The Herculean Choice

• This is based on Hercules’ fable, and the choice he had to make between an easy but empty life, and a hard but meaningful one
  • For Stoics, this symbolize the choice we have to make every day between what we believe will help us living a more virtuous life, and what will procure us pleasure
    • Stoics are opposed to living a hedonic life

    • The Stoics tended to view joy not as the goal of life, which is wisdom, but as a by-product of it

• Managing habits
  • Stoics focus on the objective representation of things, so on and in itself, a habit is neither good or bad. But certain habits will bring us closer to a virtuous life, and others are just indulgences that bring us short-term pleasure
    • 4 steps approach to deal with bad habits
      • 1. Evaluate the consequences of your habits or desires in order to select which ones to change.
      • 2. Spot early warning signs so that you can nip problematic desires in the bud.
      • 3. Gain cognitive distance by separating your impressions from external reality.
      • 4. Do something else instead of engaging in the habit.
    • The method proposed to manage the habits we want to remove is very similar to the one discussed in Atomic Habits, James Clear
  • A good way to determine what is meaningful to us in terms of habits, is to picture our death, and try to imagine our biggest regrets

    • Nobody has ever had the words “I wish I’d watched more television” or “I wish I’d spent more time on Facebook” engraved on their tombstone.

  • If you were to die tomorrow, what would be the things you miss the most, the things you would feel the most terrible of losing?
    • For me
      • learning new things
      • conversations with people I love
      • being touched by the actions of extraordinary people
      • being amazed by creativity, music and other arts
• About Joy

  • Joy in the Stoic sense is fundamentally active rather than passive; it comes from perceiving the virtuous quality of our own deeds, the things we do, whereas bodily pleasures arise from experiences that happen to us, even if they’re a consequence of actions like eating, drinking, or having sex.

• Desire vs Gratitude
  • Desire is craving for something we don’t have
  • Gratitude comes from imagining the absence of things currently present
    • It is a good mental practice to imaging the loss of the things or people we deeply care about
      • I may want to use this perspective when I write the Grateful section in my journal. It shouldn’t be able the events that made me happy that day, but the things I practiced my loss simulation on