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September 24 - October 30, 2023
distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.
branch—he calls it the Italian branch—began with Pythagoras.
Before Socrates, philosophers were primarily interested in explaining the world around them and the phenomena of that world—in doing what we would now call science.
If we think about these things, we will lessen their impact on us when, despite our efforts at prevention, they happen:
We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.
The problem, though, is that once they fulfill a desire for something, they adapt to its presence in their life and as a result stop desiring it—or at any rate, don’t find it as desirable as they once did.
One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.
This technique—let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus.5 It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.
living as if each day were our last is simply an extension of the negative visualization technique: As we go about our day, we should periodically pause to reflect on the fact that we will not live forever and therefore that this day could be our last.
Most of us spend our idle moments thinking about the things we want but don’t have. We would be much better off, Marcus says, to spend this time thinking of all the things we have and reflecting on how much we would miss them if they were not ours.
Instead of spending our days enjoying our good fortune, we spend them forming and pursuing new, grander dreams for ourselves.
Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world. Because of adaptation, we take our life and what we have for granted rather than delighting in them. Negative visualization, though, is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation. By consciously thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalize our capacity for joy.
By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.
They agree that if what you seek is contentment, it is better and easier to change yourself and what you want than it is to change the world around
Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill.
“Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.” He offers our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions as examples of things that are up to us, and our possessions and reputation as examples of things that aren’t.6 From this assertion it follows that we are faced with a choice in the desires we form: We can want things that are up to us, or we can want things that are not up to us.
If we want things that are not up to us, though, we will sometimes fail to get what we want, and when this happens, we will “meet misfortune” and feel “thwarted, miserable, and upset.”7 In
“There are things over which we have no control at all” or to mean “There are things over which we don’t have complete control.”
Epictetus suggests, quite sensibly, that we are behaving foolishly if we spend time worrying about things that are not up to us; because they are not up to us, worrying about them
Epictetus says we have complete control over our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions.
cream. I have a degree of control over whether I act on this craving but no control over whether this craving spontaneously arises within me. Likewise,
Epictetus is wrong to include our impulses, desires, and aversions in the category of things over which we have complete control.
this, I should add that although I have complete control over which of these goals I set for myself, I obviously don’t have complete control over whether I achieve any of them; my achieving the goals I set for myself instead typically falls into the category of things over which I have some but not complete control.
Whether or not we live in accordance with our values is, of course, a different question: It is something over which we have some but not complete control.
Marcus thinks that by forming opinions properly—by assigning things their correct value—we can avoid much suffering, grief, and anxiety and can thereby achieve the tranquility the Stoics seek.9
stop us from taking steps to curb our arrogance, to rise above pleasures and pains, to stop lusting after popularity, and to control our temper. Furthermore,
According to Epictetus, we should keep firmly in mind that we are merely actors in a play written by someone else—more precisely, the Fates.
We cannot choose our role in this play, but regardless of the role we are assigned, we must play it to the best of our ability.
To avoid this, we must learn to adapt ourselves to the environment into which fate has placed us and do our best to love the people with whom fate has surrounded us.
More precisely, they are advising us to be fatalistic with respect to the past, to keep firmly in mind that the past cannot be changed.
In their advocacy of fatalism, then, the Stoics were advising us to be fatalistic, not with respect to the future but with respect to the past and present.
could be different, or we can embrace this moment. If we habitually do the former, we will spend much of our life in a state of dissatisfaction; if we habitually do the latter, we will enjoy our life.
if we cannot resist
pleasures, we will end up playing, Marcus says, the role of slave, “twitching puppetwise at every pull of self-interest,” and we will spend our life “ever grumbling at today or lamenting over tomorrow.”
And it certainly won’t be fun saying no to the ice cream someone has offered him—and saying it not because he is on a diet but so he can practice refusing something he would enjoy. Indeed, a novice Stoic will have to summon up all his willpower to do such things.
What Stoics discover, though, is that willpower is like muscle power: The more they exercise their muscles, the stronger they get, and the more they exercise their will, the stronger it gets. Indeed, by practicing Stoic self-denial techniques over a long period, Stoics can transform themselves into individuals remarkable for their courage and self-control.
you eat it, you will experience a certain gastronomic pleasure, along with a certain regret for having eaten it. If you refrain from eating the ice cream, though, you will forgo this gastronomic pleasure but will experience pleasure of a different kind: As Epictetus observes, you will “be pleased and will praise yourself” for not eating it.12
his readers one of his own bedtime meditations and offers a list of the sorts of events he might reflect on, along with the conclusions he might draw regarding his response to these events:
“Keep away from low company.”
“You lunatic, what difference does it make what part of the couch you put your weight on?”
If you are going to publish, you must be willing to tolerate criticism.2
He will think about the events of the day. Did something disrupt his tranquility? Did he experience anger? Envy? Lust? Why did the day’s events upset him? Is there something he could have done to avoid getting upset?
He suggests that as we go about our daily business, we should simultaneously play the roles of participant and spectator.3 We should, in other words, create within ourselves a Stoic observer who watches us and comments on our attempts to practice Stoicism. Along similar lines, Marcus advises us to examine each thing we do, determine our motives for doing it, and consider the value of whatever it was we were trying to accomplish. We should continually ask whether we are being governed by our reason or by something else.
Besides reflecting on the day’s events, we can devote part of our meditations to going through a kind of mental checklist. Are we practicing the psychological techniques recommended by the Stoics? Do we, for example, periodically engage in negative visualization? Do we take time to distinguish between those things over which we have complete control, those things over which we have no control at all, and those things over which we have some but not complete control? Are we careful to internalize our goals? Have we refrained from dwelling on the past and instead focused our attention on the
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changed. We will discover, says Epictetus, that our feelings aren’t hurt when others tell us that we know nothing or that we are “mindless fools” about things external to us.
And quite significantly, if we have made progress as a Stoic, we will come to regard ourselves not as a friend whose every desire must be satisfied but “as an enemy lying in wait.”6
What matters most, says Epictetus, is not our ability to spout Stoic principles but our ability to live in accordance with them.
Thus, at a banquet a Stoic novice might spend her time talking about what a philosophically enlightened individual should eat; a Stoic further along in her practice will simply eat that way.
will, out of the blue, feel delighted to be the person we are, living the life we are
“every day I reduce the number of my vices, and blame my mistakes.”10
