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January 23 - March 5, 2022
Besides contemplating the death of relatives, the Stoics think we should spend time contemplating the loss of friends, to death, perhaps, or to a falling-out. Thus, Epictetus counsels that when we say good-bye to a friend, we should silently remind ourselves that this might be our final parting.9 If we do this, we will be less likely to take our friends for granted, and as a result, we will probably derive far more pleasure from friendships than we otherwise would.
when the Stoics counsel us to live each day as if it were our last, their goal is not to change our activities but to change our state of mind as we carry out those activities.
we should think about how we would feel if we lost our material possessions, including our house, car, clothing, pets, and bank balance; how we would feel if we lost our abilities, including our ability to speak, hear, walk, breathe, and swallow; and how we would feel if we lost our freedom. Most of us are “living the dream”—living, that is, the dream we once had for ourselves.
Consider the person who has been reduced to possession of only a loincloth. His circumstances could be worse: He could lose the loincloth.
The Stoics would work to improve their external circumstances, but at the same time, the Stoics would suggest things they could do to alleviate their misery until those circumstances are improved.
After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.
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. One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.
And because negative visualization can be done repeatedly, its beneficial effects, unlike those of a catastrophe, can last indefinitely.
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. To be able to be satisfied with little is not a failing, it is a blessing
we can practice negative visualization by paying attention to the bad things that happen to other people and reflecting on the fact that these things might instead have happened to us.14 Alternatively, we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world
we can breathe a sigh of relief that we aren’t our ancestors, the way our descendants will presumably someday breathe a sigh of relief that they aren’t us!
it is a mistake to think Stoics will spend all their time contemplating potential catastrophes. It is instead something they will do periodically:
To practice negative visualization, after all, is to contemplate the impermanence of the world around us.
“beware lest delight in them leads you to cherish them so dearly that their loss would destroy your peace of mind.”
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 it.
I MENTIONED IN THE INTRODUCTION that 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.”
We need to keep firmly in mind that everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us.
There will be—or already has been!—a last time in your life that you brush your teeth, cut your hair, drive a car, mow the lawn, or play hopscotch.
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.
OUR MOST IMPORTANT CHOICE in life, according to Epictetus, is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal.
While most people seek to gain contentment by changing the world around them, Epictetus advises us to gain contentment by changing ourselves—more precisely, by changing our desires.
Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill.
EPICTETUS’S HANDBOOK OPENS, somewhat famously, with the following assertion: “Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.” He offers our opinions, impulses, desires, and aversions as examples of things that are up to us, and our possessions and reputation as examples of things that aren’t.6 From this assertion it follows that we are faced with a choice in the desires we form: We can want things that are up to us, or we can want things that are not up to us.
Epictetus suggests, quite sensibly, that we are behaving foolishly if we spend time worrying about things that are not up to us; because they are not up to us, worrying about them is futile.
Instead, my goal should be an internal goal: to behave, to the best of my ability, in a lovable manner. Similarly, my goal with respect to my boss should be to do my job to the best of my ability. These are goals I can achieve no matter how my wife and my boss subsequently react to my efforts.
She should have as her goal not something external over which she has little control, such as getting her novel published, but something internal over which she has considerable control, such as how hard she works on the manuscript or how many times she submits it in a given period of time.
The things in the second category—those over which he has no control at all—he will set aside as not worth worrying about.
According to Epictetus, we should keep firmly in mind that we are merely actors in a play written by someone else—more precisely, the Fates.
In particular, if we reject the decrees of fate, Marcus says, we are likely to experience tranquility-disrupting grief, anger, or fear.
When the Stoics advocate fatalism, they are, I think, advocating a restricted form of the doctrine. More precisely, they are advising us to be fatalistic with respect to the past, to keep firmly in mind that the past cannot be changed.
We can spend our days wishing our circumstances were different, but if we allow ourselves to do this, we will spend our days in a state of dissatisfaction.
Marcus reminds us that all we own is the present moment and why he advises us to live in “this fleeting instant.”5 (This last advice, of course, echoes the Buddhist advice that we should try to live in the moment—another interesting parallel between Stoicism and Buddhism.)
the Stoics we have been considering were notably ambitious. Seneca, as we’ve seen, had an active life as a philosopher, playwright, investor, and political advisor. Musonius Rufus and Epictetus both ran successful schools of philosophy. And Marcus, when he wasn’t philosophizing, was hard at work ruling the Roman Empire. These individuals were, if anything, overachievers.
Stoic philosophy, while teaching us to be satisfied with whatever we’ve got, also counsels us to seek certain things in life. We should, for example, strive to become better people—to become virtuous in the ancient sense of the word. We should strive to practice Stoicism in our daily life. And we should, as we shall see in chapter 9, strive to do our social duty:
Musonius takes this technique one step further: He thinks that besides living as if bad things had happened to us, we should sometimes cause them to happen. In particular, we should periodically cause ourselves to experience discomfort that we could easily have avoided. We might accomplish this by underdressing for cold weather or going shoeless.
they did not inflict these discomforts to punish themselves; rather, they did it to increase their enjoyment of life.
If all we know is comfort, we might be traumatized when we are forced to experience pain or discomfort, as we someday almost surely will.
A person who periodically experiences minor discomforts will grow confident that he can withstand major discomforts as well, so the prospect of experiencing such discomforts at some future time will not, at present, be a source of anxiety for him.
A third benefit of undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort is that it helps us appreciate what we already have.
if we really want to enjoy that warmth and sense of shelter, we should go outside in the cold for a while and then come back in. Likewise, we can (as Diogenes observed) greatly enhance our appreciation of any meal by waiting until we are hungry before we eat it
intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, “the more masters will he have to serve.”
the Cynic philosopher Diogenes argues that the most important battle any person has to fight is the battle against pleasure. The battle is particularly difficult to win because pleasure “uses no open force but deceives
There are some pleasures, the Stoics would argue, from which we should always abstain. In particular, we should abstain from those pleasures that can capture us in a single encounter.
For the Stoics—and, indeed, for anyone attempting to practice a philosophy of life—self-control will be an important trait to acquire.
More generally, if we cannot resist pleasures, we will end up playing, Marcus says, the role of slave, “twitching puppetwise at every pull of self-interest,” and we will spend our life “ever grumbling at today or lamenting over tomorrow.”
There is, after all, a fine line between enjoying a meal and lapsing into gluttony. There is also a danger that we will cling to the things we enjoy.
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.
if we weighed the costs and benefits of eating it against the costs and benefits of not eating it—we might find that the sensible thing for us to do, if we wish to maximize our pleasure, is not eat it. It is for just this reason that Epictetus counsels us, when contemplating whether or not to take advantage of opportunities for pleasure, to engage in this sort of analysis.
Seneca advises that we periodically meditate on the events of daily living, how we responded to these events, and how, in accordance with Stoic principles, we should have responded to them.
When contemplating whether to criticize someone, he should consider not only whether the criticism is valid but also whether the person can stand to be criticized.
