📚The Book in 3 Bullets

• We should all adopt a philosophy of life in order to avoid misliving, and to know what is worth pursuing in life, and how to obtain the things that are worth pursuing.

• The goal of Stoicism is the attainment of tranquility; to reduce negative emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, and grief, and to enhance positive emotions such as joy and happiness.

• Be content with what you have in your life, periodically imagine losing the things you love in life, and focus on what is in your control. If you do these things, you will be on the path to living the “good life.”

👤Who Should Read It?

• Anyone who does not have a philosophy of life, or that feels that they are constantly being pulled by emotions. Stoicism is about using logic and rationality to experience positive emotions and lead a good life.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.

• We should live as if this very moment were our last.

• All things human are short-lived and perishable.

• If what you seek is contentment, it is better and easier to change yourself and what you want than it is to change the world around you.

• If you are going to publish, you must be willing to tolerate criticism.

• Not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself.

📖 Summary & Notes

• The Stoics realized that a life plagued with negative emotions—including anger, anxiety, fear, grief, and envy—would not be a good life. They therefore became acute observers of the workings of the human mind and as a result became some of the most insightful psychologists of the ancient world. They went on to develop techniques for preventing the onset of negative emotions and for extinguishing them when attempts at prevention failed.

• The goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion from life but to banish negative emotions.

• Although modern philosophers tend to spend their days debating esoteric topics, the primary goal of most ancient philosophers was to help ordinary people live better lives.

• Much has changed in the past two millennia, but human psychology has changed little. This is why those of us living in the twenty-first century can benefit from the advice that philosophers such as Seneca offered to first-century Romans.

Part One: The Rise of Stoicism

• Most religions don’t give guidance on what things in life are and aren’t worth pursuing.

• Whatever philosophy of life a person adopts, they will probably have a better life than if they tried to live without a coherent philosophy of life.

• Zeno (333-261 BC) was the first Stoic.

• 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.

Part Two: Stoic Psychological Techniques

Negative Visualization

• Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune. This is the danger of being an overzealous optimist.

• We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire.

• We need a technique for creating in ourselves a desire for the things we already have.

• The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

• The Stoics recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would.

• The Stoics think we should spend time contemplating the loss of friends, to death, perhaps, or to a falling-out. Thus, Epictetus counsels that 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.

• When the Stoics counsel us to live each day as if it were our last, their goal is not to change our activities but to change our state of mind as we carry out those activities.

• We should contemplate the loss of our possessions. Most of us spend our idle moments thinking about the things we want but don’t have. We would be much better off spending this time thinking of all the things we have and reflecting on how much we would miss them if they were not ours.

• Instead of spending our days enjoying our good fortune, we spend them forming and pursuing new, grander dreams for ourselves. As a result, we are never satisfied with our life. Negative visualization can help us avoid this fate.

• To be able to be satisfied with little is not a failing, it is a blessing—if, at any rate, what you seek is satisfaction.

• If we look to see how our ancestors lived, we will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world. We tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without, including antibiotics, air conditioning, toilet paper, cell phones, television, windows, and eyeglasses.

• A few times each day or a few times each week a Stoic will pause in his enjoyment of life to think about how all this, all these things he enjoys, could be taken from him.

• Remember: there’s a difference between contemplating something bad happening and worrying about it.

• Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.

• By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.

The Dichotomy of Control

• It’s impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united.

• If what you seek is contentment, it is better and easier to change yourself and what you want than it is to change the world around you.

• It is foolish for us to want friends and relatives to live forever since these are things that aren’t up to us.

• The dichotomy of control: some things are up to us and some things aren’t up to us.

• We are behaving foolishly if we spend time worrying about things that aren’t up to us; because they are not up to us, worrying about them is futile. We should instead concern ourselves with things that are up to us since we can take steps either to bring them about or prevent them from happening.

Fatalism

• If we want our life to go well, we should, rather than wanting events to conform to our desires, make our desires conform to events; we should, in other words, want events “to happen as they do happen.”

• The Stoics advise us to be fatalistic with respect to the past and present, but not with the future.

• Epictetus advises us to want events “to happen as they do happen,” he is giving us advice regarding events that do happen—that either have happened or are happening—not advice regarding events that will happen.

• The Stoics argued that the best way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy whatever desires we find within us but by learning to be satisfied with our life as it is—by learning to be happy with whatever we’ve got.

• Stoic philosophy, while teaching us to be satisfied with whatever we’ve got, also counsels us to seek certain things in life. We should, for example, strive to become better people—to become virtuous in the ancient sense of the word. We should strive to practice Stoicism in our daily life.

Self-Denial

• Besides contemplating bad things happening, we should sometimes live as if they had happened. Instead of merely thinking about what it would be like to lose our wealth, we should periodically “practice poverty”: We should content ourselves with “the scantiest and cheapest fare” and with “coarse and rough dress.”

• We need to do hard things for the sake of doing hard things. And should periodically cause ourselves to experience discomfort that we could easily have avoided. We might accomplish this by underdressing for cold weather or going shoeless.

• By undertaking acts of voluntary discomfort, we harden ourselves against misfortunes that might befall us in the future.

• Voluntary discomfort can be thought of as a kind of vaccine: By exposing ourselves to a small amount of a weakened virus now, we create in ourselves an immunity that will protect us from a debilitating illness in the future.

• A person who periodically experiences minor discomforts will grow confident that he can withstand major discomforts as well, so the prospect of experiencing such discomforts at some future time will not, at present, be a source of anxiety for him.

• It would be one thing if we could take steps to ensure that we will never experience discomfort, but since we can’t, the strategy of avoiding discomfort at all costs is counterproductive.

• If we cannot resist pleasures, we will end up playing the role.

• Willpower is like muscle power: The more you exercise your muscles, the stronger you get, and the more you exercise your will, the stronger it gets.

• The act of forgoing pleasure can itself be pleasant.

• The goal of the Stoics is not to stop experiencing emotion. Instead, it is to experience fewer negative emotions.

Part Three: Stoic Advice

Duty

• To do your duty to your kind—you must feel a concern for all mankind. You must remember that we humans were created for one another, that we were born to work together the way our hands or eyelids do.

• When we awaken in the morning, rather than lazily lying in bed, we should tell ourselves that we must get up to do the proper work of man, the work we were created to perform.

Social Relations: On Dealing with Other People

• When it is possible to do so, we should avoid associating with people whose values have been corrupted, the way we would avoid, say, kissing someone who obviously has the flu.

• Seneca advises us to avoid people who are simply whiny, “who are melancholy and bewail everything, who find pleasure in every opportunity for complaint.”

• When we interact with an annoying person, we must keep in mind that there are doubtless people who find us to be annoying.

• In our dealings with others, we should operate on the assumption that they are fated to behave in a certain way. It is therefore pointless to wish they could be less annoying.

• 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.

• In a good marriage, two people will join in a loving union and will try to outdo each other in the care they show for each other.

Insults: On Putting Up with Put-Downs

• Remember, what is insulting is not the person who abuses you or hits you, but the judgment about them that they are insulting.

• Even if we succeed in removing the sting of an insult, we are left with the question of how best to respond to it. One wonderful way, say the Stoics, is with humor.

  • Of the kinds of humor we might use in response to an insult, self-deprecating humor can be particularly effective.

• By laughing off an insult, we are implying that we don't take the insulter and his insults seriously.

• A second way to respond to insults is with no response at all.

• Refusing to respond to an insult is, paradoxically, one of the most effective responses possible.

• Our nonresponse can be quite disconcerting to the insulter, who will wonder whether or not we understood his insult. Furthermore, we are robbing him of the pleasure of having upset us, and he is likely to be upset as a result.

Grief: On Vanquishing Tears with Reason

• Although it might not be possible to eliminate grief from our life, it is possible to take steps to minimize the amount of grief we experience over the course of a lifetime.

• By contemplating the deaths of those we love, we will remove some of the shock we experience if they die.

• Rather than mourning the end of someone’s life, we should be thankful that they lived at all. This is what might be called retrospective negative visualization. In normal, prospective negative visualization, we imagine losing something we currently possess; in retrospective negative visualization, we imagine never having had something that we have lost.

