Stoics

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (William B. Irvine)

Negative visualization:

• We tend to be happy because we're insatiable; called hedonic adaptation; see study of lottery winners.
• Spend time imagining we have lost the things we value (e.g., imagine wife left us, child has died). 
• This makes us value those things more. 
• Also contemplate our own death, the loss of our possessions. 

Control:

• Focus on changing things we can control, namely our own desires. 
• Three categories: things over which we have complete control, things over which we have some control, things over which we have no control. 
• We can have complete control over our internal goals. E.g., I can have some control over whether I win a tennis match but complete control over whether I play my best.

Fatalism:

• We can preserve our tranquility by taking a fatalistic attitude towards what is going to happen to us.
• The Romans saw life as a horserace that had been fixed: the Fates already knew who would win and who would lose. Nonetheless, they worked hard to effect events. Why? Because they were fatalistic regarding the past. 
• We should work to be happy with whatever life has given us. We could spend our time wishing this moment were different or we could embrace it. 
• This is the reverse of negative visualization: "Instead of thinking about how our situation could be worse, we refuse to think about how it could be better."

Self-denial:

• Not only should we visualize bad things happening to us, but we should sometimes live as if they had happened. 
• We should periodically engage in acts of voluntary discomfort. We should also sometimes forgo opportunities to experience pleasure. E.g., sometimes pass up the opportunity to drink wine to learn self-control. 

Meditation:

• Not like Buddhist practice. Instead actively think at night about the day -- what disrupted my tranquility, did I experience anger, etc.? Am I practicing the techniques recommended by the Stoics? 

Social relations:

• How to experience tranquility while dealing with people? Prepare before dealing with them. Avoid people with corrupted values. 
• Marcus on dealing with annoying people. 

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Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life"

Seneca's thesis is that life is not in fact short but that we squander our time. 

• "It is not that we have a brief length of time to live, but that we squander a great deal of that time."
• "We are besieged by vices that encircle us, preventing us from rising up and lifting our eyes to contemplate the truth, and keeping us down once they have overwhelmed us, our attention fixed upon lust." 

Things we waste our time one:

• Men "who spend many hours with their barber, having any hairs that grew the previous night plucked, as a formal debate is held over each separate lock, as hair out of place is restored to its proper position or thinning locks combed forward to the forehead from this side and that." These men "flare up in a rate" if "anything is lopped off their mane," if "every lock does not fall back into its proper ringlet." 
• Scholars: "No one will doubt that those men are energetic triflers who devote their hours to the study of useless literature...It was a foolish passion once confined to the Greeks to inquire into the number of oarsmen Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or Odyssey was written first..."
• Paulinus, stop caring so much about your corn! "[I]t is better for a man to know the accounts of his own life than those of the corn-market."
• Multi-taskers: "It is generally agreed that no activity can be properly undertaken by a man who is busy with many things."
• "The greatest waste of life consists in postponement: that is what takes away each day as it comes, that is what snatches away the present while promising something to follow."

The problem:

• Not prepared for death: "When finally some weakness has reminded them of their mortality, how fearfully they meet death, as though they were not quitting life but being dragged away from it!"
• "They shout repeatedly that they have been fools, as they have not really lived, and if only they escape from that illness, their lives will be devoted to leisure; that is when they reflect on how pointlessly they have toiled to gain what they do not enjoy."

The answer:

• "Only men who find time for philosophy are at leisure, only they are truly alive...The ones you should regard as devoting time to the true duties of life are those who wish to have as their intimate friends every day Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus..."
• "These men will set you on the road to immortality." For "what philosophy has made sacred cannot suffer harm; no age will destroy those works."
• Seriously, stop thinking so much about corn! Think instead "holy and lofty" things, like God, the afterlife. "Come, leave the ground behind and direct your mind's gaze on those things."
• "Many things worth knowing wait for you in this manner of life -- the love and exercise of the virtues, the ability to forget the passions, the knowledge of living and of dying, a state of deep repose."