Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You

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When things irritate us, or when we feel as if the universe is conspiring against us, we would do well to remember that we are better off seeing those irritants as the strewn shavings on the carpenter’s floor and accepting that they are a natural by-product of a greater thing at work. There will always be people and events that get in the way of our plans. Thus we should not get too attached to our ambitions and realise that our tiny aims are an insignificant part of the myriad of plans, thwarted and realised, that make up the grand scheme of fortune as it continues to unravel itself.

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions. If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now” (Marcus Aurelius, private journals). We can look at the things and people we value each day with the knowledge that we will most likely lose them at some point, and love them all the more for that. One day your best friend may move away, and you may never see each other again. Loved ones may die or become estranged. Your partner, despite your promises to love each other forever, may one day leave you. In fact, it is inevitable: through death or choice, your closest relationships will end.it is the very nature of religion that it furnishes us with comfortable answers, and without it the business of finding meaning in life becomes more complex and personal. So let’s look a little closer at what those things are that do not fall under our control. The feeling of letting them go is enormously liberating, so we want to make sure we can confidently reap the benefits without doing ourselves (or others) a disservice by ignoring anything that’s important.

Stoicism offers us great lessons and helpful threads to weave through our lives. As I hope I’ve shown, it is at its best neither cool nor detached but rather open, porous and connected easily to life. When we play a game of tennis, we are only partially in control of the outcome. If we fixate on the thought ‘I must win this game’, then we are trying to control something that we cannot. Our opponent might be better than us. He or she might start to beat us, and then we would feel like we were failing. We’d feel disappointment and anxiety. Failure is a disturbing feeling. Of course it is harder to get excited about a future event if we keep reminding ourselves it might not happen. We’re so indoctrinated against the idea of pessimism that it might seem as if we are actively denying ourselves a source of happiness through this exceptio. But consider the alternative. When we become very excited about a future event, we forget the present and place ourselves in the future. We are at the mercy of something outside of our control: whether or not the event happens as we would wish. It may turn out to be better than expected, or roughly the same, or worse. The more excited we are, the more likely it is to fail to meet our expectations, in the same way that something we dread is likely to not be half as bad as we feared. If we were the last person on Earth, we wouldn’t bother with buffetless ventilators or ironic iPhone cases. When the desire to impress others is removed, we live a more authentically Epicurean existence. And again, we should not make the mistake of thinking that Epicurus would deny us such things as a fancy fan. Instead, he would have us not cultivate the need for such things in the first place, so that the pain of losing them when they are broken, lost or stolen would not compromise any enjoyment we might obtain from them in the meantime. My happiness seems to me no more attached to what I earn (once past that watershed point of not having money troubles) than it does to my wallpaper. And I know more than my fair share of wealthy people and they’ll tell you the same.But we have, by absorbing the crux of Epictetus’s teaching (that it is not events that cause our problems but our appraisal of them), already made the biggest and most important leap. By fully accepting the fact that we are responsible for our angry responses (and not those who anger us), we are crossing the wide river to more tranquil pastures, from which it is very difficult to return. Holding On To Anger The next major means of achieving happiness, and redemption from the encumbrances of society, was offered by the Marxists: work will set you free. The Stoics referred to these external things as ‘indifferents’. If we ultimately attach no importance to them, we can be sure that if they disappear from our lives, we won’t suffer too great a pain of missing them. ‘Permit nothing to cleave to you that is not your own,’ Epictetus says, ‘nothing to grow to you that may give you agony when it is torn away.’ If something is not under our control, we can recognise it as such and decide that it’s fine as it is.

We make two common mistakes when we try to be liked: we either try to impress or we try to be like the other person. To escape the cycle of pain and boredom, then, we need to take control of our stories. ‘Ordinary men,’ Schopenhauer wrote (and we can include the ladies too), ‘are intent merely on how to spend their time; a man with any talent is interested in how to use his time.’This may sound familiar to modern minds acquainted with the notion of ‘reframing’ a problem as an opportunity, and it is one of the Stoics’ most powerful and prevailing ideas. “Suffer Now”, to be Happy Later? After we achieve our goals, we are forced to disidentify with them. Sometimes this can be painful, and perhaps more commonly so for men, who tend to equate success with achievements and standards external to themselves. Out There and In Here are two very different kingdoms, and other people are not accountable for how we feel. No one, however ludicrously they behave, has the right or the direct means to affect your self-control or dignity. No one need annoy us so much that we in turn become a source of annoyance to others.