A Guide to the Good Life

This is the second of two posts summarising the main points made in the book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic JoyImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. by William Irvine. In case you missed it you can read my first post of the series here (and here’s some further thoughts in case you’re interested).

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

In this post I’ll cover the following:

negative visualisation
duty
grief
anger
fame
luxury, and
aging/death

Negative Visualization

Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune – Seneca

I’ve written about the importance of negative visualisation before. Think about what can go wrong in your life. You can lose your job, your health, your home. Try to appreciate and be grateful for the people and things we already have:

When we say goodbye to a friend, we should silently remind ourselves that this might be our final parting. If we do this, we will be less likely to take our friends for granted, and as a result, we will probably derive far more pleasure from friendships than we otherwise would.

More specifically step through your plans for the day and meditate momentarily about the worst case scenario for everything you’re involved in or you have to do. By doing this you attain two benefits:

You think about how best to prevent these undesirable issues occurring in the first place
You mentally brace yourself so if they do actually happen then your “tranquility” won’t be too affected. Your willpower, self-discipline and self-control are all improved.

Note that the purpose of this isn’t to generate overly pessimistic expectations (we tend to have an optimism bias) as:

The problem with pessimistic expectations, such as those of the clinically depressed, is that they have the power to alter the future; negative expectations shape outcomes in a negative way. Not everyone agrees with this assertion. Some people believe the secret to happiness is low expectations. If we don’t expect greatness or find love or maintain health or achieve success, we will never be disappointed. If we are never disappointed when things don’t work out and are pleasantly surprised when things go well, we will be happy. It’s a good theory — but it’s wrong. Research shows that whatever the outcome, whether we succeed or we fail, people with high expectations tend to feel better. At the end of the day, how we feel when we get dumped or win an award depends mostly on how we interpret the event.

By reflecting back on the day you realise that all the worst-case scenarios you envisaged never happened so you begin to:

… imagine alternative realities, and not just any old reality but a better one; and we need to believe that we can do it. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals.

The stoics also had a certain way of approaching the following desires and emotions:

Duty: Help people but don’t expect any thanks. Provide the help needed then look for someone else to help.

Grief: Like I said previously the belief that Stoics are emotionless is incorrect. Of course Stoics grieve but when they lose something or someone instead of focusing on the loss think of what you had and be thankful for it.

Anger: There are three possible strategies here:

Laugh – instead of a source of frustration treat the initiating event as a source of hilarity. This will then dissipate the negative emotions.
Put the anger into context. Think, “In 100 years will this actually matter?” In the grand scheme of things the anger will be cosmically insignificant.
Think about the brevity of life. Your life is too short to waste time choosing to be angry.

Fame: Question why you want to become well known? To get people to admire you then you have to do things other people define as good which may not be how you define good. You then live your life in conflict with your values. An ideal state is to keep up a sense of indifference towards approval or otherwise (refer to part 1 of this series and read about the trichotomy of control). Paradoxically, being indifferent to the opinions of others makes you seem self –confident which in turn garners an increased amount of admiration.

Away with the world’s opinion of you—it’s always unsettled and divided.

~ Seneca Quotes from Letters from a Stoic

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Luxury: By avoiding the desire to become wealthier you avoid the danger of failing to appreciate the simple things in life this includes:

diet (I recommend the paleo diet)
clothes
housing, and
furniture.

This approach is very minimalist but the goal is to appreciate what you’ve got without becoming overly attached to it.

Aging and Death

Death: There’s nothing bad about it at all except the thing that comes before it—the fear of it.

~ Seneca Quotes from Letters from a Stoic

As stated here:

There is no heaven or hell in Stoicism; the time to live one’s life and to perfect one’s virtues is in the present.

My take on the Stoic approach to aging and death is that it’s not death that actually bad as you stop existing, but it is the actual process of dying which may be bad, for example, it could be painful and traumatic but equally you may die in your sleep.

So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.

~ Epicurus

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. non-existance

Additionally, a question raised by Lucretius was the fact you’ve already experienced one period of non-existence, before you were born (as shown in the image above). Why don’t you think about that period of non-existence in the same way as non-existence following death? I think the difference is that once you are born then you start to accumulate experiences so death deprives us of having more of these experiences. However, if you have developed a coherent philosophy of life and spent time attaining the things in life you value to the best of your ability, then how many more experiences do you need?

William B. Irvine: Older and Wiser – Ancient Advice on Aging Well