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

by William B. Irvine

Another of Seneca’s consolations is addressed to Helvia, Seneca’s mother. Whereas Polybius had been grieving the death of a loved one, Helvia was grieving the exile of Seneca. In his advice to Helvia, Seneca takes the argument he offered Polybius—that the person whose death Polybius is grieving wouldn’t want him to grieve—one step further: Because it is Seneca’s circumstances that Helvia is grieving, he argues that inasmuch as he, being a Stoic, doesn’t grieve his circumstances, Helvia shouldn’t either. (His consolation to Helvia, he observes, is unique: Although he read every consolation he could find, in not one of them did the author console people who were bemoaning the author himself.)

EPICTETUS ALSO OFFERS advice on grief management. He advises us, in particular, to take care not to “catch” the grief of others. Suppose, for example, we encounter a grief-stricken woman. We should, says Epictetus, sympathize with her and maybe even accompany her moaning with moaning of our own. But in doing so, we should be careful not to “moan inwardly.”8 In other words, we should display signs of grief without allowing ourselves to experience grief.

The best single source for Stoic advice on preventing and dealing with anger is Seneca’s essay “On Anger.” Anger, says Seneca, is “brief insanity,” and the damage done by anger is enormous: “No plague has cost the human race more.”

If we are dealing with someone who, despite being an adult, behaves like a child, we might want to punish him for insulting us. It is, after all, the only thing he will understand.

SENECA OFFERS lots of specific advice on how to prevent anger. 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. In particular, says Seneca, we need to remember that in some cases, the person at whom we are angry in fact helped us; in such cases, what angers us is that he didn’t help us even more.

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.

To avoid becoming angry, says Seneca, we should also keep in mind that the things that anger us generally don’t do us any real harm; they are instead mere annoyances.

avoid becoming angry, says Seneca, we should also keep in mind that the things that anger us generally

don’t do us any real harm; they are instead mere annoyances. By allowing ourselves to get angry over little things, we take what might have been a barely noticeable disruption of our day and transfor...

What if we are unable to control our anger? Indeed, what if we find ourselves lashing out at whoever angered us? We should apologize.

The act of apologizing, besides having a calming effect on us, can prevent us from subsequently obsessing over the thing that made us angry.

Such cases, the Stoics would tell us, are tragic. For one thing, life is too short to spend it in a state of anger. Furthermore, a person who is constantly angry will be a torment to those around her. Why not instead, Seneca asks, “make yourself a person to be loved by all while you live and missed when you have made your departure?”

PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY, the Stoics argue, in large part because they are confused about what is valuable. Because of their confusion, they spend their days pursuing things that, rather than making them happy, make them anxious and miserable. One of the things people mistakenly pursue is fame. The fame in question comes in varying degrees. Some want to be known around the world. Some seek not world fame, but regional or local fame.

You would have been much better off, Epictetus thinks, if you had been indifferent to social status. For one thing, you would not have had to spend time trying to curry favor with this person. Furthermore, you would have deprived him of the ability to upset you simply by failing to invite you to a banquet.

Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them.

Marcus agrees with Epictetus that it is foolish for us to worry about what other people think of us and particularly foolish for us to seek the approval of people whose values we reject. Our goal should therefore be to become indifferent to other people’s opinions of us. He adds that if we can succeed in doing this, we will improve the quality of our life.4

Marcus also offers some words of advice to those who value what many would take to be the ultimate form of fame: immortal fame. Such fame, Marcus says, is “an empty, hollow thing.” After all, think about how foolish it is to want to be remembered after we die. For one thing, since we are dead, we will not be able to enjoy our fame. For another, we are foolish to think that future generations will praise us, without even having met us, when we find it so difficult to praise our contemporaries, even though we meet them routinely. Instead of thinking about future fame, Marcus says, we would do well to concern ourselves with our present situation; we should, he advises, “make the best of today.”6

One way to overcome this obsession, the Stoics think, is to realize that in order to win the admiration of other people, we will have to adopt their values.

Consequently, before we try to win the admiration of these other people, we should stop to ask whether their notion of success is compatible with ours.

More important, we should stop to ask whether these people, by pursuing whatever it is they value, are gaining the tranquility we seek. If they aren’t, we should be more than willing to forgo their admiration.

