Positive thinking always sounded like a bunch of hogwash to me.
Just think happy thoughts and boom: happy things happen? I mean, come ooooon! As I was saying in my last article, this is basically a short term solution that might hurt you more in the long term than actually doing nothing. But one has to wonder: Is there a better option?
I've always been told that I'm a pessimist. If only I'd be more opened to the world and think that good outcomes are likely, oh, how good everything would be for me. For a while, I believed them to the point where I castigated myself for not really being able to do that. Smile, think rainbows are just around the corner, imagine all the wonderful things that await for me tomorrow or the day after. In the back of my mind though, something felt off.
Then I read a book and realized that they were all wrong. Also, I became a Stoic.
When people think of Stoics, they think of people who are unflinching in the face of hardness, who stoutly take whatever life throws at them. The modern interpretation took, as it does, the extremes of antic stoicism and forgot the rest. Sure,it is true: a stoic accept the worst part of life as necessary, even expected. But there's so much more...
Part of being a stoic is always asking the question:
"Why is this bad?"
This question opens your mind to the possibility that it is your belief that something should be a certain way or is a certain way that bring you pain. The world...just IS. As Shakespeare said it best:
The hidden part of being a stoic, the unexpected is this: Being a stoic has a certain optimism about it. This is what "real" stoicism is, as it was envisioned in ancient Rome by Seneca and his followers. There's a giddy excitement about life, brought by the dark expectations with whom every stoic starts its day. There's real appreciation. There's being present now. This is the stuff that a good life is made of.
Marcus Aurelius, the stoic emperor, wrote in his book, Meditations:
Begin each day by telling yourself : Today I will be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness--all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good and what is evil.
I mean, this sounds downright dire! But that's the whole point.
Some stoics go even darker, they advice thinking about everything that could go wrong, how you could die, how someone you love could be dead and you're about to find out when looking at the phone, how Trump will be POTUS...
But all this is part of something called "premeditation" and its ultimate goal is actually to have you thinking clearly about how BAD the day could go. It is not rare that you'll find a spring in your step when you realize, the worst thing about this particular early morning, is that it starts so early!
The premeditation can be a powerful tool for you happiness because it forces you to realize that your worries might, one day, come true but maybe not today, maybe not all of them and even if they would, it wouldn't be the catastrophe that you feared. It's counter intuitive but, the premeditation can calm you anxiety about the world and get you closer to acceptance.
A stoic will "premeditate" daily on what could go wrong, feel it and live it, for a few seconds, minutes everyday then go live the actual life. If you want, you can imagine it a negative meditation. In his wonderful book, The Antidote, Oliver Burkeman talks with people who swear to live Stoically. It's a great read but there's a part that really stood out to me: most stoics he meet are not necessarily living a "fortunate" life but have a cheeriness about them that impressed the author.
Could the key to happiness be in training your mind to think like a Stoic?
Dr Keith Seddon', a moderator for the Stoic Forum that Burkeman interviews, advises people to try a very simple experiment:
Try thinking Stoically for the duration of a single trip to the supermarket. Is something out of stock? Are the queues too long? You are not obligated to tolerate the situation, but to become upset, would be, in Stoic terms, an error of judgement. You cannot control the situation, reacting with fury to it is irrational"
I read this and I'm excited about the possibilities. A rational path to happiness? A way that is not tainted by happy-go-lucky bullshit? I'll buy that. I invite you to try it too.
You might just feel liberated.