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October 3 - October 17, 2021
I reflected on what a bunch of spoiled brats we twenty-first-century humans are. Here we were in a climate-controlled bus, heading toward a climate-controlled airport, so we could fly across the country in a climate-controlled airplane. Should we experience thirst on that flight, someone would bring us the beverage of our choice, and if the flight was long enough, someone would offer us food. Should our bowels move, there would be a flush toilet just down the aisle. And not to be forgotten, the toilet in question would in all likelihood have toilet paper.
It is both easy to use and remarkably effective. I call it the Stoic test strategy: when faced with a setback, we should treat it as a test of our resilience and resourcefulness, devised and administered, as I have said, by imaginary Stoic gods.
framing effect: how we mentally characterize a situation has a profound impact on how we respond to it emotionally.
by thinking of setbacks as tests of our character, we can dramatically alter our emotional response to them. We can, in particular, develop our ability to stay calm, even in the face of very significant setbacks, and this in turn can have a dramatic impact on our quality of life.
Their goal wasn’t to banish emotion but to minimize the number of negative emotions—such as feelings of frustration, anger, grief, and envy—that they experienced. They had nothing against the experience of positive emotions, including delight and even joy.
Their goal was not to remain calm while suffering a setback but rather to experience a setback without thereby suffering. It is an important difference.
“we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.”
Thoughtful people, by contrast, minimize the number of setbacks they experience by learning how the world works and using this knowledge to plan their activities.
the biggest cost by far is the emotional distress a setback triggers.
He explained that although the list of things she would have to do differently was very long, the list of things she couldn’t do was short.
“We cannot always control what happens in our life . . . , but we can always control what we do with what happens.”
“I might have been given a bad break,” he concluded, “but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.”
“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
When the number of options available is limited, it is foolish to fuss and fret. We should instead simply choose the best of them and get on with life. To behave otherwise is to waste precious time and energy.
This is why they came up with what I am calling the Stoic test strategy. To employ it, we assume that the setbacks we experience are not simply undeserved tribulations but tests of our ingenuity and resilience, administered by imaginary Stoic gods.
To pass these tests, we must not only come up with effective workarounds to setbacks but must also, while doing so, avoid the onset of negative emotions.
By thinking about how things could be worse, they effectively sank an anchor into their subconscious minds (not that they thought in these psychological terms). The presence of that anchor affected how they subsequently felt about their current situation. Instead of comparing it to the superior situations they routinely found themselves dreaming of, they compared it to the inferior situations they imagined and thereupon concluded that things weren’t so bad.
This process, now known as negative visualization, is one of the most remarkable psychological instruments in the Stoic tool kit.
what we should do is periodically have flickering thoughts about how our lives and circumstances could be worse.
Consequently, when a water pipe bursts, your first response should not be to try to mend the pipe, or to go out and buy drinking water so you can make your morning coffee. It should be to turn off the water supply, to prevent your dwelling from getting flooded.
Usually the harm done us by our emotions—if we allow them to be triggered—is the biggest cost associated with a setback.
‘You must not harbor anger,’ I admonished myself. ‘You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent, and yet not return anger. You must not become bitter. No matter how emotional your opponents are, you must be calm.’
as the Stoics well knew, anger is a double-edged sword: besides motivating us, it can exhaust us, so that we run out of energy before winning our battle.
The people we love won’t be with us forever—if nothing else, our own death will deprive us of their company. The Stoics therefore recommend that we periodically make a point of reminding ourselves just how wonderful it is that the people we love are currently part of our life.
As we have also seen, when you encounter a setback, your subconscious mind goes into action. It tries to make sense of what is going on by providing a frame for the setback. But even though it has lots of frames to choose from, it tends to favor the blame frame: it assumes that you have been wronged, that some person or group of people has it in for you.
You are wrong if you think anyone has been exempted from ill; the man who has known happiness for many a year will receive his share some day; whoever seems to have been set free from this has only been granted a delay.
We should therefore be flattered if we encounter setbacks. Paradoxically, it is evidence that we have caught the attention of God—indeed, that he regards us as a candidate for achieving human excellence.
I’ve given you a certain portion of myself, this faculty of motivation to act and not to act, of desire and aversion, and, in a word, the power to make proper use of impressions; if you pay good heed to this, and entrust all that you have to its keeping, you’ll never be hindered, never obstructed, and you’ll never groan, never find fault, and never flatter anyone at all.
“excellence withers without an adversary.”
with the judicious use of framing, you can turn the setbacks you experience into vehicles for self-transformation.
Also, these emotions, once they erupt, can do us more harm than the setback itself does.
“Nothing seems to me more unhappy than the man who has no experience of adversity.” Consequently, he says, a wise man will welcome a degree of adversity into his life.
“Some men,” he says, “have presented themselves of their own accord to misfortune when it is slow to afflict them, seeking to find an opportunity for their worth to shine out when it is in danger of falling into obscurity.”
The hero’s journey, Campbell wrote, begins with life in the ordinary world, when along comes the call to adventure.
To a much greater extent, though, our life experience determines the size and shape of our comfort zone. In particular, if we make a point of exposing ourselves to things that make us either physically or emotionally uncomfortable, we can train ourselves to be comfortable with them and thereby expand our comfort zone.
“Although all things in excess bring harm, the greatest danger comes from excessive good fortune: it stirs the brain, invites the mind to entertain idle fancies, and shrouds in thick fog the distinction between falsehood and truth.”
Another variant of negative visualization involves what might be called prospective retrospection. To employ this technique, you periodically pause, as you are going about your daily routine, to reflect on the likelihood that at some point in the future, you will wish you could travel back in time to this very moment.
“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”
enter that “cottage of darkness” full of curiosity, knowing that she spent her life play ing the role of “a bride married to amazement.”