MANY PEOPLE are haunted by a fear that in some cases significantly constrains their freedom, namely, the fear of failure. The individuals in question might contemplate doing something that will test their courage, determination, and ability, but then decide against the attempt, with the key factor in their decision being the fear of failure. From their point of view, it is better not even to attempt something than to fail while trying to accomplish it. There are, to be sure, failures that any sensible person will want to avoid—those failures, for example, that result in death or disfigurement. The failures that many people seek to avoid, though, will not cost them their life or health. The cost of failure is instead having to endure the open mockery, or maybe the silent pity, of those who learn of their failure. It is better, failure-averse people reason, not even to attempt an undertaking than to run the risk of public humiliation.

Realize that many other people, including, quite possibly, your friends and relatives, want you to fail in your undertakings. They may not tell you this to your face, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t silently rooting against you. People do this in part because your success makes them look bad and therefore makes them uncomfortable: If you can succeed, why can’t they? Consequently, if you attempt something daring they might ridicule you, predict disaster, and try to talk you out of pursuing your goal. If, despite their warnings, you make your attempt and succeed, they might finally congratulate you—or they might not.

IRONICALLY, BY REFUSING to seek the admiration of other people, Stoics might succeed in gaining their (perhaps grudging) admiration. Many people, for example, will construe the Stoics’ indifference to public opinion as a sign of self-confidence:

Along similar lines, Epictetus asserts that “it is better to die of hunger with distress and fear gone than to live upset in the midst of plenty.”4 More generally, he argues that not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself is.

There is indeed a danger that if we are exposed to a luxurious lifestyle, we will lose our ability to take delight in simple things. At one time, we might have been able to savor a bowl of macaroni and cheese, accompanied by a glass of milk, but after living in luxury for a few months we might find that macaroni no longer appeals to our discriminating palate; we might start rejecting it in favor of fettuccine Alfredo, accompanied by a particular brand of bottled water.

When, as the result of being exposed to luxurious living, people become hard to please, a curious thing happens. Rather than mourning the loss of their ability to enjoy simple things, they take pride in their newly gained inability to enjoy anything but “the best.” The Stoics, however, would pity these individuals.

Musonius, for example, advises us to dress to protect our bodies, not to impress other people. Likewise, our housing should be functional: It should do little more than keep out extreme heat and cold, and shelter us from the sun and wind. A cave would be fine, if one were available.

Having all this, he observes, will not make Lucilius happy: “You will only learn from such things to crave still greater.”

Natural desires, such as a desire for water when we are thirsty, can be satisfied; unnatural desires cannot.12 Therefore, when we find ourselves wanting something, we should pause to ask whether the desire is natural or unnatural, and if it is unnatural, we should think twice about trying to satisfy it.

Luxury, Seneca warns, uses her wit to promote vices: First she makes us want things that are inessential, then she makes us want things that are injurious. Before long, the mind becomes slave to the body’s whims and pleasures.13 Along similar lines, Musonius tells us that he would rather be sick than live in luxury. Sickness, he argues, may harm the body, but a life of luxury harms the soul as well by maki...

EVEN THOUGH SHE DOESN’T pursue wealth, a Stoic might nevertheless acquire it. A Stoic will, after all, do what she can to make herself useful to her fellow humans. And thanks to her practice of Stoicism, she will be self-disciplined and single-minded, traits that will help her accomplish the tasks she sets for herself. As a result, she might be quite effective in helping others, and they might reward her for doing so. It is possible, in other words, for the practice of Stoicism to be financially rewarding.

THE PRECEDING COMMENTS about wealth, by the way, also apply to fame. The Stoics, as we have seen, will not seek fame; to the contrary, they will strive to be indifferent to what others think of them.

think the Stoics would have been more wary of enjoying fame than enjoying fortune. There is a danger, as we have seen, that wealth will corrupt us, particularly if we use it to finance luxurious living. The danger that fame will corrupt us, however, is even greater.

In particular, the glow that comes from being famous might trigger in us a desire for even more fame, and the obvious way to accomplish this is by saying things and living in a manner calculated to gain the admiration of other people. To do this, though, we will probably have to betray our Stoic principles.

