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July 16 - August 23, 2020
by thinking of setbacks as tests of our character, we can dramatically alter our emotional response to them.
instead of thinking of setbacks merely as unfortunate experiences, we can reframe them as tests of our resilience and ingenuity.
by getting angry, I would only be hurting myself. This incident demonstrated the possibility of thinking my way out of becoming angry, something I had previously thought was impossible.
“We cannot always control what happens in our life . . . , but we can always control what we do with what happens.”
Botha had come to realize that she had it in her power to choose whether to respond to the attack with anger, and she thereupon decided not to, knowing that anger has the power to devour those who experience it.
Other disabled individuals have benefited from the resulting technologies, so Hawking’s setback had a silver lining for humanity. Many setbacks do, especially if the person set back is resilient.
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.
playing the role of victim is likely to increase the anguish you experience as the result of the wrongs that are done you. You will feel emotionally helpless. A resilient person will refuse to play the role of victim. To play this role is to invite pity, and she doesn’t regard herself as a pitiful being. She is strong and capable. She may not be able to control whether she is a target of injustice, but she has considerable control over how she responds to being targeted. She can let it ruin her day and possibly her life, or she can respond to it bravely, remaining upbeat while she looks for
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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.
It is important to realize that in advising us to negatively visualize, the Stoics weren’t advocating that we dwell on how things could be worse; that would indeed be a recipe for misery. Instead, what we should do is periodically have flickering thoughts about how our lives and circumstances could be worse.
It is easy to take what we have for granted. Consequently, after a long period in which nothing bad happens, a practicing Stoic might become complacent and forget to do negative visualization. This has happened to me on many occasions. Fortunately for us, the Stoic gods have a way of getting us to think about how things could be worse: they show us how they could be worse by presenting us with setbacks. In doing this, they are actually doing us a favor, since a setback, if we deal with it in the proper frame of mind, is likely to trigger in us a renewed appreciation of our life and
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Epictetus, “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.”2 More generally,
“what upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things.”
Seneca shared this view—“It is not how the wrong is done that matters, but how it is taken”4—as did Marcus Aurelius: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate ...
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What could have been merely a setback transmogrifies into an ordeal.
The competing obligations frame:
The incompetence frame:
The storytelling frame:
The comedic frame:
“laughter, and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!”
if you can bring yourself to laugh at the things that make most people cry, you have a powerful weapon to use against life’s adversities.
The game frame:
The Stoic test frame:
Engage in this kind of “mortality meditation,” say Stoics, and we will fully appreciate the existence of those we love while they are still alive, meaning that
our love can make a difference in their lives. We will therefore feel less need, when they are no longer with us, to grieve their passing. In particular, we won’t have regrets about what we could and should have done while they were alive, since we likely would have done it. It should be clear that rather than being ghoulish, these meditations are a deeply life-affirming exercise.
Stoics recommend that when we experience a setback, we make a point of consciously framing it as a kind of test. Allow ourselves to get frustrated, and we get a low grade; allow ourselves to become angry or despondent—or even worse, regard ourselves as victims—and we fail. Ideally, the setback won’t give rise to negative emotions within us, not because we are successfully concealing our distress but because we have no distress to conceal.
According to Seneca, God (think Jupiter) sets us back not to punish us but to give us an opportunity to do something courageous and thereby increase our chances of attaining “the highest possible excellence.” God, Seneca explains,
hardens, reviews, and disciplines those who have won his approval and love; but those whom he seems to favor, whom he seems to spare, he is keeping soft against the misfortunes that are to come. 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.1
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. God, says Seneca, knows that “a man needs to be put to the test if he is to gain self-knowledge” and that “only by trying does he learn what his capacities are.”2
the key thing is that we assume that we are being tested for our own good.
human tendency to blame setbacks on someone else and then to get angry at that person. They also realized that if we acted quickly, we could short-circuit this process. In particular, by framing the setback as a test of our resilience and ingenuity, we could not only prevent the onset of negative emotions but transform the setback into a challenge that we might enjoy undertaking.
One side effect of studying for Stoic tests is that your self-confidence will rise. The more challenges you successfully meet, the more confident you will become of your ability to meet them. By voluntarily dealing with setbacks, you can also improve your ability to spot the silver linings in the gray clouds of daily life, and appreciate just how relatively setback-free your life is.
She is not only tolerant of hearing noes but is thankful for their existence: “The noes are actually a gift,” she says. Her mentor, she explains, had instructed her to “go out into the world and gather as many noes as you possibly can. It is your homework to be rejected over and over and over and over, and then come back and report on it.” It was, she said, “the most important thing I could have ever done and the most important advice I could have
been given.”3 She learned to listen closely to the noes and to mine them for clues. It turns out that noes are a valuable commodity, if you can tolerate hearing them and know what to do with them.
There is, of course, a chance that despite your best efforts, you don’t accomplish the macro-goal of the challenge you’ve undertaken. If this happens, you needn’t hang your head in shame. After all, you did your best, and what more can you do than that? You should also keep in mind that there is something much, much worse than failing to do something difficult, and that is not even attempting
to do it because you feared failure.
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.
“When mind and body have been corrupted by pleasure, nothing seems bearable—not because the things which you suffer are hard, but because you are soft.”
THE ANCIENT GREEKS were well aware of the setup phenomenon. They believed that the goddess Nemesis liked to punish extreme pride and foolish overconfidence, otherwise known as hubris. What particularly irked her were people who not only expected things to go well for them in the future but also were convinced that they somehow deserved for them to go well.
“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.”
One is what might be called last-time meditation, in which you acknowledge that because you are mortal, there will be a last time for everything you do. There will be a last time you flip a light switch, a last time you eat dinner, and a last time you say goodbye to your parents, spouse, children, and friends. You have already done some things for the last time: there is a very good chance, for example, that you will never again dial a rotary telephone, type on a typewriter, or take a math exam. There will be a last time you lay your head on a pillow, as well as a last time you take a breath.
