Stoic route to valuing things is to accept that whether they come or go from our lives is not under our control. This understanding allows us to enjoy them even more, because we know that we will not have them in our lives forever.

If we were the last person on Earth, we wouldn’t bother with buffetless ventilators or ironic iPhone cases. When the desire to impress others is removed, we live a more authentically Epicurean existence. And again, we should not make the mistake of thinking that Epicurus would deny us such things as a fancy fan. Instead, he would have us not cultivate the need for such things in the first place, so that the pain of losing them when they are broken, lost or stolen would not compromise any enjoyment we might obtain from them in the meantime. We have already looked at the things that lie within our control, namely our thoughts and actions, and how we take charge of these by distinguishing between ‘appearances’ and ‘impressions’: between external events and our interpretations of those events. But now we have a huge coda to that thought: nothing else matters. How other people behave towards us, for example, is of no real interest, as their behaviour is ‘external’ and not within the realm of our thoughts or actions. If our partner is stressed and acts… Of course it is harder to get excited about a future event if we keep reminding ourselves it might not happen. We’re so indoctrinated against the idea of pessimism that it might seem as if we are actively denying ourselves a source of happiness through this exceptio. But consider the alternative. When we become very excited about a future event, we forget the present and place ourselves in the future. We are at the mercy of something outside of our control: whether or not the event happens as we would wish. It may turn out to be better than expected, or roughly the same, or worse. The more excited we are, the more likely it is to fail to meet our expectations, in the same way that something we dread is likely to not be half as bad as we feared. Thus we might be terrific listeners with a disarming honesty that makes most people feel very comfortable in our company, while we ourselves are convinced we are merely awkward misfits, unable to play the kinds of social games everyone else seems to enjoy. But we have, by absorbing the crux of Epictetus’s teaching (that it is not events that cause our problems but our appraisal of them), already made the biggest and most important leap. By fully accepting the fact that we are responsible for our angry responses (and not those who anger us), we are crossing the wide river to more tranquil pastures, from which it is very difficult to return. Holding On To AngerIf we are feeling angry, upset or hurt, it’s understandable, but we have forgotten ourselves. It may be unavoidable that we will feel some of these negative emotions, perhaps every day, but there is all the difference in the world between allowing them to take root (which comes from believing they are caused by external events and leads to us holding others accountable for our feelings) and accepting responsibility for them, and seeing if we might correct them internally. The well-being of ourselves and others may be to us a ‘preferred indifferent’, and thus something to be enjoyed or secured where convenient, but it is ultimately an indifferent because it does not occupy that realm of actions and thoughts that is uniquely our concern. Things will not necessarily work out for the best. External events will proceed as planned without our involvement, and that knowledge can encourage us to treat them as they occur with a Stoic, qualified indifference. According to Mill, happiness should not be our goal per se, and to chase it directly is a mistake. Instead, we should see it as a by-product, something achieved indirectly through the process of individual liberation from the levelling demands of society. Rather than directly seeking tranquillity or finding happiness through Christ, one might discover it as a by-product of a more personal emancipation. There is something of Aristotle in all of this: identifying our highest aim (liberty rather than virtue) through what makes us unique, and then working towards…

When others inspire us, they tend to do so through the clear expression of these sketchy, adumbrated thoughts we ourselves have known but never had the perspicacity to formulate with certainty. A Thousand Plus Years Later… We can aim high, seek to change the world, yet always be satisfied with the outcome. The Stoics have taken the reclusive Epicurean instruction to desire only what you already have, and allowed it to be active, engaged and vital. To escape the cycle of pain and boredom, then, we need to take control of our stories. ‘Ordinary men,’ Schopenhauer wrote (and we can include the ladies too), ‘are intent merely on how to spend their time; a man with any talent is interested in how to use his time.’ We know already the two big questions we might ask ourselves when we are feeling mad, bad or sad: I am responsible for how I feel about external events. What am I doing to give myself this feeling? Is this thing that’s upsetting me something which lies under my control? If not, what if I were to decide it’s fine and let it go?We are unlikely to reach his almost holy standard ourselves, but it is our attempt to do so that gives us the best sort of life and therefore the happiest. We may not spend our lives ceaselessly jumping for joy, but we will vastly reduce feelings of pain, anguish and disturbance as we continue along that x=y diagonal: something that could constitute a remarkable transformation in our lives. His aim, then, is not to avoid those he doesn’t like but to find a way around the clashing of personalities and achieve a harmonious relationship with all people. We must remember this if Stoicism ever seems detached and cold to us. Its ultimate aim is not an emotionless detachment from others but is rather about living in harmony with what the ancients called ‘Nature’ and being a productive part of humankind. When work ends – through retirement or downsizing – many people become depressed, because their sense of self was too closely tied to such ends. A line misattributed to Plutarch and more accurately credited to Die Hard’s Hans Gruber runs as follows: ‘When Alexander the Great saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer’. How We View Commitment The psychiatrist-author Viktor E. Frankl, writing of his experiences in the concentration camp, finds this same truth in the most unthinkable circumstances, when he writes about the way in which prisoners placed in positions of authority granted meagre favours to their friends while others were denied: It is not for me to pass judgement on those prisoners who put their own above everyone else. Who can throw a stone at a man who favours his friends under circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life or death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same. Mitigating Future Disappointment

What counts is not the work but our relationship to it. Schopenhauer, refreshingly, ascribed far more importance to what one does with one’s leisure. The ideal he describes (and he goes into some detail about how to sensibly store capital and live off the interest) is to be wealthy enough to have expansive free time and the intellectual capabilities to fill it with contemplation and activity in the service of mankind. It may not be our work but rather what we do with the rest of our time that gives us our true sense of worth. We might choose to identify far more with our hobby of paragliding, or the daily demands and rewards of trying to be a good-enough… Our ruinous, dehumanising society began for Rousseau with the fact that we must work. This leads to us reflecting on our social position, and creates feelings of envy and vanity.For it to be solid, our happiness would not rely on fortuity or what we happen to have. It would be fundamentally about who we are. Stoicism Remembering this invites us to express our feelings to those we love now while we can, to never take them for granted, and to not regret, when it’s too late, that they never knew how important they were to us. “What You Love is Mortal” Tidy narratives are things we choose to apply; meanwhile, experience is messy and active and not reducible to these clean nouns and designations. As priorities change, regrets may surface. Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse working in palliative care, recorded what she perceived to be the top five regrets of the dying. They were: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier. In matters of love, a mature relationship involves celebrating the mystery and wholeness of one’s partner. It is standing in appreciation of their otherness, not neurotically attempting to obliterate it because at some level their separation from us might trigger responses we once had to a fallible, unavailable parent. It is realising that we are each of us alone, that no one is ever entirely right for us because we are all broken, and that we can only open our broken aloneness to that of another.