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

by William B. Irvine

In other words, we need a technique for creating in ourselves a desire for the things we already have.

A better strategy for getting what you want, he says, is to make it your goal to want only those things that are easy to obtain—and ideally to want only those things that you can be certain of obtaining.

all we own is the present moment

He realized that in many cases, we work hard to obtain something because we are convinced that we would be miserable without it. The problem is that we can live perfectly well without some of these things, but we won’t know which they are if we don’t try living without them.

In other words, voluntary discomfort can be thought of as a kind of vaccine: By exposing ourselves to a small amount of a weakened virus now, we create in ourselves an immunity that will protect us from a debilitating illness in the future.