Those wishing to read the Stoics would do well to start with the essays of Seneca, especially, “On the Happy Life,” “On Tranquility of Mind,” and “On the Shortness of Life.”

And I think the biggest mistake, the one made by a huge number of people, is to have no philosophy of life at all. These people feel their way through life by following the promptings of their evolutionary programming, by assiduously seeking out what feels good and avoiding what feels bad. By doing this, they might have a comfortable life or even a

These thinkers have also tended to gravitate toward tranquility as something very much worth pursuing, although many of them disagreed with the Stoics on how best to pursue it.

It doesn’t help that those who think fame and fortune are more valuable than tranquility vastly outnumber those who, like myself, think tranquility is more valuable. Can all these other people be mistaken? Surely I am the one making the mistake! At the same time, I know, thanks to my research on desire, that almost without exception the

According to the Stoics, if I seek tranquility, I need to give up other goals that someone in my circumstances might have, such as to own an expensive, late-model car or to live in a million-dollar home. But what if everyone else is right and the Stoics are wrong? There is a chance that I will someday look back on what I will then term “my Stoic

One significant psychological change that has taken place since I started practicing Stoicism is that I experience far less dissatisfaction than I used to. Apparently as the result of practicing negative visualization, I have become quite appreciative of what I’ve got. There remains, to be sure, the question of whether I would continue to be

As a consumer, I seem to have crossed some kind of great divide. It seems unlikely that, having crossed it, I will ever be able to return to the mindless consumerism that I once found to be so entertaining.

should add that the reason I have so few consumer desires is not because I consciously fight their formation. To the contrary, such desires have simply stopped popping into my head—or at any rate, they don’t pop nearly as often as they used to. In other words, my ability to form desires for consumer goods seems to have atrophied. What brought about

When he is scared of doing something, I must force him to confront his fears and overcome them. Why play this game against my other self? In part to gain self-discipline. And why is self-discipline worth possessing? Because those who possess it have the ability to determine what they do with their life. Those who lack self-discipline will have the