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April 12 - April 18, 2025
If you try to live without a philosophy of life, you will find yourself extemporizing your way through your days. As a result, your daily efforts are likely to be haphazard, and your life is likely to be misspent. What a waste!
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.
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. Their goal in throwing these curveballs our way is to make our days not harder but better.
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.
We should think of the Stoics not as grim individuals but as eternal optimists who possessed a profound ability to put a positive spin on life’s events.
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.
One sign of maturity is a realization of the extent to which you, either intentionally or unintentionally, make life difficult for those around you.
Because of the connection between setbacks and desires, if a person were incapable of experiencing desire, nothing would count as a setback.
Theodore Roosevelt offered this bit of Stoic-inspired advice: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”11
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.
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.
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.
People aren’t, however, perfectly rational. In particular, they are influenced by how choices are framed, and a choice framed in terms of survival will seem more attractive than the same choice framed in terms of death.
Conclusion: 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.
Usually the harm done us by our emotions—if we allow them to be triggered—is the biggest cost associated with a setback.
This may be true, but 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. Furthermore, the anger we express often triggers anger in those on the other side of an issue.
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.
As we have seen, our interpretation of an event is like the frame of a painting. Put a Rembrandt in one sort of frame, and it will look hideous; switch it to another, and it will look sublime. The same is true of the setbacks we experience. Put a setback in one psychological frame, and we will find it upsetting; put it in another, and we may discover, much to our amazement, that we enjoy dealing with that setback.
Regardless of the imaginary tester we choose, the key thing is that we assume that we are being tested for our own good.
In other words, whereas Jefferson was interested in anger management, the Stoics were interested in anger prevention.
This may sound strange, but a wise man knows that although adversity can crush us, it can also, if we are in the right frame of mind, strengthen us and thereby enhance our ability to withstand adversity.
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 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.
For an event to count as a setback, it must not only come as a surprise to us but must, from our point of view, count as a change for the worse.
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.
You can do this by going out of your way to expose yourself, in measured doses, to the things you fear.
To last-time meditate, you periodically pause in your daily routine to reflect that no matter what you are doing, there is a chance that this is the last time you will ever do it.
These last-time meditations may sound depressing, but they have the power to infuse everyday occurrences with meaning.
In doing prospective retrospection, you simply remind yourself that at the present moment, almost regardless of what you are doing, you are quite likely living in the dream world of your future self. Enjoy living that dream!
SUPPOSE YOU CAME TO POSSESS INFORMATION about when and how you will die. What would you do with it? A Stoic would have no trouble answering this question. Since his primary goal in life is to attain and then maintain tranquility, he would spend the time that remained experiencing as few negative emotions as he can, with as little anxiety, fear, anger, and regret as possible. He would do his best to embrace the sources of delight that his life still had to offer. In more general terms, he would regard his dying days as an opportunity to top a good life with a beautiful and fitting capstone.
In order to have our best chance at a good death, we must keep in mind the Stoic principle that we should not concern ourselves with things we cannot control.
Another central principle of Stoicism is that we should be socially useful: we should, that is, do what we can to help those around us have better lives.
Your goal, under such circumstances, should be to make sure that no matter when your editor publishes your novel, it will stand as a complete work—or as complete as is humanly possible.
