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February 17 - August 10, 2022
TO BEGIN WITH, I am not a member of some obscure religious cult. I am a modern adherent of an ancient philosophy. More precisely, I am a practicing Stoic, in the sense that I have chosen to live my twenty-first-century life in accordance with the strategies for living that were devised two thousand years ago by the Stoic philosophers Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus, among others.
you try to live without a philosophy of life, you will find yourself extemporizing your way through your days.
FOR MANY OF US, becoming frustrated or angry is the natural response to not getting what we want—getting angry is just what we do. Fortunately, an alternative response exists. 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.
Stoic test strategy is based on their appreciation of a phenomenon that has been rediscovered by modern psychologists, who christened it the framing effect: how we mentally characterize a situation has
profound impact on how we respond to it emotionally.
They discovered, more precisely, that by thinking of setbacks as tests of our character, we can dramatically alter our emotional response to them.
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.
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.
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.
You should have, since 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.
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.
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. In other words, it only makes matters worse.
WHEN WE BECOME ANGRY, we have two options: we can either express our anger or suppress
SO WHAT SHOULD WE DO when we feel that someone has wronged us? Our first objective, says Seneca, should be to avoid getting angry.
The doctor ended up being an hour late, and during that hour, I made an interesting discovery: although I knew full well that I had every right to be angry at her for making me wait, I just couldn’t bring myself to do so.
In her talks, she described the philosophy by which she lives: “We cannot always control what happens in our life . . . , but we can always control what we do with what happens.”
In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt offered this bit of Stoic-inspired advice: “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.
On the advice of psychologists, parents of the 1990s and 2000s worked hard to give their children setback-free childhoods.
These overly protective parents also took steps to prevent their children from experiencing failure.
Dealing with your emotions and your subconscious mind, I should add, is a lifelong challenge, since unlike any children you might have, your emotions and subconscious mind are never going to grow up.
They realized, to begin with, that there is an upside to having a subconscious mind. It can, for example, read body language and facial expressions in a way that is very difficult to put into words.
Your subconscious mind also has a moral sense. It turns out that many heroic rescues are triggered not by rational analysis—there simply isn’t time for it—but rather by a gut moral instinct about what must be done under certain circumstances.
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.
First, however, it will be useful to familiarize ourselves with two psychological phenomena, anchoring and framing, that lie at the heart of the Stoic test strategy. They were “discovered” in the late twentieth century, two millennia after the Stoics put them to work in their lives and philosophy.
THE ANCIENT STOIC PHILOSOPHERS were way ahead of these psychologists and businessmen. They employed the anchoring phenomenon not to sell shirts but to have a more fulfilling life.
This process, now known as negative visualization, is one of the most remarkable psychological instruments in the Stoic tool kit.
Instead, what we should do is periodically have flickering thoughts about how our lives and circumstances could be worse.
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!
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 of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
In art gallery terms, then, an optimist is someone who customarily places life’s paintings into frames that make them look beautiful, and a pessimist is someone who places them into ugly frames.
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.
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.
People normally think of setbacks as annoying events, or even worse, as undeserved tribulations; as a result, they respond by getting frustrated or angry.
By choosing another frame, we can keep our cool in the face of a setback and thereby increase our chances of finding the optimal workaround. And not only that, but by employing the Stoic test frame, we can interpret setbacks as interesting challenges, thereby deriving a degree of satisfaction from dealing with them.
The Stoic would add that since we don’t have it in our power to resurrect the dead, we are wasting our time mourning their passing excessively. To the extent possible, we should simply accept their death and get on with life.
Stoics recommend that when we experience a setback, we make a point of consciously framing it as a kind of test.
We humans, in other words, are hybrid creatures, part god and part animal.
gangrenous,
I know that the key to success is to take one more stroke, and then, when I have finished it, take another. By doing this, I can silence and even humiliate Lazy Bill: “You lose, Billy Boy!”
capitulate,
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.
hedonists.
They believed that the goddess Nemesis liked to punish extreme pride and foolish overconfidence, otherwise known as hubris. What
prosaic
