More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 2 - August 3, 2023
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.
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. Rather than experiencing frustration and anger on being set back, they might experience no small measure of satisfaction on successfully dealing with the challenge presented them by that setback.
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.”
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.”1 Because of anger, people insult and sue each other, they divorce each other, and they hit and even kill each other. Because of anger, the nations those people live in go to war, and as a result, millions might die at the hands of people they have never even met. Cities might be reduced to rubble, and civilizations might fall.
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.
This is why they came up with what I am calling the 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.
The Stoics, in other words, came up with a strategy for turning the setback lemons that life hands us into lemonade—or maybe even a lemon meringue pie.
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.
This process, now known as negative visualization, is one of the most remarkable psychological instruments in the Stoic tool kit. 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.
According to 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.”
This sounds perverse, I know, but look at the unhappy people around you. The surest way to win their praise is to adopt and live in accordance with their values. It will then be easy for them to praise you, because by doing so, they are indirectly praising themselves. The snag, of course, is that by sharing their values you will likely end up sharing their misery.
anger is a double-edged sword: besides motivating us, it can exhaust us, so that we run out of energy before winning our battle.
Social reformers are therefore wise to follow in the footsteps of Gandhi and King, and stay calm while working passionately to bring about change.
If we presented a Stoic with the list of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, his response would be to skip the first four—denial, anger, bargaining, and depression—and go directly to stage five, acceptance.
take myself to be tested not by Stoic gods but by the ghost of Seneca. And in a deeper sense, the ghost of Seneca does exist. Because I have read his works, Seneca haunts my intellect, occasionally offering me a compliment but much more often raising his ghostly eyebrows at me in a look of dismay. Regardless of the imaginary tester we choose, the key thing is that we assume that we are being tested for our own good.
if we are set back, we have five seconds to declare the event to be a Stoic test.
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.
ANOTHER ADVANTAGE OF ROWING is that it puts me into intimate contact with what I call Lazy Bill.2 This creature lives in my subconscious mind, where it spends most of its time sleeping. When I am rowing, though, it routinely puts in an appearance. I will be straining to do a 500-meter practice sprint, or I will be 3,000 meters into a 5,000-meter race, and Lazy Bill will speak up: “You know, Bill, you could just stop rowing. Think of how much better you would feel if you just stopped rowing!”
You can substantially reduce the sting of this failure—and thereby increase your chance of eventual success—by engaging in a bit of creative framing: you can, in particular, think of your failures as obstacles rather than setbacks.
For whatever reason, these hard-to-please individuals often feel a need to tell others about their discomfort. They want the rest of us to be aware of it and ideally to do something about it.
In most cases, religious ascetics deny themselves pleasures and subject themselves to various discomforts so they can experience a better afterlife. God, they think, will be impressed by their seriousness and consequently will reward them with a heavenly eternity. By contrast, Stoics engage in toughness training so they can have a better life.
Acknowledge your mortality, though, and you will be acutely aware that every day you live represents a withdrawal from a life bank that has a finite number of days in it. In most circumstances, you don’t know what that number is. It might be as low as 1, meaning that this is your last day alive, but it might also be 25,500, meaning that you have seventy years more to live. Since you have a finite number of days left to you, they are precious, and it would be foolish to waste them.
Our death, we conclude, is both imminent and unavoidable. We must then turn our attention to a different undertaking: having the best death possible. This is when our Stoic training can come into play.
