Oprah Winfrey's boyfriend, Stedman Graham, is the author of a pop psychology book called You Can Make It Happen: A Nine-Step Plan For Success. I'm indebted to the US comedian Norm MacDonald for the observation that there's something fishy about this - presumably step one, in Graham's case, was "become Oprah Winfrey's boyfriend", while the other eight were "just hang around". To be a guru, it helps to have got to where you are thanks to some proper life experience. On this score, the Roman philosopher Epictetus - born into slavery in the first century AD, crippled, then exiled from Rome - passes the test. He also has the accolade of having written the first, and arguably the best, self-help book in history.
"Therapy culture" is supposed to be a modern invention; indeed, the people most sniffy about it tend to be the same ones lobbying for a return to the teaching of Greek and Latin in schools. And yet half of everything you'll read in the self-help section of your local bookshop turns out to have been expressed first by Epictetus the Stoic, in his book the Enchiridion, aka the Manual For Living, aka Chicken Soup For The First-Century Greek Soul.
"It's all there," said Professor AA Long, a classicist at Berkeley University, my nominated personal life coach in figuring out if Epictetus held the secret to happiness, although I suspect if I used the phrase "life coach" to his face he might hit me over the head with a copy of Plato's Republic. "Particularly this idea that judgments are in our power, that our emotions are determined by our judgments, that we can always step back and ask ourselves: 'Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?'" So, Epictetus invented cognitive therapy. Our thoughts about events determine how we feel about them, which is handy, because thoughts, with work, can be altered.
"Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things," says Epictetus (he didn't actually write the book, though, being illiterate). "For example, death is nothing terrible... the opinion about death, that it is terrible, is the terrible thing." Maybe that's taking things a little far. "But in daily life I do find myself thinking, 'What would Epictetus do?'" Long said. "I think it's useful for our everyday moods. For stepping back from getting irritated. Road rage, for example."
Another lesson from Epictetus: change is inevitable. Try to deny this, and you'll be miserable. "If you would have your children and your wife and your friends to live for ever," he says, "you are silly."
Not that the book isn't dated in parts. Epictetus also notes that just because you hear a raven croaking, that doesn't mean a terrible fate will befall you and your family. Which, until I read it, was one irrational anxiety I didn't have.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
