emotions and how we reacted in the moment and how we dealt with that emotional reaction helps children understand appropriate emotional regulation. That's a very abstract sentence. Let me give you a sense of what I mean by that. One of the really important things about reminiscing about the child's own emotional experiences is, you know, the child throws a tantrum in the supermarket. And that's the worst time

• 25:15Speaker 02

  to try and sit down and have, you know, a calm conversation with them. You just want to get out of the situation. But then later, when the child calms down, it's important to sit down and say, let's talk about what happened. You know, why were you so upset? And not to say, that was bad, you were wrong. But what happened? You know, why were you upset? Okay, I understand why that upset you. But maybe being that upset was not the best way to get what they wanted. And to help them figure out how to recognize their emotions and resolve them and regulate them.

• 25:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. So in other words, the story is helping you name the emotion, to understand how it came about, to understand what options you might have had in the moment. So it's allowing you in some ways to recreate the event in some ways and ask, how could you maybe have reacted differently?

• 26:06Speaker 02

  I could not have said that better. And when parents tell stories about their own childhood, they're of course not talking about their child's emotional reaction. But often those stories are told in moments where the kids are struggling with something. So the parent's story becomes, well, okay, let me tell you how I dealt with something like that in my life and the lesson I took from it. Maybe that will help you think about your life. They're worldviews. Stories are little models of the world.

• 26:48Shankar Vedantam?

  You found, Robin, that the way in which people tell these family stories is really important. And you've identified two common styles that parents use when telling family stories. What are these two styles?

• 27:02Speaker 02

  So some parents, some families are very elaborative or collaborative. So I'll give you an example. It's a very simple example. This is actually one of my favorite conversations. It was between a mother and her eight-year-old child. And they had gone to Callaway Gardens, which is a recreational beautiful garden near here. They'd been on a long bike trip. And the child, I'll call her Rebecca, was riding on the handlebars of the mother's bike. And the mother was a bit of a daredevil and Rebecca was a little scared because her mother was kind of going a little wild. And her mother is saying, you know, oh, it's so much fun, you know, rushing down those cobblestones.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  And Rebecca was saying, yeah, I was, you know, I was a little scared. And the mother, they both laughed, so they're not laughing at Rebecca. They're laughing together. The mother says, yeah, you were a little scared. I was, maybe I shouldn't have done that. And then, you know, what else do you remember about it? And Rebecca says, oh, I was getting so tired. And, you know, I wanted to be home. And the mother like confirms, it's like, yes, it was a long day. And, you know, but we had, but they're laughing and they're having a good time. And at the end, the mother says, we have a good time together, don't we? And Rebecca says, yes, we do. So they had different perspectives on that event. Rebecca may not have had as much fun as her mother.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  But they kind of come to an agreement that they enjoy being together and that they accept each other for who they are.

• 28:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, and they're constructing the story together, even though in fact, they don't exactly have the same story.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  They don't have the same memory.

• 28:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, but they're putting the two memories together and in some ways coming up with something that is a collaborative, shared memory.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And we see that even in the larger families when it's a whole family together. And this is also really particularly important. I mean, obviously, it's important to talk about the fun times, the positive events, laughing, creating those bonds. But it's also important to talk about the challenging experiences. Like I mentioned, having a temper tantrum. If you never talk about it, the child never learns what to do with that emotion the next time it happens. We asked families to talk about challenging experiences. Many of them talked about an illness or death, death of a grandparent or a beloved family pet. And the families that were more collaborative,

• 29:36Speaker 02

  who really shared the emotional experience, you know, I know that you were really sad about that. I was sad too. I remember, you know, that you, you were crying when Suzie came over to hug you and. That kind of shared emotional resonance really helps us deal with grief and mourning and difficult experiences.

• 30:11Shankar Vedantam?

  There's also a second style of storytelling that you studied, Robyn, and you call this a repetitive style of storytelling. What is this style? What does it look like?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  So rather than being, asking open-ended questions, you ask close-ended questions. Did you have fun, rather than how did you feel? And that there's no opportunity for the child to do more than say yes or no. Or even saying something like, you remember your grandmother's cookies, don't you? You know, maybe that's not always important to the child. Maybe she wants to talk about the ornaments that were on the Christmas tree. So it's not really giving the child an opportunity to recall their perspective on the event or what they remember. And when the child doesn't remember, the parent will simply repeat the question.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  You know, who, who, who drove down to Florida with us? Who was in the front seat? Don't you remember? Who was in the front seat with us? And the child just doesn't remember, right? So it's almost as if the elaborative collaborative style is, their, their goals are different. Their goals are to create a shared story in the moment that creates a resonance and a shared history and helps us to bond and understand each other.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  The more non-elaborative or repetitive parents, it's about getting the facts right. I remember this is a mother with her four-year-old son, who was a dinosaur fanatic. And they were talking about going to a natural history museum. And she was asking about seeing the T. rex. And he was like, no, there was no T. rex. And she was like, yes, there was. There was a T. rex there. Don't you remember? And she goes on and says, you know, and then we saw, you know, the exhibit on this dinosaur and that dinosaur. And he's like, yeah, there was a brontosaurus and da-da-da-da. And he lists them. He says, but there was no T. rex.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  And she's saying, I know there was a T. rex. And then he says, no. And he names another museum. And she says, oh, that's right. But it was almost as if there was a T. rex there. So she, you know, it's not a collaboration of kind of, oh, maybe there wasn't. You know, maybe my memory could not be accurate, or maybe the way you're remembering it is different.

• 32:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  You know, there's kind of a, an assumption that I remember it correctly and you don't. And it's my job to make sure you remember it correctly.

• 33:03Shankar Vedantam?

  I asked Robyn why she thought families with collaborative styles of storytelling functioned better than families that told stories in order to get the facts right, or families that didn't tell stories at all.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  We create our sense of self through our sense of our experiences. I am the person I am because I've had these experiences. This has made me the person I am today. This has set up my beliefs, my goals, my values. Particularly in adolescence and young adulthood, when we really, all of us go through a period of identity questioning, right? As children, we don't question our family's values, their religious values, their community values, their moral values.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  But then we get to an age where we have more resources. We're moving out into the world. We have a greater set of friends and contacts. We can think about things more abstractly. We start to go through what Eric Erickson called the identity crisis. Who am I? Who do I want to be? You know, just because my parents go to church, do I want to go to church? Just because my parents vote for this political party, is that my political party? Many, many adolescents and young adults end up in the same place as their parents. But we all go through that process of exploration and questioning.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  And that's when we really start to put together what's called a life story or a life narrative. How did I become the person I am? And who do I want to be? In doing that, we need material. We certainly have our own experiences. But what we've discovered is that adolescents and young adults really draw from their parents' stories, the stories their parents tell them about their childhoods and their family history, to figure out what their own personal experiences mean and how to make sense of it. It's how they draw their life lessons and moral stances.

