You want a good life, and so does everyone I have ever met, yet it is rare to meet someone who can tell you what they mean by it. Ask, and you get a list of things rather than a life. A house, a certain income, a job with a title in it, a body that looks a particular way. Much of that list was handed to us by our parents or picked up when we were young, and we can spend twenty years working toward it without asking whether it was ever ours, or whether the people who already have those things seem to be living well.
The Stoics took the question seriously. They did not dismiss money, health, or a good reputation. They considered all three worth having, but they didn't believe these things determined whether someone lived well. A person could have all three and still live badly, or lose all three and still live well. What mattered was how you used what you had. How you judged, how you treated people, whether you could be relied on when things went wrong. You do not have to agree with every part of their philosophy to see the point. The things we chase can make life easier, but they cannot decide whether we live it well.
So it is worth spending some time deciding what a good life means to you. Write it down, then cross out anything you only want because someone else would see you having it. Separate what remains into the choices you can make and the outcomes you can only work toward. You may want both, but do not confuse them. What is left may be shorter than you expected, and closer than you expected. A few people you can be honest with, work you do not resent, the opportunity to care for yourself, and some hours that are your own.
That gives you something to measure your decisions against, especially when other people have strong opinions about what you should want. What follows are ten lessons I have taken from the Stoics and from my own experience. They are the ones I return to when I need to remember what sort of life I am actually trying to build.
1. Not every thought deserves your attention
A thought arrives, and because it arrived in your own head it comes with a kind of authority. We treat it as news that something has to be dealt with, and so we deal with it, and an hour later we have had an argument that never took place or planned for a disaster that never came. Epictetus wrote in the Enchiridion that people are disturbed not by things but by the judgments they form about things, and he gave his students a habit for the moment a hard thought shows up. Say to it that it is an appearance and not necessarily the thing it appears to be, and then ask whether it concerns anything you can do something about.
A great many thoughts fail there, and more fail when you ask whether there is an action at the end of them. If there is, take it or schedule it, and the thought has done its job. If there is not, you are not thinking, you are circling, and circling feels like work while producing nothing. It also helps to know when your thoughts are least reliable. The ones that arrive after eleven at night, or before you have eaten, or in the hour after someone has criticized you, are not necessarily as reliable as the ones you have when you’re rested and thinking clearly, and a thought that keeps coming back is not truer for having come back. Write the ones that will not leave on a piece of paper and read them the next day. Whatever is still standing deserves your attention, and the rest was weather, which you can let pass without following it out of the room. What you do follow is what shapes you, which I wrote about in You Are What You Attend To.
2. You can be right and still handle something badly
Being right feels like a license to say whatever follows from it, however it comes out. Once we are sure of the facts we tend to assume the tone and the timing will take care of themselves, and that the other person’s reaction is their problem. They rarely see it that way, and they are not wrong, because a true thing said in a way the other person cannot hear has achieved nothing except making you feel justified. The Stoics kept the judgment and the act apart. Knowing the right answer was one thing, and doing the fitting thing with it was a separate skill that had to be practiced on its own.
I have come to think that being right is a responsibility rather than a license, because the person who is right is the one who can afford to be gentle. Say the true thing once, plainly, and stop. The three extra sentences that establish how right you were are the ones that cost you the relationship, and they add nothing to the truth. Whether a conversation went well is decided in the week after it, not by who was right at the end.
3. Your first judgment about someone is rarely the whole story
We form a view of a person in the first minute and then spend the following years collecting evidence for it. The view forms fast because it has to, since we cannot wait to know someone before deciding how to behave with them, and the trouble is that we forget it was provisional. Epictetus told his students not to say that a man bathes badly but that he bathes quickly, and not to say that someone drinks badly but that he drinks a great deal, because unless you know what a person is trying to do you cannot know whether he is doing it badly.
