Living Well in a Permacrisis: What Stoic Philosophy and Psychology Say About Control, Worry and Happiness

On November 1, Collins Dictionary announced its word of the year for 2022: permacrisis, defined as "an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events". It is hard to argue with the choice. In the past twelve months:

• Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, starting the largest war in Europe since 1945 and a refugee crisis involving millions of people.
• Inflation reached levels most people under fifty had never experienced. US consumer prices rose 9.1 percent in the year to June. UK inflation reached 11.1 percent in October, the highest in 41 years, driven by energy and food.
• Europe faced an energy crisis, with households and businesses worried about how to pay for heating this winter.
• The pandemic continued in the background, and climate-related disasters, from heatwaves to floods, made the news month after month.

Surveys show the toll. In the American Psychological Association's Stress in America survey, published in October, 83 percent of adults said inflation was a significant source of stress, and 27 percent said that most days they were so stressed they could not function. Gallup's global survey of emotions found that negative experiences, such as worry, stress, sadness, anger and physical pain, reached a record high in 2021, the latest year measured.

So the question for the end of this year is a very old one: how do you live well when so much of what happens is outside your control? Philosophers have been answering it for more than two thousand years. Psychologists have been testing some of those answers for the past fifty. This post looks at what they agree on.

1. The oldest answer: the dichotomy of control

The Stoics were a school of Greek and Roman philosophers. Three of them are widely read today: Seneca, a Roman statesman; Epictetus, a former slave who became a teacher; and Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who wrote private notes to himself that we now call the Meditations. None of them lived easy lives. Seneca was exiled and eventually forced to kill himself. Epictetus was permanently lame. Marcus Aurelius ruled through war and a devastating plague.

Their central idea is set out at the start of Epictetus's Handbook:

Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.

The Stoic argument is that suffering often comes from treating things we cannot control as if we could, and neglecting the things we can. We cannot control inflation, a war or an energy market. We can control how we respond: what we pay attention to, what we value, how we treat people and what we do next.

Modern readers often add a middle category: things we can influence but not control. You cannot control whether you keep your job, but you can influence it by doing good work. You cannot control an election, but you can vote. The practical rule is simple: put your effort into what you control and influence, and practise accepting the rest.

2. What modern psychology adds

Several lines of psychological research reach similar conclusions, and some of them were directly inspired by the Stoics.

The fit is not perfect. The Stoics claimed that virtue alone is sufficient for a good life, which few psychologists would accept. Money, health and relationships matter a great deal for wellbeing, and research shows it. Poverty and insecurity are real harms, not just matters of opinion. Telling someone who cannot afford heating to "change their perspective" would be both unkind and wrong.

The useful core is narrower: when you have done what you can, how you think about what remains makes a real difference to how you feel and act.

3. Attention: the thing you most clearly control

If the Stoics were writing today, they would probably have a lot to say about phones.

The 24-hour news cycle and social media feeds are designed to hold attention, and negative, alarming content holds attention best. During the pandemic, the word "doomscrolling" entered dictionaries to describe the habit of reading bad news compulsively. Studies of news consumption have linked heavy exposure to distressing news, such as coverage of terrorist attacks or disasters, with higher levels of acute stress, even among people with no direct connection to the events.

This is not an argument for ignoring the world. Staying informed is part of being a responsible citizen. But there is a big difference between reading a good summary of the news once or twice a day and refreshing a feed every few minutes. The second does not make you better informed. It makes you more anxious, and it rarely leads to any action.

Practical rules:

• Choose your sources. A few reliable outlets, read at set times, beat endless feeds.
• Ask what you will do with the information. If the answer is nothing, you can probably read less.
• Protect the first and last hour of the day. These shape your mood and sleep more than any others.
• Turn off news notifications. Very few events require you to know about them within minutes.

4. Kindness: the surprising good news of the crisis years

There was one encouraging finding in this year's World Happiness Report, published in March. Using Gallup data, the authors found that benevolence, measured as donating to charity, volunteering and helping strangers, rose sharply in 2021 in every region of the world. Overall, it was nearly 25 percent higher than before the pandemic. Helping strangers rose most.

That fits a long line of research. Helping others is one of the most reliable ways to improve your own wellbeing. Experiments by Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues found that people who were asked to spend a small amount of money on someone else were happier at the end of the day than people asked to spend it on themselves. Studies of volunteering find similar effects.

The Stoics would not be surprised. They believed that humans are fundamentally social, members of a community that extends to all humanity. Marcus Aurelius wrote that "what is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee." This year, millions of people across Europe opened their homes to Ukrainian refugees, and many more donated money and time. Whatever else 2022 has been, it has also been a year of extraordinary generosity.

When things feel out of control, helping someone is a way to act on what is within your power, and it is good for you too.

