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January 23 - March 5, 2022
PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY, the Stoics argue, in large part because they are confused about what is valuable. Because of their confusion, they spend their days pursuing things that, rather than making them happy, make them anxious and miserable.
the Stoics claim that the price of fame is sufficiently high that it far outweighs any benefits fame can confer on us.
Marcus agrees with Epictetus that it is foolish for us to worry about what other people think of us
Unfortunately, this is often repeated advice that can lead to excusing bad behavior. Often, the only way to improve ourselves is to take note of what other people think of our behavior, whether they verbalize it or not, in order to alter our behavior for the better. Though it does make sense to pay closer attention to the opinions of people we admire.
think about how foolish it is to want to be remembered after we die. For one thing, since we are dead, we will not be able to enjoy our fame.
And although wealth can procure for us physical luxuries and various pleasures of the senses, it can never bring us contentment or banish our grief. In support of this assertion, Musonius points to all the rich men who feel sad and wretched despite their wealth.
the Stoics value highly their ability to enjoy ordinary life—and indeed, their ability to find sources of delight even when living in primitive conditions.
Musonius advises us to follow the example set by Socrates: Rather than living to eat—rather than spending our life pursuing the pleasure to be derived from food—we should eat to live.
we must eat daily, and that the more often we are tempted by a pleasure, the more danger there is that we will succumb to it. It is for this reason, Musonius says, that “the pleasure connected with food is undoubtedly the most difficult of all pleasures to combat.”
People who achieve luxurious lifestyles are rarely satisfied: Experiencing luxury only whets their appetite for even more luxury.
Those who crave luxury typically have to spend considerable time and energy to attain it; those who eschew luxury can devote this same time and energy to other, more worthwhile undertakings.
The Buddhist viewpoint regarding wealth, by the way, is very much like the view I have ascribed to the Stoics: It is permissible to be a wealthy Buddhist, as long as you don’t cling to your wealth.
In extreme cases, these young people harbor a profound sense of entitlement. They think it is life’s job to unroll a red carpet ahead of them, down whatever path they choose to take. When life fails to do this—when the path they have chosen gets bumpy and rutted, or even becomes impassible—they are astonished. This isn’t how things are supposed to be!
Indeed, many people go through life repeatedly making the same mistakes and are no closer to happiness in their eighties than they were in their twenties. These individuals, rather than enjoying their life, will have been embittered by it, and now, near the end of their life, they live to complain—about their circumstances, their relatives, the food, the weather, in short, about absolutely everything.
This is 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.”
Consider lust, the desire for sexual gratification. Lust is, for many people—and for males in particular, I think—a major distraction in daily living.
Because they distract us, feelings of lust have a significant impact on how we spend our days.
Sophocles offered another viewpoint. When he had grown old and someone asked whether, despite his years, he could still make love to a woman, he replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from this, like a slave who has escaped from a mad and cruel master.”
A young person might find it baffling that someone would be willing to settle for “mere tranquility”; an octogenarian will probably not only appreciate how precious a thing tranquility is but will realize how few people manage, over the course of a lifetime, to attain it.
Someone with a coherent philosophy of life will know what in life is worth attaining, and because this person has spent time trying to attain the thing in life he believed to be worth attaining, he has probably attained it, to the extent that it was possible for him to do so.
If you have a philosophy of life, decision making is relatively straightforward: When choosing between the options life offers, you simply choose the one most likely to help you attain the goals set forth by your philosophy of life.
The most important reason for adopting a philosophy of life, though, is that if we lack one, there is a danger that we will mislive—that we will spend our life pursuing goals that aren’t worth attaining
we need to keep in mind that it is a lucky accident that we are enjoying whatever it is we are enjoying, that our enjoyment of it might end abruptly, and that we might never be able to enjoy it again. We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.
Thus, if life should snatch one source of delight from them, Stoics will quickly find another to take its place: Stoic enjoyment, unlike that of a connoisseur, is eminently transferable.
Because they have learned to enjoy things that are easily obtainable or that can’t be taken from them, Stoics will find much in life to enjoy.