Describing a person before you judge them is harder than it sounds. You know someone replied late or made a sharp comment. What you don't know is why they did it. Yet we often treat our own explanation as though it were a fact. A first judgment also says as much about you as about them, revealing what you needed that day and what you were afraid of. Some of the people who have mattered most in your life may not have impressed you at first. I try not to settle my opinion of anyone until I have seen them under pressure and seen how they treat someone who can do nothing for them, because those two situations show what the first minute cannot. People are also allowed to be different from the person they were when you first met them, which is a courtesy you will want extended to you.
4. Someone can be disappointed in you without you having done anything wrong
Other people’s disappointment feels like evidence of something we did, and so if they are let down we reason that we must have let them down, and we go looking for the fault. Sometimes it is there. Other times, their disappointment comes from expectations you never agreed to. They assumed you would stay in a certain job or follow the path they had imagined for you, even though you never promised to do either. The Stoics put what other people think of you among the things outside your control, in the same list as your body and your property, and they did not mean that opinion does not matter. They meant that you cannot run your life by it, because the people around you want different things from you, and some of them want opposite things, so disappointing no one is not available to anyone who makes their own decisions.
What matters is whether you broke something you promised or only something they assumed. If it is the first, repair it. If it is the second, you can be sorry they are hurt without agreeing that you were wrong. Say plainly what you decided and why, be kind about it, and do not try to talk them out of their disappointment, because it is theirs to carry and the attempt turns into an argument about whether they are allowed to feel it. I wrote about this at length in Don’t Let Opinions Control You.
5. You will never reach a point where nothing can go wrong
A great deal of effort goes into reaching a position where we will finally be safe. Enough money, the right job, the mortgage paid, the children settled, and then we will be able to relax. Each of these is worth having, but none of them can guarantee the security we hope they will bring. Reaching one milestone might remove a few worries, but there will always be others to take their place. The person with no money worries about rent, the person with plenty worries about markets and their own health, and the worry fills whatever room it is given. The only security I have found that holds is the kind that does not depend on circumstances, which is knowing that you have handled things before, and it is worth keeping an actual list of what you have already come through, because fear has a short memory and the list does not. Whatever you are postponing until things are safe, do a small version of it this month. The safe month is not on the calendar.
6. You don’t have to remain the person you used to be
We talk about ourselves in the present tense as though the description were fixed. I am not a morning person, I am bad with money, I am not someone who speaks up. Some of these descriptions may have been true when we first adopted them. But repeat them often enough, and what began as a habit can start to feel like a permanent fact. Seneca, who was an old man when he wrote to Lucilius, told him that he felt himself being not only reformed but transformed, and in the same letter admitted that he did not yet dare to hope there was nothing left in him that needed changing. He was not claiming to have become a new man. He was saying that the old one was still movable, at an age when we assume everything has set.
Changing often begins with acting differently long before you feel different. In the meantime, the new behavior can feel like a costume, and it becomes tempting to abandon it on the grounds that it is not really you. It was not you yet. If you wait to feel like the new person before acting like them, you may never begin.
And the old self is held in place partly by the people and places around it. Your family remembers who you were and expects it, your friends have jokes that depend on it, and your own kitchen is arranged for the person you are trying to stop being. Sometimes that means spending less time in places that pull you back into old habits. More often, it means telling the people around you how you're trying to change, so they stop expecting you to be the person you used to be.
Whenever you hear yourself say “I am” followed by a limit, what you are usually describing is a habit, and a habit has a history and can be given a different one. Pick one of them and break it once this week. One exception can be enough to show you that an old pattern is not necessarily permanent, and that you have more room to change than you thought.
7. What you repeatedly do matters more than what you intend to do
Intentions are pleasant to hold and cost nothing, which is why we have so many of them. Epictetus was blunt about the alternative. Every habit and faculty, he told his students, is preserved and increased by the corresponding actions, so if you would be a reader, read, and if you would be a writer, write, and every time you give in to anger you have not only done a bad thing but added fuel to a fire that will catch more easily next time. It works in both directions. Whatever you did today, the walk or the hour on the phone, cast a vote for the person you are becoming. Your intentions matter, but they cannot do the work for you.
