Tips from A Guide to the Good Life
Written by William Irvine, and summarized below. Read on 2022-06-19.
- Practice negative visualization regularly. Imagine losing things and people you value most, as well as the loss of your own life.
- Go further, and engage in voluntary discomfort. Put yourself in socially embarrassing situations like dressing poorly, and physical suffering e.g. underdressing for the cold.
- Fame and fortune are not worth having.
- Tranquility is the goal.
- Avoid befriending people whose values are corrupt.
- Things which you have no control over - ignore.
- Things which you have some control over - internalize your goals (e.g. in playing tennis, to play the best match possible), and not the outcome which you cannot control (e.g. winning the match).
- Things which you have complete control over - these are your goals and values. It could be argued that desires are uncontrollable.
- Be fatalistic with respect to the past: what has happened to us in the past, and at this very instant, are beyond our control, and so it is foolish to get upset about these things.