• 35:14Shankar Vedantam?

  An interesting finding from your research, Robin, is that knowing family stories appears to help people be more resilient in the face of adversity. And you say this might be because hearing other people's struggles provides us with something that you call vicarious memory. What is vicarious memory?

• 35:34Speaker 02

  A vicarious memory is a memory that you have of something that happened to somebody else. So I can tell you, for example, I can tell you a story that happened to my husband when he was a child. I wasn't there. I didn't know him when he was a child. But he's told me that story. I know that story. And so I have a vicarious memory of it. That's what these intergenerational narratives are. Most of our knowledge of the world is vicarious. And these vicarious memories essentially provide models or views of how the world works.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  So when we have these stories of our parents and our family, they become ways of understanding both how the world works and how we fit into that world.

• 36:42Shankar Vedantam?

  One of your studies looked at how children coped following the 9/11 attacks, with specific attention to the role of the family stories being told. Tell me about that study and what you found.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  What we discovered is that the families who had been able to talk more openly and in more collaborative ways about difficult and challenging experiences pre-9/11 had kids post-9/11 who were showing better aspects of well-being. They were showing fewer behavior problems, fewer indexes of depression, less anxiety, fewer symptoms like anger problems, substance abuse. So there was something about being in a collaborative storytelling family that buffered them against some of the anxiety that we all experienced after 9/11.

• 37:42Shankar Vedantam?

  There was another study conducted by the psychologist Adam Brown of the New School that looked at how familiarity with family stories affects military veterans. What did he find, Robin?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  So, as you might imagine, military veterans who have seen combat come home, and it's very, very difficult for them to talk about their experiences for multiple reasons. One, they themselves are traumatized. They don't want to traumatize their listeners. And frankly, their listeners don't always encourage...

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Wanting to hear about the awful things that had to happen. We saw this with World War II vets, Holocaust survivors. It's a general pattern of people who have experienced trauma. We see it with refugee families. But the veterans who came home having experienced traumatic combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ones who knew more of their family history showed higher levels of adjustment and well-being than those who did not. And again, it's some suggestion that having that as a buffer is helpful.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  And I think it's because that tells you we are a family that perseveres. We've been through hard times. We've gotten through them. We stay together. We get through it.

• 39:24Shankar Vedantam?

  In one of the stories that you elicited from one of your research participants, a 14-year-old named Mary, she told you about a story involving her grandfather and her father. Tell me that story, Robin.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  This was an African-American family. And it shows how family stories can situate us not only in family history, but in world history. So this is a story about the civil rights movement and about this family's role in the civil rights movement. So Mary told us this story that her father, when he was in a stroller, was taken to a civil rights rally where MLK spoke in Atlanta by his, I think it was by his grandparents. And he still remembers it, even though he was so young, he was in a stroller. And... According to the story,

• 40:22Speaker 02

  it really changed his perception of the world. He felt validated and it was the awakening of his political consciousness. Now, is that possible? Probably not if he was in a stroller. But it's still a great story. And Mary herself used that story to talk about her own interests and work in political activism.

• 40:56Shankar Vedantam?

  So when Mary tells that story of her father in a stroller listening to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., what she's saying is, that is my story as well.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  That is my story, not just of me and my family, but of my people.

• 41:22Shankar Vedantam?

  You found that when young people tell family stories from the perspective of a parent or an ancestor, this can have very powerful effects. You once heard a story from a 14-year-old named Dave, who told you a story about his mother when she was in high school. What was the story?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Dave was, he was 14. And he talked about this story where his mother was also in junior high or middle school. And she was at the school bus stop and she overheard one kid bullying this other little boy. And she went up to him, and this is the story that Dave tells. She went up to him and she said, "Stop bullying that kid", even though she was really scared herself and was afraid of what the bully would do to her. And the bully said, "What's it to you?" And she said, "It's not right." And so the bully hauled off and hit her. And then he comes back. He said, "But my mother, you know, she didn't even realize her nose was broken, but she went to the hospital and indeed, her nose got broken.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  And that was just such a courageous thing for my mom to do, to stand up to a bully like that." And the coda of the story, and this is really critical too, is, "And it really taught me how important it is to stand up to bullies." So Dave is putting himself in his mother's shoes, in her head. What is she thinking? What is she saying? How is she feeling? And that even though she was scared, she did it anyway. So it really is this lovely model of what it means to be morally courageous that he's internalizing.

• 43:09Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, he's essentially saying, "My mother could be courageous when she was 14. I can too."

• 43:16Speaker 02

  The developmental age matching, I think, is important because every child that age thinks their parent doesn't understand them and never went through anything like this. But this is, she's like me. And of course, parents are identity figures. I'm like her.

• 43:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Stories are not just stories. They are sophisticated tools that humans use to pass on values, norms, and the complex contours of relationships. In family settings, stories can be engines of meaning, identity, and purpose. When we come back, how we can start to tell better stories. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 44:16Speaker 05

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• 45:16Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Robin Fivush is a psychologist at Emory University who studies family stories. She's found that intergenerational storytelling has a wide range of psychological benefits that range from increased resilience to higher self-esteem.

• 45:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Robin, you and your colleague Marshall Duke have theorized that there are three types of family stories and that one of these three is the most predictive of positive outcomes. What are these three types of stories, Robin?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Ascending, descending, and oscillating. These are not about particular stories. It's about the shape of the whole family saga, so to speak. So this is really the family history. So ascending, in some sense, it's the American dream. You know, we came with nothing, we worked hard, and we succeeded. Ta-da. Descending is, things are bad, they only got worse, things are never going to get better. And oscillating is, life happens. There's good in life, there's bad in life. We will talk about the bad things that happened, but we'll also put them in the context of all of the good things that happened.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  So, for example, we came, we worked hard.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, we didn't have as much success as we might have liked. There were some back steps that we had to take, but we overcame. And now, we are here and we're still together. That's a characterization, because all family sagas are a little bit of all of those. But the problem with in ascending, everything's great all the time, is that it's not. And life happens. And if that's all, if that's your model, when something bad happens, you have no resources. You have no, "Well, I know Grandpa Joe went through something like this and was okay." You have nothing to rely on.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  So you just have no coping skills. Descending, of course, is this kind of spiraling down into rumination. So the oscillating story is one where you have a sense of, life has its ups and downs, but we are a strong, persevering family. We will overcome. We will get through this.

