Sometimes a catastrophe blasts these people out of their jadedness. Suppose, for example, a tornado destroys their home.
Such events are tragic, of course, but at the same time they potentially have a silver lining: Those who survive them might come to appreciate whatever they still possess. More generally, war, disease, and natural disasters are tragic, inasmuch as they take from us the things we value, but they also have the power to transform those who experience them. Before, these individuals might have been sleepwalking through life; now they are joyously, thankfully alive—as alive as they have felt in decades.
Before, they might have been indifferent to the world around them; now they are alert to the world’s beauty.
Catastrophe-induced personal transformations have drawbacks, though. The first is that you can’t count on being struck by a catastrophe. Indeed, many people have a catastrophe-free—and as a consequence, joyless—life. (Ironically, it is these people’s misfortune to have a life that is blessedly free of misfortune.) A second drawback is that catastrophes that have the power to transform someone can also take his life.
Consider, for example, a passenger on an airliner, the engines of which have just burst into flames. This turn of events is likely to cause the passenger to reassess his life, and as a result, he might finally gain some insight into what things in life are truly valuable and what things are not. Unfortunately, moments after this epiphany he might be dead.
The third drawback to catastrophe-induced transformations is that the states of joy they trigger tend to wear off.
Those who come close to dying but subsequently revive typically regain their zest for living. They might, for example, feel motivated to contemplate the sunsets they had previously ignored or to engage in heartfelt conversations with the spouse they had previously taken for granted. They do this for a time, but then, in all too many cases, apathy returns: They might ignore the gorgeous sunset that is blazing outside their window in order to complain bitterly to their spouse that there is nothing worth watching on television.
Negative visualization does not have these drawbacks. We don’t have to wait to engage in negative visualization the way we have to wait to be struck by a catastrophe. Being struck by a catastrophe can easily kill us; engaging in negative visualization can’t. And because negative visualization can be done repeatedly, its beneficial effects, unlike those of a catastrophe, can last indefinitely. Negative visualization is therefore a wonderful way to regain our appreciation of life and with it our capacity for joy.
The Stoics are not alone in harnessing the power of negative visualization. Consider, for example, those individuals who say grace before a meal. Some presumably say it because they are simply in the habit of doing so. Others might say it because they fear that God will punish them if they don’t. But understood properly, saying grace—and for that matter, offering any prayer of thanks—is a form of negative visualization. Before eating a meal, those saying grace pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that this food might not have been available to them, in which case they would have gone hungry. And even if the food were available, they might not have been able to share it with the people now at their dinner table. Said with these thoughts in mind, grace has the ability to transform an ordinary meal into a cause for celebration.
Some people don’t need the Stoics or a priest to tell them that the key to a cheerful disposition is periodically to entertain negative thoughts; they figured it out on their own. In the course of my life, I have met many such people. They analyze their circumstances not in terms of what they are lacking but in terms of how much they have and how much they would miss it were they to lose it. Many of them have been quite unlucky, objectively speaking, in their life; nevertheless, they will tell you at length how lucky they are—to be alive, to be able to walk, to be living where they live, and so forth. It is instructive to compare these people with those who, objectively speaking, “have it all,” but who, because they appreciate none of what they have, are utterly miserable.
Earlier I mentioned that there are people who seem proud of their inability to take delight in the world around them. They have somehow gotten the idea that by refusing to take delight in the world, they are demonstrating their emotional maturity: To take delight in things, they think, is childish. Or maybe they have decided that it is fashionable to refuse to take delight in the world, the way it is fashionable to refuse to wear white after Labor Day, and they feel compelled to obey the dictates of fashion. To refuse to take delight in the world, in other words, is evidence of sophistication.
If you ask these malcontents for their opinion of the cheerful people just described—or even worse, of those Stoic optimists who go on at length about what a wonderful thing glass is—they are likely to respond with disparaging remarks:
“Such people are clearly fools. They shouldn’t be satisfied with so little. They should want more and not rest content until they get it.” I would argue, though, that what is really foolish is to spend your life in a state of self-induced dissatisfaction when satisfaction lies within your grasp, if only you will change your mental outlook. 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. And if you seek something other than satisfaction, I would inquire (with astonishment) into what it is that you find more desirable than satisfaction. What, I would ask, could possibly be worth sacrificing satisfaction in order to obtain?
