Daily Practice:
Seeing the Negative

Today we are going to dive into Stoicism, a philosophical system that emerged in ancient Greece under the philosopher Zeno of Citium 2,300 years ago. Who was Zeno of Citium and why should we care about him?

Well, we unfortunately do not know a lot about him, as most primary texts from his life have been lost. We know he was deeply embedded in the scholarly community of ancient Greece, studying under a variety of philosophers before, in turn, taking on his own pupils. According to some very flattering secondary sources, his head was “naturally bent to one side” and he had “fat, flabby, [and] weak legs.” Thankfully, the historical record is a bit more reliable when it comes to the school of philosophy he founded, which we call Stoicism.

We should care about our dear, flabby friend Zeno because Stoicism ended up blossoming into a wide-reaching philosophy — one that aimed to unify physics, logic, and ethics. It has many fascinating sides to it that we’ll have to set aside, but for today we’ll focus on one of the useful ways it sought to shift our internal mindsets. In particular, we are going to explore a Stoic technique called negative visualization.

Negative visualization is best described as a psychological thought experiment where you consider an alternate universe in which you no longer have some positive part of your life. This can be something fairly trivial, like imagining if instead of being a mild, sunny day, the weather today was cold and pouring rain. Or considering if you had not taken that vacation to Peru last year. But it can also be something deeply consequential. Never having met a romantic partner. Losing a parent or child. Falling out of touch with one of your closest friends.

The idea is to go deep into these scenarios — to truly visualize them. Let’s take having never met a romantic partner as an example. What would that be like? You would never have had that first date. That nervous uncertainty. That period of blind infatuation. All those small moments of sharing your life with them — and building a shared life together.

Negative visualization is useful because it helps combat our natural tendency to adapt to the things we have, thereby taking them for granted. This tendency, referred to as the hedonic treadmill, is unavoidable — and omnipresent. You buy that new car. The first day, you can’t stop looking at it in the driveway, all new and shiny. For the first few weeks, you marvel at its smooth steering and crisp sound system. But pretty soon, it just becomes, well, your car. You get used to it — and even start to find flaws. You get annoyed at the weird beeping it makes whenever you take an extra second to put on your seatbelt. It gets its first dent — which was not your fault, to be clear. And this happens with everything. That shirt you bought with that insanely cool pattern. That new promotion, complete with a healthy pay raise. And, yes, even your spouse. But with negative visualization, you can transport yourself to a world in which you once again do not have that thing. You can momentarily reset your brain and appreciate something for the first time again. Ultimately, the exercise pushes us to cultivate gratitude for what we have and the ways in which things have gone well for us.

An important aspect of negative visualization is that it embraces the fact that so much of our life unfolds due to random chance. That question you happened to ask that changed the course of that conversation with your friend. That text you first sent asking your spouse, then just an acquaintance, if they wanted to join the group hike. That person you met who changed your career trajectory.

On that note, negative visualization can be expanded to provide a radical perspective on just how much of our fortune falls outside of our control. Take the accident of your birth. What if, instead of a free and democratic country, you had been born in a totalitarian regime, like the 26 million people who live in North Korea? What if you had been born as a woman four hundred years ago, with few legally protected rights? What if you had been born last week in Sudan, a country experiencing armed conflict and mass civil unrest? There is no reason why this couldn’t have been you, other than it wasn’t. This preconscious coin toss landed heads, but it could have just as easily landed tails — and reflecting on this can lead to a deep appreciation for our place in the world and in history.

Sometimes we stumble across negative visualization in our day-to-day lives. You nearly get in a car crash on the highway. For a brief period — maybe a day, maybe a week — you can readily consider what your life would have been like had you not hit the brakes in time. You hear about an old friend who lost their job in the midst of a painful breakup. You wait anxiously for your lab results back, finally receiving them back and learning that you tested negative. For a moment, you can access that parallel universe where something has gone deeply awry. It can quickly feel all too real.

You’ll find that you can’t bottle these moments. Soon, their effects fade, and life lulls you back into its usual rhythms. But with negative visualization, you can summon this perspective on demand. You can fight your tendency to take good (even neutral, or bad-but-not-awful) things for granted and live with deep appreciation for almost any part of your life.