A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (28 page)

I
WILL END THIS BOOK
by sharing some of the insights I have gained in my practice of Stoicism. In particular, I will offer advice on how individuals wishing to try Stoicism as their philosophy of life can derive the maximum benefit from the trial with the minimum effort and frustration. I will also describe some of the surprises, as well as some of the delights, that lie in store for would-be Stoics.

The first tip I would offer to those wishing to give Stoicism a try is to practice what I have referred to as
stealth Stoicism
: You would do well, I think, to keep it a secret that you are a practicing Stoic. (This would have been my own strategy, had I not taken it upon myself to become a teacher of Stoicism.) By practicing Stoicism stealthily, you can gain its benefits while avoiding one significant cost: the teasing and outright mockery of your friends, relatives, neighbors, and coworkers.

It is, I should add, quite easy to practice Stoicism on the sly: You can, for example, engage in negative visualization without anyone being the wiser. If your practice of Stoicism is successful, friends, relatives, neighbors, and coworkers might
notice a difference in you—a change for the better—but they will probably be hard-pressed to explain the transformation. If they come to you, perplexed, and ask what your secret is, you might choose to reveal the sordid truth to them: that you are a closet Stoic.

M
Y NEXT PIECE OF ADVICE
for would-be Stoics is not to try to master all the Stoic techniques at once but to start with one technique and, having become proficient in it, go on to another. And a good technique to start with, I think, is negative visualization. At spare moments in the day, make it a point to contemplate the loss of whatever you value in life. Engaging in such contemplation can produce a dramatic transformation in your outlook on life. It can make you realize, if only for a time, how lucky you are—how much you have to be thankful for, almost regardless of your circumstances.

It is my experience that negative visualization is to daily living as salt is to cooking. Although it requires minimal time, energy, and talent for a cook to add salt to food, the taste of almost any food he adds it to will be enhanced as a result. In much the same way, although practicing negative visualization requires minimal time, energy, and talent, those who practice it will find that their capacity to enjoy life is significantly enhanced. You might find yourself, after engaging in negative visualization, embracing the very life that, a short time before, you had complained wasn’t worth living.

One thing I have discovered, though, in my practice of Stoicism is that it is easy to forget to engage in negative visualization and as a result to go for days or even weeks without having
visualized. I think I know why this happens. By engaging in negative visualization, we increase our satisfaction with our circumstances, but on gaining this sense of satisfaction, the natural thing to do is simply enjoy life. Indeed, it is decidedly unnatural for someone who is satisfied with life to spend time thinking about the bad things that can happen. The Stoics, however, would remind us that negative visualization, besides making us appreciate what we have, can help us avoid clinging to the things we appreciate. Consequently, it is as important to engage in negative visualization when times are good as it is when times are bad.

I tried making it my practice to engage in negative visualization each night at bedtime, as part of the “bedtime meditation” described back in
chapter 8
, but the experiment failed. My problem is that I tend to fall asleep remarkably fast after my head hits the pillow; there simply isn’t time to visualize. I have instead made it my practice to engage in negative visualization (and more generally to assess my progress as a Stoic) while driving to work. By doing this, I transform idle time into time well spent.

A
FTER MASTERING
negative visualization, a novice Stoic should move on to become proficient in applying the trichotomy of control, described in
chapter 5
. According to the Stoics, 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. In particular, we waste our time and
cause ourselves needless anxiety if we concern ourselves with things over which we have no control.

I have discovered, by the way, that applying the trichotomy of control, besides helping me manage my own anxieties, is an effective technique for allaying the anxieties of the non-Stoics around me, which anxieties might otherwise disrupt my tranquility. When relatives and friends share with me the sources of anxiety in their lives, it often turns out that the things they are worried about are beyond their control. My response to such cases is to point this out to them: “What can you do about this situation? Nothing! Then why are you worrying about it? It is out of your hands, so it is pointless to worry.” (And if I am in the mood, I follow this last comment with a quotation from Marcus Aurelius: “Nothing is worth doing pointlessly.”) It is interesting that even though some of the people I have tried this on can charitably be described as anxiety-prone, they almost always respond to the logic of the trichotomy of control: Their anxiety is dispelled, if only for a time.

As a Stoic novice, you will want, as part of becoming proficient in applying the trichotomy of control, to practice internalizing your goals. Instead of having winning a tennis match as your goal, for example, make it your goal to prepare for the match as best you can and to try your hardest in the match. By routinely internalizing your goals, you can reduce (but probably not eliminate) what would otherwise be a significant source of distress in your life: the feeling that you have failed to accomplish some goal.

In your practice of Stoicism, you will also want, in conjunction with applying the trichotomy of control, to become a
psychological fatalist about the past and the present—but not about the future. Although you will be willing to think about the past and present in order to learn things that can help you better deal with the obstacles to tranquility thrown your way in the future, you will refuse to spend time engaging in “if only” thoughts about the past and present. You will realize that inasmuch as the past and present cannot be changed, it is pointless to wish they could be different. You will do your best to accept the past, whatever it might have been, and to embrace the present, whatever it might be.

