Elf Sternberg

One of the great touchstones of philosophical greatness, in Greek thought at least, is the ability to respect your reactions to crises and opportunities, and to exercise power over those reactions. The secret to understanding how that works can be found in writing romance novels.

If there’s one absolutely consistent theme throughout my stories, it’s that the greatest mystery in human thought is simply this one: why do we make choices and decisions at all?

I’ve come to some satisfactory conclusions, the most important of which is that choice involves nothing supernatural. There’s no “soul” that “I” don’t have any access to, that makes decisions one way or another. That decision making is based not on reason, but on emotion, and that without emotions we would be eternally caught in an optimization loop, unable to break down and make a choice. Even as we weigh choices from the most trivial to the most essential, from what to have for lunch to whom to love and marry, in the end it is emotions that rise up and say, “It’s time to break the tie. You have other things to worry about, young hairless African plains ape, like that cheetah stalking you.”

I’m also a practicing Stoic of the old school, and one of the criticisms often hurled at Stoicism is that Stoics are unfeeling, unemotional creatures who think too much about death, and let that maudlin rumination leech them of feeling.

Obviously, if on the one hand I practice Stoicism, and on the other hand I believe that our emotions are the core and essence of what we are, and that we couldn’t be human without being fully emotional, then I believe that being Stoic and being emotional are fully compatible.

I’m a writer, and writers think about emotions a lot. To borrow a page from my character creation notes, a great character always has an internal tension between two different goals, one long-term and one short-term. Since I write romances, my two protagonists often start with a short-term need to get the hell away from each other for plot reasons, and a long-term desire for affirmation, love, and finding their place in the world. The trick of good writing is to show how those two desires conflict with each other, and then to show how deciding to go for the long-term solution slowly reveals the “real person” under the conflict such that they start to see how suitable the other person is as a partner.

I believe we all have these short- and long-term goals, and that they’re frequently at odds with one another. The desire to lock myself into my mancave and write for hours on end is clearly in conflict with long-term desire to have a happy marriage, and I’ve learned that I have to consistently push away from the desk and attend to my family. My long-term goal is more important to me than my short-term desires.

That’s the primal secret to having power over your reactions. You have to recognize that a reaction is an expression of a short-term desire, and that those expressions aren’t always suitable. By practicing how you’ll react to crises and opportunities, even in the quiet theater of your own skull, you’ll have more control over yourself when the time comes to put that rumination into practice.

I think that’s why romance writers tend to have such stupendous output. They’ve uncovered the secret to dealing with harsh emotions, by rehearsing them over and over on the pages they write. Readers get to experience that second-hand, but for the writer, exploring those details and analyzing them down to their bones gives them that insight. By understanding this conflict, they find the strength to sit down every morning, face the keyboard, and write.

You should practice this too. Every morning, ask yourself one question: “What one terrible thing could go wrong today? How would I deal with it?” Take a deep breath and ask yourself, if your long-term values were fully engaged, if you were seeking to be fully and emotionally satisfied, and not the hormonal, irrational, animal reactive person you are when you’re just “thinking fast,” how would you want to react? Who would need you more than you needed yourself in that moment? Do this regularly, and you’ll be a far stronger person than someone who doesn’t.

I'm a practicing Stoic of the Modern school, although my meditative style is much more heavily invested in Buddhist traditions and I have more than a little attraction to the Secular Buddhist movement. Recently I've been reading Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True, and one thing he wrote that I really liked is an anology between the Buddhist notion of Mara and natural selection.

There's a ridiculous strain of thought in the less-educated corners of Christianity that somehow scientists worship Darwin. Evangelist Lee Summrall, who's widely published and widely read in Christian bookstores, is a typical example of the breed, so it's not just random internet wackos. But Wright's got a point: if scientists were to think of evolution as a conscious and creative force, they would have to conclude that is a nasty, capricious, and fairly horrific conscious force. Everything from the bit about the whole red in tooth and claw to the more subtle horrors of fungi that eat brains from the inside out. If we were to attribute motives to natural selection, would we happily accept cancer, Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy? Would we cheerfully embrace death itself at all?

And even more subtly, what we know about the human condition points to a pretty terrible outcome: our brains are constructed to deceive us, our emotions are hard-wired to be continually restless and unhappy, always in search of the safety and security of the tribe on the left, and the power and prestige of pulling ahead of the pack on the right.

Wright says that Buddhism is a toolkit for getting a grip on these impulses, for gaining insight into them and getting at least a little more control over them, for extending our free will just a little bit further than the few seconds every day where we actually exercise our will, and not just our habits and instincts. Because one way or another, the human condition is hard, and we need better tools for managing it.