Living More Happy as a Stoic

What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, of course the streets go unannounced. How about instructions on how to live in the 20th century? This seems less likely, but in recent years, they have seen a certain interest in the work of three Roman Stoic philosophers who offered this very thing. They were Seneca, tutor of Emperor Nero; Epiactus, a former slave; and Mark Aureli, emperor.

Modern books, based on their own ideas and repacked as directions on how to lead a good life today, include “A Guide for Best Life” by William Irvain, “Stoicism and the Art of Happiness” by Donald Robertson, “The Daily Stoic” by Ryan Holidej and Steven Hanselman, “become a Stoik” by Massimo Pigliucci. What divides all these books is the belief that people can benefit by going back and examining the ideas of these Roman Stoics. There is even a week of years devoted to Stoicism.
Stoicism estimates that the key to a good and happy life is cultivating a fine mental state, which Stoics identify with virtue and rationality. The ideal life is what is in harmony with nature, which we are all part, and a quiet indifference to external events. It began in Greece and was founded around 300 PK from Zeno, who used the name of the Stoa painting in Athens and thus came to be called Stoicism. Most of the early Stoics are lost, so they are Roman Stoics that have been more influential over the centuries and continue to be today.

Check your thinking
So, what were the ideas? Two fundamental principles can be found both in the notebook, a brief work that sums up Epic's ideas. The first is that some things are within our control and some are not, and that most of our discontent is caused by the thought that we can control things, when in fact, we can't.
What can we control? Epistitis argues that we actually control very little. We don't control what happens to us, we can't control what people around us say or do, and we can't fully control our bodies, which are damaged and sick and eventually die without our preferences. The only thing we really control is how we think about things, the judgments we make about things.
This leads to the second basic principle from Epitus - not the things that upset us but the way we think about things. Things happen. Then we make judgments about what happens. If we judge that something truly bad has happened, then we may become upset, sad, or angry, depending on what it is. If we judge that something bad is likely to happen then we can be fearful or anxious. All these emotions are the product of our judgment. Things in themselves are neutral values, for what may seem terrible to us may be a matter of indifference to someone else or even welcome by others. It's our judgments that present the value of something in reality, and it's those judgment assessments that give us emotional reactions.
The good news is that these values judgments are one thing we have full control over. Things happen, none of which is good or bad, and it's within our power to decide how we value them. The paradox of Stoicism, as Epistitis formulates, is that we have almost no control over anything, but at the same time we have potentially full control over our happiness.

Train Your Minds
At first glance, this seems to underestimate the real challenges people face in their daily lives. How can just thinking differently help someone trying to put food on their table, for example? Stoics weren't scared of it. They fully acknowledged that life can be difficult sometimes.
Seneca knew this very well: he suffered exile, numerous trials, and was eventually forced to commit suicide by Nero. He also knew it was very easy to say: “I wouldn't let these outside things disturb me”, but he was persecuted by another and not that he was disturbing himself.
So Stoics developed a series of practical exercise designed to help train people to include Stoic ideas in their daily lives. Seneca recommended taking an inventory at the end of each day, noting when you are angry by something trivial, or acting in anger in response to someone who may not deserve it and so forth. By noting your mistakes and thus hoping that you will do better the next day.
Mark Aurell had another strategy, reminding them every morning that he would probably encounter many angry, stressed, impatient, ungrateful people during the day. Reflecting on this forward, the hope was that he would be less likely to respond politely. But he also reflected on the fact that none of these people would be so deliberately. They were victims of their wrong judgment.
Here we have another paradox: nobody chooses to be unhappy, pronounced, angry, miserable, and yet these are actually all products of our judgment, the thing within our control.

Accept What Happens
Another Stoic strategy is to remind ourselves of our relative inadequacy. The world is not surrounding us. Aurel regularly reflected in his meditations on the vastness of the universe and the vastness of time that lay in the past and in the future so that his short life would be brought into a broader context.
Our lives are just a moment when they're placed inside this cosmic perspective. In view of this, why should we expect space to give whatever people want to happen? Rather, it would be absurd to expect it to conform to our will.
As Epics put it, if you expect the universe to give what it wants, you will be disappointed, but if you embrace everything that the universe gives, then life will be much softer. Again, this is easier to say than to do, but more and more people are taking into consideration Stoic counsel and working hard to include it in their daily lives.