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

by William B. Irvine

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.

“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.”

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.

the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world. Because of adaptation, we take our life and what we have for granted rather than delighting in them. Negative visualization, though, is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation. By consciously thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalize our capacity for joy.

We should become self-aware:

We should use our reasoning ability to overcome negative emotions.

If, despite not having pursued wealth, we find ourselves wealthy, we should enjoy our affluence;

if what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others.

The Stoics spent a considerable amount of time devising techniques for taking the pain out of our relationships with other people.

The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness—our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control

To conquer our insatiability, the Stoics advise us to engage in negative visualization.

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.

When we spend time dealing with things over which we have some but not complete control, we should be careful to internalize our goals.

We should be fatalistic with respect to the external world: