I confess: I love watching animals do nothing. It’s a good thing, too, because that’s how they spend most of their time. If you live in the countryside or visit often, you might enjoy this as well. It’s peaceful. When I watch sheep grazing in a field, my mind shifts from the so-called complicated problems in my life to something much simpler. But it’s not just the peace that draws me in.
Animals have a lot to teach us. Tim Ferriss once joked that when people hear the word Stoicism, they might picture a cow standing in the rain—”not sad, not particularly happy, just an impassive creature accepting whatever life throws its way.” He goes on to explain that Stoicism is much more than that, but the animal metaphor still holds weight.
Take Tim’s cow in the rain. If I look into a field at a cow, chances are it’s doing one of four things: standing, walking, lying down, or eating grass. It doesn’t judge the weather. It doesn’t feel the rain and complain to the other cows: “This sucks, I don’t feel like walking today.” It just walks. Sure, cows can’t talk (or maybe I just haven’t watched them long enough), but you get the point. The weather is beyond its control, so it doesn’t worry about it.
The same goes for sheep. When I watch a sheep, I don’t see it stressing. It doesn’t judge external things as good or bad. It’s not thinking, “This grass isn’t up to my standards, I need to speak to the farmer.” It just accepts whatever comes. It might move to a tastier patch of grass or seek a dry spot to rest, but if those options aren’t available, it adapts to the alternative.
Some people think Stoicism means passively accepting whatever happens and never trying to change things. That’s a misconception. Stoics believe in making an effort to improve life—but without attaching judgment to the outcome. They don’t see events as good or bad, just as things that happen.
For Stoics, only four things are truly good: wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. The only true bad is vice—the corruption of these virtues. Everything else is neutral, or what they call “indifferent.” That doesn’t mean these things don’t matter, just that they shouldn’t define our happiness. Good health, for example, is preferred over bad health, but since it’s not entirely in our control, we shouldn’t base our well-being on it.
Animals, in their own way, embody this idea. They can learn what’s good or bad through training, but it’s usually a human assigning those labels. Left to their own instincts, they don’t dwell on these judgments the way we do. A cow might prefer fresh grass over dry, but it doesn’t despair if fresh grass isn’t available. Pain is unpleasant, but, as far as we know, animals don’t dwell on it.
Donald Robertson captures this idea in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor:
According to the Stoics, our initial reaction to pain or illness may be natural and reasonable, but amplifying or perpetuating our suffering by complaining about it over time is unnatural and unreasonable. Animals may cry out in pain and lick their wounds for a while, but they don’t ruminate about it for weeks afterward or write letters to their friends complaining about how badly they’ve been sleeping.
That’s the Stoic lesson I try to learn from animals. I don’t want to drag out suffering long after the pain has passed.
Do not let us build a second story to our sorrow by being sorry for our sorrow.
Dubois, Self Control
Of course, I’m simplifying. Animal psychology is far more complex. But that’s exactly why I find comfort in watching them.
When I look into a field, I see an animal just calmly existing. I don’t know what struggles it has faced, but whatever they were, they’re in the past. Right now, it’s just standing, eating grass. Now it’s walking. Now it’s lying down. Soon, it’ll stand again.
