The Stoic Habit

The Stoic Habit

This book distills Stoicism into practical advice for modern life. It explores how to cultivate virtue, manage desires, and make better choices, not for wealth or status, but for a more fulfilling life.

Here's what you'll gain:

• Learn to apply Stoic principles to everyday life.
• Understand the root of your unhappiness and how to overcome it.
• Develop habits that foster virtue and inner peace.
• Make choices that align with your values and strengthen your relationships.

Core Content:

1. Living in Accordance with Nature:

• Align your actions with the natural order, understanding that opposing it leads to suffering.

• Recognize that nature has its own order and we must adjust our will to it.

• Acknowledge that violating the laws of society and relationships will brings natural consequences.

• Understand that everything in nature follows its course, like our bodies which obey its process in sickness and health.

• Living against nature will only result in conflict with ourselves, leading to internal conflicts and psychological distress.

2. Ignorance & Mental Shortcuts:

• Be aware of your mental shortcuts and biases which can lead to poor judgment and overconfidence.

• Understand why we are prone to take mental shortcut, thus conserve our energy and effort.

• Identify that mental shortcuts minimize cognitive and decision-making effort, improving efficiency.

• Our brains are wired to form certain conclusions, judgements about what is good and bad based on natural selection.

• Recognize when we are likely to fall for taking shortcuts and minimize thinking, opening mindsets to new ideas.

3. The Desire for Externals:

• Mistrust desires like pleasure, status, and wealth, these are beyond your control.

• Appreciate that evolutionary past has shaped desire for foods or peer esteem.

• Distinguish between what's in your power and what isn't.

• Desires work behind the scenes to affect our attention, focusing thoughts of attention toward its satisfaction

• We will be blind to the inner workings of our own desires and their mechanisms in our lives unless we train ourselves.

4. From Indifferents to Indifference:

• Not to reject indifferents, let their indifference to us change how we feel about them, as like being attracted to one that is not fond of us.
• Understand and accept the agreement made with nature that we will eventually have to hand everything back to the universe.

5. The Dangers of Our Desires:

• Our desires aren’t something we created, they are part of our loan agreement with the nature.

  • It is better to view all events as something nature is loaning to us and will eventually reclaim one way or another.

• Anything outside us isn't truly ours or ours to keep, our life and what it offers is merely on loan from nature.

• Even when we try our best to influence events in our favor, they need not and often do not break in our direction.

Q&A

Q: What does it mean to live in accordance with nature?

A: It means aligning our choices with the way the world naturally operates, understanding that we can't control everything and must accept the consequences of our actions. For example, living a virtuous life in society.

Q: Why are mental shortcuts a problem?

A: They can lead to bad decisions and overconfidence by causing us to exclude important information.

Q: How should we view our desires?

A: With mistrust, acknowledging that they're often driven by factors beyond our control and satisfaction of wants isn't within control.

Q: What are "indifferents," and how should we treat them?

A: "Indifferents" are external things and desires that aren’t inherently good or bad. Treat them with caution, enjoying them but not becoming overly attached.