• 47:53Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that it's really valuable for parents to share stories of their own transgressions with their children. What are these transgression stories and why are they important to share?

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Transgression stories are stories that really challenge our sense of who we are. We did something that we're ashamed of, not proud of, we feel guilty about. We hurt somebody or did something wrong. And we all do it. I mean, hopefully, in our lives, small transgressions. We lie, we cheat, maybe we do a little bit of stealing, or we betray a trust, we break a promise. So, for example, we're working with adolescents. So the stories that the parents tell, the transgressions are minor. They cheated on an exam, relatively minor. A lot of them are about lying to their parent or sneaking out.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  I think sometimes adolescents and young adults think that their parents don't understand what it is to go through teenage angst, don't understand what it is...

• 49:02Speaker 02

  To be angry, or dark, or moody. But in fact, we all have those memories. And it's one thing to say, oh, yes, I felt like that too when I was your age. I think it's another thing when you tell a story like this. It gives it a texture, a reality. It's like, you really were a brat. Wow, you do get it. You get who I am. You get what I'm feeling.

• 49:38Shankar Vedantam?

  You also say that collecting and saving physical objects can also keep family stories alive. Robin, you treasure an object that connects you to a woman whom you've never met, named Annie Lester. What is this object, and who was Annie Lester?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  The object is a diamond engagement ring. So when I married my husband, unfortunately, both of his parents died relatively young, and neither was alive when I met him. So I never had the opportunity to meet either one of them. But when we got married, he was able to give me his mother's ring. His mother's name was Annie Lester. And he has a fairly large and very good storytelling family. So I have been enmeshed in stories about Paul, his father, and Annie Lester, his mother. And everybody has these fabulous stories.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  But I never got a chance to meet them. But through this ring, I feel connected to his mother. And his mother was, she was a wisp of a woman who was a force of nature. She also was very wild in her teenage years. Settled down and was just fiercely loyal to her family. And anybody who did any kind of threatened harm to her family got a lesson from Annie Lester. She had a sharp tongue and wasn't afraid to use it. She was stubborn, but unbelievably loving.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  And I just love those characteristics. So I feel connected to her, even though I've never met her. Stories carry a connection even when that person is no longer there. And that connection, for me, with Annie Lester is a connection of love and compassion, so that I can still feel that love and compassion even when the person is no longer there.

• 52:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Robin Fivush is a psychologist at Emory University. Robin, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

• 52:15Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, your questions answered. We'll dive into listener stories and questions about Stoicism with philosopher Massimo Pigliucci. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 53:33Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 53:38Shankar Vedantam?

  When you hear someone described as stoic, what pops up in your mind? Do you think of this person as being emotionless? Would you describe them as having a stiff upper lip? Are they repressing their feelings?

• 53:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Our modern understanding of the word stoic has strayed from the meaning embraced by stoic philosophers in the ancient world. Today, it's often used to imply that someone is emotionally stunted or joyless. Yet philosopher Massimo Pigliucci says that stoicism, as understood by thinkers such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, can offer us a path to greater well-being and satisfaction. We talked with Massimo in a recent episode of Hidden Brain called U2.0: The Wisdom of Stoicism. He joins us again today for an installment of your questions answered. Massimo Pigliucci, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 54:35Speaker 06

  It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me back.

• 54:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Massimo, you talked in our first discussion about how you used to assume that stoicism meant like being Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Do you hear that a lot when you talk to people about stoicism? And where do you think that impression of stoicism comes from?

• 54:53Speaker 06

  Yes, I do hear that a lot, which is kind of ironic because Mr. Spock is actually one of my favorite fictional characters. But on the other hand, I wouldn't suggest any actual human being to try to live as Spock does. So it puts me in an odd position of having to defend both Spock and stoicism, which requires some mental gymnastics. I think where it comes from is, over time, over centuries, the words that identify

• 55:25Speaker 06

  Several of the major Greco-Roman philosophies, not just Stoicism, but also Epicureanism, skepticism and cynicism. They kind of degenerated in normal parlance, in common parlance, to mean something that is rooted distantly in the original, but it's actually quite distorted. For instance, think about Epicureanism, right? If today I say, "Oh, I'm in Epicurean," people immediately start thinking about sex, drugs and rock and roll. But that was definitely not the way Epicures thought we will live our life, we should live our life. He thought that the most important thing was stay away from pain, physical and mental, if possible, and then to pursue very mild pleasures, you know, friendship, a simple meal, that sort of stuff. Same thing with Stoicism.

• 56:09Speaker 06

  Today, it often means stiff upper lip attitude associated usually with the stereotype of, you know, British men and things like that. Suppression of emotion hints the Spock idea. Now, those are connected vaguely to something real about Stoicism. Stoicism is in fact about endurance, in part. That's where you get the stiff upper lip, although they're not the same thing. And Stoicism is about being conscious of your emotions and trying to regulate them in a way that is actually good for you. And you can see how you can go from there to the simplistic version of, "Oh, that means I just need to suppress my emotions."

• 56:51Shankar Vedantam?

  So in our earlier conversation, you talked about an idea from Marcus Aurelius, that is, if the cucumber is bitter, don't eat it. So you can't make the cucumber unbitter. So rather than focus on something you cannot control, focus on the things you can control. I'd like to share a listener's story that I think is a good encapsulation of the idea that we should avoid eating bitter cucumbers. This comes from listener Adam.

• 57:16Speaker 07

  So I was an electrical engineering student at the University of Michigan. And as you can imagine, this meant lots of stressful problem sets and lots of stressful exams. But funny enough, taking exams wasn't actually the part I dreaded most. The real horror always came after the exam was finished. When everyone poured out in the hallway outside the lecture hall. That's when the postmortem would begin. Hey, man, what'd you get for question two? I did a seven equivalent for question four. What did you do? See, I'm a terrible test taker, so these conversations were absolute torture to me. Within the minutes, I'd discover all the ways my answers were different from my friends. And I'd be convinced of my failure as an engineer.

