More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
a way of demonstrating how irrationally we approach even mildly unpleasant experiences – and how we might find unforeseen benefits lurking within them, if only we could bring ourselves to look.
Real Stoicism is far more tough-minded, and involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.
When you’re irritated by a colleague at the next desk who won’t stop talking, you naturally assume that the colleague is the source of the irritation; when you hear that a beloved relative is ill and feel pained for them, it makes sense to think of the illness as the source of the pain. Look closely at your experience, though, say the Stoics, and you will eventually be forced to conclude that neither of these external events is ‘negative’ in itself. Indeed, nothing outside your own mind can properly be described as negative or positive at all. What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you
...more
“Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?”.’
Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more.
‘Whenever you grow attached to something,’ writes Epictetus, ‘do not act as though it were one of those things that cannot be taken away, but as though it were something like a jar or a crystal goblet . . . if you kiss your child, your brother, your friend . . remind yourself that you love a mortal, something not your own; it has been given to you for the present, not inseparably nor forever, but like a fig, or a bunch of grapes, at a fixed season of the year.’
Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.
our judgments are what cause our distress – and so they’re all that we need to be able to control in order to substitute serenity for suffering.
what’s the absolute worst that could happen as a result of this? Almost always, asking this question will reveal your judgments about the situation to have been exaggerated, and cutting them down to size will vastly increase your chances of replacing distress or annoyance with calm.
For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones. And dwelling on the worst-case scenario, the ‘premeditation of evils’, is often the best way to achieve this – even to the point,
We elevate those things we want, those things we would prefer to have, into things we believe we must have; we feel we must perform well in certain circumstances, or that other people must treat us well. Because we think these things must occur, it follows that it would be an absolute catastrophe if they did not. No wonder we get so anxious: we’ve decided that if we failed to meet our goal it wouldn’t merely be bad, but completely bad – absolutely terrible.
Rather than merely enjoying pleasurable things during the moments in which they occur, and experiencing the unpleasantness of painful things, we develop the habits of clinging and aversion: we grasp at what we like, trying to hold onto it forever, and push away what we don’t like, trying to avoid it at all costs. Both constitute attachment. Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments,
When you start meditating, it soon becomes apparent that thoughts – and emotions – bubble up in much the same uncontrollable, unbidden fashion in which noises reach the ears, smells reach the nose, and so on. I could no more choose for thoughts not to occur than I could choose not to feel chilly when I was woken by the ringing of the morning bell at five-thirty each day – or, for that matter, than I could choose not to hear the bell.
Taking a non-attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, starts from a different question: who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like’ doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn’t that you don’t feel motivated; it’s that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you’re procrastinating on as passing weather, you’ll realise that your reluctance about working isn’t something that needs to be eradicated, or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the
...more
rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present.
‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.’
The results were unequivocal: the 3 per cent of graduates with written goals had amassed greater financial wealth than the other 97 per cent combined.
But the deeper truth remains: many of us are perpetually preoccupied with plans.
It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort. Try the following potentially mortifying exercise in self-examination. Consider any significant decision you’ve ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: a relationship you entered despite being dimly aware that it wasn’t for you, or a job you accepted even though, looking back, it’s clear that it was mismatched to your interests or abilities. If it felt like a difficult decision at the time, then it’s likely that, prior to taking it, you felt the
...more
giving up goals, and embracing uncertainty
a friend who told him he spent too much energy thinking about his future.
In fact, it promised to help him achieve more, by permitting him to enjoy his work in the present, rather than postponing his happiness to a point five years in the future
‘Causally minded’ people, to use Sarasvathy’s terminology, are those who select or are given a specific goal, and then choose from whatever means are available to make a plan for achieving it. Effectually minded people, on the other hand, examine what means and materials are at their disposal, then imagine what possible ends, or provisional next directions, those means might make possible. The effectualists include the cook who scours the fridge for leftover ingredients; the chemist who figured out that the insufficiently sticky glue he had developed could be used to create the Post-it note;
...more
‘Start with your means. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Start taking action, based on what you have readily available: what you are, what you know and who you know.’
ask how big the loss would be if you failed. So long as it would be tolerable, that’s all you need to know. Take that next step, and see what happens.
something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed.
when I asked him what he thought was the biggest barrier to happiness for most people. ‘It’s just a total absence of awareness, except for the thoughts that are continuously passing through your mind. It is the state of being so identified with the voices in your head’
don’t you feel a certain tranquility when you seek to become the witness to your thoughts, rather than identifying with them completely?
Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.
Instead of seeking ways to solve your problems in the future, it can be illuminating to try asking yourself if you have any problems right now.
Most problems, by definition, involve thoughts about how something might turn out badly in the future, whether in five minutes or in five years, or thoughts about things that happened in the past. It can be curiously difficult to identify any problems that afflict you at this very moment, in the present – and it is always the present.
You’re vastly more likely to be killed as the result of a car crash than an air crash, and vastly more likely to die of heart disease than at the hands of a violent intruder.
if you spend time and energy protecting your home from attackers that you could have spent on improving your diet, you’ll be letting your biases guide you towards a greater feeling of security at the expense of your real safety.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact,
you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
‘Things are not permanent, they don’t last, there is no final security,’ she says. What makes us miserable is not this truth, but our efforts to escape it.
You actually have to be kind to people if you want them to like you! You have to look into their eyes!
Major, major problems. But you have to manage, because you have to. So you take what you have and you get on with it. And you can be happy like that, because happiness comes from your family, and other people, and in making something better of yourself, and in new horizons . . . right? Why worry about something you don’t have?’
By eliminating gods and the afterlife, the scientific picture of the universe seems to have sapped individual human lives of any special meaning; we fit in only as mere organisms, living out our brief lives for no reason, and then perishing. This, he suggests, is the source of the ultimate insecurity, the one that underlies all the others.
This, then, is the deep truth about insecurity: it is another word for life. That doesn’t mean it’s not wise to protect yourself, as far as you can, from certain specific dangers. But it does mean that feeling secure and really living life are, in some ultimate sense, opposites. And that you can no more succeed in achieving perfect security than a wave could succeed in leaving the ocean.
The Stoic technique of negative visualisation is, precisely, about turning towards the possibility of failure. The critics of goalsetting are effectively proposing a new attitude towards failure, too, since an improvisational, trial-and-error approach necessarily entails being frequently willing to fail. The spiritual ruminations of Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts, meanwhile, point to an even deeper kind of failure: the ultimate – and ultimately liberating – failure of the ego’s efforts to maintain its separation and security.
Like product managers with failures stuffed into a bedroom closet, we will do anything to tell a success-based story of our lives. This leads, among other consequences, to the entertaining psychological phenomenon known as ‘illusory superiority’.
perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live.
it’s worth trying to recall it when failure strikes: next time you flunk an exam, or mishandle a social situation, consider that it is only happening because you’re pushing at the limits of your present abilities – and therefore, over the long run, improving them.
I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea there was going to
...more
J.K. Rowling speech about failure in 2008
Again and again, we have seen how merely not wanting to think certain thoughts, or to feel certain emotions, isn’t sufficient to eliminate them. That’s why nobody ever wins Daniel Wegner’s ‘white bear challenge’, why self-help affirmations often make people feel worse, and why confronting worst-case scenarios is almost always preferable to trying to pretend they couldn’t happen.
The terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 would have functioned like an extreme version of the death questions on a terror-management questionnaire, startling anyone who heard the news into the realisation that they, too, could go into the office one ordinary morning and die. ‘It is [fear] that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices,’
‘Death is nothing to us,’ he says, ‘since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’
We can’t imagine what it’s like to be in a state of dreamless sleep, either, but we surrender to it every night, and very few of us do so with feelings of terror. ‘People who are averse to death’, Nagel notes, drily, ‘are not usually averse to unconsciousness.’
‘People don’t generally come to me because they fear the oblivion of being dead,’ Tillinghast said. ‘But the idea of everything that makes life lifely drawing to a close – well, that’s a much greater source of anxiety.’ It is true, of course, that you won’t be around to experience being deprived of those benefits, so fearing that deprivation is arguably unjustifiable.
