The Antidote (4 page)

The suggestion here is not that negative emotions don't really exist, or that they don't matter, or that they can easily be brushed aside through sheer force of will. The Stoics aren't making any such claims; they are merely specifying the mechanism through which all distress arises. And they do mean all. Even losing your home or your job or a loved one, from this perspective, is not a negative event in itself; in itself, it's merely an event. To which you might respond: but what if it really
is
bad? Lacking a home and an income, you might perish from starvation, or exposure. Surely that would be bad? But the same relentless logic applies. What makes the prospect of starvation or exposure distressing in the first place? The beliefs that you hold about the disadvantages of death. This view of how emotions work, as the leading Stoic scholar A.A. Long points out, is the underlying insight behind contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy, too. ‘It's all there [in the work of the Stoics],' he told me. ‘Particularly this idea that judgments are in our power, that our emotions are determined by our judgments, and that we can always step back and ask: “Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?”.' It was a method of thinking he regularly employed himself, Long explained, to deal with everyday distresses, such as road rage. Were other drivers really behaving ‘badly'? Or was it more accurate to say that the cause of his anger was his belief that they ought to behave differently?

The distinction is crucial. The idea that it is ultimately our beliefs that cause our distress, as we've seen, is a perspective shared by Stoics and positive thinkers alike. Beyond this, though, the two traditions diverge utterly – and the divergence becomes most baldly apparent when it comes to beliefs about the future. The evangelists of optimism argue that you should cultivate as many positive expectations about the future as you can. But this is not the good idea that it may at first appear to be. For a start, as Gabriele Oettingen's experiments demonstrate, focusing on the outcome you desire may actually sabotage your efforts to achieve it. More generally, a Stoic would point out, it just isn't a particularly good technique for feeling happier. Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being
less
prepared, and
more
acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can't persuade himself to believe are good. (And such things will happen.) This is a problem underlying all approaches to happiness that set too great a store by optimism. Trying to see things in an exclusively positively light is an attitude that requires constant, effortful replenishment. Should your efforts falter, or prove insufficient when confronted by some unexpected shock, you'll sink back down into – possibly deeper – gloom.

Applying their stringent rationality to the situation, the Stoics propose a more elegant, sustainable and calming way to deal with the possibility of things going wrong: rather than struggling to avoid all thought of these worst-case scenarios, they counsel actively dwelling on them, staring them in the face. Which brings us to an important milestone on the negative path to happiness – a psychological tactic that William Irvine argues is ‘the single most valuable technique in the Stoics' toolkit'. He calls it ‘negative
visualisation'. The Stoics themselves, rather more pungently, called it ‘the premeditation of evils'.

The first benefit of dwelling on how bad things might get is a straightforward one. Psychologists have long agreed that one of the greatest enemies of human happiness is ‘hedonic adaptation' – the predictable and frustrating way in which any new source of pleasure we obtain, whether it's as minor as a new piece of electronic gadgetry or as major as a marriage, swiftly gets relegated to the backdrop of our lives. We grow accustomed to it, and so it ceases to deliver so much joy. It follows, then, that regularly reminding yourself that you might lose any of the things you currently enjoy – indeed, that you will definitely lose them all, in the end, when death catches up with you – would reverse the adaptation effect. Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more. ‘Whenever you grow attached to something,' writes Epictetus, ‘do not act as though it were one of those things that cannot be taken away, but as though it were something like a jar or a crystal goblet … if you kiss your child, your brother, your friend remind yourself that you love a mortal, something not your own; it has been given to you for the present, not inseparably nor forever, but like a fig, or a bunch of grapes, at a fixed season of the year.' Each time you kiss your child goodnight, he contends, you should specifically consider the possibility that she might die tomorrow. This is jarring advice that might strike any parent as horrifying, but Epictetus is adamant: the practice will make you love her all the more, while simultaneously reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass.

The second, subtler, and arguably even more powerful benefit of the premeditation of evils is as an antidote to anxiety. Consider
how we normally seek to assuage worries about the future: we seek reassurance, looking to persuade ourselves that everything will be all right. But reassurance is a double-edged sword. In the short term, it can be wonderful, but like all forms of optimism, it requires constant maintenance: if you offer reassurance to a friend who is in the grip of anxiety, you'll often find that a few days later, he'll be back for more. Worse, reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worstcase scenario he fears probably won't occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it. All too often, the Stoics point out, things will not turn out for the best.

But it is also true that, when they do go wrong, they'll almost certainly go
less
wrong than you were fearing. Losing your job won't condemn you to starvation and death; losing a boyfriend or girlfriend won't condemn you to a life of unrelenting misery. Those fears are based on irrational judgments about the future, usually because you haven't thought the matter through in sufficient detail. You heard the rumour about cutbacks at the company, and instantly jumped to a mental image of being utterly destitute; a lover behaved coldly and you leapt to imagining lifelong loneliness. The premeditation of evils is the way to replace these irrational notions with more rational judgments: spend time vividly imagining exactly how wrong things could go
in reality,
and you will usually find that your fears were exaggerated. If you lost your job, there are specific steps you could take to find a new one; if you lost your relationship, you would probably manage to find some happiness in life despite being single. Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.