• 57:56Speaker 07

  Now, one day, after a particularly brutal electromagnetics final, I walked out feeling devastated and certain I bombed it. Sure enough, my friends were also worried, waved me over to go over answers with them. But as I was walking over there, it suddenly hit me. The ink was dry. The grades were now in the hands of the professor and completely out of my control. Why put myself through the stress of confirming whether I'd messed up when there's nothing I could do about it?

• 58:23Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think, Massimo? Was Adam correctly channeling his inner Marcus Aurelius?

• 58:28Speaker 06

  Oh, perfectly. I think Marcus would have been very, very happy about it, very proud. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the reasoning there is exactly correct, right? Once the test is done, it's over. There's nothing you can do to change it. The only thing you can do is to learn from your mistakes eventually, if you actually did make mistakes, and then get ready for the next test, right? So to subject yourself to these after-the-fact, you know, postmortem analysis, where you're gonna have all sorts of doubts, which may not be justified. Yes, your answers may be different from those of your friends, but that doesn't mean you got the wrong answers. They may be the ones that were wrong, right? There is no way to know until you get the results of the test. So my advice would be to do exactly that.

• 59:12Speaker 06

  After the test, say, guys, I need a break. I'm walking back to my room. I'm reading a book. I'm listening to music. Whatever it is that relaxes you and makes you feel better. And then wait for the test and see what actually happened.

• 59:26Shankar Vedantam?

  So I want to play you the rest of what Adam told us. He doesn't check his answers with his friends. He says the test is done, the postmortem is pointless. A few days later, the test came back graded.

• 59:37Speaker 07

  Now, when the graded exams came back a week later, something surprising and kind of funny happened. I'd gotten a 94 out of 100, one of the top grades in the class, an A. But here's the kicker. Out of the five questions, I'd gotten every single one wrong, every one. The teaching assistant in his notes explained they were all arithmetic errors, little multiplication slip ups. So he just took off one or two points on each question. And at the top of the exam, I kind of even remember him writing. He said, "You clearly know electromagnetics. You just need to work on your multiplication." Now, had I done the hallway review with my friends after the test the week before, I would have spent the whole week convinced I'd failed and imagining my future career ruined. And it would have all been for nothing.

• 1:00:22Shankar Vedantam?

  So Massimo, this reminds me of that saying I read somewhere. "I'm an old man and I've had many worries, most of which never happened."

• 1:00:30Speaker 06

  Exactly. And Seneca, in fact, one of the Stoics, the ancient Stoics, makes that point repeatedly in his letters to his friend Lucillas. He says, "You know, a lot of the times we worry about things that are actually not going to happen. And if that's the case, then why worry in the first place? You're creating a problem that may not in fact exist." Now, I'm happy that that was the conclusion for the listener. However, it could, of course, have gone the other way around. And that would have certainly not changed the basic point. I mean, even if he had in fact failed the test and done horribly, and it turns out he's a horrible engineer and maybe you should switch to, I don't know, music as a major, the same principles applies.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  The thing was over, no sense in worrying about it, until you are back in a position to do something about it. It is really about agency, right? So it's not a question of not caring. "Oh, I'm not worried as in I'm not caring." Of course you care. You do want to do well in your tests, right? But caring is, means... Doing your best to actually do well on the task and then move on. And learn, once the time comes, learn from the mistakes if you actually made any. And if it turns out that the mistakes were in fact dramatic, so much so that you actually have to rethink, you know, the rest of your life, okay, well, that's also under your control. You can do that. It may be painful. It may be not what you expected, but it's

• 1:02:00Speaker 06

  still, the same principle still holds.

• 1:02:02Shankar Vedantam?

  What are some of the other central principles of Stoicism, Massimo?

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  Well, one of the fundamental principles is that our goal in life should be to live rationally and prosocially, which the Stoics put it in this way. They said, we should live according to nature, meaning according to human nature. Their analysis of human nature is that we are essentially animals. So we need the same things that a lot of other animals need, right? Shelter, food, water, that sort of stuff. But we are specifically animals that are highly social and capable, at least, of reason. We're not always reasonable, but we, in fact, even often arguably, but we're certainly capable of it. Reason is the way, is the best way that we have to actually solve our problems. So according

• 1:02:52Speaker 06

  to the Stoics, therefore, if that's human nature, then a good human life means to try, to do your best, to live prosocially, to cooperate with other people, and to try to solve your problems rationally. And I think that's excellent advice across the board. Another one of the fundamental Stoic concepts is cosmopolitanism. The notion is that we should do our best to think of everyone else on the planet, regardless of where they live and whether we know them personally or not, as our brothers and sisters, or our relatives, friends, and stuff like that. Why? Well, because we're all rational animals.

• 1:03:31Speaker 06

  We all share this, this basic human ability to, and propensity to live socially and, and to use reason to solve problems. Therefore, there is no reason, in fact, reason itself tells you that, that it's nonsense to just treat other people differently. They're just like you. And it's only an accident of personal history, whether you know them or not, you met them or not. So cosmopolitanism is another one of those fundamental Stoic concepts.

• 1:03:58Shankar Vedantam?

  So when we look across cultures and religious traditions, we can often see core themes that come up again and again in different practices and beliefs. We got an email from listener Amy who writes, "Stoicism is Taoism. Taoism is to seek balance, to find the harmonious flow, to achieve but not strive, to be centered in the present. Stoicism took the allegory of Taoism and made it specific, practical for the West." What's your take on Amy's note, Massimo?

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  Well, again, there are some similarities for sure. There are some passages in Marcus' series that I could point out, and they do really sound Taoists. For instance, one of my favorite is when Marcus tells himself that if there is an obstacle and your first instinct is to just go straight at the obstacle, you bump your head against the wall, that might not be the best way to do it. If you stop and reflect about things, there may be a way around it, or above it, or under it. And he says, I'm paraphrasing here, he says that essentially the obstacle can become the way, the way forward. In other words, the obstacle itself might suggest to you another way of doing things

• 1:05:09Speaker 06

  that uses the obstacle in your favor instead of against you. Now, that really is straightforward Taoism. This is going with the flow. However, that's only one component of both Taoism and Stoicism. They differ in a number of other respects. And also, we have no reason to think that one directly influenced the other. Taoism took shape a little earlier than Stoicism, about a century or so, or thereabout earlier. But we have no reason to believe that there has been any contact between the two cultures in that sense, in sort of a cross philosophical exchange, so to speak. Also, there are a number of other things in Stoicism

• 1:05:52Speaker 06

  that don't find any, as far as I know, I'm not an expert on Taoism, but as far as I know, they don't find a correspondence in Taoism. For instance, the notion of cardinal virtues, the notion that we should live According to nature in the specific sense that I was saying earlier. But certainly, there are similarities and not just with Taoism. Buddhism is perhaps even more obvious example of a similarity between the two philosophies on the eastern and western tradition. In terms of their ethics, there often are major differences in terms of metaphysics. The way in which, let's say, Buddhists or Taoists think about the universe and how it works is very different from the way the Stoics do.

