The Little Book of Stoicism

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43621841-the-little-book-of-stoicism

Notes

Core principles

According to Jonas Salzgeber, the core principles of Stoicism are represented visually as the Stoic Happiness Triangle. This triangle provides a simple overview of the most important aspects of Stoicism.

The Core Goal: Eudaimonia

At the core of the triangle is Eudaimonia.

• Eudaimonia is the ultimate goal of life shared by all ancient philosophies.
• It is the main promise of Stoic philosophy and is defined as living a supremely happy and smoothly flowing life. It is about thriving in our lives.
• The Greek origin of the word means being on good terms (eu) with your inner daimon (your highest self).
• This state of thriving and living optimally well results from bringing one’s moment-to-moment actions into harmony with one’s highest self.

The three core principles

The corners of the triangle define how one achieves eudaimonia:

• Live with Arete (express your highest self in every moment)

  • To be on good terms with your highest self, you must close the gap between what you are capable of and what you are actually doing.
  • Arete translates as “virtue” or “excellence”. It means expressing the highest version of yourself moment to moment.
  • Living with arete requires using reason in your actions and living in harmony with deep values.
  • Virtue acts as a form of wisdom or strength that helps you perform the appropriate action at all times.
  • The pursuit of arete is also referred to as living in agreement with nature. For humans, nature is perfected by the application of reason.

  The Stoics classified virtue into four cardinal virtues:

  • Wisdom: Understanding how to act and feel appropriately, including deliberation, healthy judgment, perspective, and good sense.
  • Justice: Knowing how to act and feel well in relationships, including good-heartedness, integrity, public service, and fairness.
  • Courage: Knowing how to act and feel correctly when facing fearful situations, including bravery, perseverance, honesty, and confidence.
  • Self-Discipline (Temperance): Knowing how to act and feel right despite strong desire, inner resistance, or lust, including orderliness, self-control, forgiveness, and humility.

• Focus on What You Control (accept whatever happens and make the best of it)

  • This is considered the most prominent principle in Stoicism.
  • The principle requires focusing solely on the things that are within our power.
  • The only things we have full control over are our voluntary judgments and actions.
  • Everything else (such as the weather, other people’s actions, health, wealth, or outcomes of our behaviors) is either partially or not at all under our control.
  • External things that are not up to us are classified as indifferent; they cannot ultimately help or harm our flourishing. They must be accepted, and we should focus on making the best of the situation.
  • The goal is to focus on the process (effort and preparation) rather than the outcome, allowing one to achieve success regardless of external results.

• Take Responsibility (get good from yourself)

  • This principle states that good and bad come solely from yourself.

  • Because living with arete is sufficient for a happy life (Corner 1) and external factors are not relevant (Corner 2), we are responsible for our own flourishing.

  • We should not let outside circumstances determine our well-being.

  • It is crucial in Stoicism that it is not external events that make us happy or miserable, but our interpretation (judgment) of those events. Every external event, even if uncontrollable, offers an area we can control: how we choose to respond to it.

  • Taking responsibility and focusing on self-improvement helps overcome the “victim mentality”—blaming external circumstances for unhappiness—and is necessary for attaining eudaimonia.

    In essence, Salzgeber presents the core of Stoicism as the recognition that happiness (Eudaimonia) is achieved internally by striving for excellence (Arete), by diligently focusing energy only on what we can influence, and by accepting full responsibility for our own character and responses.

Stoic practices

Jonas Salzgeber organizes the Stoic methods for practical living into 55 Stoic Practices, which are intended to help people gain resilience, confidence, and calmness. Stoicism is described as a philosophy requiring little theory and a lot of practice, akin to surfing or wrestling. Salzgeber categorizes these practices into three main types for everyday application:

1. Preparing Practices: Exercises done for oneself, often without needing a specific life situation to train on.
2. Situational Practices (Dealing with Self): Strategies for handling oneself in tough or challenging life situations.
3. Situational Practices (Dealing with Others): Methods for interacting with difficult or challenging people.

Below is a comprehensive overview of the Stoic practices described in the sources:

I. Preparing Practices (21 Practices)

These practices build the foundation for emotional resilience and virtue.