The Stoics were not stoical! Nor did they live joyless lives! Indeed, they were probably more likely to experience joy than most non-Stoics.
the Stoics did not advocate that we “bottle up” our emotions. They did advise us to take steps to prevent negative emotions and to overcome them when our attempts at prevention fail, but this is different from keeping them bottled up: If we prevent or overcome an emotion, there will be nothing to bottle.
when people experience personal catastrophes, it is perfectly natural to experience grief. After this bout of reflexive grief, though, a Stoic will try to dispel whatever grief remains in him by trying to reason it out of existence. He will, in particular, invoke the kinds of arguments Seneca used in his consolations: “Is this what the person who died would want me to do? Of course not! She would want me to be happy!
because we are mere mortals, some grief is inevitable in the course of a lifetime, as are some fear, some anxiety, some anger, some hatred, some humiliation, and some envy. The goal of the Stoics was therefore not to eliminate grief but to minimize
I would, in particular, question the claim, made by many psychological therapists, that people are not well equipped to deal with grief on their own. I think people are less brittle and more resilient, emotionally speaking, than therapists give them credit for.
It would be bad enough if grief counseling were simply ineffective. In some cases, though, such counseling seems to intensify and prolong people’s grief; in other words, it only makes things worse.
The obvious conclusion to draw from this research is that “forced grieving” in accordance with the principles of grief therapy, rather than curing grief, can delay the natural healing process; it is the psychological equivalent of picking at the scab on a wound.
“Recent findings suggest that reticence and suppression of feelings, far from compromising one’s psychological well-being, can be healthy and adaptive. For many temperaments, an excessive focus on introspection and self-disclosure is depressing. Victims of loss and tragedy differ widely in their reactions: Some benefit from therapeutic intervention; most do not and should not be coerced by mental health professionals into emotionally correct responses. Trauma and grief counselors have erred massively in this direction.” These authors add that they reject the doctrine, now commonly accepted,
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According to Seneca, “A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.” He therefore recommends that we “do away with complaint about past sufferings and with all language like this: ‘None has ever been worse off than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured!’” After all, what point is there in “being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy?”
MODERN POLITICS presents another obstacle to the acceptance of Stoicism. The world is full of politicians who tell us that if we are unhappy it isn’t our fault. To the contrary, our unhappiness is caused by something the government did to us or is failing to do for us.
It is true that our government and our society determine, to a considerable extent, our external circumstances, but the Stoics understood that there is at best a loose connection between our external circumstances and how happy we are.
Stoics don’t think it is helpful for people to consider themselves victims of society—or victims of anything else, for that matter. 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.
Others may have it in their power to affect how and even whether you live, but they do not, say the Stoics, have it in their power to ruin your life. Only you can ruin it, by failing to live in accordance with the correct values. The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation.
if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life.
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.
If you had gone to Epictetus and said, “I want to live a good life. What should I do?” he would have had an answer for you: “Live in accordance with nature.” He would then have told you, in great detail, how to do this. If, by way of contrast, you went to a twentieth-century analytic philosopher and asked the same question, he probably would have responded not by answering the question you asked but by analyzing the question itself:
the Stoics want us to set many of our other personal desires aside so we can do our duty to serve our fellow humans. They were, as we have seen, a duty-bound group; unlike many modern individuals, the Stoics were convinced that there was something in life bigger than themselves.
For each desire we fulfill in accordance with this strategy, a new desire will pop into our head to take its place. This means that no matter how hard we work to satisfy our desires, we will be no closer to satisfaction than if we had fulfilled none of them. We will, in other words, remain dissatisfied.
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 Stoics, as we have seen, thought tranquility was worth pursuing, and the tranquility they sought, it will be remembered, is a psychological state in which we experience few negative emotions, such as anxiety, grief, and fear, but an abundance of positive emotions, especially joy.
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. How did we respond to an insult? To the loss of a possession? To a stressful situation?
we should use our reasoning ability to convince ourselves that even though certain activities are pleasurable, engaging in those activities will disrupt our tranquility, and the tranquility lost will outweigh the pleasure gained.
But although we should enjoy wealth, we should not cling to it; indeed, even as we enjoy it, we should contemplate its loss.
We are social creatures; we will be miserable if we try to cut off contact with other people. Therefore, if what we seek is tranquility, we should form and maintain relations with others.
The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness—our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control—