Seneca pushes this way of thinking to its logical conclusion. If visualising the worst can be a source of tranquility, what about deliberately trying to experience a taste of the worst? In one of his letters, he proposes an exercise that was the direct predecessor of my adventures in embarrassment on the London Underground, though admittedly more extreme. If what you fear the most is losing your material wealth, he advises, don't try to persuade yourself that it could never happen. (That would be the Dr Robert H. Schuller approach: refusing to countenance the possibility of failure.) Instead, try acting as if you had already lost it. ‘Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress,' he suggests, ‘saying to yourself the while: “is this the condition that I feared?”.' You may not have much fun. But the exercise will force a collision between your wildest anxieties about how bad such an eventuality might be, on the one hand, and on the other, the reality – which may be unpleasant, but also much less catastrophic. It will help you grasp that the worst-case scenario is something with which you would be able to cope.

This all made intellectual sense to me, but I wanted to know if anyone really lived according to these principles today. I had heard rumours of a contemporary community of self-described Stoics, scattered around the globe, and my research brought me swiftly to something called the International Stoic Forum, an internet message-board with more than eight hundred members. Further investigation led to the story of a police officer in Chicago, who claimed to use the principles of Stoicism to keep calm while confronting violent gang members. At another website, a school-teacher from Florida reported back from the inaugural meeting of the International Stoic Society, held in Cyprus in 1998. Throughout all this, one name kept cropping up – as a moderator
of the International Stoic Forum, as the tutor to the Chicago cop, and as the author of numerous web postings on the benefits of living Stoically. My intention had been to track down a Seneca for the modern era. I imagined that this person might have chosen to shun society, as Seneca did in his later years; that he might live, for example, in a simple rustic dwelling in the foothills of some Mediterranean volcano, spending his days in philosophical contemplation and his evenings drinking retsina. But the person to whom my enquiries led, in the event, was none of these things. His name was Keith, and he lived a short train ride to the northwest of central London, in the town of Watford.

Despite living in Watford, Dr Keith Seddon did fulfill certain criteria of otherworldliness. This became clear as soon as I saw his house. Set back from its better-kept neighbours by a tall hedgerow, in which I eventually located a very small gate, it resembled a wizard's cottage as conceived by Tolkien, had
The Lord of the Rings
been set in the London commuter belt. It was early afternoon, and raining hard. The front room, I gathered by peering through the large bay window, was empty of people, but crammed with teetering piles of books, along with an extensive collection of panama hats. It took several rings of the doorbell before Seddon answered. But when he did, he looked the part: a long grey beard, twinkling eyes, and a leather waistcoat, the whole thing topped off by one of his panamas. ‘Come in,' he said, three times in a row, then led me out of the rain, through the hallway, and into a small side room containing a gas fire, a sofa, and two high-backed armchairs. In one of them sat his wife, Jocelyn. Much of the remaining space was taken up by still more books, squeezed into insufficient bookcases. Works of classical philosophy jostled
against more esoteric titles:
The Book of Egyptian Ritual, An Introduction to Elvish,
and
Fountain Pens of the World.
Seddon ushered me to the sofa, and went to fetch me a Diet Coke.

It was immediately evident that fate had not been especially kind to the couple. Jocelyn suffered from severe early-onset rheumatoid arthritis, which had left her badly debilitated. Though she was only in her early fifties, she now had great difficulty even raising a glass to her lips, a manoeuvre that required the use of both hands and clearly caused her pain. Keith was her full-time carer, and suffered himself from myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. Both had PhDs, and had planned on academic careers, but then Jocelyn's illness had got in the way. Now Keith's work as a tutor of correspondence courses in Stoicism, teaching students at private American universities, was drying up, too, and money was seriously tight.

Yet the atmosphere in the overheated little room was far from despondent. Jocelyn, it emerged, didn't describe herself as a Stoic like her husband, but shared a similar cast of mind: she said her illness had proven to be a ‘dark gift', and that once she'd learned to ignore the people telling her to ‘fight' it, or to ‘think positive', she had come to understand her dependence on others as a kind of blessing. She seemed serene; Keith, meanwhile, was practically bubbly. ‘Being a Stoic is really a very uncomfortable position to be in!', he declared merrily. ‘People throughout history have made this big mistake about happiness, and here we are, the Stoics, standing out on the fringe – beyond the fringe, really! – and shouting from over the horizon: “You've got it all wrong! You've got it all wrong!”'

Keith traced his beginnings as a Stoic to a bizarre incident that had happened to him at around the age of twenty, while he was walking through a wooded park, not far from his home outside London. He described it as a shift in perspective – the kind of
jolting insight that often gets described as a ‘spiritual experience'. ‘It was quite a short thing,' he recalled. ‘Just a minute or two. But suddenly, for that minute or two, I was … ‘ He paused, hunting for the right words. ‘I was
directly aware of how everything was connected together in space and time,'
he said at last. ‘It was like travelling out into space, perceiving the universe as a whole, and seeing everything connected together in exactly the way it was meant to be. As something finished and complete.'

I took a sip of Diet Coke, and waited.

‘It was like an Airfix model,' he said, with an exasperated shake of the head, which I took to mean that it hadn't really been like an Airfix model at all. ‘I had the sense that it was all done
on purpose,
by some kind of agency. Not a God outside the universe, pulling the strings, you understand. But as if
the whole thing itself
were God.' He paused again. ‘You know, the funny thing is, it didn't really strike me as particularly significant at the time.' Having briefly entered a mystic realm of cosmic consciousness, the twenty-year-old Seddon forgot about it, went home, and got on with his degree.