1. The Stoic Art of Acquiescence: Accept And Love Whatever Happens

   Involves the willing acceptance of external events, even those judged as “bad”. By bringing one’s will into harmony with reality, suffering (which stems from resisting reality) is minimized. This is related to the idea that misfortunes happen for us, not against us, serving as nature’s treatment to become better people.

2. Undertake Actions with a Reserve Clause

   When planning actions, one adds the caveat “if nothing prevents me,” thereby accepting that the outcome is ultimately beyond one’s direct control. This cultivates detachment from outcomes, helping to maintain tranquility and equanimity regardless of success or failure (process focus).

3. What Stands in the Way Becomes the Way

   Views difficulties and struggles not as obstacles, but as opportunities for growth and practice of virtue (courage, humility, patience, etc.). This involves “turning the obstacle upside down” to use setbacks as fuel to become stronger.

4. Remind Yourself of the Impermanence of Things

   Recognizes that life is ephemeral and everything changes constantly, like a river flowing past. By acknowledging impermanence, attachment to possessions and people is reduced, diminishing fear of loss.

5. Contemplate Your Own Death

   Known by the Latin phrase Memento mori (remember you are mortal). Periodically reflecting on mortality is irrational fear and enhances the appreciation and enjoyment of life. It focuses the mind on living with arete (expressing one’s highest self) now, rather than postponing “sensible plans”.

6. Consider Everything as Borrowed from Nature

   Treats everything one possesses (body, possessions, relationships, status) as temporarily loaned from nature. This prepares one to return these “gifts when called upon, making no complaint”.

7. Negative Visualization: Foreseeing Bad Stuff

   An imagination exercise where one anticipates possible negative future scenarios to prepare for and cope with them effectively and calmly. This practice trains emotional resilience and ensures one is not “crushed and shocked” when misfortune arises.

8. Voluntary Discomfort

   The physical practice of occasionally embracing discomfort (e.g., temporary poverty, cold showers, restricted diets) to train endurance, improve self-control, and quiet the appetite for material possessions. It expands one’s comfort zone, preparing for when uncomfortable situations occur naturally.

9. Prepare Yourself for the Day: The Stoic Morning Routine

   Involves introspective rehearsal, such as meditating on one’s rational nature, asking how to achieve freedom from negative emotions and tranquility, and preparing to meet challenging people with patience and kindness.

10. Review Your Day: The Stoic Evening Routine

    A nightly reflection routine to review the day’s actions, seeking to identify faults, successes, and ways to improve (self-analysis). This practice enhances mindfulness and self-control, as one knows they will be judged by their own court at night.

11. Keep a Role Model in Mind: Contemplate the Stoic Sage

    Encourages comparing one’s actions against an ideal, such as the hypothetical Stoic Sage, to attain “perfect eudaimonia”. Asking, “What would the Sage do?” creates a pause between stimulus and response, enabling a deliberate, virtuous choice.

12. Stoic Aphorisms: Keep Your “Weapons” Ready at Hand

    Involves creating and memorizing succinct statements of fundamental principles (like “ready at hand” Enchiridion) to counteract irrational thoughts in chaotic reality.

13. Play Your Given Roles Well

    Focuses on fulfilling the duties appropriate to one’s various roles (e.g., human being, daughter, citizen, friend). Playing one’s role well, even if others do not fulfill theirs, is living in agreement with nature and leads to a happy life.

14. Eliminate the Nonessential

    Encourages cutting out superfluous words and actions, focusing instead on essential matters to gain more time and tranquility. One should ask at every moment, “Is this necessary?”.

15. Forget Fame

    Advocates for indifference toward reputation and social status, recognizing that fame is short-lived and outside one’s control. Virtue should be its own reward, and satisfaction should be derived from virtuous behavior, not external approval.

16. Like a Minimalist: Live Simple

    Promotes living a simple, functional lifestyle and remaining indifferent to material possessions (which are external and indifferent). True wealth lies in wanting less, as “freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it”.

17. Take Back Your Time: Cut Out News and Other Timewasters

    Involves guarding time meticulously (“the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers”) and prioritizing essential activities over nonessential ones like consuming news or excessive entertainment. News is discouraged because it often involves worrying about things beyond the power of one’s will.

18. Win at What Matters

    Emphasizes prioritizing “the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, the knowledge of how to live and die” over professional expertise or status. The most valuable asset is one’s character.