5. Perspective without denial

Another Stoic exercise is sometimes called "the view from above": imagining your situation from a great height, as one small part of a vast world and a long history. Marcus Aurelius used it often. Done well, it does not make problems disappear, but it can make them feel more manageable.

Psychologists have studied something similar under the name self-distancing. Ethan Kross and colleagues found that people who reflect on a painful experience from a distanced perspective, for example by thinking about themselves in the third person or imagining how they will see it in ten years, tend to feel less overwhelmed and think more clearly than people who replay the experience in the first person.

Perspective is not the same as denial. The war in Ukraine is a catastrophe. The cost-of-living crisis is causing real hardship. The aim is not to pretend things are fine. It is to keep your thinking clear enough to act well.

6. A practical toolkit for the winter

Here is a short set of practices that are consistent with both Stoic philosophy and modern evidence.

Each morning

• [ ] Name one thing today that is within your control, and one that is not.
• [ ] Decide what you will do about the first.

Each day

• [ ] Limit news to set times, from a small number of reliable sources.
• [ ] Do one thing for someone else, however small.
• [ ] Get outside, move and see daylight if you can.

Each evening

• [ ] Write down three things that went well and why. This is one of the most tested positive psychology exercises.
• [ ] Ask yourself, as Seneca did, what you did well today and what you would do differently.

Each week

• [ ] Spend unhurried time with people you care about.
• [ ] Review your finances calmly and make one concrete plan, rather than worrying in general.
• [ ] Notice one worry that did not come true.

When you need more

• [ ] If stress is stopping you from functioning most days, talk to a doctor or mental health professional. Philosophy is a good companion, but it is not a substitute for care.

7. For leaders: managing teams in a permacrisis

Many people are bringing these worries to work. A few things help:

• Acknowledge reality. Pretending that the cost-of-living crisis is not happening makes people feel unseen.
• Be clear about what the organisation controls. Pay reviews, flexibility and support are within your power. Say what you are doing.
• Reduce unnecessary uncertainty. People cope better with bad news than with no news. Communicate plans early and often.
• Make help easy to find. If you offer an employee assistance programme or financial advice, remind people it exists and that using it is normal.
• Model a sustainable pace. Leaders who look calm and steady, without pretending everything is fine, give their teams permission to do the same.

Why this matters

• Stress is at record levels. Global surveys show worry and stress higher than at any time in more than a decade of measurement.
• Not all distress is avoidable, but some is. How we use our attention and interpret events changes how we feel.
• Ancient ideas have modern support. The core Stoic practices have close equivalents in some of the best-tested psychological treatments.
• Kindness helps twice. Helping others makes a real difference to them and reliably improves our own wellbeing.

Final Thoughts

It is easy to read the Stoics as advice to keep a stiff upper lip and feel nothing. That is a misreading. Seneca grieved. Marcus Aurelius worried. Their point was not to stop feeling, but to avoid being ruled by fears about things they could not change, so that they could act well on the things they could.

That seems like good advice for the end of a hard year. We cannot control the war, the energy markets or the price of food. We can control how much of our attention we hand over to fear, how we treat the people around us, and what we do next. There is good evidence that those choices matter, both for our own wellbeing and for the people who depend on us.

The permacrisis may continue into next year. But a crisis that lasts a long time also gives us a long time to practise. As Epictetus put it, it is not things themselves that disturb us, but our judgements about them. That is not a reason for complacency. It is a reason for hope, because judgements are something we can work on.

Sources

• Collins Dictionary, Collins Word of the Year 2022 (November 1, 2022): "permacrisis".
• Office for National Statistics, Consumer price inflation, UK: October 2022 (November 16, 2022): CPI inflation of 11.1 percent.
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index - June 2022 (July 13, 2022): 9.1 percent rise over the year.
• American Psychological Association, Stress in America 2022: Concerned for the future, beset by inflation (October 2022).
• Gallup, 2022 Global Emotions Report (June 2022): Negative Experience Index at a record high in 2021.
• John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Lara B. Aknin and Shun Wang (eds.), World Happiness Report 2022 (March 18, 2022).
• Epictetus, Enchiridion (Handbook), chapters 1 and 5. Quotations here follow common English translations, whose wording varies.
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6.54 and elsewhere.
• Seneca, On Anger, Book 3.36, on the evening review.
• Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (1976); Albert Ellis, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (1962).
• Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin and Michael I. Norton, "Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness", Science 319(5870) (2008).
• Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk, "Self-Distancing: Theory, Research, and Current Directions", Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 55 (2017).
• Martin E. P. Seligman, Tracy A. Steen, Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson, "Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions", American Psychologist 60(5) (2005): the "three good things" exercise.
• E. Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver, "Media's role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings", PNAS 111(1) (2014).