The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient

by William B. Irvine

Sometimes your life is going along smoothly—splendidly, even—and then out of the blue, an obstacle appears. It can happen at work, at play, at home, or as was the case with my airport setback, while traveling. The plan you devised for yourself can no longer be carried out, so you have to come up with a new one.

SOMETIMES IT IS NATURE that sets you back.

In most cases, though, it isn’t nature that obstructs your progress; it is other people.

This fact is easy to forget, given that you are more acutely aware of the problems others cause you than you are of the problems you cause them. One sign of maturity is a realization of the extent to which you, either intentionally or unintentionally, make life difficult for those around you. Consequently, you should keep in mind the words of Seneca: “we are bad men living among bad men; and only one thing can calm us—we must agree to go easy on one another.”

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if you drew up a list of the people who have caused you setbacks, you would have to put yourself on that list, probably at the top.

SETBACKS AND DESIRES ARE INTERCONNECTED: whether something counts as a setback depends on what a person wants, and how significant the setback is depends on how much he wants it.

Because of the connection between setbacks and desires, if a person were incapable of experiencing desire, nothing would count as a setback.

How many setbacks you experience depends, as I have suggested, on how much foresight you possess. The days of a thoughtless person are likely to be filled with obstacles that he failed to anticipate, and as a result, he is likely to find life both frustrating and unfair.

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.

when you add up the costs imposed on you by being set back, you will often find that the biggest cost by far is the emotional distress a setback triggers.

setbacks carry a double cost. The first might be described as their physical cost.

But alongside these physical costs, there will be emotional costs.

Unfortunately, the strategy that many people employ isn’t just ineffective, it’s counterproductive. It results in them becoming first frustrated and then angry, which substantially increases the harm done them by the setback.

Different people respond to setbacks in different ways. Some people are quite sensitive to them: even a minor setback will have a significant impact on their emotional state, and after experiencing it, they won’t bounce back quickly. They might feel incapable of finding a workaround for the setback, or they might play the role of victim and complain to anyone who will listen how unfair it is that they were set back in this manner. They might go on to argue that because of their victimization, they shouldn’t have to come up with a workaround; someone else should have to do it for them. Most of us, though, are tougher than this. We respond to the setbacks we experience not by feeling helpless and defeated but by feeling frustrated.

Getting frustrated, on the other hand, often begets anger. This is unfortunate, since anger is incompatible with happiness; indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy. Consequently, getting frustrated in response to a setback only makes things worse.

we often direct our setback-triggered anger at someone, and when we express our anger to that person, he or she could very well respond by returning it.

I might ask a friend for advice on finding a workaround for a setback, but I would never ask—or expect—a friend to be angry or sad about my being set back. This sort of commiseration turns a setback for one person into a setback for two, without helping the first person overcome the setback.

WHEN WE BECOME ANGRY, we have two options: we can either express our anger or suppress it. If suppressed, our anger might take root in us and enter a kind of dormant state, only to spring back to life at an inopportune moment:

Suppose that instead of suppressing our anger, we express it. Do so in a manner that breaks the law, and we might end up in prison. And while expressing anger in a socially acceptable manner may or may not hurt the person at whom we are angry, it is certain to have a negative impact on ourselves.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca understood how much harm we do by allowing ourselves to get angry. In his essay “On Anger,” he asserts, “No plague has cost the human race more.”

SO WHAT SHOULD WE DO when we feel that someone has wronged us? Our first objective, says Seneca, should be to avoid getting angry. That way we will have no anger to deal with and therefore no anger either to express or to suppress.

thinking my way out of becoming angry,

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.

WHEN YOU EXPERIENCE A SETBACK, your subconscious mind goes to work trying to fathom its cause, and it is inclined to point an accusing finger: it looks for another person as the cause and likes to attribute sinister motives to that person. More generally, your subconscious mind tends to treat life’s setbacks as undeserved tribulations. It therefore tries to convince you that you have been wronged. Shortly thereafter—unless you take steps to prevent it—your emotions will rise in support of your subconscious mind’s interpretation of events.

once your emotions are triggered, they are hard to subdue, so they may continue to disrupt your life long after the setback that triggered them has been overcome.

The Stoics weren’t anti-emotion; indeed, they placed a high value on positive emotions, including delight, joy, and a sense of awe.

they were intent on reducing the number of negative emotions they experienced, including frustration, anger, grief, and disappointment.

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.

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take our subconscious mind out of the setback-response loop. More precisely, we preclude it from suggesting a finger-pointing explanation for a setback,

If we are clever in our use of the strategy, though, we can find ourselves not only avoiding negative emotions but also experiencing positive ones, including pride, satisfaction, and maybe even joy, as we rise to meet the challenge the setback represents.

two psychological phenomena, anchoring and framing, that lie at the heart of the Stoic test strategy.

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the anchoring effect. In Kahneman and Tversky’s experiment, the rigged wheel sank an “anchor” into the subconscious minds of their research subjects, and on lodging there, it affected their subsequent speculations about the world.

In both experiments, a subject’s conscious mind lacked sufficient information to make a rational guess, but instead of admitting its ignorance, it yielded the floor to the subject’s subconscious mind, which was happy to hazard one. Those guesses, though, were distorted by the anchors that had been sunk into the subject’s subconscious mind.

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.

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,

Framing is another curious psychological phenomenon that was employed by the ancient Stoics,

the use of framing can prevent setbacks from disrupting our tranquility; indeed, frame events cleverly, and we might even find ourselves welcoming the setbacks

WHEN LIFE PRESENTS US WITH A SETBACK, we have many ways to explain it—many different frames, that is, in which to place it. As we have seen, our subconscious mind tends to assume that it was other people who set us back and that they did so on purpose and even with malice. I will refer to this as the blame frame. Once our subconscious mind has done this, our emotions will be aroused, and we will likely get angry.

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by coming up with alternative explanations for our setbacks, it puts them in frames that are neutral or even beautiful.

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The competing obligations frame:

person deciding what you got may be enmeshed in a web of obligations, meaning that if she gives you what you want, she will be unable to give others what they deserve.

The incompetence frame:

Frame the incident as incompetence rather than malice, and the emotion you subsequently experience might be pity rather than anger.

The storytelling frame:

think in terms of the setback story you might tell in the future. It may be a story about how frustrated you were, how mean and stupid pe...

Stoic’s primary goal in life was to attain and then maintain tranquility—to avoid, that is, experiencing negative emotions while continuing to enjoy positive emotions.

The comedic frame:

“laughter, and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!”

The game frame: