William B. Irvine

A grand goal in living is the first component of a philosophy of life. This means that if you lack a grand goal in living, you lack a coherent philosophy of life.

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. Stoicism, as we shall see, was one of the most popular and successful of the ancient schools of philosophy.

What, then, must a person do to have what the Stoics would call a good life? Be virtuous!

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.

Rather than being passive individuals who were grimly resigned to being on the receiving end of the world’s abuse and injustice, the Stoics were fully engaged in life and worked hard to make the world a better place.

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

Modern individuals rarely see the need to adopt a philosophy of life. They instead tend to spend their days working hard to be able to afford the latest consumer gadget, in the resolute belief that if only they buy enough stuff, they will have a life that is both meaningful and maximally fulfilling.

It is tempting, at this point, to describe the Stoics as patient people, and indeed they were, but a caveat is in order. In one sense, a patient person is one who can suffer a setback without complaint. That is not, however, what the Stoics were doing. Their goal was not to remain calm while *suffering* a setback but rather to experience a setback *without thereby suffering*. It is an important difference.

In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt offered this bit of Stoic-inspired advice: ‘Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.’

Whereas the use of anchoring can help us better appreciate our lives, the use of framing can prevent setbacks from disrupting our tranquility; indeed, frame events cleverly, and we might even find ourselves welcoming the setbacks we experience.

Stoics, as we have seen, are often caricatured as emotionless, wooden figures, but this simply isn’t the case. The Roman Stoics had a reputation for being not just optimistic but positively cheerful.

If you are reading these words, you are doubtless a thoughtful individual who spends time and energy thinking ahead in order to prevent foreseeable setbacks. But have you also spent time and energy developing a strategy for minimizing the emotional harm done to you by unforeseeable setbacks? You should have, since when you add up the costs imposed on you by being set back, you will often find that the biggest cost by far is emotional distress a setback triggers.

The word commiserate comes from the Latin commiseratus, which in turn derives from com, meaning ‘with,’ and miser meaning ‘wretched.’ We want them, in other words, to get angry as well, so they can share our wretchedness.

Ideally, the setback won’t give rise to negative emotions within us, not because we are successfully concealing our distress but because we have no distress to conceal.