The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

by Ward Farnsworth

We appear to go through life reacting directly to events and all else in the world. That appearance is an illusion. We react to our judgments and opinions – to our thoughts about things, not to things themselves. We usually aren’t aware of this.

For example: we desire whatever we don’t have, we are contemptuous of whatever we do have, and we judge our state and our success by comparisons that are arbitrary and pointless. We chase money and pleasure in ways that can bring no real satisfaction; we pursue reputation in the eyes of others that can do us no real good. We torment ourselves with fear of things that are more easily endured than worried about.

The Stoic responds to the suffering of others like a good doctor who has seen it all before: with activity and compassion, though probably without much emotion.

We are more sensitive to a cut made by a surgeon’s scalpel than to ten wounds by sword in the heat of battle. Montaigne, That the Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them (1580)

Those things with respect to which everyone is weak, we regard as hard and beyond endurance. We forget what a torment it is to many of us just to abstain from wine or be made to get up at daybreak. These things are not essentially difficult. It is we who are soft and slack. Seneca, Epistles 71.23

Like a bowl of water, so is the soul; like the light falling on the water, so are the impressions the soul receives. When the water is disturbed, the light also seems to be disturbed; yet it is not disturbed. Epictetus, Discourses 3.4.20

Pay attention to your impressions, watch over them without sleeping, for what you guard is no small thing: self-respect and fidelity and self-possession, a mind free from emotion, pain, fear, disturbance – in a word, freedom. Epictetus, Discourses 4.3.7

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me, I adapt to them. Montaigne, Of Presumption (1580)

These are the two ideas you should keep at the very front of your mind and think about. One is that things in the world do not touch your spirit, but stand quietly external to it; that which disturbs us comes only from the opinions within us. Second, everything you see changes in a moment and will soon be gone. Keep in mind always how many of these changes you have already seen. The world is constant change; your life lies in your opinion. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.3.4

Our ultimate insignificance makes the case for living well in the present, for no other purpose survives.

When a steadfast mind knows that there is no difference between a day and an age, whatever the days or events that may come, then it can look out from the heights and laugh as it reflects on the succession of the ages. Seneca, Epistles 101.9

A correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus