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July 11 - July 16, 2023
The true goal of life for Stoics isn’t to acquire as many external advantages as possible but to use whatever befalls us wisely, whether it be sickness or health, wealth or poverty, friends or enemies. The Stoic Sage, or wise man, needs nothing but uses everything well; the fool believes himself to “need” countless things, but he uses them all badly.
Even the Stoic wise man, therefore, may tremble in the face of danger. What matters is what he does next. He exhibits courage and self-control precisely by accepting these feelings, rising above them, and asserting his capacity for reason.
Everything comes back to the exercise of reason and the goal of living wisely.
very clever, but not necessarily wise.
Cf clever vs intelligence
Rhetoricians thrive on praise, which is vanity; philosophers love truth and embrace humility. Rhetoric is a form of entertainment, pleasant to hear; philosophy is a moral and psychological therapy, often painful to hear because it forces us to admit our own faults in order to remedy them—sometimes the truth hurts.
people who confuse “Stoicism” with “stoicism” (i.e., having a stiff upper lip) often think that it’s about suppressing feelings like anxiety, which they view as bad, harmful, or shameful. That’s not only bad psychology, it’s also totally in conflict with Stoic philosophy, which teaches us to accept our involuntary emotional reactions, our flashes of anxiety, as indifferent: neither good nor bad. What matters, in other words, isn’t what we feel but how we respond to those feelings.
If you stick with the facts and don’t unnecessarily extrapolate from them, you will put paid to many anxieties in life.
As an aspiring Stoic, you should begin by practicing deliberately describing events more objectively and in less emotional terms.
those who assume that they have the fewest flaws are often the ones most deeply flawed in the eyes of others.
there’s nothing wrong with pleasure unless we begin craving it so much that we neglect our responsibilities in life or it replaces healthy and fulfilling activities with ones that are not.
When doing what feels pleasurable becomes more important than doing what’s actually good for us or our loved ones, though, that’s a recipe for disaster. There’s a world of difference between healthy pleasures and unhealthy ones.
The obstacle standing in the way becomes the way.
Nothing is entirely under your control, except your own volition. Always accepting this and preparing yourself in advance to meet both success and failure with equanimity can help you avoid feeling angry, surprised, or frustrated when events don’t turn out as you might have wished. It can also stop you from worrying about things in anticipation of them going wrong.
when people disagreed with Marcus, he first tried to persuade them to see things from his perspective. However, if they persisted in obstructing what he believed to be a just course of action, he remained calm and transformed the obstacle into an opportunity to exercise some other virtue, such as patience, restraint, or understanding. His equanimity remained intact as long as he never desired what was beyond his grasp, which constitutes one of the foundations of the Stoic remedy for worry and anxiety.5
if you don’t act with the reserve clause in mind, then any failure immediately becomes an evil to you or a potential source of distress. By contrast, if you accept that the outcome couldn’t have been other than it was and wasn’t under your direct control, then you should suffer no harm or frustration. In this way, the mind is saved from anxiety and preserved in its natural equanimity,
One of the most robustly established findings in the entire field of modern psychotherapy research is the fact that anxiety tends to abate naturally during prolonged exposure to feared situations, under normal conditions. That’s been the basis of evidence-based phobia treatments since the 1950s, and it’s also an integral part of modern treatment protocols for other, more complex forms of anxiety, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
familiarity breeds not contempt but indifference. We can expect anxiety to abate naturally with repeated exposure, under normal conditions.
the feared situation must be experienced for considerably longer than normal for anxiety to properly habituate. In fact, if exposure is terminated too soon, the technique may actually backfire and increase anxiety and sensitization to the feared situation.