19. Become an Eternal Student

    Encourages the continuous pursuit of knowledge and wisdom to improve oneself. As “warriors of the mind,” the goal is to digest the theory and put it into practice, not just to read about it.

20. What Do You Have to Show for Your Years?

    A reflection on mortality (Memento mori) that encourages living purposefully and mindfully, rather than wasting time and realizing too late that life has passed. The focus is on making progress in one’s character and values.

21. Do What Needs to Get Done

    A practice in self-discipline to overcome inner resistance (laziness, lack of motivation) and perform necessary duties, recognizing that humans are made for exertion, not pleasure. This means doing what is required whether one feels like it or not.

II. Situational Practices: Dealing with Yourself When Life Gets Tough (17 Practices)

These practices focus on managing one’s internal responses to external events.

1. Your Judgment Harms You

   Reinforces the principle that external events are neutral, and it is one’s judgment or interpretation of an event that causes disturbance or harm. The power lies in wiping out this judgment immediately and taking responsibility for one’s own emotional state.

2. How to Deal With Grief

   Suggests conquering grief using reason rather than deceiving it. While nature requires some initial sorrow, excessive grief is vain and must be stopped before it becomes self-harming. Focus on being grateful for the time enjoyed with the lost person. When supporting others, sympathize externally but avoid internalizing their grief.

3. Choose Courage and Calm over Anger

   Views anger (a desire to repay suffering) as brief madness and toxic. The strategy is to reject the first signs of anger and use reason, which is more reliable than rash anger, to pursue necessary action. One can force physical relaxation or objectively describe the situation to gain time and distance.

4. Beat Fear with Preparation and Reason

   Argues that fear is often a result of imagination and wanting things outside one’s control. One should anticipate fears (preparation) and confront them rationally and calmly in one’s mind until they become familiar and lose their power (reason).

5. Blame Your Expectations

   Encourages reducing frustration and anger by aligning one’s expectations with reality, rather than demanding the world conform to one’s desires. Unmet, overly optimistic expectations are the cause of disappointment; anticipating potential setbacks helps prevent surprise and intense grief.

6. Pain and Provocation: Great Opportunities for Virtue

   Treats every challenge, physical or emotional, as a chance to practice virtues like patience, endurance, and self-restraint. Nothing can prevent the choice to respond with virtue, effectively turning the setback into raw material for growth.

7. The Equanimity Game

   When one is thrown off balance by minor circumstances, the goal is to recover one’s self-control as quickly as possible. Consistent practice of returning to a “balanced mind” (equanimity) increases mastery.

8. The Anti-Puppet Mindset

   Focuses on preventing external events (like weather, news, or others’ opinions) and internal impulses from dictating one’s emotional state or actions. One must cut the strings that pull the mind by grounding choices in deep values and maintaining mindfulness. The immediate steps are: 1) Don’t get upset; 2) Do the right thing.

9. Life Is Supposed to Be Challenging

   Adopts the mindset that difficulties are inevitable and necessary for personal growth and character development, viewing them as opportunities for training, like a sparring partner.

10. What’s so Troublesome Here and Now?

    Advocates for extreme focus on the present moment, recognizing that the past is gone and the future is uncertain. When overwhelmed, one isolates the challenge and asks, “What is there in this work which I cannot endure or support?” to make it easier to deal with.

11. Count Your Blessings

    A practice in gratitude, urging one to appreciate what they currently possess and be thankful for all that has been given. This is done while guarding against attachment, ready to surrender things when they are taken away.

12. Other-ize

    Involves stepping outside oneself when inconvenience or misfortune occurs and imagining how one would react if the same event happened to someone else, like a friend. This provides perspective, reduces self-pity, and helps maintain a balanced mind.

13. Take the Bird’s-Eye View

    An imaginative exercise to look at oneself and all human affairs from a vast distance (e.g., from the sky). This minimizes the perceived importance of one’s troubles and reminds one of the brevity of life and the immensity of the universe.

14. It’s the Same Old Things

    A perspective that recognizes that most human experiences, challenges, and emotions are perennial and not unique to the present time. This helps one avoid taking things too seriously and reduces the surprise caused by “trifles”.

15. Meat Is Dead Animal: Observe Objectively

    Involves analyzing an object or situation as objectively and value-free as possible, reducing complex things to their basic constituents (e.g., wine is just grape juice). This prevents one from attributing excessive importance or meaning to external things.

