What constitutes a good life? How should I live? These are key questions in most philosophies of life, and while there are plenty of philosophies on offer, I’ve come to believe that Modern Stoicism has a lot to give us.
How Modern Stoicism differs from Ancient Greek or Roman Stoicism is a topic for another article, but if you’re interested in a great introduction to Stoicism, a good place to start is William B. Irvine’s book A Guide to the Good Life.
Most Stoics – ancient or modern – would agree that living a virtuous life is how we should live our lives. A life with the potential to bring us personal happiness, fulfillment and tranquility. These mental states are considered cornerstones of a good life and the pursuit of virtue and good character allows us to get there.
To simplify, if we can live virtuously, a good life will follow – or as Seneca put it in Letters from a Stoic: “A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.”
A key psychological technique practiced already by the Roman Stoics is called premeditatio malorum. Irvine translates this to negative visualization and describes it as “spending time imagining that we have lost the things we value”. For example, we could visualize that our wife has left us or that we’ve lost our job.
Ultimately, we could even contemplate on death so that we wouldn’t take life for granted. That’s precisely what Marcus Aurelius recommended in Meditations: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
Despite the gloomy sound of it, the purpose of this technique is to help us realize that things could always be much worse, and that we should be grateful for what we have. As Irvine describes it, “we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and [...] we will no longer sleepwalk through our life”.
I find negative visualization a powerful tool for experiencing gratitude even in situations where it otherwise might be difficult. Such as when you’re in the middle of a global Coronavirus pandemic and each time you switch on the news it’s mostly “bad”.
Gratitude, after all, is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness in positive psychology research. It helps people feel more positive emotions, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build stronger relationships.
So why not try to experience gratitude through negative visualization even in the worst of times?