writings from the ancient things with a central theme around a stoic technique called negative visualization
Remember the time you craved the latest iPhone. After saving a few months of money, you finally bought one for yourself. You enjoyed it in weeks to come but after a few months you no longer as excited as you were when you have first had it. Hedonic adaptation is our natural tendency to return to level happiness after an initial surge of positive emotions (usually pleasure). After…
When a friend is facing uncertainties from life challenges, we are almost always obliged to cheer him up. We give him hope by saying some of the most positive things we could think. Things like “It will be okay.”, “There is always a rainbow after the rain.” the list goes on. However, the Stoics argue that this is not the best way to calm an anxious friend. The…
Premeditatio Malorum is a stoic exercise of expecting of terrible things that can happen at any event or time. Some people mistakenly view this practice as pessimism but it’s actually a great way to prepare for setbacks. Most of disappointment in people’s life came from an unrealistic view of a perfect world – that things ought to happen the way we want it to be. Obviously that’s not the case. When you expect the worst…
On of the common practice of Stoicism is premeditatio malorum which basically means expecting the bad things that can happen in any event. For the stoics, its a way of preparing for the worst. As a result, a lot of people question whether this practice is a form of pessimism. A pessimistic person cannot help but think of a negative series of events on a particular situation. For a simple health issue for instance, a pessimistic person…