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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. 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.”
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.
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.
“We cannot always control what happens in our life . . . , but we can always control what we do with what happens.”5 It is a strategy that Stoic philosopher Epictetus would have applauded. 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.
“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.
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 workarounds to the obstacles that people have wrongly placed in her path.
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.
The Stoics weren’t anti-emotion; indeed, they placed a high value on positive emotions, including delight, joy, and a sense of awe. They knew that without these emotions, ours would be a gray existence—and probably pointless as well. At the same time, though, they were intent on reducing the number of negative emotions they experienced, including frustration, anger, grief, and disappointment.
By treating a setback as a Stoic test, we take our subconscious mind out of the setback-response loop. More precisely, we preclude it from suggesting a finger-pointing explanation for a setback, an explanation that assumes that someone else is taking advantage of us or abusing us. This prevents the activation of our emotions, which not only dramatically lowers the personal cost of being set back but also improves our chances of dealing with the setback in a thoughtful manner.
Besides thinking about how much worse off you would be if you lost something, you can think about how much worse off you would be if you never had it to begin with.
Whereas the use of anchoring can help us better appreciate our lives, the use of framing can prevent setbacks from disrupting our tranquility; indeed, frame events cleverly, and we might even find ourselves welcoming the setbacks we experience! This, I realize, is a pretty remarkable claim to make, so allow me to explain.
“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.”
More generally, he reminds us that “what upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things.”3
Marcus Aurelius: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Whereas most people valued fame and fortune,6 a 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. He also knew that when people judge others, they do so in accordance with their own values, not in accordance with the values of the people they are judging. He therefore concluded that a sensible Stoic will ignore the praise of non-Stoics, so it would be pointless for him to go out of his way to gain that praise by sharing his setback stories.
When someone wrongs you, keep in mind Seneca’s comment that “laughter, and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears!”8 He also reminded us that this technique was employed
Another time humor comes in handy is when we have been insulted.10 Lots of people respond to insults by getting angry, and the insult thereby sets them back. A better response is simply to laugh. By doing so, we not only forestall anger in ourselves but make the person who insulted us look like a fool: he hit us with his best verbal shot, and we just laughed it off.
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.
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:
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.
Epictetus tells us that “it is difficulties that reveal what men amount to; and so, whenever you’re struck by a difficulty, remember that God, like a trainer in the gymnasium, has matched you against a tough young opponent.”
The second but more significant factor in grading your performance will be your emotional response to the setback. If you remain calm and collected, you will be worthy of, say, a B. If your goal is to get an A or even an A+ on the exam, though, you will have to do more than remain calm; you will have to welcome the setback and even perk up a bit on its appearance.
Besides taking steps to avoid being surprised by undesirable events, Stoics recommend that we take steps to change what, for us, counts as an undesirable event. This suggestion sounds farfetched, I realize, so allow me to explain.
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.
the Stoics knew that exposure to discomfort, if done in a systematic fashion, would have the effect of reducing the total amount of discomfort they experienced in daily living.
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.
WE HAVE SEEN, the ancient Stoics weren’t opposed to the experience of positive emotions, such as delight and even joy. They cautioned, though, against allowing ourselves to become overjoyed, since doing so increases our chances of being miserable when we are ultimately set back. We should instead take good fortune in stride, the way, ideally, we take bad fortune. Do things right, and other people will be unaware of our fortune, whether it be good or bad.
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. Yes, some story elements will remain unresolved, but no important business will be left undone. In particular, those who helped you will have been thanked for their help, and the people you love will know of this love. There will be precious few things about the plot that you would want to change, if you had it in your power to do so. This is in part because of the choices you made but also, and more important,
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