• 1:06:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Some of our listeners have noticed a discrepancy between those who talk about Stoicism and those who practice it. A listener named Gigi said she has been romantically involved with men who say they are Stoics, but also prone to volatile temper tantrums.

• 1:06:51Speaker 08

  There was one who would send me something from Meditations every single day. And though they proclaim to follow Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and all of these great philosophers with these great ideas, it seemed like the more they got into Stoicism, the less centered they were, the less calm they were, the less stoic they were. Anyway, love your show. Thanks for everything you do.

• 1:07:16Shankar Vedantam?

  So Massimo, it has to be tempting to carry around a copy of Meditations to talk the Marcus Aurelius talk, but not walk the Marcus Aurelius walk?

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  Yes, and unfortunately, the listener is pointing to a whole subcategory, subclass, so to speak, of aspiring Stoics who is really making a fundamental mistake. These are the so-called red pill, manly man kind of approach to Stoicism.

• 1:07:42Speaker 06

  I call it Broicism, as in bros. And it's a really a distortion of the original Stoicism. In the case of the Broics in particular, what they often point out is that the word virtue, which of course plays a major role in Stoic philosophy, comes from the Latin vir, V I R, which also means man. And therefore, they conclude that, you know, manly man. Well, yeah, but that's really a very partial view, even on simple, straightforward etymological grounds. If they hadn't taken an additional step, they would have discovered that the word vir in Latin itself is actually a translation of the Greek arete, which means excellence. It means just to do the best you can.

• 1:08:26Speaker 06

  And arete is gender neutral. So there is really no particular reason to think that Stoicism is a manly kind of thing.

• 1:08:37Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, Stoicism, emotions, and relationships. We look at how Stoic ideas can help us navigate tricky interactions with family, coworkers, and friends. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 1:10:39Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:10:43Shankar Vedantam?

  The Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius once wrote, "Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart."

• 1:10:57Shankar Vedantam?

  But when the people we are bound to drive us crazy, when they leave their dirty dishes in the sink, or talk over us at an important work meeting, or gossip about us with other friends, loving them with all our heart can be difficult. Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher at the City College of New York. He's the author of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life.

• 1:11:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Massimo, I want to talk about the role of Stoicism in dealing with various emotions. A listener named Jabari reached out to share a moment when he had to call on his Stoic reserves during a moment of panic at Disney World. He and his kids got into one of those pods you sit in for an adventure ride, and the attendant locked the door.

• 1:11:44Speaker 11

  And then I said, wait, I don't see how to get out of here. I don't see any way out of this pod. And I myself started to have my own internal panic attack. And I started to internally break down. And I looked to my right, and I saw three of my kids. They were just having the time of their life. And I said to myself, if I melt down right now, that's going to impact them. So I had to tap into the different areas of Stoicism and just really calm myself

• 1:12:28Speaker 11

  and endure the two- or three-minute experience that I was going through. And when it ended, I was OK.

• 1:12:38Shankar Vedantam?

  So, Massimo, it's striking to me that Jabari tapped into his inner Stoic because he wanted to do right by his kids. I think many parents have experienced moments like this. You want to freak out, but if you freak out, your kids are going to freak out, so you keep yourself together. Is this something of a Stoic hack?

• 1:12:55Speaker 06

  Yes, it is. And in fact, congratulations to the listener for really having mastered that so well. And again, this isn't about suppressing emotions, right? The listener himself said that he was feeling the panic, right? He just managed to handle it so that it wouldn't show up externally because that would make things worse and it would affect his children. So that's an important thing to keep in mind. Stoics are not people who don't feel or somehow manage to completely repress the emotions. All of the ancient Stoics are very clear about this. Epictetus says, you know, I don't, to his students, "I don't want you to become unfeeling statues." You know, you're human beings, not pieces

• 1:13:37Speaker 06

  of marble. And Seneca says, "Even sages, even the ideal Stoic, of course, has feelings because they're human." But the important thing is that you have the presence of mind to know how to direct those feelings and how to handle those feelings, depending on the situation, right? There may very well be a situation when you're on your own, there's no problem if you go to the bathroom and you start screaming. That's fine. It's not un-Stoic. If it makes you feel better, go for it. However, if the screaming is in the middle of the situation that we just heard and your kids are gonna freak out, then that's not a good thing to do. And good presence of mind, good self-control in that sense.

• 1:14:20Speaker 06

  Again, this is not a matter of repressing, it's a matter of handling and modulating your emotions.

• 1:14:25Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I remember I was on a flight many years ago when my daughter was maybe two or three years old and we were flying across the Atlantic. And about halfway through, the pilot comes on the intercom and he basically says, you know, "We need to turn back because there's something wrong with the plane. And we're over the Atlantic Ocean right now, so obviously it's not a pleasant idea." My daughter's sitting next to me, she's fast asleep, and I, of course, am quite freaked out because you don't want to hear that your plane has a problem when you're over the Atlantic Ocean. We turn back and as we come into land, there are fire trucks that are racing along the side of the plane as the plane is coming in to land. And so it's really terrifying. And my daughter is awake at

• 1:15:07Shankar Vedantam?

  this point, and I'm just smiling at my daughter and saying, you know, "What are you playing with? Or what shall we draw in your book?" And in my heart, of course, my heart is like jumping out of my chest. But this is along the lines of what Jabari said, but I think there's a larger lesson here, Massimo, which is that is it possible that one way in which we can learn to be better Stoics is actually to ask ourselves not how does this affect me, but how does this affect the people around me?

• 1:15:33Speaker 06

  So I think you're right that asking ourselves how our behavior is affecting other people is not only helpful in a practical sense, because you know, if we're talking about your kids or your partner or your brother, that's a significant incentive to get a hold of yourself and to manage things better than it would be if you were on your own. But also, it is very Stoic, because the whole point, or a major point, I should say, of Stoicism is, again, that we are pro-social animals. We should always think about how our actions affect other people. Epic Theodor's Taree students, that there are three disciplines that they need to practice.

• 1:16:18Speaker 06

  They're called the discipline of desire, the discipline of action, and the discipline of ascent. Desire is about reminding yourself what's really good for you and what is not good for you, regardless of what other people tell you. So in other words, it's about thinking, figuring out exactly your values and your disvalues, the kind of things that you think are important or not. The second discipline, the one of action, is entirely devoted to how am I going to behave toward other people? How am I going to put into practice my values and these values when it comes to other people? Because we're always with other people. We live in societies, you know, unless you're a Robin Selkroeser on a deserted island, you always live with other people, you're always interact with other people.

• 1:17:02Speaker 06

  So the discipline of action becomes fundamental to the way you live your life. The third one, by the way, the discipline of ascent, is about making the first two automatic. It's about training yourself to always trying to make the right decision, no matter the circumstances.

• 1:17:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's talk about the role of Stoicism in dealing with grief. Here's a message we received from listener Jules.

• 1:17:27Speaker 12

  In 2024, my best friend of 46 years, Anne, died of ALS. We spent much of the prior three years together realizing her bucket list. And during that time, on a trip to Uruguay, we listened to one of your episodes on Stoicism and agreed that it was the closest description of the type of philosophy we had both tried to live and were especially living during the time of her illness and decline.

• 1:17:58Speaker 12

  It gave me great comfort. I think it gave her great comfort. But after she died, that perspective and ability to adhere to that philosophy completely went out of the window for me. And it's been almost two years, and I have recovered that perspective. But I still look back on that time as a bit of a failure to myself and to Anne.

• 1:18:22Speaker 06

  First of all, I think that the fact that she spent time with her friends before she died and did the things that her friends wanted to do, that's beautiful. And that reminds me of one of my favorite passages in Epictetus, where he says that we should not pine after figs in winter. And what he meant by that is like, you know, figs are available during the summer. When they are available, eat them, enjoy them, not a problem. But when the winter comes, accept the fact that this is not the season for figs. Don't say, oh, if only there were figs in winter. Well, there aren't. That's just the way nature works.

• 1:19:03Speaker 06

  And the idea is to apply that to our life and enjoy our friends, our loved ones, when they are around. Sometimes we have this attitude of taking things and people for granted and then only realizing later on when they're gone that, oh, I should have spent more time, I should have been doing this or that or the other. So she did exactly the right thing. She enjoyed the figs when they were during summertime. Now, of course, then comes the regret, the grief, the part of the figs in winter stuff. Now there, I would say, one of the best things that I've read about grief from a Stoic perspective is Seneca's letter to his friend Marcia.

• 1:19:45Speaker 06

  Marcia had lost an adult son. I think he probably went off to war. And, you know, that's a perilous thing to do. So he didn't come back. And she was in grief and the grief kept going on for, you know, a couple, a couple of years. And so Seneca decides to write to her. And he says, look, it's perfectly normal that you felt grief. But now you are becoming identified with your grief. You are beginning to neglect your other family, your other children, your husband, your friends, your social duties. Now it's time to intervene. And I think he had a point. So he's acknowledging, he says, in fact, he actually says, those people who tell you that you should not feel grief at all, evidently they have never lost anybody.

• 1:20:30Speaker 06

  So he's very reasonable. He's very humane from that perspective. He says, you know, of course, if you lose somebody you love, you're going to go through grief. The question is, however, can you get out of it in a reasonable fashion and reasonable timing and get back to what, what he saw as your duties as a human being to other people? Your friend was important, but you know, there are other people out there and they also need your help.

• 1:20:55Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering in some ways from Jules's question, whether we should see stoicism as a process rather than a finished goal. In other words, should we have a growth mindset about stoicism in that we should see periodic breakdowns in our efforts to be stoic with a certain degree of, you know, stoicism?

• 1:21:15Speaker 06

  That's right. So the, the stoic sage, the ideal stoic is somebody who never goes through any trouble of that sort, right? He or she always knows how to handle things. But then Seneca himself says, look, sages are as rare as the phoenix, the mythological bird that rises from its ashes. And according to Roman mythology, there is one phoenix every 500 years. So there are not that many, right? Doesn't happen. And so the idea is to try and make progress. And of course you're going to slip back, you know, because you're a human being, you're going to make mistakes. It's okay. The right thing to do with mistakes is not to beat yourself up for it because you made the mistake, there is nothing you can do at this point.

• 1:21:59Speaker 06

  The only thing you can do is to learn from it and then get back up and resume your, your path.

• 1:22:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's talk a bit more about Stoicism in the context of our relationships with other people. Marcus Aurelius said, "It's valuable to highlight the virtues of the people around us." He writes, "When you want to cheer yourself up, think of the positive qualities of your friends and acquaintances. The efficiency of one, for instance, the moral sensibility of another, the generosity of a third, and so on." Massimo, I'm wondering whether this is not merely a gratitude practice, but a way of systematically turning our minds from that tendency to see the negative and to practice instead to see the positive?

• 1:22:42Speaker 06

  Yes, with a major caveat, however. So we're not talking just about straightforward optimism, you know, think positively kind of thing, which you hear a lot these days. Well, sometimes it's not rational to think positively. You know, there are certain things that are actual problems, and some of these problems are in fact impossible to overcome or very, very difficult to overcome, in which case just to think positively about it ends up being a way, long term, to blame the victim. Because, oh, you didn't think positively enough, and that's why that happened to you. But what Marcus is doing there is, at an intuitive level, anticipating discoveries in 20th century and 21st century psychology. It is true that exercises in gratitude are good for you.

• 1:23:28Speaker 06

  That is, they actually do something positive, something helpful to your own psyche. And what they do is they remind you, because it's too easy, especially these days, to open up your internet browser or your newspaper or listen to the radio and be flooded with all sorts of negative, really seriously bad stuff. So it's easy to fall into despair, you know, the famous doom scrolling kind of attitude. Reminding yourself that there are actual people around you that you actually know personally that are trying to do their best. They are, in fact, they have... Characteristics, you know, character traits, virtues, as the Stoics will call them,

• 1:24:10Speaker 06

  that are positive and you can emulate, you can, you can set them in front of yourself as an example of how to live or live better. I mean, that is in fact a counter to all of these negative stuff that comes in. It's not to, to discount the negativity. As I said, there are real problems, but real problems can be better handled if you actually have models of how to behave in a positive constructive fashion.

