To the Stoics, though, Aristotle’s belief was absurd, because many people, with age, will lose many or all of these external goods. For example, let’s imagine that you develop an excellent moral character over your entire life, but that at a certain age you lose your wealth, your health, your family, and suddenly find yourself facing death. Would that suddenly mean, at this point, that your life is no longer good, or that you’ve lost your moral character? Of course not. And what about “good looks”? Socrates, who was considered to have been one of the most virtuous people who ever lived, was legendary for looking ugly. People said that Socrates, with his famous pug nose, resembled a satyr.
By insisting that virtue is the only true good, the Stoics affirmed a radical egalitarianism. While it’s better for someone to have obvious advantages, even if you’re poor, sick, ugly, or dying, it’s still entirely possible for you to be a good and virtuous person. And regardless of your circumstances in life, it’s still possible to find some way to study philosophy. As Seneca wrote, anyone can develop excellence of mind, if they so desire: “Philosophy doesn’t exclude or select anyone. Its light shines for all.”10
REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR not you are personally drawn to Stoic ways of thinking, I hope you can now see how these two ideas, when combined, are so powerful. If someone truly adopted the Stoic ideas that “virtue is the only true good” and “many things are outside of our control,” this would produce a significant shift in the way most people view and experience the world. And that shift would make any external misfortunes feel much less terrible. Regardless of that, we can summarize Seneca’s idea about the relationship between misfortune and virtue in a simple formula: it’s not what we bear, but how we bear it that matters. While any adversity could strike us, it’s how we respond that is a measure of our true character.
PREPARING FOR ADVERSITY
If you don’t want someone to panic during a crisis, train him or her beforehand.
—Seneca, Letters 18.6
One Stoic approach to reduce the sting of adverse events is called praemeditatio malorum, “the premeditation of future adversity.” This involves briefly rehearsing potential negative events in your mind before they occur. Should the event then actually take place in the future, you’ll be mentally prepared for it, and the emotional shock will be significantly reduced. While this technique doesn’t work for everyone and could cause anxiety instead (in which case you shouldn’t use it), it has worked exceptionally well for me and for many others. In fact, everyone already has experimented with this who has experienced a fire drill as a schoolchild. Rehearsing a potential disaster in advance increases your ability to cope and think clearly should the imagined disaster ever take place.
Speaking of fire drills, Seneca offers this exact advice to Lucilius, after describing the terrible destruction of Lyon by fire:
When one doesn’t anticipate a disaster, it weighs more heavily on us. Shock strengthens the impact, and every mortal feels more profound grief when left in astonishment. Therefore, nothing should be unexpected by us. We should send our minds ahead in advance, and we should consider not just what typically happens but what could happen.11
Or even more strongly, as he writes elsewhere, “Let us think of anything that could happen as something that will happen.”12
The basic idea behind the premeditation of adversity is to briefly rehearse any possible misfortune in your imagination—like you’re practicing or exercising your Stoic muscles. As Seneca notes, “That which has been long expected is more gentle when it arrives.”13 Also, we should expect adversity to occasionally cross our paths because “hardships arrive through a law of nature.”14 The premeditation of adversity goes back to the earliest Greek Stoics and was used by all of the significant Roman Stoics.15 Seneca refers to it often across his many writings. One of the most famous places it crops up is at the beginning of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Writing a note in his personal journal, Marcus reminds himself: “Say to yourself each morning: Today I will meet with people who are meddling, ungrateful, overbearing, deceitful, envious, and unsocial. They suffer from these flaws through ignorance of good and bad.”16
True enough: Seneca and the other Stoics realized that the world is full of annoying people. And since they will cross your path, you might as well anticipate it. That will help you to avoid having a negative, emotional reaction when it actually takes place. So the next time you go for a drive in your car, remind yourself that you might encounter a crazy motorist, fueled with road rage. Should that happen, you won’t feel surprised in the least, but like a well-trained Stoic, you’ll be able to say, “I knew it” or “I expected it.”17
My best use of praemeditatio malorum involved my little son, Benjamin. Shortly after he was born, I bought a townhouse in Sarajevo. While it has a beautiful view, the hard wooden stairs leading up to the third floor, where the bedrooms are located, are extremely steep and dangerous. As we’d say in the United States, “They aren’t up to code.” The stairs are so hazardous that if Benjamin had fallen down them, he literally could have been killed.
To prevent my son from hurting or even killing himself, I approached the project in stages. First, I took every reasonable precaution I possibly could to prevent this from happening. After I purchased the house, I had a railing installed on the stairway to make the stairs safer for everyone. (It was unbelievable that there was no railing installed, to begin with!) Second, I had a wooden gate made with a lock on it and installed at the top of the stairs. We would lock the gate at night so that no one could tumble down the stairway by accident. Finally, I placed friction tape on the narrow, slippery stairs, to create some traction and make them less dangerous.
That was everything I could physically do, but the stairway remained unsafe. So the next step involved training. Every morning, when Benjamin walked down the stairs with his mom to go to school, I would always say, “Benjamin, be sure to hang on to the railing!” He would say, “Okay!” and proceed accordingly. In fact, I still remind him today.
The last thing I did was to practice praemeditatio malorum. Since this was a serious concern, I would imagine Benjamin falling down the stairs and hurting himself. That way, if it actually happened, at least I’d be fully prepared for it. (In other words, I wouldn’t panic the way my wife did when our son fell off a slide at kindergarten and hit his head.) I also imagined how I would respond to him falling down the stairs, based on the severity of his injuries.
While this sounds like a slightly unpleasant exercise, I’m glad I did it, because, sure enough, one day he did fall down the stairs, when he was six. Fortunately, he was toward the bottom of the stairs when he fell. And while he scraped his back on the hard, sharp edges of the stairs, he was fine. It was just a scare with no severe injuries. The Stoic training I had used allowed me to respond to the misfortune calmly—with concern, but without panic. There was no sense of shock or surprise when it happened, because I had anticipated it.
The Stoic exercise of contemplating future misfortune strongly resembles a technique of modern psychotherapy known as exposure therapy, which helps people confront and overcome their fears. In exposure therapy, the patient is exposed bit by bit to the source of the anxiety or phobia, but in tiny doses. Over time, the exposure increases until the fear completely vanishes or is significantly diminished. While exposure therapy can take many different forms, one technique involves exposing yourself to the source of the fear entirely through the imagination. That kind of exposure therapy, which is used today by psychologists, corresponds exactly to the ancient Stoic practice.