How to Win the War Against Setbacks and Become Unstoppable: Introducing The Stoic Game of Life
A Guest Post by Andrew Perlot
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The following is a guest post written by .
Andrew stumbled on Meditations at age sixteen, and Marcus Aurelius and Socrates took up residence in the back of his brain soon after. He’s a former journalist interested in ancient history, philosophy, and partner acrobatics.
You can follow him at his Substack, .
Stoic philosophy wouldn’t exist without a tragedy.
If Zeno of Citum hadn’t lost his entire fortune in a shipwreck — if he hadn’t washed up ragged on foreign shores far from friends and family — the modern world would lack one of its greatest psychological technologies.
We might imagine alternative Zenos:
Pouty Zeno stayed on the beach until slavers captured him.
Suicidal Zeno decided his misfortune was too great to bear.
Misanthropic Zeno cursed fate for favoring others more than him.
These alternate-reality Zenos probably wouldn’t wander into Athens, hook up with the city’s philosopher scene, and found a school of thought that’s bettered the lives of countless humans, as real-life Zeno did.
So tragedy didn’t create Stoicism. Tragedy fell on someone capable of putting it to good use. The right person. A prepared person.
Put another way: The shipwreck wasn’t a tragedy at all. The real tragedies are the billions of setbacks wasted on those who can’t see them for the opportunities they are.
The Art of Utilizing Setbacks.
Every setback, annoyance, or tragedy is a seed. Our mind is the field it falls on. Whether that field is fertile ground for the seed or completely inhospitable depends on us.
Will I let this stop me? Will I let this break me? Or will I make this yet more fuel for the fire?
These are important questions. The worst fate can be an opportunity to grow more disciplined and resilient. Disasters might open doors we never imagined existed.
But it’s one thing to give lip service to these ideas and another to live them. Setbacks large and small frustrate us, impede us, hurt us. If we’re not careful, they’ll bury our greatness and diminish our will.
Luckily, we’re not victims of circumstance. It’s always in our power to flip the script and take back our agency. Stoicism teaches us to do it.
The Game Every Stoic Plays:
There’s a game Stoics play in the sandbox of life. Our only opponents are ourselves and the universe.
Perhaps “game” makes it sound too casual — it’s a contest.
We score ourselves based on two outcomes:
How we manage the thoughts, emotions, and reactions stemming from setbacks.
How well we overcome or adapt to the setback.
Stoics believe each is done by aligning ourselves with wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. But it’s easier to grasp what losing points looks like.
Seethe for a minute because someone did something immoral or hurtful? Lose a point or two.
Spend the afternoon internally simmering in rage? Lose a larger chunk of points.
Snap and verbally berate the person? Maybe you lose all your points.
The game is graded on a sliding scale adjusted to your ever-improving skill. The better you get, the higher the stakes of every slip-up.
“Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.13
The more anxious, angry, jealous, or frustrated you become, the less likely you are to pull off a skillful adaptation to whatever life just threw at you.
That sounds like a problem. Our emotions feel like roiling, uncontrollable things that bubble up from within and take on a life of their own. That’s not what they are.
The Way Emotions Work:
The Cognitive Theory of Emotion the Stoics pioneered — now backed by decades of psychological research — suggests phenomena are value-neutral. Only the judgments we form about phenomena have weight and lead to emotions.
Decide you’ve been taken advantage of? You’ll feel bad. Decide something else? You’ll feel something else.
This realization gives us power because we can remove a negative emotion or even bring about a positive one by examining and altering underlying beliefs. Pride, satisfaction, excitement, and joy can result from skillfully contending with hard circumstances.
This isn’t about deluding ourselves. It’s not self-gaslighting. It’s talking to ourselves and determining if our judgments about reality are objectively true or merely a dark story we’ve spun.
The Stoic Game Begins
“Severity…. It is not cruelty but a contest. We should offer ourselves to Fortune in order that, struggling with her, we may be hardened by her. Gradually she will make us a match for herself.” –Musonius Rufus, Lecture 4.
We ace the great Stoic game by nipping negative emotions in the bud before they gain momentum, take on a life of their own, and interfere with our ability to make good choices. Then we find ways to make good use of setbacks or at least adapt to them.
To get ahead of negative emotions, we remind ourselves that whatever just happened is the universe’s opening gambit in the newest round of life’s great contest. Much depends on our first countermove. If your countermove is a complaint, outburst, or sulking, you lose. You get extra points for staying calm, and lots of extra points for being in a good mood (not faking a good mood).
Frame the setback as a part of a contest with a great prize at the end. This buys you time to examine the situation critically.
It’s helpful to think of your misfortune as something the universe, fate, or a god has put on your plate to give you an opportunity to improve. Will you rise to the occasion or sink into despair? Seneca explores the “why bad things happen to good people,” angle in On Providence (Hint: It’s so we can improve).
Second, find an angle on your “disaster” that allows you to look on it in a neutral or even positive light. One of my favorite questions to ask myself: “Is it possible this setback will lead to a better outcome than I initially intended?”
Our minds are ingenious. They will find these possibilities for us if we stay with the question. I often end up feeling positive emotions or excitement when I’m playing the Stoic game skillfully.
The Stoic Playbook
As a beginner, it’s best to pick proven plays from the ancient Stoic’s playbook.
Emotions can be defused and replaced via ingenious exercises devised by the Stoics and other ancient philosophical schools. You can read about them in Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. With time, you’ll realize which exercises are right for your situation.
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
—Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning
You’ll eventually be able to utilize these exercises on the fly, but if you’re already in emotional turmoil, using the ancient philosophical journaling method can do wonders.
Here are some of the best plays to shift your emotional state:
Take a lesson from Michael Cane and find a way to use the difficulty.
Psychologically reanchor yourself for happiness.
Briefly imagine your life is worse. Because it could always be so much worse. Gratitude is often the result of this exercise.
Example: You’re injured or sick. Close your eyes and spend two minutes imagining that you’ve gone blind. You’ll never see the wonderful colors of the world again, nor the beauty of nature, or read (at least visually). Think of how challenging it will be to navigate the world. Now open your eyes and appreciate the amazing privilege of sight.
Ask yourself if this setback will matter in a month, a year, or a decade. If not, why worry about it now?
If someone else is being stupid or greedy, find a better viewpoint for their actions.
The Two Prizes At Stake
The first prize at stake is the ability to be unstoppable and anti-fragile. If you have a mental rejoinder to every event, if you know how to use disasters and setbacks to make you stronger, then what can stop you? Is anything ever a truly bad occurrence?
The second is Eudaimonia (thriving/happiness/good flow of life).
I was skeptical of the Stoic claim that skillfully playing this “game” generated happiness as a byproduct, but it does.
“There is a pleasure in having succeeded in enduring something the actual enduring of which was very far from pleasant.” –Seneca, Letters on Ethics, Letter 68.
There’s something incredibly satisfying about living up to your expectations and standards. It leaves you feeling good in a way no ephemeral physical pleasure can.
I’ve heard that "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." That may or may not be true.
But I will say that no ephemeral pleasure feels as good as the deep satisfaction of living up to your own deeply-considered values.
This is a game I’ll be playing for the rest of my life.
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