Field Guide to a Happy Life

"As the Modern Stoicism movement has blossomed over the past decade, its practitioners and enthusiasts have struggled with some of the movement's stranger claims. Should we really be indifferent to death of a loved one, or to our own demise? Is it truly unacceptable to care about one's work? Should we really look to nature for moral guidance? And what role does Providence have in ordering human affairs? In A Field Guide to a Happy Life, philosopher and Stoic Massimo Pigliucci has embarked on an ambitious task: offering his own view how the teachings of the Stoics can be adapted to modern mores and knowledge, taking as his inspiration the classic epitome of ancient Stoicism, Epictetus' Handbook. This is not another translation of Epictetus' teachings. Epictetus's ancient Stoicism, with its emphasis on indifference, can seem to call for us to be soulless automatons. For him, all aspiration was vanity and all grieving wrong-headed. Pigliucci is a modern master of the school, and is offering a major revision of the philosophy. This is not hubris: The ancient Stoics believed that their ideas were meant to be updated by future generations. And so Pigliucci revises or discards the teachings of ancient Stoicism that have come to seem inhumane-arguing that it's fine to want to do well at work or to mourn the loss of a loved-one-or unscientific, while retaining the doctrine's core emphasis on resilience and equanimity.