%% ID: 13204901 Updated: 2022-01-28 %% ![](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article3.5c705a01b476.png) # About Title: [[Other/Obsidian Starter Vault(Second Brain)/Readwise 1/Articles/Better Living Through Stoicism, From Seneca to Modern Interpreters]] Author: [[Molly Young]] Category: #articles Number of Highlights: ==15== Last Highlighted: *2022-01-03* Readwise URL: https://readwise.io/bookreview/13204901 Source URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/books/stoicism-books.html # Highlights the sound of a human scream is — perhaps for evolutionary reasons — difficult to tune out. ^278319103 --- One of the premises of Stoicism is that it will help you assimilate horrible events with equanimity. The proper way to respond to catastrophe, the Stoics will tell you, is to perceive it as a training exercise. Or, as Seneca put it: “Disaster is virtue’s opportunity.” ^278319104 --- Stoicism is many things — it was devised and refined over centuries — but the basic principles can be summed up quickly ^278319105 --- Excellence of character, or virtue, is the only true good, and we should spend our lives pursuing it. Virtue is its own reward, but as a free bonus it will also make us happy. ^278319106 --- We should make a distinction between what we can and cannot control, and quit worrying about things in the second category. All of the above is easier said than done, but what isn’t? ^278319107 --- Stoicism is also a protocol of attentiveness ^278319108 --- One of the recommended practices is the “daily review,” in which you take a moment each evening to reflect on the previous waking hours. ^278319109 --- lack of attentiveness amounted to psychological slavery. ^278319110 --- today you’re less likely to complain about being “enslaved” by your phone than “addicted” to it ^278319111 --- the absence of self-mastery and freedom derive from an external agent: for the enslaved person, his owner; for the addict, his substance. ^278319112 --- There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us,” Seneca wrote. “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” ^278319113 --- “Philosophy is no miracle cure, and it should not be treated as one.” ^278319114 --- Try the “view from above” exercise, Fideler suggests, in which you imagine that you are hovering miles above Earth and gazing down at the speck of yourself, pondering the insignificance of your troubles in the grand scheme. ^278319115 --- you imagine that a wise person (for example: Socrates) is watching over your actions, so that you can behave with appropriate virtue. ^278319116 --- I can’t control someone else’s construction site, it is within my power to purchase earplugs and then watch a detailed YouTube tutorial about how to “Stop Inserting Earplugs Wrong!” Now I work in hushed tranquillity — free of the restlessness that Seneca described as “symptomatic of a sick mind.” Farewell. ^278319117