It may be true, says Seneca, that by being exiled he has been deprived of his country, his friends and family, and his property, but he has taken with him into exile the things that matter most: his place in Nature and his virtue.

Having said this, I should add that it is entirely possible to grow old without becoming ripe for Stoicism or any other philosophy of life. Indeed, many people go through life repeatedly making the same mistakes and are no closer to happiness in their eighties than they were in their twenties. These individuals, rather than enjoying their life, will have been embittered by it, and now, near the end of their life, they live to complain—about their circumstances, their relatives, the food, the weather, in short, about absolutely everything.

Consider lust, the desire for sexual gratification. Lust is, for many people—and for males in particular, I think—a major distraction in daily living. We might be able to control whether or not we act on lustful feelings, but the feelings themselves seem to be hardwired into us. (If we lacked such feelings or could easily extinguish them, it is unlikely that we would have survived as a species.) Because they distract us, feelings of lust have a significant impact on how we spend our days.

AMONG THE VARIOUS philosophies of life, Stoicism is particularly well suited to our later years. For most people, old age will be the most challenging time of life. A primary objective of Stoicism, though, is to teach us not only to meet life’s challenges but to retain our tranquility as we do. In addition, old people are more likely than young people to value the tranquility offered by the Stoics.

Those who have lived without a coherent philosophy of life, though, will desperately want to delay death. They might want the delay so that they can get the thing that—at last!—they have discovered to be of value.

Musonius tells us, for example, that it is wrong for us to choose to die if our living “is helpful to many.”

The Stoics, I am convinced, would respond to such

thinking by asking whether a life in which nothing is worth dying for can possibly be worth living.

It will take both effort and willpower to abandon our old goals, such as the attainment of fame and fortune, and replace them with a new goal, namely, the attainment of tranquility.

WHAT WILL BE our reward for practicing Stoicism? According to the Stoics, we can hope to become more virtuous, in the ancient sense of the word. We will also, they say, experience fewer negative emotions, such as anger, grief, disappointment, and anxiety, and because of this we will enjoy a degree of tranquility that previously would have

For most people, experiencing delight requires a change in circumstances; they might, for example, have to acquire a new consumer gadget. Stoics, in contrast, can experience delight without any such change; because they practice negative visualization, they will deeply appreciate the things they already have.

Because they have learned to enjoy things that are easily obtainable or that can’t be taken from them, Stoics will find much in life to enjoy. They might, as a result, discover that they enjoy being the person they are, living the life they are living, in the universe they happen to inhabit. This, I should add, is no small accomplishment.

Because of these similarities, Stoics and Christians found themselves competing for the same potential adherents. In this competition, however, Christianity had one big advantage over Stoicism: It promised not just life after death but an afterlife in which one would be infinitely satisfied for an eternity. 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.

Like the Stoics, Thoreau was interested in developing a philosophy of life. According to the Thoreau scholar Robert D. Richardson, “His was always the practical question, how best can I live my daily life?,” and his life itself can best be understood, says Richardson, as “one long uninterrupted attempt to work out the practical concrete meaning of the stoic idea that the laws which rule nature rule men as well.”7 Thoreau went to Walden Pond to conduct his famous two-year experiment in simple living in large part so that he could refine his philosophy of life and thereby avoid misliving: A primary motive in going to Walden, he tells us, was his fear that he would, “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

If this book has done its job, readers will appreciate how woefully mistaken this characterization of Stoicism is. The Stoics were not stoical! Nor did they live joyless lives! Indeed, they were probably more likely to experience joy than most non-Stoics.

Suppose, in particular, that a Stoic finds himself grieving the loss of a loved one. This Stoic, it should be noted, will not react by trying to stifle the grief within him—by pretending, for example, that he is not grieving or by grimacing to block the flow of tears. He will instead recall Seneca’s comment to Polybius that when people experience personal catastrophes, it is perfectly natural to experience grief. After this bout of reflexive grief, though, a Stoic will try to dispel whatever grief remains in him by trying to reason it out of existence. He will, in particular, invoke the kinds of arguments Seneca used in his consolations: “Is this what the person who died would want me to do? Of course not! She would want me to be happy! The best way to honor her memory is to leave off grieving and get on with life.”