Friday, October 28, 2016

Apparently I have been a practicing semi-Stoic my entire adult life

According to William Irvine by way of Massimo Pigliucci's blog, How To Be A Stoic:

“The stoics thought they had an answer to this question. They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value— that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique— let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus . 5 It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.”

Yep, negative visualization is the story of my life.