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What do I love about: A Guide to the Good Life?
While I love stoicism as a philosophy, I have never truly understood how it came to be or how other philosophies have impacted stoicism. The author does a fantastic job in taking the reader through the evolution of stoicism. The writer makes a strong case for Roman stoicism which focuses on acquiring tranquility. I love how the writer also provides insights to the great stoics such as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Musonius Rufus and Epictetus.
What do I not love about: A Guide to the Good Life?
Nothing
Who should read: A Guide to the Good Life?
Anyone curious about this ancient philosophy or if you are looking to adopt a philosophy in life.
Who should not read: A Guide to the Good Life?
Philosophy skeptics may benefit from staying away
Notes about A Guide to the Good Life?
- Cyrenaic school advocated for a hedonistic life
- Cynics advocated an ascetic lifestyle. Cynicism requires its adherent to live in abject poverty
- The stoics fell between Cyrenaics and the cynics
- It is better to fall in with the crows than with flatterers; for in one case you are devoured when dead and in another case while alive
- Pay attention to your enemies for they are the first to discover your mistake
- The stoics enjoyed whatever good things happened to be available, but even as they did so, they prepared themselves to give up things in question
- Marcus Aurelius was a Roman stoic and they abandoned logic and physics. They seek to gain tranquility while Greek stoics wanted to attain virtue
- Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions such as grief, anger, and anxiety and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy
- Seneca was the best writer amongst the great stoic such as Musonius Rufus (known for his pragmatism), Epictetus (analysis), & Marcus Aurelius known for meditations
- Stoicism does not require its adherence to adopt an ascetic lifestyle. To the contrary, the stoics thought there is nothing wrong with enjoying the good things life has to offer, as long as we are careful in the manner in which we enjoy them. In particular, we must be ready to give up the good things without regret if our circumstances should change
- We need to use our reasoning ability to drive away all that excites or affrights us
- 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
- All things everywhere are perishable so if we fail to recognize this and instead go around assuming that we will always be able to enjoy the things we value, we will likely find ourselves subject to considerable distress when the things we value are taken away from us.
- We humans are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. This is called the Hedonic adaptation. One key to happiness is to forestall the adaptation process. By thinking about how things could be worse, we forestall or reverse the hedonic adaption process
- The easiest way to gain happiness is to want the things we already have
- To be able to be satisfied with little is not failing; it is a blessings
- Engaging in projective visualization, Epictetus believes, will make us appreciate the relative significance of the bad things that happen to us and will therefore prevent them from disrupting our tranquility
- A few times each day or week, a stoic will pause in his enjoyment of life to think about how all these things he enjoys could be taken from him.
- Stoics advise us to contemplate the world’s impermanence. All things human are short lived and perishable
- It is impossible that happiness and yearning for what is not present should ever be united
- All we own is the present moment
- We should cause ourselves to experience discomfort that we could have easily avoided
- Enhance your appreciation of any meal by waiting until we are hungry before we eat it and greatly enhance our appreciation of any beverage by waiting until we are thirsty before we drink it
- Willpower is like muscle power. The more you exercise the muscle the stronger it gets
- To know how many are jealous of you, count your admirers. In addition we have to deal with the envy that we feel towards those who have enjoyed even greater success than we have
- Seneca advises us to avoid people who are whiny, who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint. He justifies this avoidance by observing that a companion who is always upset and bemoans everything is a foe to tranquility
- Few people, Musonius would have us believe, are happier than the person who has both a loving spouse and devoted children
- 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”?
- What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things
- By laughing off an insult, we are implying that we do not take the insulter and his insults seriously
- For this reason, a humorous reply to an insult can be far more effective than a counter insult would be
- The process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults
- Respond to insults with humor or with no response to all
- If we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft
- If we make it our goal to please others, we will no longer be free to please ourselves
- It is better to die of hunger with distress and fear gone than to live upset in the midst of plenty
- As the result of being exposed to luxurious living, people become hard to please, a curious thing happens
- We must eat daily, and that the more often we are tempted by a pleasure, the more danger there is that we will succumb to it. It is for this reason, Musonius says that “the pleasure connected with food is undoubtedly the most difficult of all pleasures to combat”
- Natural desires, such as desire for water when we are thirsty can be satisfied; unnatural desires cannot
- Lao Tzu observed that “he who knows contentment is rich”
- It is possible to enjoy something and at the same time be indifferent to it
- It is the mind that makes us rich; this goes with us into exile, and in the wildest wilderness, having found there all that the body needs for its sustenance
- By contemplating our own death-we could increase our chance of experiencing joy
- What will be our reward for practicing Stocisim? According to the Stoics, we can hope to become more virtuous, in the ancient sense of the word. We will also, they say, experience fewer negative emotions such as anger, grief, disappointment, and anxiety and because of this we will enjoy a degree of tranquility that previously would have been unattainable.
- What stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life-or our failing to have a philosophy at all
- If you consider yourself a victim you are not going to have a good life
- The stoics sought tranquility which 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
- If despite not having pursued wealth we find ourselves wealthy we should enjoy our affluence. It was the cynics not the stoics who advocated asceticism
- Sources of human unhappiness: our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control. To conquer our insatiability, the stoics advice us to engage in negative visualization. We should contemplate the impermanence of things
- Stocisim 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
- One of the worst things we can do when somebody annoys us is to get angry
- Seneca advises us periodically to live as if were poor and Musonius advises us to do things to cause ourselves discomfort. Following this advice requires a greater degree of self-discipline than practicing the other stoic techniques does
- Those who lack self-discipline will have the path they take through life determined by someone or something else and as a result there is a very real danger that they will mislive
- We live in a world in which no matter what you do, you might be making a mistake