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

by William B. Irvine

Another sting-elimination strategy, suggested by Epictetus, is to 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.4 Rather than getting angry at this person for his honesty, we should calmly set him straight.

One particularly powerful sting-elimination strategy is to consider the source of an insult. If I respect the source, if I value his opinions, then his critical remarks shouldn’t upset me. Suppose, for example, that I am learning to play the banjo and that the person who is criticizing my playing is the skilled musician I have hired as my teacher. In this case, I am paying the person to criticize me. It would be utterly foolish, under these circumstances, for me to respond to his cr...

Suppose, however, that I don’t respect the source of an insult; indeed, suppose that I take him to be a thoroughly contemptible individual. Under such circumstances, rather than feeling hurt by his insults, I should feel relieved: If he disapproves of what I am doing, then what I am doing is doubtless the right thing to do. What should worry me is if this contemptible person approved of what I am doing. If I say anything at all i...

“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.”7 From this it follows that if we can convince ourselves that a person has done us no harm by insulting us, his insult will carry no sting.

And how are we to respond to an insult, if not with a counterinsult? One wonderful way, say the Stoics, is with humor.

The Stoics realized this and as a result advocated a second way to respond to insults: with no response at all. Instead of reacting to an insult, says Musonius, we should “calmly and quietly bear what has happened.”

This is what might be called retrospective negative visualization. In normal, prospective negative visualization, we imagine losing something we currently possess; in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost. By engaging in retrospective negative visualization, Seneca thinks, we can replace our feelings of regret at having lost something with feelings of thanks for once having had it.

Grief is a negative emotion and therefore one that we should, to the extent possible, avoid experiencing. If a friend is grieving, our goal should be to help her overcome her grief (or rather, if we properly internalize our goals, it should be to do our best to help her overcome her grief). If we can accomplish this by moaning insincerely, then let us do so. For us to “catch” her grief, after all, won’t help her but will hurt us.

The best single source for Stoic advice on preventing and dealing with anger is Seneca’s essay “On Anger.”

Anger, says Seneca, is “brief insanity,” and the damage done by anger is enormous: “No plague has cost the human race more.”

Being angry, Seneca concludes, is a waste of precious time.1

What worries Seneca about employing anger as a motivational tool is that after we turn it on, we will be unable to turn it off,

“Reason,” he cautions, “will never enlist the aid of reckless unbridled impulses over which it has no authority.”

More generally, when someone wrongs us, says Seneca, he should be corrected “by admonition and also by force, gently and also roughly.” Such corrections, however, should not be made in anger. We are punishing people not as retribution for what they have done but for their own good, to deter them from doing again whatever they did. Punishment, in other words, should

SENECA OFFERS lots of specific advice on how to prevent anger. We should, he says, fight our tendency to believe the worst about others and our tendency to jump to conclusions about their motivations.

if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft.

To avoid becoming angry, says Seneca, we should also keep in mind that the things that anger us generally don’t do us any real harm; they are instead mere annoyances. By allowing ourselves to get angry over little things, we take what might have been a barely noticeable disruption of our day and transform it into a tranquility-shattering state of agitation. Furthermore, as Seneca observes, “our anger invariably lasts longer than the damage done to us.”7 What fools we are, therefore, when we allow our tranquility to be disrupted by minor things.

Seneca suggests that besides being an effective response to an insult, humor can be used to prevent ourselves from becoming angry: “Laughter,” he says, “and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!”

He recommends, as we have seen, that we contemplate the impermanence of the world around us. If we do this, he says, we will realize that many of the things we think are important in fact aren’t, at least not in the grand scheme of things.

“We are bad men living among bad men, and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.”

When angry, says Seneca, we should take steps to “turn all [anger’s] indications into their opposites.” We should force ourselves to relax our face, soften our voice, and slow our pace of walking. If we do this, our internal state will soon come to resemble our external state, and our anger, says Seneca, will have dissipated.

Buddhists practice a similar thought-substitution technique. When they are experiencing an unwholesome thought, Buddhists force themselves to think the opposite, and therefore wholesome, thought. If they are experiencing anger, for example, they force themselves to think about love. The claim is that because two opposite thoughts cannot e...

Epictetus therefore advises us not to seek social status, since if we make it our goal to please others, we will no longer be free to please ourselves. We will, he says, have enslaved ourselves.

Our goal should therefore be to become indifferent to other people’s opinions of us. He adds that if we can succeed in doing this, we will improve the quality of our life.4

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. For another, we are foolish to think that future generations will praise us, without even having met us, when we find it so difficult to praise our contemporaries, even though we meet them routinely. Instead of thinking about future fame, Marcus says, we would do well to concern ourselves with our present situation; we should, he advises, “make the best of today.”

BESIDES VALUING FAME, people typically value wealth. These two values may seem independent, but a case can be made that the primary reason we seek wealth is that we seek fame.1 More precisely, we seek wealth because we realize that the material goods our wealth can buy us will win the admiration of other people and thereby confer on us a degree of fame. But if fame isn’t worth pursuing, and if our primary reason for seeking wealth is so we can gain fame, then wealth shouldn’t be worth pursuing either.