• Although reason might not be able to extinguish our grief, it has the power to remove from it whatever is excessive and superfluous.

• Grief is a negative emotion and therefore one that we should, to the extent possible, avoid experiencing.

Anger

• Anger is another negative emotion that, if we let it, can destroy our tranquility.

• Being angry is a waste of precious time.

• We should fight our tendency to believe the worst about others and our tendency to jump to conclusions about their motivations.

• If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger.

• Our anger invariably lasts longer than the damage done to us. What fools we are, therefore, when we allow our tranquility to be disrupted by minor things.

• Humor can be used to prevent ourselves from becoming angry: Laughter is the right response to the things which drive us to tears. The idea is that by choosing to think of the bad things that happen to us as being funny rather than outrageous, an incident that might have angered us can instead become a source of amusement.

• What seems vitally important to us will seem unimportant to our grandchildren. Thus, when we feel ourselves getting angry about something, we should pause to consider its cosmic (in)significance. Doing this might enable us to nip our anger in the bud.

• When angry, we should force ourselves to relax our faces, soften our voices, and slow our pace of walking.

• Life is too short to spend it in a state of anger.

Personal Values

• 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 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.

• Cato consciously did things to trigger the disdain of other people simply so he could practice ignoring their disdain.

• Ironically, by refusing to seek the admiration of other people, Stoics might succeed in gaining their (perhaps grudging) admiration.

• We seek wealth because we realize that the material goods our wealth can buy us will win the admiration of other people and thereby confer on us a degree of fame.

• It is folly to think that it is the amount of money and not the state of mind that matters.

• The Stoics value highly their ability to enjoy ordinary life—and indeed, their ability to find sources of delight even when living in primitive conditions.

• Dress to protect our bodies, not to impress other people.

• People who achieve luxurious lifestyles are rarely satisfied: Experiencing luxury only whets their appetite for even more luxury.

• A person must keep in mind that his happiness depends more on his values than on where he resides.

Dying: On a Good End to a Good Life

• Some are disturbed because they fear what might come after death. Many more, though, are disturbed because they fear that they have mislived—that they have lived without having attained the things in life that are truly valuable.

• Someone who thinks he will live forever is far more likely to waste his days than someone who fully understands that his days are numbered, and one way to gain this understanding is periodically to contemplate his own death.

On Becoming a Stoic

• If you have a philosophy of life, decision-making is relatively straightforward: When choosing between the options life offers, you simply choose the one most likely to help you attain the goals set forth by your philosophy of life.

• The most important reason for adopting a philosophy of life, though, is that if we lack one, there is a danger that we will mislive—that we will spend our life pursuing goals that aren’t worth attaining or will pursue worthwhile goals in a foolish manner and will therefore fail to attain them.

• We need to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.

Part Four: Stoicism for Modern Lives

• Philosophies of life have two components: They tell us what things in life are and aren’t worth pursuing, and they tell us how to gain the things that are worth having. The Stoics, as we have seen, thought tranquility was worth pursuing, and the tranquility they sought, it will be remembered, 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.

• Our evolutionary ancestors benefited from wanting more of everything, which is why we today have this tendency. But our insatiability, if we do not take steps to bridle it, will disrupt our tranquility; instead of enjoying what we already have, we will spend our life working hard to gain things we don’t have, in the sadly mistaken belief that once we have them, we will enjoy them and search no further.

Practicing Stoicism

• You would do well, I think to keep it a secret that you are a practicing Stoic.

• 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.

• At spare moments in the day, make it a point to contemplate the loss of whatever you value in life.

• 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.

• 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.

• You will realize that inasmuch as the past and present cannot be changed, it is pointless to wish they could be different.

• Self-deprecating humor should be the standard response to insults. When someone criticizes you, you should reply that matters are even worse than he is suggesting. If for example, someone suggests that you are lazy, you should reply that it is a miracle that you get any work done at all.

• Instead of getting angered by events, you should persuade yourself to laugh at them.

• 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.