Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times―A Practical Guide to Stoicism for Self-Improvement and Personal Growth

The Stoics also articulated the mood that we should aspire to as our default setting—ataraxia (literally, ‘without disturbance’)—a carefully calibrated state of tranquillity that is not happiness, or joy, or any of the ecstatic states found in religious or mystical experiences, or in the more modern highs of falling in love or taking cocaine. Instead, ataraxia is a state of contentment or peace where the world can be falling in around your ears, but your equilibrium is undisturbed.

He recognised that the sign of a ‘real man’ is not anger, but the ability to remain calm.

If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right

Epictetus said a man should be concerned with his own emotional reaction to his brother’s anger, rather than his brother’s anger itself.)

You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply—though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire . . . Nothing has really changed since Seneca wrote these words. We still live ‘as if destined to live forever’. We put off things we really want to do until retirement, or we think we can take a break only when we earn a certain amount of money, or we borrow a lot of money to have a big mortgage in a posh suburb—not really contemplating that it ties us to working hard, perhaps in an industry we hate, for another 30-plus years.

You are more likely to feel an inner disturbance if you set your heart and mind on something that is beyond your control to obtain.