6 Reasons Why Intelligent People Fail to Be Happy

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1. November 10, 2018 at 7:23 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   3 secrets to happiness, according to Roman Stoics
   https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/want-to-be-happy-then-live-like-a-stoic-for-a-week

   What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, obviously the roads – the roads go without saying. How about guidance for how to live in the 21st century?

   Stoicism holds that the key to a good, happy life is the cultivation of an excellent mental state, which the Stoics identified with virtue and being rational. The ideal life is one that is in harmony with Nature

   The first is that some things are within our control and some are not, and that much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking that we can control things that, in fact, we can’t.

   What can we control? Epictetus argues that we actually control very little. We don’t control what happens to us, we can’t control what the people around us say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own bodies

   This leads us to the second foundational principle from Epictetus: it’s not things that upset us, but how we think about things. Stuff happens. We then make judgements about what happens.

   The good Stoic news is that these value judgements are the one thing over which we have complete control. Things happen, none of which are inherently good or bad, and it’s within our power to decide how we value them.

   So the Stoics developed a whole series of practical exercises designed to help train people to incorporate Stoic ideas into their daily lives.

   Accept what happens

   Another Stoic strategy is to remind ourselves of our relative unimportance. The world does not revolve around us.

   As Epictetus put it, if you expect the universe to deliver what you want, you are going to be disappointed, but if you embrace whatever the universe gives, then life will be a whole lot smoother.

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