A Guide To The Good Life

A Guide To The Good Life is a roadmap for aspiring Stoics, revealing why this ancient philosophy is useful today, what Stoicism is truly about, and showing you how to cultivate its powerful principles in your own life.

There are two central themes in Stoicism, values which all Stoics strive to integrate into their lives as much as possible. Those two goals are:

Virtue. Tranquility.

Chances are you don’t really know what these mean, or if you do, you think of the wrong thing.

For example, virtue might be defined as “having high moral standards” and therefore make you think only monks, priests and Mother Theresa are good examples of virtuous people. But virtue in a Stoic sense is more about living a life that’s aligned with your own set of values.

Synonyms of the word are goodness, honesty, righteousness, dignity, integrity, trustworthiness, decency and merit, for example, which all rely on you doing what you say and saying what you do.

In the same vein tranquility is not about napping a lot or being lazy. Tranquility is the art of ridding yourself of negative emotions. A tranquil person shows great self-control and won’t let her emotions dominate her intellect, for example by staying calm in a traffic jam, because she knows getting angry at traffic is useless.

One of the worst, yet most common vicious cycle we get stuck in, especially in the Western world, is the hedonic treadmill. Scientifically known as hedonic adaptation, this is a system in which we chase material possessions, only to attain them, quickly get used to and bored by them, to reset and chase the next item.

A tranquil and virtuous person knows she must break out of this cycle and Stoics have one major way of doing so: learning to want the things we already have and appreciating the things in our life. The more you want what you have, as compared to having what you want, the happier you’ll be.

A very simple exercise you can use to achieve this is negative visualization: Imagine the things and people you take for granted and interact with the most would suddenly vanish and be gone forever. This’ll make you feel bad for a second, because the thought of loss is painful, but at the same time it’ll give you an instant surge of appreciation and show you how lucky you are to still have them in your life.

I found a quote a few years ago that perfectly sums this up:

The biggest step towards becoming more tranquil you can take is changing your attitude towards the things you can’t control. This takes two steps: Realizing when something is outside of your control…