O
THER PEOPLE
, as we have seen, are the enemy in our battle for tranquility. It was for this reason that the Stoics spent time developing strategies for dealing with this enemy and, in particular, strategies for dealing with the insults of those with whom we associate. One of the most interesting developments in my practice of Stoicism has been my transformation from someone who dreaded insults into an insult connoisseur. For one thing, I have become a collector of insults: On being insulted, I analyze and categorize the insult. For another thing, I look forward to being insulted inasmuch as it affords me the opportunity to perfect my “insult game.” I know this sounds strange, but one consequence of the practice of Stoicism is that one seeks opportunities to put Stoic techniques to work. I will have more to say about this phenomenon below.

One of the things that makes insults difficult to deal with is that they generally come as surprises. You are calmly chatting with someone when—wham!—he says something that, although it might not have been intended as an insult, can
easily be construed as one. Recently, for example, I was talking to a colleague about a book he was writing. He said that in this book, he was going to comment on some political material I had published. I was delighted that he was aware of my work and was going to mention it, but then came the put-down: “I’m trying to decide,” he said, “whether, in my response to what you have written, I should characterize you as evil or merely misguided.”

Realize that such comments are to be expected from academics. We are a pathetically contentious lot. We want others not only to be aware of our work but to admire it and, better still, to defer to the conclusions we have drawn. The problem is that our colleagues seek the same admiration and deference from us. Something has to give, and as a result, on campuses everywhere, academics routinely engage in verbal fisticuffs. Put-downs are commonplace, and insults fly.

In my pre-Stoic days, I would have felt the sting of this insult and probably would have gotten angry. I would have vigorously defended my work and would have done my best to unleash a counterinsult. But on that particular day, having fallen under the influence of the Stoics, I had the presence of mind to respond to this insult in a Stoically acceptable manner, with self-deprecating humor: “Why can’t you portray me as being
both
evil
and
misguided?” I asked.

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. If, for example, someone suggests that I am lazy, I reply that it is a miracle that I get any work done at all. If someone accuses me of having a big ego,
I reply that on most days it is noon before I become aware that anyone else inhabits the planet. 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 insult 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.

O
NE OF THE WORST THINGS
we can do when other people annoy us is get angry. The anger will, after all, be a major obstacle to our tranquility. The Stoics realized that anger is anti-joy and that it can ruin our life if we let it. In the course of observing my emotions, I have paid careful attention to anger and as a result have discovered a few things about it.

To begin with, I have become fully aware of the extent to which anger has a life of its own within me. It can lie dormant, like a virus, only to revive and make me miserable when I least expect it. I might, for example, be in yoga class trying to empty my head of thoughts, when out of nowhere I find myself filled with anger about some incident that took place years before.

Furthermore, I have drawn the conclusion that Seneca was mistaken in suggesting that there is no pleasure in expressing anger.
¹
This is the problem with anger: It feels good to vent it and feels bad to suppress it. Indeed, when our anger is righteous anger—when we are confident that we are right and
whomever we are angry at is wrong—it feels quite wonderful to vent it and let the person who wronged us know of our anger. Anger, in other words, resembles a mosquito bite: It feels bad not to scratch a bite and feels good to scratch it. The problem with mosquito bites, of course, is that after you scratch one, you typically wish you hadn’t done so: The itch returns, intensified, and by scratching the bite, you increase the chance that it will become infected. Much the same can be said of anger: Although it feels good to vent it, you will probably subsequently regret having done so.

It is one thing to vent anger (or better still, feign anger) with the goal of modifying someone’s behavior: People do respond to anger. What I have discovered, though, is that a significant portion of the anger I vent can’t be explained in these terms. When I am driving my car, for example, I periodically get angry—righteously, I think—at other drivers who drive incompetently, and sometimes I even yell at them. Since my windows and theirs are rolled up, the other drivers can’t hear me and therefore can’t respond to my anger by not doing again in the future whatever it was that made me mad. This anger, although righteous, is utterly pointless. By venting it, I accomplish nothing other than to disturb my own tranquility.

In other cases, although I am (righteously) angry at someone, I cannot, because of my circumstances, express my anger directly to him, so instead I find myself having black thoughts about him. Again, these feelings of anger are pointless: They disturb me but have no impact at all on the person at whom I am angry. Indeed, if anything, they serve to compound the harm he does me. What a waste!

I have found, by the way, that practicing Stoicism has helped me reduce the frequency with which I get angry at other drivers: I yell perhaps a tenth as often as I used to. It has also helped me reduce the number of black thoughts I have about people who wronged me long ago. And when black thoughts do infect me, they don’t last as long as they used to.

Because anger has these characteristics—because it can lie dormant within us and because venting it feels good—our anger will be difficult to overcome, and learning to overcome it is one of the biggest challenges a Stoic practitioner faces. But one thing I have found is that the more you think about and understand anger, the easier it is to control it. As it so happens, I read Seneca’s essay on anger while waiting at a doctor’s office. The doctor was woefully behind schedule, and as a result I was left sitting in the waiting room for nearly an hour. I had every right to be angry, and in my pre-Stoic days I almost certainly would have been angry. But because I was thinking about anger during that hour, I found it impossible to get angry.

I have also found that it is quite useful to use humor as a defense against anger. In particular, I have found that one wonderful way to avoid getting angry is to imagine myself as a character in an absurdist play: Things aren’t supposed to make sense, people aren’t supposed to be competent, and justice, when it happens at all, happens by accident. Instead of letting myself be angered by events, I persuade myself to laugh at them. Indeed, I try to think of ways the imaginary absurdist playwright could have made things still more absurd.