The Stoic Challenge by William B. Irvine

Author:William B. Irvine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

USING THE STOIC TEST STRATEGY

As we have seen, our interpretation of an event is like the frame of a painting. Put a Rembrandt in one sort of frame, and it will look hideous; switch it to another, and it will look sublime. The same is true of the setbacks we experience. Put a setback in one psychological frame, and we will find it upsetting; put it in another, and we may discover, much to our amazement, that we enjoy dealing with that setback.

As we have also seen, when you encounter a setback, your subconscious mind goes into action. It tries to make sense of what is going on by providing a frame for the setback. But even though it has lots of frames to choose from, it tends to favor the blame frame: it assumes that you have been wronged, that some person or group of people has it in for you. This likely triggers anger in you, which in turn makes it harder for you to deal with the setback.

Stoics recommend that when we experience a setback, we make a point of consciously framing it as a kind of test. Allow ourselves to get frustrated, and we get a low grade; allow ourselves to become angry or despondent—or even worse, regard ourselves as victims—and we fail. Ideally, the setback won’t give rise to negative emotions within us, not because we are successfully concealing our distress but because we have no distress to conceal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.