This book is a good introduction to Stoicism. It is almost a manual on life, but not quite. At the very least, it details the journey of a traveler who has examined the road/s. Before reading the excerpts, here is a short video.
- Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence. By practicing Stoic techniques, we can cure the disease and thereby gain tranquility.
- The joy the Stoics were interested in can best be described as a kind of objectless enjoyment—an enjoyment not of any particular thing but of all this. It is a delight in simply being able to participate in life.
- Hedonic adaptation / satisfaction treadmill – We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.
- Solution to hedonic adaptation is to forestall and reverse the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get. Besides finding a way to forestall the adaptation process, we need to find a way to reverse it.
- The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.
- Enjoy what we have without clinging to it.
- Negative visualization – The Stoics recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value. This enjoyment will come to an end. If nothing else, our own death will end it. Negative visualization, rather than making people glum, will increase the extent to which they enjoy the world around them, in as much as it will prevent them from taking that world for granted.
- While most people seek to gain contentment by changing the world around them, Epictetus advises us to gain contentment by changing ourselves—more precisely, by changing our desires. Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill.
- Voluntary discomfort: Besides contemplating bad things happening, we should sometimes live as if they had happened. In particular, instead of merely thinking about what it would be like to lose our wealth, we should periodically “practice poverty”: We should, that is, content ourselves with “the scantiest and cheapest fare” and with “coarse and rough dress.” This way we harden ourselves against misfortunes that might befall us in the future. Voluntary discomfort can be thought of as a kind of vaccine. A second benefit of undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort comes not in the future but immediately. A person who periodically experiences minor discomforts will grow confident that he can withstand major discomforts as well, so the prospect of experiencing such discomforts at some future time will not, at present, be a source of anxiety for him. Third benefit of undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort is that it helps us appreciate what we already have.
- The most important battle any person has to fight is the battle against pleasure.
- As we go about our daily business, we should simultaneously play the roles of participant and spectator.
- Actions rather than words.
- Not to seek fame and fortune, since doing so will likely disrupt our tranquility.
- Be careful in choosing our associates; other people, after all, have the power to shatter our tranquility. Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.”
- If we detect anger and hatred within us and wish to seek revenge, one of the best forms of revenge on another person is to refuse to be like him.
- How to deal with insults: When insulted, people typically become angry. Because anger is a negative emotion that can upset our tranquility, the Stoics thought it worthwhile to develop strategies to prevent insults from angering us—strategies for removing, as it were, the sting of an insult.
- Pause. Consider whether what the insulter said is true. If it is, there is little reason to be upset.
- Consider the source of an insult. If I respect the source, if I value his opinions, then his critical remarks shouldn’t upset me. Suppose, however, that I don’t respect the source of an insult; indeed, suppose that I take him to be a thoroughly contemptible individual. Under such circumstances, rather than feeling hurt by his insults, I should feel relieved: If he disapproves of what I am doing, then what I am doing is doubtless the right thing to do. What should worry me is if this contemptible person approved of what I am doing.
- Humor. By laughing off an insult, we are implying that we don’t take the insulter and his insults seriously.
- No response at all. Refusing to respond to an insult is, paradoxically, one of the most effective responses possible. For one thing, as Seneca points out, our nonresponse can be quite disconcerting to the insulter, who will wonder whether or not we understood his insult. Furthermore, we are robbing him of the pleasure of having upset us, and he is likely to be upset as a result.
- Anger, says Seneca, is “brief insanity,” and the damage done by anger is enormous: “No plague has cost the human race more.” When angry, says Seneca, we should take steps to “turn all [anger’s] indications into their opposites.” We should force ourselves to relax our face, soften our voice, and slow our pace of walking. If we do this, our internal state will soon come to resemble our external state, and our anger, says Seneca, will have dissipated.
- Fame : the Stoics claim that the price of fame is sufficiently high that it far outweighs any benefits fame can confer on us. Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them. But if we seek social status, we give other people power over us. We should be consistent in our indifference; we should, in other words, be as dismissive of their approval as we are of their disapproval.
