Stoics DO Want Friendship | Nancy Sherman & Simon Drew

- The Stoic does need friendship to the extent that friendship is a natural and necessary element of human life.
- Seneca wrote plays, the themes of which often represented our need for closeness with other people.
- Nancy Sherman believes that through Seneca’s plays we find great examples of the necessity of friendship, particularly in the way that we can learn compassion and self-empathy from our friends when we we cannot achieve this on our own. She has used this in her work with military servicemen who have committed acts that were justified morally by law and rules of war, but that were also devastating from the human perspective. When soldiers feel that they have committed existential wrongdoing then it is friends who are often the counterbalance and nourishing force that bring them back from the brink of self-ruin.
- Even Marcus Aurelius realised that we need people in our lives in order to show us qualities that we would hope to embody within ourselves. In fact, he wrote in his journal about the many brilliant qualities he had learned from his family, teachers and friends.
- The Stoics wrestle with what it means to “need” something. Do we “need” friends? Well you wouldn’t necessarily desire a friend like you would desire a good meal or a nice car. It’s not about desiring or averting friendship, but rather it’s about a selection of friends without a sticky attachment. We can then lose a friend, should this happen, without anxious aversion.
- “We need to train a behaviour, the Stoics say, that isn’t saturated with acquisitiveness and… with a dread of loss ” - Nancy Sherman quote.
- It’s better to have health than to not have health, or to have friendship than to not have friendship, we just need to be prepared for possible loss. This is how the Stoics help us.
- We can and should have friendship, but by losing our grasping attachment to friends we actually guard ourselves against debilitating anxiety and suffering that so often results from loss.

Simon Drew is an Australian Alignment Coach, musician and host of the Practical Stoic Podcast. On this show he interviews some of the most influential thinkers in Stoicism and philosophy today, including Massimo Pigliucci, Donald Robertson, Ryan Holiday, Gregory Lopez, Sharon Lebell, Gregory Sadler, Nancy Sherman, Kai Whiting, and many more. He also draws inspiration from the great Stoic thinkers like Zeno, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and more. Both as a coach and as the host of the podcast Simon has helped thousands of people around the world to improve their lives using Stoic philosophy. Find Simon and his work in the following places:

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