Irvine Summarized

Oct 30, 25

I finished re-reading A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine, and it is a book that never fails to give me something to ponder. I’ve said before, that I often miss things that would seem to be obvious, and upon this re-reading the single word tranquility has been resonating, because I caught a single sentence in the book that says something like, having a philosophy of life makes decidion-making easier because one simply makes his decision based on his philosphy of life. In the case of the Roman stoics, if the attainment of tranquility is the centerpiece of a philosophy of life, then decisions ought to be made based on which option leads to tranquility. Sounds simple, but I hadn’t conceptualized it like that until just this week. I have to make a decision about something: Which of my options has the highest liklihood of yielding or adding to my sense of tranquility? I have never asked this question before when confronted with a decision, instead opting toward something more nebulous and undefined. It strikes me that this is one area of life in which having a working philosophy of life can make things easier, if not better.

Tranquility, and pursuing that which will lead to tranquility also means avoiding that which will disrupt tranquility. Irvine points out that one of the major disruptors of tranquility is insatiability, which is hard-wired into us via the evolutionary process, and this is where Irvine’s approach to stoicism really shines. The ancient stoics, you see, placed “the gods” in an important role in their philosophy. They believed that humans were created by the gods, and that humans were different from other creations because the gods gave them the ability to reason. This was of course well before Charles Darwin and our updated understanding that humans are evolved creatures just like every other creature. Irvine updates stoicism to include this understanding. Our insatiability is easier to understand in this context to boot. Human evolved to be insatiable because those who were not insatiable were out-competed and relegated to the evolutionay dustbin. Same thing with our tendency to worry, to experience pain, fear, anger, etc. All traits that at some point in our development were winning traits, but can nowadays be seen more like evolutionary holdovers, and if tranquility is what one seeks, impediments.

  1. Practice negative visualization. Irivine notes that most of us just follow the default hedonistic philosophy and spend our lives trying to acquire the things that we believe will make us happy, and we seldom stop to notice that as soon as we acquire the thing in question, another thing takes its place, and we find ourselves on the hedonic treadmill. We can never find tranqility in the continual pursuit of things. The remedy to this is to short-circuit our evolutionary programming by learning to want the things we already have, and we do this by practicing negative visualization. Irvine recommends we spend an amount of time every day imagining losing the things we have, such as our loved ones, our cars, our houses, and so forth, so that we will learn to appreciate those things while we have them, while simultaneously innoculating ourselves against the day that we do eventually and inevitably lose those things. The stoics remind us that everything we think we own are actually on loan (from the gods), and all of these things can be recalled at without so much as a moment’s notice. Our sons and daughters can die in car crashes. Our houses can burn down. And ultimately, everything that we find so important will one day be taken away from us by our deaths.

  2. Practice the trichotomy of control Phenomena can be categorized in three ways: 1. Things over which we have no control. 2. Things over which we have complete control. 3. Things over which we have some, but not complete control. If something is outiside of our control, only a fool would spend time on it. Instead, Irvine notes, we should adjust our internals, which are within our control.

  3. Practice fatalism about the past and the present.
  4. Practice voluntary discomfort.