If you want to know whether your actions reflect what you value, look at your calendar and your bank statement for the last month. They will not tell the whole story, since much of our time and money goes toward obligations we cannot avoid. But they can reveal the distance between the life we say we want and the one our daily choices are building. The same goes for what you repeatedly tolerate, which shapes you as surely as what you repeatedly do. When you find the gap between what you say you want and what the records show, the most effective move is usually not to add a new habit but to remove the one daily action that most contradicts you. Removing is easier than adding, and it clears the space the new thing was going to need anyway.
8. A good life will still have bad days
On a bad day the whole life comes up for review. One failed meeting or one quarrel and we are suddenly auditing our choices and the past ten years, as if the day had revealed a truth the good days were hiding. It had not. A bad day is a bad day, and the error is one of scale, since we take a reading from twenty-four hours and apply it to a life. So make no large decisions and draw no conclusions about your life on a bad day, because the question of what the day means is not one you can answer while you are in it. Let the day be bad without adding a story to it, and see what the morning after says. I wrote more about this in A Bad Day Is Not a Bad Life. A good life that has no bad days in it is not a life. It is a holiday brochure.
9. The ordinary days are the ones that make up your life
If you add up the days you would call memorable, the weddings and the trips you still talk about, they fit in a few weeks. The rest of your life has been Tuesdays. We treat these as the gaps between the real events, time to be got through on the way to something, and the result is that the bulk of a life gets lived at half attention. Seneca opens his first letter to Lucilius by telling him to hold every hour in his grasp, and he was not talking about the big hours. He meant the ones that slip away while we are postponing, which is how, he said, life speeds by.
The quality of your life is, to a degree that is hard to accept, the quality of your ordinary day, and that gives you somewhere to work. A small improvement in something you do three hundred times a year is worth more than a large one in something you do once. The first hour of the morning, the way you eat dinner, whether the phone is on the table, the last thing you do before sleep, these are where the real gains are, and they are cheap. Nobody saves for a year to improve their Wednesday evening, and yet the Wednesday evening is where they live. The holiday you are saving for will be ten days, and you will spend part of it thinking about the Wednesday evenings you are going back to.
An ordinary day asks for nothing, and so nothing in it will demand that you look up. You have to decide to. One way is to pick a single repeated moment, the walk home or the first coffee, and treat it for a week as if it were the event, with the attention you would give a view you had traveled to see. The walk home and the conversation at the table are not the waiting room. They are the appointment.
10. The people you love will not be here forever
Everyone knows this one. Epictetus told his students that when they kissed their child or their wife they should say to themselves that they were kissing a human being, meaning a mortal one, and the line can sound terribly cold. He was not telling them to love less. He was telling them to remember, in the middle of the kiss, that this was not guaranteed, because nothing else makes us pay attention to what we have been given.
We put off the visit and the phone call on the assumption that there will be another chance, and there usually is, until the one time there is not, and nobody is told in advance which time that will be. What people regret afterwards is rarely the grand gesture they never made. It is the ordinary visits they skipped and the questions they never got around to asking, about what their father was like at twenty or what their friend was afraid of, and the chance to ask them ends on a day nobody announces. Love, in the end, is mostly attention, and attention is given in ordinary hours or not at all. I wrote about what this does to grief in You Will Never Be Ready for Every Loss. But while the people you love are still here, the advice is much simpler. Make the call, ask the question you have wondered about, and say what you have been meaning to say while they can still hear it.
At the beginning, I suggested writing down what a good life would look like for you. Keep that answer somewhere you can find it. There will be days when you lose sight of it, when you get caught up in things that seem urgent and forget what you decided was important. I do too. But knowing what matters to you means you can catch yourself when that happens, even in the middle of an ordinary day, and make the next choice a little closer to the life you want.
Stay stoic,
SW
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How to Handle Regret
There is probably something in your past that you still go back to. Something you said or did not say, or a person you kept meaning to call while there was still time. I have mine, and I would be surprised if you did not have yours. Regret is a kind of pain that is often made almost entirely out of our own thinking, which is also the reason it can be worked on.
