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September 24 - October 30, 2023
Continue to practice Stoicism, “even when success looks hopeless.”13
But we will also discover that they are the cause of most of the negative emotions we experience. Strangers upset us when they cut us off in traffic. Relatives trouble us with their problems. Our boss might ruin our day by insulting us, and the incompetence of our coworkers might cause us stress by increasing our workload. Our friends might neglect to invite us to a party and thereby cause us to feel slighted.
Even when other people don’t do anything to us, they can disrupt our tranquility. We typically want others—friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers, and even complete strangers—to think well of us.
We therefore spend time and energy trying to wear the right clothes, drive the right car, live in the right house in the...
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The gods, he says, created us for a reason—created us, as he puts it, “for some duty.”
“fellowship is the purpose behind our creation.” Thus, a person who performs well the function of man will be both rational and social.4
“the service and harmony of all.” More precisely, “I am bound to do good to my fellow-creatures and bear with them.”5
don’t. What motivated Marcus to do his duty, though, was not fear of punishment but the prospect of a reward.
Thus, when it is possible to do so, we should avoid associating with people whose values have been corrupted, the way we would avoid, say, kissing someone who obviously has the flu.
annoying. More generally, when we find ourselves irritated by someone’s shortcomings, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings. Doing this will help us become more
When dealing with an annoying person, it also helps to keep in mind that our annoyance at what he does will almost invariably be more detrimental to us than whatever it is he is doing.
We can also, Marcus suggests, lessen the negative impact other people have on our life by controlling our thoughts about them. He counsels us, for example, not to waste time speculating about what our neighbors are doing, saying, thinking, or scheming. Nor should we allow our mind to be filled with “sensual imaginings, jealousies, envies, suspicions, or any other sentiments” about them that we would blush to admit. A
think about what other people are thinking except when he must do so in order to serve the public interest.8 Most important, Marcus thinks it will
social fatalism: In our dealings with others, we should operate on the assumption that they are fated to behave in a certain way. It is therefore pointless to wish they could be less annoying.
If I respect the source, if I value his opinions, then his critical remarks shouldn’t upset me.
the insult. “Remember,” says Epictetus, “that what is insulting is not the person who abuses you or hits you, but the judgment about them that they are insulting.”
“what upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about these things.”8
If a clever response comes to us, it comes hours
The advantage of a nonresponse, of simply carrying on as if the insulter hadn’t even spoken, is that it requires no thought on our part. Indeed,
Refusing to respond to an insult is, paradoxically, one of the most effective responses possible. For one thing, as Seneca points out, our nonresponse can be quite disconcerting to the insulter, who will wonder whether or not we understood his insult.
not be possible to eliminate grief from our life, it is possible, Seneca thinks, to take steps to minimize the amount of grief we experience over the course of a lifetime.
in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost. By engaging in retrospective negative visualization, Seneca thinks, we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.
“No plague has cost the human race more.” Because of anger, he says, we see all around us people being killed, poisoned, and sued; we see cities and nations ruined. And besides destroying cities and nations, anger can destroy us individually.
What worries Seneca about employing anger as a motivational tool is that after we turn it on, we will be unable to turn it off, and that whatever good it initially does us will (on average) be more than offset by the harm it subsequently does.
We should, he says, fight our tendency to believe the worst about others and our tendency to jump to conclusions about their motivations. We need to keep in mind that just because things don’t turn out the way we want them to, it doesn’t follow that someone has done us an injustice.
More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft.
By allowing ourselves to get angry over little things, we take what might have been a barely noticeable disruption of our day and transform it into a tranquility-shattering state of agitation.
What fools we are, therefore, when we allow our tranquility to be disrupted by minor things.
humor can be used to prevent ourselves from becoming angry:
What seems vitally important to us will seem unimportant to our grandchildren.
Thus, when we feel ourselves getting angry about something, we should pause to consider its cosmic (in)significance. Doing
advice that has a parallel in Buddhism. When angry, says Seneca, we should take steps to “turn all [anger’s] indications into their opposites.” We should force ourselves to relax our face, soften our voice, and slow our pace of walking.
Finally, apologizing for the outburst can help us become a better person: By admitting our mistakes, we lessen the chance that we will make them again in the future.
Furthermore, a person who is constantly angry will be a torment to those around her.
“make yourself a person to be loved by all while you live and missed when you have made your departure?”
and particularly foolish for us to seek the approval of people whose values we reject.
people, we will have to adopt their values. More precisely, we will have to live a life that is successful according to their notion of success. (If we are living what they take to be an unsuccessful life, they will have no reason to admire us.)
Does she really want to abandon the pursuit of her dream in order to win these individuals’ acceptance?
complexity of their schemes for gaining happiness, they find themselves experiencing anxiety, anger, and frustration. They also discover that their success has a downside:
midlife crisis. The person experiencing the crisis might sensibly conclude that his unhappiness is the result of wanting the wrong things. In
instead, he concludes that he is unhappy as the result of making certain short-term sacrifices to attain various long-term goals.
He therefore decides to stop making these short-term sacrifices: He buys a new car, or abandons his wi...
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and along with it, the prospect of death drawing ever nearer—probably will.
In our youth, we delude ourselves into thinking death is for other people.
Those who have lived without a coherent philosophy of life, though, will desperately want to delay death.
and if, instead of knocking ourselves out trying to become popular, we worked to maintain and improve our relationships with those we knew to be true friends.1
The Stoics, on the other hand, thought it possible that there was life after death but were not certain of it, and if there was indeed life after death, the Stoics were uncertain what it would be like.
They realized, for example, that what makes insults painful is our interpretation of the insults rather than the insults themselves.
Indeed, the consensus view among psychological therapists is that we should stay in touch with our emotions: Rather than trying to deny their existence, we should contemplate them, and rather than trying to bottle them up, we should vent them.
if we find ourselves disturbed by negative emotions, we should not attempt to deal with them on our own but should instead share them with a psychological counselor who has made it her business to understand how the
