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The examples below are from our newsletter series while making Letters from a Stoic. Each book gets its own series — the ideas, the art, the rabbit holes we go down along the way.

Human beings feel the pain of loss roughly twice as acutely as the joy of gains. Find $100, you're up 1 happiness point. Lose the same $100 and you're down 2 happiness points, even though you're in the same absolute position. It's called loss aversion, and it makes sense evolutionarily because it spurs us to strive for more, which helps the prepared survive.

But what happens when we're surrounded by prosperity and abundance we weren't wired for? We adapt. Fast. There's a term for this: hedonic adaptation. We get used to the good stuff quick, and our baseline for "acceptable" keeps rising. One can imagine this taken to an extreme, where every harm is removed from the developmental path, and the ways in which this would distort our sense of what is tolerable, what level of discomfort is acceptable, and who or what should be blamed when our expectations aren't met.

The Stoics understood this better than anyone, and in some ways it's their starting point. Expect nothing and you will be content. From our modern perspective this seems extreme, but we can at least experiment with lowering expectations to the point where we accept that some discomfort is inevitable. Suffering is an inescapable feature of life. In the face of it, the only noble choice is to endure it. And with some luck, courage, and compassion, hopefully we get to endure it together.

I recently noticed something about bad days. If you check all of the items off your to-do list, it makes no difference whether you did so miserably or with equanimity. The report was written, the project was completed, the dishes were done, the mail was dropped off, the trash was taken out. And the things don't care whether you suffered to do them, or delighted in doing them. The modern version of this is the saying "Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice." 

Without getting too self-helpish, I do believe that this is an excellent example of the kind of actionable wisdom that Seneca and Stoicism in general offer. It pairs perfectly with last week's insight, that the present is really all we have, and how we can completely miss it by engaging in unnecessary suffering, rumination or anxiousness. 

For this illustration for "Letters from a Stoic," I chose a Parisian street as the backdrop, a sunset reflected in the Hausmann windows. A shadow is cast on the memory, transforming the scene into a rainy night, the crown of the man's head making a second dark sun. Seneca encourages us to accept the difficulties of life with equanimity, and to reject the temptation to dwell on what we can't control. And my day was more pleasurable for having read him.