When, as the result of being exposed to luxurious living, people become hard to please, a curious thing happens. Rather than mourning the loss of their ability to enjoy simple things, they take pride in their newly gained inability to enjoy anything but “the best.” The Stoics, however, would pity these individuals. They would point out that by undermining their ability to enjoy simple, easily obtainable things—bowls of macaroni and cheese, for example—these individuals have seriously impaired their ability to enjoy life.

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.

What will a Stoic do if, despite not pursuing wealth, she finds herself well off? Stoicism does not require her to renounce wealth; it allows her to enjoy it and use it to the benefit of herself and those around her. It does, however, require her enjoyment to be thoughtful. She must keep firmly in mind that her wealth can be snatched from her; indeed, she should spend time preparing herself for the loss of it—by, for example, periodically practicing poverty. She must also keep in mind that unless she is careful, enjoyment of her wealth can undermine her character and her capacity to enjoy life. She will, for this reason, steer clear of a luxurious lifestyle.

If we are virtuous—if we have the proper values—exile cannot harm or degrade us. If we are not virtuous, though, exile will deprive us of much of what we (mistakenly) think is valuable, and we will therefore be miserable.5

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.

If those in exile find themselves lacking things, he asserts, it is because they seek to live in luxury.

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. We might be able to control whether or not we act on lustful feelings, but the feelings themselves seem to be hardwired into us. (If we lacked such feelings or could easily extinguish them, it is unlikely that we would have survived as a species.) Because they distract us, feelings of lust have a significant impact on how we spend our days.

It is entirely possible for an octogenarian to be more joyful than her twenty-year-old grandchild, particularly if the octogenarian, in part because of her failing health, takes nothing for granted, while the grandchild, in part because of her perfect health, takes everything for granted and has therefore decided that life is a bore.

When Caligula, whom Canus had angered, ordered his death, Canus retained his composure: “Most excellent prince,” he said, “I tender you my thanks.” Ten days later, when a centurion came to take him to be executed, Canus was playing a board game. Rather than complaining bitterly about his fate or begging the centurion to spare his life, Canus simply pointed out to the centurion that he, Canus, was one piece ahead in the game—meaning that his opponent would be lying if he subsequently claimed to have won. On the way to his execution, when someone asked about his state of mind, Canus replied that he was preparing himself to observe the moment of death in order to learn whether, in that moment, the spirit is aware that it is leaving the body.

when Stoics contemplate their own death, it is not because they long for death but because they want to get the most out of life. As we have seen, someone who thinks he will live forever is far more likely to waste his days than someone who fully understands that his days are numbered, and one way to gain this understanding is periodically to contemplate his own death.

To many modern individuals, such behavior is inexplicable. They feel this way in part because to them, nothing is worth dying for. Indeed, they focus their energy not on doing their duty regardless of the consequences and not on taking principled stands that could get them into trouble, but on doing whatever it takes to go on enjoying the pleasures life has to offer. The Stoics, I am convinced, would respond to such thinking by asking whether a life in which nothing is worth dying for can possibly be worth living.

In particular, as part of our practice of negative visualization, say the Stoics, 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.

Along these lines, remember that when Seneca and Musonius were banished to islands, rather than succumbing to depression, they set about studying their new environment.

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. They might, as a result, discover that they enjoy being the person they are, living the life they are living, in the universe they happen to inhabit. This, I should add, is no small accomplishment.

We are no longer children, he says, and yet we procrastinate. Keep this up and we will one day realize that we have grown old without having acquired a philosophy of life—and that, as a result, we have wasted our life.

And a good technique to start with, I think, is negative visualization. At spare moments in the day, make it a point to contemplate the loss of whatever you value in life. Engaging in such contemplation can produce a dramatic transformation in your outlook on life. It can make you realize, if only for a time, how lucky you are—how much you have to be thankful for, almost regardless of your circumstances.

I have instead made it my practice to engage in negative visualization (and more generally to assess my progress as a Stoic) while driving to work. By doing this, I transform idle time into time well spent.

AFTER MASTERING negative visualization, a novice Stoic should move on to become proficient in applying the trichotomy of control,

When relatives and friends share with me the sources of anxiety in their lives, it often turns out that the things they are worried about are beyond their control. My response to such cases is to point this out to them: “What can you do about this situation? Nothing! Then why are you worrying about it? It is out of your hands, so it is pointless to worry.” (And if I am in the mood, I follow this last comment with a quotation from Marcus Aurelius: “Nothing is worth doing pointlessly.”)

In particular, I have found that one wonderful way to avoid getting angry is to imagine myself as a character in an absurdist play: Things aren’t supposed to make sense, people aren’t supposed to be competent, and justice, when it happens at all, happens by accident. Instead of letting myself be angered by events, I persuade myself to laugh at them. Indeed, I try to think of ways the imaginary absurdist playwright could have made things still more absurd.

Programs of voluntary discomfort are therefore best left to “advanced Stoics.”

Seneca reminds us that even though it may be unpleasant to endure something, we will, on successfully enduring it, be pleased with ourselves.6

The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that acquiring the things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am and will in no way contribute to my having a good life. In

My time is coming, I told myself, and I must do what I can to prepare for it.