The Manual: A Philosopher's Guide to Life

What if, where others were upset, envious, excited, possessive, or greedy, you were objective, calm, and clearheaded? Can you envision that?

The will of nature may be learned from those events in life in which we don’t differ from one another. For instance, when someone else’s slave-boy breaks a cup, we’re ready at once to say, ‘That’s just one of those things.’ So you should be clear, then, that if your own cup gets broken, you ought to react in exactly the same way as when someone els

Marcus also offers advice on anger avoidance. He recommends, as we have seen, that we contemplate the impermanence of the world around us. If we do this, he says, we will realize that many of the things we think are important in fact aren’t, at least not in the grand scheme of things. He reflects on the times, almost a century earlier, of Emperor V

Suppose we get lucky, and after wanting something that is not up to us, we succeed in getting it. In this case, we will not end up feeling “thwarted, miserable, and upset,” but during the time we wanted the thing that is not up to us, we probably experienced a degree of anxiety: Since the thing is not up to us, there was a chance that we wouldn’t g