“You can’t always get what you want,” sang the philosopher, Mick Jagger, “But if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”  There is some wisdom in that, if interpreted rightly.

God knows we live in a world where we don’t always get what we want, and sometimes that’s even a good thing – I thought seriously about entering the priesthood at one point in my life and through the rearview mirror can plainly see what sort of disaster that’d have been, for example. 

But the last part of that lyric is a problem, too: Do we get what we need?  Can we, really?  Interpreted literally, the answer is a resounding, “No.”  It’s just too optimistic a thought because that would mean either everything I actually wind up with was what I needed (highly questionable and disturbing), or that if I just tried a bit harder, things would work out in a satisfactory manner (a more Pollyannaish conclusion is scarcely imaginable).

But maybe the line could be interpreted in a way that would make some sense.

In this world, there are things and states of being that are desirable and there are those that are undesirable.  If we could have our choice in the matter, we’d have a life filled with the desirables and devoid of the undesirable – that would seemingly be “best.”

For instance, a long, healthy life is desirable.  And, in fact, if I could simply live forever with no discomfort and illness, perhaps that would be even more desirable – there are scientists even now who spend their days working on therapies to bring this allegedly happy state into reality. 

A fine reputation is desirable.  To be loved, loved well, and loved often is desirable.  An unlimited supply of wealth and freedom to do as we wish appear desirable.

The opposite of each of these seems undesirable – no one really wants a life that is short, sickly, friendless, devoid of a lover or two, plagued with a poor reputation, physically impoverished, and spent in some form of slavery or subservience.  This is obvious enough.

If we each made a list of things that seem desirable to us, that list would contain commonalities with most others and dissimilarities based on our own tastes and preferences – maybe part of the list would be universal and the rest personal or culturally specific.

Now, let’s examine our lists more closely.  We’ll do this by taking another sheet of paper and making two columns.  Label one column: “Out of my control.”

In that column, write down all the preferable things from your original list that, in the end, you do not control and cannot control.  Can you control how long your life is, really?  You may influence your health, but the healthiest of joggers get run down by motorists, and the most careful of eaters occasionally ingest some salmonella.  Or get shot in drive-bys.  Or choke on vomit in their sleep….

Regardless of what contemporary science is up to in terms of the search for immortality, I don’t think that, if the day arrives when a planetoid decides to collide with Earth, any of us will be left, no matter how long we may have lived otherwise.

Reputations depend on what others think of you.  What if someone gets the wrong idea about something you may have done, or a terrible rumor spreads behind your back?  What if you have even objectively done well and, yet, your community thinks that the good acts you performed are not good at all?  Notoriously, humans have a penchant for getting it wrong where truth is concerned, and that includes the truth about how we ought to think about one another: What people decide to think about you is utterly, in the end, beyond your ability to control.

Can you make people truly love you?  And even if someone loves you completely, passionately, madly with all their soul, can you make them act on that?  Wouldn’t any exhibition of force turn the act into one of violence, not love at all?  Can we control all of our circumstances – what if your beloved lives in another country and neither of you will ever see one another again because of political turmoil or economic difficulties?  Love cannot be forced… and there are barriers love cannot surmount.

Whether we have any wealth or not is just as much an accident of time and location of birth, and good or poor fortune, as anything else.  Idiots inherit billions; highly intelligent people starve to death for lack of basic healthcare and nutrition.  Impoverished but highly creative people make innovative discoveries that aren’t noticed till after their lifetimes while people who have no creativity at all profit from the inventions and discoveries.  Stock markets drop into the depths of the earth taking our retirement funds and financial stability with them.

Freedom, in the sense of freedom to pursue one’s desires, can be limited or eliminated in myriad ways.  One example: One could be arrested, unjustly convicted of a crime, and sentenced to a life of forced hard labor.  Or one develops a mental illness with a severe level of symptoms that do not respond to medications well – and this limits one’s ability to recognize one has choices or to interpret the world well enough to experience real choice for any meaningful length of time.

Most of the things on your list, I imagine, could go beneath the “Out of my control” column.  Yes, we may be able to influence some of these things, but, in the end, they are out of our hands.  In spite of our finest efforts, they will do as they will do and be as they will be.  Such is the brunt of reality.

Does this suggest one ought to give oneself over to a sophisticated pessimism?  It would be understandable should one decide to do so– it certainly makes more sense than an innocent-eyed optimism.  But I am not of a tradition that thinks our only choices are between optimism and pessimism.  Because, “if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”

There is a philosophical position that stands beyond optimism and pessimism.  It largely has to do redefining happiness, adjusting one’s expectations of the world, and raising one’s standards.  That position, developed in ancient Greece and Rome, is called Stoicism.

Much if not all our misery, the Stoic philosophers thought, comes from mistaking the desirable and the undesirable for “good” and “evil” states.  By contrast, the philosophers in question said that the desirable and undesirable are really neither good nor evil – or, to put it another way, both are really good in themselves and whether we perceive them as good or evil for us depends on our attitudes about them, our interpretation – and since this is the case, we can always adjust our thoughts to match reality.

