A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

by William B. Irvine

They did advise us to take steps to prevent negative emotions and to overcome them when our attempts at prevention fail, but this is different from keeping them bottled up: If we prevent or overcome an emotion, there will be nothing to bottle.

The goal of the Stoics was therefore not to eliminate grief but to minimize it.

people are not well equipped to deal with grief on their own. I think people are less brittle and more resilient, emotionally speaking, than therapists give them credit for.

in 1937 by the psychiatrist Helene Deutsch. She claimed that failing to grieve after a personal loss would subsequently trigger a delayed bout of grief that would be “as

fresh and intense as if the loss just occurred.”

More significantly, we are encouraged to vote for the candidate who claims to possess the ability, by skillfully using the powers of government, to make us happy.

They were convinced that what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all.

you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take.

transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances.

is to change people’s external circumstances.

It teaches us that we are very much responsible for our happiness as well as our unhappiness. It also teaches us that it is only when we assume responsibility for our happiness that we will have a reasonable chance of gaining

“I want to live a good life. What should I do?” he would have had an answer for you: “Live

He would then have told you, in great detail, how to do this. If, by way of contrast, you went to a twentieth-century analytic philosopher and asked the same

he probably would have responded not by answering the question you asked but by analyzing the question itself: “The answer to your question depends on what you mean by ‘a good life,’ which in t...

When this philosopher had finished speaking, you might be impressed with his flair for philosophical analysis, but you might also conclude, with good reason, that he himself lacked a coherent philosophy of life.

This means that no matter how hard we work to satisfy our desires, we will be no closer to satisfaction than if we had fulfilled none of them. We will, in other words, remain dissatisfied.

particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather

we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have.

have suggested, are not alone in claiming that our best hope at gaining happiness is to live not a life of self-indulgence but a life of self-discipline and, to a degree, self-sacrifice.

We should become self-aware:

We should observe ourselves as we go about our daily business, and we should periodically reflect on how we responded to the day’s events. How did we respond to an insult? To

We should use our reasoning ability to overcome negative emotions. We should also use our reasoning ability to master our desires, to the extent that it is possible to do so. In particular, we should use reason to convince ourselves that things such as fame and fortune aren’t worth having—not, at any rate, if what we seek is tranquility—and therefore aren’t worth pursuing.

if what we seek is tranquility, we

should form and maintain relations with others. In doing so, though, we should be careful about whom we befriend. We

The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness—our insatiability

and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control—and they developed techniques for removing these sources of unhappiness from our life.

• To curb our tendency to worry about things beyond our control, the Stoics advise us to perform a kind of triage with respect to the elements of our life and sort them into those we have no control over, those we have complete control over, and those we have some but not complete control over.

We should realize that what has happened to us in the past and what is happening to us at this very moment are beyond our control, so it is foolish to get upset about these things.

to survive and reproduce will play a greater role in evolutionary processes than a joyful individual who chooses not to reproduce.

Those who could experience pain were therefore more effective at transmitting their genes than those who couldn’t, and as a result we humans have inherited the ability to experience pain.

We experience it because our evolutionary ancestors who cared deeply about gaining and retaining social status were more likely to survive and reproduce than our ancestors who were indifferent to social status and who, therefore, didn’t experience pain on being insulted.

Damaged cells produce arachidonic acid, which triggers the creation of prostaglandins, which in turn cause fever, inflammation, and pain. By preventing the formation of prostaglandins, aspirin short-circuits this process.2

Stoic techniques at once but to start with one technique and, having become proficient in it, go on to another. And a good technique to start with, I think, is negative visualization.

The Stoics, however, would remind us that negative visualization, besides making us appreciate what we have, can help us avoid clinging to the things we appreciate.

it my practice to engage in negative visualization each night at bedtime, as part of the “bedtime meditation” described back in chapter 8, but the experiment failed.

AFTER MASTERING negative visualization, a novice Stoic should move on to become proficient in applying the trichotomy of control, described in chapter 5. According to the Stoics, we should perform a kind of triage in which we distinguish between things we have no control over, things we have complete control over, and things we have some but not complete control over; and having made this distinction, we should focus our attention on the last two categories.

Self-deprecating humor has become my standard response to insults. When

make it clear to the insulter that I have enough confidence in who I am to be impervious to his insults; for me, they are a laughing matter. Furthermore,

I have become fully aware of the extent to which anger has a life of its own within me. It can lie dormant, like a virus, only to revive and make me miserable when I least expect it. I

Again, these feelings of anger are pointless: They disturb me but have no impact at all on the person at whom I am angry. Indeed, if anything, they serve to compound the harm he does me. What a waste!

Because anger has these characteristics—because it can lie dormant within us and because venting it feels good—our anger will be difficult to overcome, and learning to overcome it is one of the biggest challenges a Stoic practitioner faces. But one thing I have found is that the more you think about and understand anger, the easier it is to control it. As it so happens, I read Seneca’s essay on anger while

am certain, was right when he pointed to laughter as the proper response to “the things which drive us to tears.”2 Seneca

WHEN DOING THINGS to cause myself physical and mental discomfort, I view myself—or at any rate, a part of me—as an opponent in a kind of game. This opponent—my “other self,” as it were—is on evolutionary autopilot: He wants nothing more than to be comfortable and to take advantage of whatever opportunities for pleasure present themselves.

Those who lack self-discipline will have the path they take

through life determined by someone or something else, and as a result, there is a very real danger that they will mislive.

By racing against each other, we are all simultaneously racing against ourselves, although not all of us are consciously aware of doing so.

On reaching my fifties, I started examining the seventy- and eighty-year-olds I knew in an attempt to find a role model. It was easy, I discovered, to find people in that age group who could serve as negative role models; my goal, I thought, should be to avoid ending up like them. Positive role models, however, proved to be in short supply.

participate in life. It is a profound realization that even though all this didn’t have to be possible, it is possible—wonderfully, magnificently possible.