• 1:24:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's talk about Stoicism in workplace relationships. We received a message from a listener named John who shared a story about his workplace.

• 1:24:49Speaker 13

  I had a experience in my career where a very aggressive business partner took steps that were going to be very damaging to a large group of people I worked with. And most people reacted with anger, but I, for whatever reason, reacted with sadness and even pretty much thought about him as a child, somebody's baby even, and a human being who for some reason had gone astray.

• 1:25:28Speaker 13

  At any rate, it made it a more humane situation, one that I found more tolerable and actually probably helped me lead us to a better result.

• 1:25:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Would you consider John's response to be an example of Stoicism, Massimo?

• 1:25:45Speaker 06

  Yes, the Stoics cultivate this attitude of being charitable toward other people and toward themselves, to be, to be fair. In fact, they think that moral blame is not particularly useful. When you say to somebody that somebody is bad or evil or something like that, you just put a label on, on a behavior, but that label isn't particularly useful. It only allows you to dismiss that person, perhaps even to dehumanize them at some, at some level. While on the other hand, what the listener did there is exactly the Stoic thing to do. That is, here is somebody who is misguided. Epictetus often uses words along the lines of misguided. It's like, this person has problems of his own, who knows what they are, then we may

• 1:26:27Speaker 06

  or may not be able to find out what those problems are, but he does have a defective faculty of judgment. And that's the way one should look at it. There are reasons why that faculty judgment became defective, either temporarily or permanently. And now the question isn't, you know, to label the person one way or the other. The question is, what is it I can do here and now to at least ameliorate the facts of the situation? So you focus on your intentions to make things better, and you act accordingly. Blaming, it's not particularly useful. And so I think that's exactly the Stoic attitude.

• 1:27:11Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, Stoicism in an age of volatility. We'll hear listeners' thoughts and questions about how to apply Stoicism to modern problems. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:27:42Speaker 05

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• 1:28:12Speaker 14

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• 1:28:44Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:28:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Focus on what you can control. Don't expect people to be something they're not. Avoid eating life's bitter cucumbers. There are many aspects of life where the advice of the Stoics feels eminently reasonable. But then we get a breaking news alert on our phone or go on social media, and we're deluged with reminders of the disasters and conflicts all around us.

• 1:29:13Shankar Vedantam?

  What can a philosophy designed for an ancient world say to us, who are living in a world that is moving so quickly and violently? Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher at the City College of New York. He's the author of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life.

• 1:29:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Massimo, I'd like to start with a message we received from a listener named Annie. She was raised in California by British parents, whom she describes as Stoic, and she came of age during a volatile time in the United States.

• 1:29:46Speaker 15

  There were various issues happening in the late 60s through the 70s, when I was a teenager, that I very much felt should not be accepted and should be pushed against, which I did a lot of, much to my parents' distress. And likewise, as a parent myself, I raised my kids to question authority, to question the world they're living in, and don't accept everything as it is. And I think that is very germane to what is happening now in this country.

• 1:30:25Shankar Vedantam?

  So, Massimo, when a parent discourages a child's activism, is that really Stoicism?

• 1:30:32Speaker 06

  I think it's problematic. I mean, it's understandable from the point of view of the parent. One of the most important things as a parent is to make sure your kids are safe. But you know, life is what it is and it's important. Sometimes you cannot make everybody safe. And also, it's important to develop your kids from a moral perspective, from a character perspective. And activism, being involved and being aware of what's happening in the world, thinking critically, questioning authority when it needs to be questioned. I mean, that phrase is a little too easy these days. Oh, I don't, I question authority. Well, sometimes authority is correct. When I go to my doctor, most of the times I accept her authority because she's the doctor, not I. Right?

• 1:31:15Speaker 06

  Now, so occasionally I question even her authority because, yeah, well, can you explain this more? Because it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But sometimes it's okay to go with authority. But when we're talking about especially political authority and governments that go in directions that might not be good for society. And of course, you need to question them. So I think that, in a sense, almost always we live in times of turmoil. Yeah, the sixties and seventies, certainly. I would argue that current times, as we speak, are times of turmoil in many places in the world, including the United States. Now, Stoics would say that it is important to be socially and politically active. Why? Well, that's because it's one of your duties as a member of the cosmopolis,

• 1:32:00Speaker 06

  as a member of the broader family of humanity. You don't live your life just on your own. You are a part of a society and you need to do your bit in order to make society better.

• 1:32:15Shankar Vedantam?

  A listener named Jeff wrote in to ask how we might channel Stoicism when it comes to gigantic problems like global climate change.

• 1:32:23Speaker 16

  I've been aware of Stoic philosophy for years. And by the time I retired, I felt I'd mastered a hybrid Zen Stoic style of coping with life. But the past 10 years have removed the wool from my eyes. Life today as a human is not for the faint of heart. The thought of my children barely surviving in a Mad Max world with billions of desperate young refugees, sea level rise, heat dome, famine, plague, and war refugees roaming the world, made my inner stoic curl up in the fetal position and cry.

• 1:33:04Speaker 16

  But thanks to your July 21 podcast, I was able to cross the line from being unable to muster my inner stoic to facing it directly towards the oncoming storm.

• 1:33:17Shankar Vedantam?

  So Massimo, do you think Stoicism can be useful when it comes to dealing with huge planetary problems like climate change?

• 1:33:24Speaker 06

  So, yes, it can be useful. However, again, the fundamental principle here is regain your agency, reclaim your agency. And there is really not much I can do directly to affect things like climate change or international politics and so on and so forth. But that doesn't mean there are no, nothing, there's nothing I can do, right? There is a number of things that activists can and in fact do carry out that can make a difference. So the enormity of the problem is never an excuse for not acting. So there's always something you can do and the important thing is to do it, of course, with again, the usual caveat, you may or may not succeed.

• 1:34:08Speaker 06

  But that's okay because there is no guarantee in life ever, I mean, no philosophy or no, no attitude can give you a guarantee of succeeding. That's, it's not a, it's not a thing. The important part is to regain control of your agency. So I would say, for instance, in the particular case of climate change and political turmoil, it's good to be informed, but it's not good to be obsessively following the news or doom scrolling and all that sort of stuff because that simply depresses you and it really doesn't, doesn't do anything helpful. So maintain a certain broad level of information, you know, be aware of what's going on, but

• 1:34:49Speaker 06

  spend most of your time doing things that actually make a difference rather than reading every article that comes your way or responding to every social media post that, that you happen to see.

