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A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

Name: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
Rating: 5 (15 reviews)
Author: William B. Irvine
ISBN: 9780195374612

William B. Irvine · 2009 · 326 pages

One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives. In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life. Using the psychological insights and the practical techniques of the Stoics, Irvine offers a roadmap for anyone seeking to avoid the feelings of chronic dissatisfaction that plague so many of us. Irvine looks at various Stoic techniques for attaining tranquility and shows how to put these techniques to work in our own life. As he does so, he describes his own experiences practicing Stoicism and offers valuable first-hand advice for anyone wishing to live better by following in the footsteps of these ancient philosophers. Readers learn how to minimize worry, how to let go of the past and focus our efforts on the things we can control, and how to deal with insults, grief, old age, and the distracting temptations of fame and fortune. We learn from Marcus Aurelius the importance of prizing only things of true value, and from Epictetus we learn how to be more content with what we have. Finally, A Guide to the Good Life shows readers how to become thoughtful observers of their own life. If we watch ourselves as we go about our daily business and later reflect on what we saw, we can better identify the sources of distress and eventually avoid that pain in our life. By doing this, the Stoics thought, we can hope to attain a truly joyful life.

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Andrej Karpathy
“Stoicism was a philosophical movement developed during the Hellenistic period and later practiced by a number of prominent historical figures, including Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. I was reminded again that this time period saw a flourishing of many competing schools of philosophy with their own ideas about the human condition and their own physical meeting locations to concentrate their followers; these have all but disappeared in the modern times. Human psychology has not changed much on the scale of 2,000 years, making a lot of these schools of thought quite relevant to this day. This work organizes this body of literature into a kind of classical antiquity self-help book. I realized that, without knowing it, I was already following many of the psychological tips and tricks that, according to the stoics, leads to tranquility and the absence of negative emotion. The book goes into much more detail, but among these are negative visualization to fight our psychological natural tendency of "hedonistic adaptation" (the practice of imagining a regression to your living condition along various dimensions to appreciate its presence), projective visualization, active self-denial (e.g. temporary practice of poverty to appreciate wealth), categorization of worries into those you do or do not have control over, which e.g. leads to fatalism w.r.t. the past and the present, meditation (not in the buddhist sense of clearing your mind, but quite opposite a deliberate, intense psychological practice of the above techniques), etc. A little bit too long, a little bit too bloated and repetitive, but good fun.”
Jason Fried
“The book that had the biggest impact on me this year was “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy” —>”↗
Shoshana Weissmann
“Everyone needs to chill out and read A Guide to the Good Life. Great book on stoicism with which I largely agree”↗
Phil Libin
“A very interesting read.”↗
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