For example, the loss of wealth makes us miserable because we think wealth is something that is ours, we should have it, it is an absolute good, we have based the meaning of our lives on the possession of it, and, so, the loss of it is extremely painful if not utterly devastating.

The Stoics would point out possession of something like wealth is out of your control.  It comes and goes.  You may influence it, but, in the end, it is the nature of wealth and economic circumstances to be in flux – and that the world itself is in flux, eternally and ceaselessly changing.  Basing one’s life on the assumption that the changing will and should behave as if it never changed and is of permanent value is simply to invite disaster and torment.

Marcus Aurelius said, “Remember that as it is a shame to be surprised if the fig-tree produces figs, so it is to be surprised if the world produces such and such things of which it is productive; and for the physician and the helmsman it is a shame to be surprised, if a man has a fever, or if the wind if unfavourable.” (Meditations, Book VIII)

And so it is with everything else in the “Out of my control” column we drew up earlier – at best, these represent things that are helpful to have or things to avoid, but they are all part of reality, both their presence and absence, their abundance or paucity.  Becoming distraught because the desirable things disappear or because the undesirable inevitably appear is a sign one doesn’t understand in the least the nature of the world in which one finds oneself.  And without that understanding, one cannot understand oneself, and without that, one cannot discover how to properly live as a human and “get what we need.”

Socrates, at his trial, once said “there are things worse than death.”  He meant that lives devoted primarily to things having no permanent value will cause us to fail in living up to the challenge of being human.  Our very humanity is a challenge, something to live up to, something requiring much effort and thought to do well.  Death itself is a part of our life, and to meet it properly is the final act that seals who it was we truly were in this world – it is the final challenge of life.  Avoiding death at all costs, selling ourselves short, completely devoting ourselves to things that have no real permanent value is, for a Stoic, failure.

Why?  Because what we truly need is much more than what we are inclined to want.  Our wants, our desires, make our lives easier, more enjoyable and pleasurable – but enjoyment and pleasure alone are not the point of human life.  They are not even the primary goals of a good human life – at best, they are byproducts of a good life, byproducts we may even have to do without sometimes.

True values for humans do not change like external things.  They are the things we could place under a second column called “In my control” on our sheet of paper.

What can I control in this world?  My attitude and my interpretation of events.  My choices.  My reason.  The intentions that motivate my actions.  My values and what I choose to value, and why.  And all of these exercised well are freedom, self-control, serenity, peacefulness, excellence of soul: living well, not just surviving.

“On the occasion of every act ask thyself, How is this with respect to me? Shall I repent of it? A little time and I am dead, and all is gone. What more do I seek, if what I am doing now is the work of an intelligent living being, and a social being, and one who is under the same law with God?” said Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, Book VIII)

What we need to live in this world well is to turn loose of attachments to things that are outside our control.  Epictetus, another great Stoic, once said something to the effect that every time one kisses one’s child, one should say under one’s breath, “One day, she will die.”  Out of morbidity, pessimism?  Is it so we love our child less? No – it’s to remind oneself not to expect more from this world than this world offers.  One’s loved ones will not live forever, and neither will you.  And when they are gone, it is the way of the world, and one must not be destroyed by it.  The day after a deep loss, one still must live and give a good example, bear burdens and responsibilities.

One must be prepared to live in a world governed by loss.

When one loves someone, it should always be with the recognition that the other may soon depart, either by death or circumstance, or because their love for one may grow cold or turn to hatred.  And this is not to inspire paranoia or a dark obsession with the possibilities and inevitabilities, but to foster an acceptance of reality and a level of detachment from things that change.

The day after your love leaves you, you will still have to give a good example, have to walk upright, bear burdens and responsibilities.  You must never be broken by the loss if external things – as the Stoic Epictetus said, nothing can steal your free will, stain your deepest and purest self… except with your permission.

One should not be so attached to anything material – such as wealth – that when Fortune or bad judgment or theft removes it, one is truly ruined.  Loss of wealth should be taken the same way as the gaining it – with an even temper.  One is who one is with or without money, and one should not allow who one truly is to be deeply affected by something as truly external to one’s worth as money.

“The god within you should preside over a being who is virile and mature, a statesman, a Roman, and a ruler; one who has held his ground, like a soldier waiting for the signal to retire from life’s battlefield and ready to welcome his relief; a man whose credit need neither be sworn to by himself nor avouched by others.  Therein is the secret of cheerfulness, of depending on no help from without and needing to crave from no man the boon of tranquility.  We have to stand upright ourselves, not be set up.”  (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book III)

What we need is self-possession and self-control, and these come only by commitment to high standards, such as serenity and justice and honor and courage, mercy, generosity, forgiveness, understanding, wisdom.  These are what a rational being needs in order to live well as a human and not only survive as a slave to things that come and go and change and torment us.  Anything more than values such as these are things we desire to make our lives pleasant.  But our real happiness doesn’t depend on anything that can be taken away from us, and that includes any of the possible pleasures available to us in this life, pleasures that can just as quickly leave us or be stolen by time and accident and the misdoings, misunderstandings, or weaknesses of others.

“You can’t always get what you want. 

But if you try sometimes

you just might find

you get what you need,”

as the song goes.   And there’s some wisdom in that worth considering.