A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

Journal,

Handbook

Among their recommendations were the following: • We should become self-aware: We should observe ourselves as we go about our daily business, and we should periodically reflect on how we responded to the day’s events. How did we respond to an insult? To the loss of a possession? To a stressful situation? Did we, in our responses, put Stoic psycholo

Vices, Seneca warns, are contagious: They spread, quickly and unnoticed, from those who have them to those with whom they come into contact.2 Epictetus echoes this warning: Spend time with an unclean person, and we will become unclean as well.3 In particular, if we associate with people who have unwholesome desires, there is a very real danger that

The Stoics therefore recommend that we avoid befriending people whose values have been corrupted, for fear that their values will contaminate ours. We should instead seek, as friends, people who share our (proper Stoic) values and in particular, people who are doing a better job than we are of living in accordance with these values. And while enjoy

Discourse on Method.

Walden,

We should, he says, learn to restrain luxury, cultivate frugality, and “view poverty with unprejudiced eyes.”

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer; his essays “Wisdom of Life” and “Counsels and Maxims,” although not explicitly Stoical, have a distinctly Stoical tone.