I f w e h av e an active imag ination, it will be easy for us to engage in negative visualization; it will be easy for us to imagine, for example, that our house has burned to the ground, our boss has fired us, or we have gone blind. If we have trouble imagining such things, though, we can practice negative visualization by paying attention to the bad things that happen to other people and reflecting on the fact that these things might instead have happened to us.14 Alternatively, we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world—that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without, including antibiotics, air conditioning, toilet paper(!), cell phones, television, windows, eyeglasses, and fresh fruit in January. Upon coming to this realization, we can breathe a sigh of relief that we aren’t our ancestors, the way our descendants will presumably someday breathe a sigh of relief that they aren’t us!
The negative visualization technique, by the way, can also be used in reverse: Besides imagining that the bad things that happened to others happen to us, we can imagine that the bad things that happen to us happened instead to others. In his Handbook, Epictetus advocates this sort of “projective visualization.” Suppose, he says, that our servant breaks a cup.15
We are likely to get angry and have our tranquility disrupted by the incident. One way to avert this anger is to think about how we would feel if the incident had happened to someone else instead. If we were at someone’s house and his servant broke a cup, we would be unlikely to get angry; indeed, we might try to calm our host by saying “It’s just a cup; these things happen.” Engaging in projective visualization, Epictetus believes, will make us appreciate the relative insignificance of the bad things that happen to us and will therefore prevent them from disrupting our tranquility.
At this point, a non-Stoic might raise the following objection.
The Stoics, as we have seen, advise us to pursue tranquility, and as part of their strategy for attaining it they advise us to engage in negative visualization. But isn’t this contradictory advice?
Suppose, for example, that a Stoic is invited to a picnic. While the other picnickers are enjoying themselves, the Stoic will sit there, quietly contemplating ways the picnic could be ruined: “Maybe the potato salad is spoiled, and people will get food poisoning.
Maybe someone will break an ankle playing softball. Maybe there will be a violent thunderstorm that will scatter the picnickers.
Maybe I will be struck by lightning and d
ie.” This sounds like no fun at all. But more to the point, it seems unlikely that a Stoic will gain tranquility as a result of entertaining such thoughts.
To the contrary, he is likely to end up glum and anxiety-ridden.
In response to this objection, let me point out that it is a mistake to think Stoics will spend all their time contemplating potential catastrophes. It is instead something they will do periodically: 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.
Furthermore, there is a difference between contemplating something bad happening and worrying about it.
Contemplation is an intellectual exercise, and it is possible for us to conduct such exercises without its affecting our emotions.
It is possible, for example, for a meteorologist to spend her days contemplating tornadoes without subsequently living in dread of being killed by one. In similar fashion, it is possible for a Stoic to contemplate bad things that can happen without becoming anxiety-ridden as a result. Finally, negative visualization, rather than making people glum, will increase the extent to which they enjoy the world around them, inasmuch as it will prevent them from taking that world for granted. Despite—or rather, because of—his (occasional) gloomy thoughts, the Stoic will likely enjoy the picnic far more than the other picnickers who refuse to entertain similarly gloomy thoughts; he will take delight in being part of an event that, he fully realizes, might not have taken place.
The critic of Stoicism might now raise another concern.
If you don’t appreciate something, you won’t mind losing it.
But thanks to their ongoing practice of negative visualization, the Stoics will be remarkably appreciative of the people and things around them. Haven’t they thereby set themselves up for heartache? Won’t they be deeply pained when life snatches these people and things away, as it sometimes surely will?
Consider, by way of illustration, the two fathers mentioned earlier. The first father periodically contemplates the loss of his child and therefore does not take her for granted; to the contrary, he appreciates her very much. The second father assumes that his child will always be there for him and therefore takes her for granted. It might be suggested that because the second father does not appreciate his child, he will respond to her death with a shrug of his shoulders, whereas the first father, because he deeply appreciates his child, has set himself up for heartache if she dies.
Stoics, I think, would respond to this criticism by pointing out that the second father almost certainly will grieve the loss of his child: He will be full of regret for having taken her for granted.
In particular, he is likely to be racked with “if only” thoughts: “If only I had spent more time playing with her! If only I had told her more bedtime stories! If only I had gone to her violin recitals instead of going golfing!” The first father, however, will not have similar regrets; because he appreciated his daughter he will have taken full advantage of opportunities to interact with her.