16. Avoid Rashness: Test Your Impressions (!)

    The core practice of placing a pause between stimulus and emotional impression/response to prevent impulsive behavior. One must spot the initial impression and then test it, primarily by asking, “Is this something that is, or is not, in my control?”. The ability to postpone reaction is foundational for living with arete.

17. Do Good, Be Good

    Emphasizes that true value lies in character and actions. One must “become good now” and do good for its own sake, as virtue is its own reward, and external recognition is superfluous.

III. Situational Practices: Dealing with Other People (16 Practices)

These practices help maintain tranquility and fulfill one’s social duty in interactions.

1. We Are All Limbs of the Same Body

   Recognizes the interconnectedness of humanity, where all individuals are limbs of the same system and are “made for cooperation”. Actions must contribute to the common welfare, as this is the only way to achieve a good life.

2. Nobody Errs on Purpose

   Assumes that people who act wrongly do so because they are mistaken or lack wisdom (Socrates’ doctrine: “Nobody does wrong willingly”). This perspective encourages patience, understanding, and forgiveness, treating the wrongdoer’s mistake as an inevitable consequence of human nature.

3. Find Your Own Faults

   When offended by another’s wrongdoing, one should immediately turn inward and consider one’s own similar failings. This diminishes anger and encourages a mild, understanding self-judgment that should be extended to others.

4. Forgive and Love Those Who Stumble

   Calls for compassion and forgiveness toward wrongdoers, seeing them as misguided relatives or like children. It is a special privilege and duty to “love even those who stumble” because they injure themselves when they act unjustly.

5. Pity Rather than Blame the Wrongdoer

   Views those who do wrong as “blinded and lamed in their most sovereign faculties” (reason). If one remembers this “injury,” anger and indignation are replaced by pity.

6. Kindness Is Strength

   Treats every encounter as an opportunity for kindness. Sincere kindness is described as “invincible” and a sign of great strength, especially when responding to rudeness or meanness.

7. How to Deal with Insults

   Strategies include pausing to evaluate the truth and source of the insult, or viewing the insulter as a childish person who deserves pity. The best revenge is to let it go and be a better example (unlikeness). The ultimate goal is to become invulnerable by recognizing that an insult is only harmful if one judges it to be so.

8. Scratches Happen In Training

   Views everyday inconveniences, mistakes, or annoying behavior as mere “scratches” or training exercises (like sparring). This lowers the emotional stakes, making it easier to shake off minor blows with equanimity and move on.

9. Don’t Abandon Others nor Yourself

   Addresses the challenge of sticking to new, virtuous behaviors while maintaining relationships with those who don’t change. One must not abandon their path of reason, nor abandon friends and family, but remain kind and patient with others’ resistance.

10. For Such a Small Price, Buy Tranquility

    A strategy to combat irritation by consciously choosing tranquility over a reaction. When trifles arise, one says internally, “I buy tranquility instead,” avoiding the “hassle” of emotional upset.

11. Put Yourself in Other People’s Shoes

    Advocates for careful listening and trying to understand the other person’s perspective and reasons before passing judgment. This fosters compassion and prevents hasty labeling.

12. Choose Your Company Well

    Advises spending time with people who are likely to improve one, as vices are contagious and companions pull one either “down or up to their level”. The goal is to keep company only with those who “uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best”.

13. Don’t Judge But Yourself

    Encourages refraining from hasty judgments of others, focusing instead on identifying and correcting one’s own faults. Philosophy is meant to “scrape off your own faults, rather than be a way to rail against the faults of others”.

14. Do Good, Not Only No Evil

    Stresses the duty to be a “force for the good in the world” and actively intervene, even in small matters, rather than standing aside when injustice or rudeness occurs. Using reason to confront annoyances can correct the offender “without useless anger”.

15. Say Only What’s Not Better Left Unsaid

    Promotes silence as a goal, speaking only what is necessary, brief, and meaningful. One should avoid gossip, comparison, and lengthy conversations about superficial matters.

16. Listen with the Intent to Understand

    Advises paying close attention to what the speaker is trying to express (empathic listening) to foster understanding and connection.

17. Lead by Example

    The final imperative: to “be one” rather than argue about what a good person should be. One must silently demonstrate principles through action, leading by example and demonstrating what one has learned, as others follow action more than instruction.