• 1:35:03Shankar Vedantam?

  The interesting thing, of course, is that I think when we are doom scrolling, we almost have the illusion that we are doing something about it because it feels like we're getting upset, we're getting outraged, and it feels like we're doing something even as we're just sitting in front of a screen and basically, you know, looking at the next screen and looking at the next screen. Marcus Aurelius had a strategy for dealing with some of our fears at times like this. He counseled himself to adopt what is called the view from above. What is this, Massimo, and how did Marcus practice this?

• 1:35:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, the view from above is a standard Stoic technique which is actually also useful in cognitive behavioral therapy, and there is pretty good modern evidence that it actually works. You can do it in a number of ways, but essentially it's about training yourself to zoom out from the specifics of the moment. One way to do it is a visual exercise, so you find a quiet moment in place in your house, you close your eyes, and then you imagine yourself zooming out from that scene, looking at yourself from above, and then looking at your house, and then looking at your city, and then going further and further out. What is the point of these exercises?

• 1:36:14Speaker 06

  It's to remind yourself that you're actually part of a much, much broader canvas, that there is a huge universe, both in space and time, and that therefore, whatever things happen to bother you in the moment, they're really tiny compared to the cosmic perspective. Now, the mistake there is to then think, oh, so they're not important. They are important to you at your scale. The view from above is just a way to remind you that your scale is not the only one, and that there are other meaningful scales at which problems will look very differently. So the idea is to relax about it and then zoom back in and see, okay, now what can

• 1:36:57Speaker 06

  I do about whatever the problem was, right? Agency is still important. But it is good, and as I said, there is very good empirical evidence from modern research, to, from time to time, sort of step back and give yourself the time to contemplate things from a broader point of view. One way to do it, by the way, is to watch videos that are helpful in this manner. One of the, my favorite is Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. And if you check it out, it's available on YouTube. That's one way to do the view from above, the meditation from above.

• 1:37:33Shankar Vedantam?

  I'd like to end with a message we received from listener Kerry. When he was in his twenties, Kerry says, he was traveling in Thailand. And one of his routines was to go swimming a mile or more out into deep waters. One day, a group of Thai fishermen maneuvered their boat near him and tried to get him to climb on board. They kept saying a word that he didn't understand, but he insisted that he didn't want a ride. I let Kerry pick up the story from here.

• 1:38:01Speaker 17

  And as I was making my way back towards the island on my own, I realized what they were saying was shark. And I had never thought about sharks, not seriously. But now my swim was turned on its head from a blissful meditative experience to quite terrifying experience. And I found this quite remarkable. So I started practicing the only thing I knew how to do to keep my heart from pounding out of my chest. I started to sing a song and it went something like this. If I'm gonna be shark meat, I'm gonna be happy shark meat. Yeah, you heard me.

• 1:38:45Speaker 17

  If I'm gonna be shark meat, I'm gonna be happy shark meat. And I continued chanting this until it became a song and pushing dark thoughts out of my mind with this trick of a song. Because I couldn't really control if I was going to be eaten by shark or not. And I was possibly shark meat whenever I went swimming. So to this day, whenever I get into the deep sea or any proverbial dark waters, I sing that song of putting away those thoughts of things I can't control anyway.

• 1:39:22Speaker 17

  And say, if I'm gonna be shark meat or car crash meat or any kind of meat, I might as well be happy meat. So that's my story.

• 1:39:35Shankar Vedantam?

  So Massimo, if you had to boil Stoicism down to three words, would happy shark meat fit that bill?

• 1:39:43Speaker 06

  It might. First of all, that's a remarkable story. And this is, you know, it's an incredible example of presence of mind and actually doing something useful in a situation that might very quickly become desperate. So now, the Stoics very often had mantras like that, that they repeated to themselves. You know, we talked about a couple of them. Don't pine for figs in winter. If the cucumber is bitter, don't eat it. And so the obstacle becomes the way. All of these things, in fact, they were very aware of this thing. And Epictetus says you should have a number of these phrases at hand for whenever the situation arises.

• 1:40:25Speaker 06

  But the listener's story also reminded me of Seneca's On Anger. In On Anger, Seneca writes about all of the techniques that might get you out of an immediate situation of anger. For instance, you know, go out for a walk, or count until 20, or go to the bathroom. You know, just anything that will, that will create a detachment, a sudden detachment from the situation so that you can de-escalate, basically. And of course, there is nothing inherently Stoic about any of those things specifically, any of those specific suggestions. What is Stoic about is the notion that I want to keep my presence of mind here. The best chance I have to do well in this situation

• 1:41:10Speaker 06

  is to act rationally and not to panic. Right? Panic has never helped anybody. And it's a, it's a great example of how you respond rationally and effectively to a situation that could very easily turn lethal.

• 1:41:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher at the City College of New York. He is the author of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life. He's also the co-author, with Gregory Lopez and Meredith Alexander Coons, of Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers. Massimo, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:41:57Speaker 06

  It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me again.

• 1:42:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:42:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Thank you to Loom by Atlassian for sponsoring the Hidden Brain 2025 Perceptions Tour. While on tour, we asked audience members to share the best piece of advice they've ever received. Here's one shared by a young attendee of our show in Boston.

• 1:42:49Speaker 18

  Hi, my name is Aria. So my piece of advice is live in the moment because it doesn't last forever. There's multiple times where this came to me. One time was I was at a playdate and my mom said it was almost time to go. And I didn't want to leave because it was with my best friend. But what I learned from that, and my mom taught me this, is that instead of crying over it or whatever, to take the time that you have and really enjoy it and spend time with it.

• 1:43:26Shankar Vedantam?

  Lovely. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:43:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Thanks again to Aria for sharing that advice. And thanks to Loom for sponsoring the 2025 Perceptions Tour. Loom is AI-powered video communication that moves teams forward, whether you're sharing feedback, obtaining approvals, or setting context. It removes the friction by making it easy to share and collaborate on work without having to be in the same room or time zone. Try Loom today at loom.com. That's L-O-O-M dot com. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 1:44:12Speaker 19

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• 1:44:44Speaker 14

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