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March 14 - April 12, 2017
the goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion from life but to banish negative emotions.
fully capable of enjoying life’s pleasures (while at the same time being careful not to be enslaved by those pleasures).
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.
a state marked by the absence of negative emotions such as anger, grief, anxiety, and fear, and the presence of positive emotions—in particular, joy.
when asked what he had learned from philosophy, Diogenes replied, “To be prepared for every fortune.”
Paul Veyne, “Stoicism is not so much an ethic as it is a paradoxical recipe for happiness.”
Misfortune weighs most heavily, he says, on those who “expect nothing but good fortune.”
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.
we need a technique for creating in ourselves a desire for the things we already have.
the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.
They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would.
Along similar lines, Seneca advises his friend Lucilius to live each day as if it were his last. Indeed, Seneca takes things even further than this: We should live as if this very moment were our last.
Most of us are “living the dream”—living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves. We might be married to the person we once dreamed of marrying, have the children and job we once dreamed of having, and own the car we once dreamed of buying. But thanks to hedonic adaptation, as soon as we find ourselves living the life of our dreams, we start taking that life for granted. Instead of spending our days enjoying our good fortune, we spend them forming and pursuing new, grander dreams for ourselves. As a result, we are never satisfied with our life. Negative visualization can help us avoid
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to someone who has not lost his capacity for joy, the world is a wonderful place.
what is really foolish is to spend your life in a state of self-induced dissatisfaction when satisfaction lies within your grasp, if only you will change your mental outlook.
A few times each day or a few times each week a Stoic will pause in his enjoyment of life to think about how all this, all these things he enjoys, could be taken from him.
there is a difference between contemplating something bad happening and worrying about it. Contemplation is an intellectual exercise, and it is possible for us to conduct such exercises without its affecting our emotions.
Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to
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.
Marcus thinks the key to having a good life is to value things that are genuinely valuable and be indifferent to things that lack value.
Besides having complete control over our goals and values, Marcus points out that we have complete control over our character. We are, he says, the only ones who can stop ourselves from attaining goodness and integrity. We have it entirely within our power, for example, to prevent viciousness and cupidity from finding a home in our soul. If we are slow-witted, it might not be in our power to become a scholar, but there is nothing to stop us from cultivating a number of other qualities, including sincerity, dignity, industriousness, and sobriety; nor is there anything to stop us from taking
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In particular, he will be careful to set internal rather than external goals. Thus, his goal in playing tennis will not be to win a match (something external, over which he has only partial control) but to play to the best of his ability in the match (something internal, over which he has complete control).
he will not have failed to attain his goal, as long as he played his best. His tranquility will not be disrupted.
We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment.
What the Stoics were advocating, then, is more appropriately described as a program of voluntary discomfort than as a program of self-inflicted discomfort.
Cynic philosopher Diogenes argues that the most important battle any person has to fight is the battle against pleasure.
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.
spending less time than we used to wishing things could be different and more time enjoying things as they are.
a person who performs well the function of man will be both rational and social.
when we find ourselves irritated by someone’s shortcomings, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings.
pause, when insulted, to consider whether what the insulter said is true. If it is, there is little reason to be upset.
pause to consider how well-informed the insulter is. He might be saying something bad about us not because he wants to hurt our feelings but because he sincerely believes what he is saying, or, at any rate, he might simply be reporting how things seem to him.
“another person will not do you harm unless you wish it; you will be harmed at just that time at which you take yourself to be harmed.”
“what upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about these things.”
Seneca thinks, we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.
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.
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.
it is perfectly acceptable, says Seneca, for a Stoic to acquire wealth, as long as he does not harm others to obtain it. It is also acceptable for a Stoic to enjoy wealth, as long as he is careful not to cling to it. The idea is that it is possible to enjoy something and at the same time be indifferent to it.
To endure and even thrive in exile, Musonius says, a person must keep in mind that his happiness depends more on his values than on where he resides.
the downside of failing to develop an effective philosophy of life: You end up wasting the one life you have.
OLD AGE, Seneca argues, has its benefits: “Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.” Indeed, he claims that the most delightful time of life is “when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.”
asking whether a life in which nothing is worth dying for can possibly be worth living.
“Always to seek to conquer myself rather than fortune, to change my desires rather than the established order, and generally to believe that nothing except our thoughts is wholly under our control, so that after we have done our best in external matters, what remains to be done is absolutely impossible, at least as far as we are concerned.”
what makes insults painful is our interpretation of the insults rather than the insults themselves.
engaging in negative visualization we can convince ourselves to be happy with what we already have and thereby counteract our tendency toward insatiability.
If 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.
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 it.
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.
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.
