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

by William B. Irvine

I knew that the dictionary defines a stoic as “one who is seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain.”3 I therefore expected that the uppercase-S Stoics would be lowercase-s stoical—that they would be emotionally repressed individuals. I discovered, though, that the goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion from life but to banish negative emotions. When I read the works of the Stoics, I encountered individuals who were cheerful and optimistic about life (even though they made it a point to spend time thinking about all the bad things that could happen to them) and who were fully capable of enjoying life’s pleasures (while at the same time being careful not to be enslaved by those pleasures). I also encountered, much to my surprise, individuals who valued joy;