- Wealth: Besides valuing fame, people typically value wealth. These two values may seem independent, but a case can be made that the primary reason we seek wealth is that we seek fame. Not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself is. It would be bad enough if the acquisition of wealth failed to bring people happiness, but Musonius thinks the situation is even worse than this: Wealth has the power to make people miserable. If we are exposed to a luxurious lifestyle, we will lose our ability to take delight in simple things. Luxury, Seneca warns, uses her wit to promote vices: First she makes us want things that are inessential, then she makes us want things that are injurious. If we take to heart the advice of the Stoics and forgo luxurious living, we will find that our needs are easily met, for as Seneca reminds us, life’s necessities are cheap and easily obtainable. Lao Tzu observed that “he who knows contentment is rich.”
- Personal change before social change: The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances. The second step in transforming a society is to change people’s external circumstances. The Stoics would add that if we fail to transform ourselves, then no matter how much we transform the society in which we live, we are unlikely to have a good life. Many of us have been persuaded that happiness is something that someone else, a therapist or a politician, must confer on us. Stoicism rejects this notion.
- Tranquility: is a psychological state in which we experience few negative emotions, such as anxiety, grief, and fear, but an abundance of positive emotions, especially joy. The Stoics produced a body of advice for anyone seeking tranquility.
- We should become self-aware.
- We should use our reasoning ability to overcome negative emotions.
- We should also use our reasoning ability to master our desires, to the extent that it is possible to do so. In particular, we should use reason to convince ourselves that things such as fame and fortune aren’t worth having —not, at any rate, if what we seek is tranquility.
- If, despite not having pursued wealth, we find ourselves wealthy, we should enjoy our affluence. But although we should enjoy wealth, we should not cling to it; indeed, even as we enjoy it, we should contemplate its loss.
- The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness—our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control. To conquer our insatiability, the Stoics advise us to engage in negative visualization. We should perform a kind of triage in which we distinguish between things we have no control over, things we have complete control over, and things we have some but not complete control over; and having made this distinction, we should focus our attention on the last two categories. The Serenity Prayer comes to mind.
- The author’s thoughts on malls : I want so few of the things that money can buy. My only entertainment at a mall is to watch the other mall-goers. Most of them, I suspect, come to the mall not because there is something specific that they need to buy. Rather, they come in the hope that doing so will trigger a desire for something that, before going to the mall, they didn’t want.Why go out of their way to trigger a desire? Because if they trigger one, they can enjoy the rush that comes when they extinguish that desire by buying its object. It is a rush, of course, that has as little to do with their long- term happiness as taking a hit of heroin has to do with the long-term happiness of a heroin addict. What brought about this state of affairs? The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that acquiring the things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am and will in no way contribute to my having a good life. In particular, were I to acquire a new car, a fine wardrobe, a Rolex watch, and a bigger house, I am convinced that I would experience no more joy than I presently do—and might even experience less. As a consumer, I seem to have crossed some kind of great divide. It seems unlikely that, having crossed it, I will ever be able to return to the mindless consumerism that I once found to be so entertaining.
- On the author’s search for role models: Throughout my life, I have sought role models, people who were in the next stage of life and who, I thought,were handling that stage successfully. On reaching my fifties, I started examining the seventy- and eighty-year-olds I knew in an attempt to find a role model. It was easy, I discovered, to find people in that age group who could serve as negative role models; my goal, I thought, should be to avoid ending up like them. Positive role models, however, proved to be in short supply.
- Doubts: It doesn’t help that those who think fame and fortune are more valuable than tranquility vastly outnumber those who, like myself, think tranquility is more valuable. Can all these other people be mistaken? Surely I am the one making the mistake! When I start having second thoughts about Stoicism, my current practice is to recall that we live in a world in which certainty is possible only in mathematics. We live, in other words, in a world in which, no matter what you do, you might be making a mistake. However I think the biggest mistake, the one made by a huge number of people, is to have no philosophy of life at all. These people feel their way through life by following the promptings of their evolutionary programming, by assiduously seeking out what feels good and avoiding what feels bad. By doing this, they might have a comfortable life or even a life filled with pleasure. The question remains, however, whether they could have a better life by turning their back on their evolutionary programming and instead devoting time and energy to acquiring a philosophy of life. According to the Stoics, the answer to this question is that a better life is possible —one containing, perhaps, less comfort and pleasure, but considerably more joy.
If interested, here is a podcast from “The Art of Manliness” re. Stoicism.
If you got this far, you may desire 🙂 more. Here is a talk by William Irvine at UT Dallas titled “Older and Wiser: Ancient Advice on Aging Well”. Talk starts at 07:17.