Make no mistake: The first father will grieve the death of his child. As we shall see, the Stoics think periodic episodes of grief are part of the human condition. But at least this father can take consolation in the knowledge that he spent well what little time he had with his child. The second father will have no such consolation and as a result might find that his feelings of grief are compounded by feelings of guilt. It is the second father, I think, who has set himself up for heartache.
The Stoics would also respond to the above criticism by observing that at the same time as the practice of negative visualization is helping us appreciate the world, it is preparing us for changes in that world. To practice negative visualization, after all, is to contemplate the impermanence of the world around us.
Thus, a father who practices negative visualization, if he does it correctly, will come away with two conclusions: He is lucky to have a child, and because he cannot be certain of her continued presence in his life, he should be prepared to lose her.
This is why Marcus, immediately after advising readers to spend time thinking about how much they would miss their possessions if these possessions were lost, warns them to “beware lest delight in them leads you to cherish them so dearly that their loss would destroy your peace of mind.”16
Along similar lines, Seneca, after advising us to enjoy life, cautions us not to develop “over-much love” for the things we enjoy. To the contrary, we must take care to be “the user, but not the slave, of the gifts of Fortune.”17
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, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it. This in turn means that by practicing negative visualization, we can not only increase our chances of experiencing joy but increase the chance that the joy we experience will be durable, that it will survive changes in our circumstances. Thus, by practicing negative visualization, we can hope to gain what Seneca took to be a primary benefit of Stoicism, namely, “a boundless joy that is firm and unalterable.”18
I mentioned in the introduction that some of the things that attracted me to Buddhism could also be found in Stoicism.
Like Buddhists, Stoics advise us to contemplate the world’s impermanence. “All things human,” Seneca reminds us, “are short-lived and perishable.”19 Marcus likewise reminds us that the things we treasure are like the leaves on a tree, ready to drop when a breeze blows. He also argues that the “flux and change” of the world around us are not an accident but an essential part of our universe.20
We need to keep firmly in mind that everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us. If nothing else, our own death will deprive us of them. More generally, we should keep in mind that any human activity that cannot be carried on indefinitely must have a final occurrence. There will be—or already has been!—a last time in your life that you brush your teeth, cut your hair, drive a car, mow the lawn, or play hopscotch. There will be a last time you hear the sound of snow falling, watch the moon rise, smell popcorn, feel the warmth of a child falling asleep in your arms, or make love.
You will someday eat your last meal, and soon thereafter you will take your last breath.
Sometimes the world gives us advance notice that we are about to do something for the last time. We might, for example, eat at a favorite restaurant the night before it is scheduled to close, orwe might kiss a lover who is forced by circumstances to move to a distant part of the globe, presumably forever. Previously, when we thought we could repeat them at will, a meal at this restaurant or a kiss shared with our lover might have been unre-markable. But now that we know they cannot be repeated, they will likely become extraordinary events: The meal will be the best we ever had at the restaurant, and the parting kiss will be one of the most intensely bittersweet experiences life has to offer.
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. Some people, I realize, will find it depressing or even morbid to contemplate impermanence.
I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain such thoughts.
* * *
F I V E
The Dichotomy of Control
On Becoming Invincible
Our most important choice in life, according to Epictetus, is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal. Most people choose the former because they think harms and benefits come from outside themselves.
According to Epictetus, though, a philosopher—by whi
ch he means someone who has an understanding of Stoic philosophy—will do just the opposite. He will look “for all benefit and harm to come from himself.”1 In particular, he will give up the rewards the external world has to offer in order to gain “tranquility, freedom, and calm.”2
In offering this advice, Epictetus is turning the normal logic of desire fulfillment on its head. If you ask most people how to gain contentment, they will tell you that you must work to get it: You must devise strategies by which to fulfill your desires and then implement those strategies. But as Epictetus points out, “It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united.”3 A better strategy for getting what you want, he says, is to make it your goal to want only those things that are easy to obtain—and ideally to want only those things that you can be certain of obtaining.
While most people seek to gain contentment by changing the world around them, Epictetus advises us to gain contentment by changing ourselves—more precisely, by changing our desires. And he is not alone in giving this advice; indeed, it is the advice offered by virtually every philosopher and religious thinker who has reflected on human desire and the causes of human dissatisfaction.4 They agree that 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.
Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill. Your other desires should conform to this desire, and if they don’t, you should do your best to extinguish them. If you succeed in doing this, you will no longer experience anxiety about whether or not you will get what you want; nor will you experience disappointment on not getting what you want.
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