Guide to Stoicism:
- Persuade ourselves to want the things we ALREADY HAVE
- Negative Visualization- when you kiss your child, understand that it may be the last time you ever see them
- Not about abandoning all emotion, only negative emotions
- Pursuit of tranquility--absence of grief, anger, anxiety, envy, and fear--and virtue and joy
- Distinguish things in our control and things NOT in our control
- Take time--such as when lying in bed--to reflect on our lives
- Must have a "grand goal"--a goal in which we should be unwilling to sacrifice in order to attain other goals
- Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil
- End our "adaption treadmill"--always adapting to the things we once desired but eventually become used to--and don't take them for granted
- Contemplate our death and the death of our friends and relatives
- "I like to say that you can rule the world because you can define your world. This is related. Your world is mostly you and your thoughts."
- “If, on the other hand, we set playing our best in a match as our goal, we arguably don’t lessen our chances of winning the match, but we do lessen our chances of being upset by the outcome of the match. Thus, internalizing our goals with respect to tennis would appear to be a no-brainer: To set as our goal playing to the best of our ability has an upside – reduced emotional anguish in the future – with little to no downside.”
- “The Stoics, by way of contrast, welcomed a degree of discomfort in their life. What the Stoics were advocating, then, is more appropriately described as a program of voluntary discomfort than as a program of self-inflicted discomfort.”
- Self-control
- “Epictetus thinks the admiration of other people is a negative barometer of our own progress as Stoics: “If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself.”
- “Other signs of progress, says Epictetus, are the following: We will stop blaming, censuring, and praising others; we will stop boasting about ourselves and how much we know"
- "Epictetus thinks that in our practice of Stoicism, we should be so inconspicuous that others don’t label us Stoics – or even label us philosophers"
- “The Stoics therefore recommend that we avoid befriending people who values have been corrupted, for fear that their values will contaminate ours.
- “Marcus recommends that when we interact with an annoying person, we keep in mind that there are doubtless people who find us to be annoying. More generally, when we find ourselves irritated by someone’s shortcomings, we should pause to reflect on our own shortcomings.”
- “A good Stoic, Marcus says, will not think about what other people are thinking about except when he must do so in order to serve the public interest.”
- “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.”
- “Suppose, for example, that someone mocks us for being bald when we in fact are bald: “Why is it an insult,” Seneca asks, “to be told what is self-evident?”
- “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. If I say anything at all in response to his insults, the most appropriate comment would be, “I’m relieved that you feel that way about me.”
- Values are in OUR control
- “Anger, says Seneca, is “brief insanity,” and the damage done by anger is enormous: “No plague has cost the human race more.”
- “… when someone wrongs us, says Seneca, he should be corrected “by admonition and also by force, gently and also roughly.”
- “… although Seneca rejects the idea of allowing ourselves to become angry in order to motivate ourselves, he is open to the idea of pretending to be angry in order to motivate others.”
- “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 have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavor. Epictetus therefore advises us not to seek social status, since if we make it our goal to please others, we will no longer be free to please ourselves. We will, he says, have enslaved ourselves.”
- “If we wish to retain our freedom, says Epictetus, we must be careful, while dealing with other people, to be indifferent to what they think of us. Furthermore, we should be consistent in our indifference; we should, in other words, be as dismissive of their approval as we are of their disapproval. Indeed, Epictetus says that when others praise us, the proper response is to laugh at them. (But not out loud!)”
- “… the downside of failing to develop an effective philosophy of life: You end up wasting the one life you have.”
- “… we are very much responsible for our happiness as well as our unhappiness. It also teaches us that it is only when we assume responsibility for our happiness that we will have a reasonable chance of gaining it. This, to be sure, is a message that many people, having been indoctrinated by therapists and politicians, don’t want to hear.”
- “Self-deprecating humor has become my standard response to insults.When someone criticizes me, I reply that matters are even worse than he is suggesting…Such responses may seem counterproductive since in offering them, I am in a sense validating the insulter’s criticisms of me. But by offering such responses, I make it clear to the insulter that I have enough confidence in who I am to be impervious to his insults; for me, they are a laughing matter. Furthermore, by refusing to play the insults game – by refusing to respond to an insult with a counterinsult – I make it clear that I regard myself as being above such behavior. My refusal to play the insult game will likely irritate the insulter more than a counterinsult would.”
- “We live in a world in which, no matter what you do, you might be making a mistake. This means that although it is true that I might be making a mistake by practicing Stoicism, I might also be making a mistake if I reject Stoicism. I might also be making a mistake if I reject Stoicism in favor of some other philosophy of life. And I think the biggest mistake, the one made by a huge number of people, is to have no philosophy of life at all.”
SUMMARIZED FROM:
and ORIGINALLY FROM:
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine
