#9 Stoic practice: be careful about what you call “good” and “bad”

This series of articles is my feedback on A Handbook for New Stoics, a book on the practice of Stoicism, by Massimo Pigliucci and Gregory Lopez. For one year, every week, I will experience the Stoic practices proposed by the handbook and I will share with you my weekly review. This will provide you with an overview of the different Stoic exercises and the benefits (or not) they can offer you.

💬 A practice presented by Seneca

True happiness, therefore, consists in virtue: and what will this virtue bid you do? Not to think anything bad or good which is connected neither with virtue nor with wickedness.

Seneca, On the Happy Life, 16

🔥 How to apply this practice?

This week, we first had to identify the different ways of qualifying something as good or bad: “This cake is horrible”, “I have a bad temper”, “he’s a great driver”, “the movie was so cool”, etc. All these ways of saying are tantamount to qualifying something as good or bad.

Once you’re aware of value judgments, the idea is to :

• reformulate sentences where the notions of good and bad are misused (i.e. from a non-stoic angle);
• continue to use the notions of…