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Why is it important to have such a philosophy? Because without one, there is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life.
the goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion from life but to banish negative emotions.
We will reconsider our goals in living. In particular, we will take to heart the Stoic claim that many of the things we desire—most notably, fame and fortune—are not worth pursuing. We will instead turn our attention to the pursuit of tranquility and what the Stoics called virtue.
Such is the madness of men, he said, that they choose to be miserable when they have it in their power to be content.
Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.
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SENECA’S ESSAY “On the Happy Life” was written for his elder brother Gallio—the same Gallio, by the way, as is mentioned in Acts 18:12–16 of the New Testament for his refusal to try St. Paul in Corinth.
In particular, the adversities we experience count as “mere training,” and “those things which we all shudder and tremble at are for the good of the persons themselves to whom they come.”28
“BEGIN EACH DAY by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.”29
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.
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.
In other words, we need a technique for creating in ourselves a desire for the things we already have. Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this—that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.
there is a difference between contemplating something bad happening and worrying about it.
some of the things that attracted me to Buddhism could also be found in Stoicism. Like Buddhists, Stoics advise us to contemplate the world’s impermanence. “All things human,” Seneca reminds us, “are short-lived and perishable.”19 Marcus likewise reminds us that the things we treasure are like the leaves on a tree, ready to drop when a breeze blows. He also argues that the “flux and change” of the world around us are not an accident but an essential part of our universe.20
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.
Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill.
By internalizing his goals in daily life, the Stoic is able to preserve his tranquility while dealing with things over which he has only partial control.
The fatalism advocated by the Stoics is in a sense the reverse, or one might say the mirror image, of negative visualization: Instead of thinking about how our situation could be worse, we refuse to think about how it could be better.
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.
On reading these and the other irritants Seneca lists, one is struck by how little human nature has changed in the past two millennia.
The most important sign that we are making progress as Stoics, though, is a change in our emotional life. It isn’t, as those ignorant of the true nature of Stoicism commonly believe, that we will stop experiencing emotion. We will instead find ourselves experiencing fewer negative emotions. We will also find that we are spending less time than we used to wishing things could be different and more time enjoying things as they are.
He will not pause to boast about the service he has performed but will move on to perform his next service, the way the grape vine moves on to bear more grapes.
Stoics differ in which aspect of the practice of Stoicism they find to be most challenging. Some might find it hardest, for example, to stop dwelling on the past; others might find it hardest to overcome their lust for fame and fortune. The biggest obstacle to Marcus’s practice of Stoicism, though, appears to have been his rather intense dislike of humanity.
Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.
This last advice is really just an application of the broader Stoic belief that, as Epictetus puts it, “what upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about these things.”
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.
“We are bad men living among bad men, and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.”
According to Seneca, “A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.”
After all, what point is there in “being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy?”21
The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in 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.
A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, 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.
THE GOAL OF STOICISM, as we have seen, is the attainment of tranquility. Readers will naturally want to know whether my own practice of Stoicism has helped me attain this goal. It has not, alas, allowed me to attain perfect tranquility. It has, however, resulted in my being substantially more tranquil than was formerly the case.
Those wishing to read the Stoics would do well to start with the essays of Seneca, especially, “On the Happy Life,” “On Tranquility of Mind,” and “On the Shortness of Life.”
