Look up from this screen and find one thing you would miss: the mug by your hand, the window with the good light, the jacket someone left on the back of a chair.
Take it away now. Picture the version of your life where it never showed up: the shop you never walked into, the apartment you almost did not apply for, the party you nearly skipped, where you met the person who owns that jacket.
If you felt a small jolt, and then something close to warmth, you just ran one of the oldest happiness tactics on record. Stoic teachers practiced it nineteen centuries ago, under a blunt name: memento mori. Psychologists put it through a controlled test in 2008, and the people in that test made a prediction about it that turned out to be backwards.
Your Mind Files Good Things Under "Normal"
Good things do not stay good-feeling. The raise, the partner, the view from the new place: each one lands with a spike, and then the spike flattens into furniture. You still have it; you have just stopped seeing it.
Psychologists call this adaptation, and the way it works is stranger than it sounds. The people who tested this strategy described their problem simply enough: the more you reflect on positive events, the more familiar and comprehensible they become and, as your understanding of them grows, the less impact they have on you. It seems that reflection, which we think sustains positive feelings, actually helps erode them.
That puts a quiet hole in the most repeated happiness advice ever given. "Count your blessings" sounds airtight. Yet when those same researchers reviewed the experiments behind it, the record was mixed, and several careful studies found that thinking about good things produced no measurable lift at all.
So ask yourself a plain question. When did you last notice the thing you worked hardest to get, not use it but notice it, the way you did on the first morning it was yours?
In Tactical Happiness, the book I am working on right now, I say that your mind is a storyteller rather than a recording device. Every time you recall something, you rebuild it, which is why memory has no delete key. The storyteller also edits the good chapters, but it does this silently, without seeking permission; it categorizes them as "normal."
The Test Where People Bet Against Themselves
In 2008, four psychologists from the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina and Harvard published a set of experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Minkyung Koo, Sara Algoe, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert wanted to know whether adaptation could be undone, even for a moment. The setup was simple.
The students chose some positive thing in their life: a holiday, an accomplishment, a kindness shown by someone who did not have to.
One group then wrote about how that good thing had come to them easily and was no surprise at all. Another group wrote about how it might never have happened, and why it was surprising that it did. Psychologists now call this second move mental subtraction.
The subtraction group ended up in a better mood than everyone else in the study, including people who simply described the good thing and people who wrote nothing. In the second study that involved 120 students, the same trend was seen.
What follows is even more interesting. A separate group was asked to imagine doing each exercise and predict how it would make them feel. They did not see the benefit coming, and if anything they leaned the other way, expecting the "might never have happened" version to feel worse.
The last study was conducted outside the classroom. Every participant had been in a relationship for five years or more, and for 15 to 20 minutes they wrote either about how they met their partner or about how they might never have met at all. The "might never have met" group showed the largest rise in relationship satisfaction. A small group of forecasters saw both options and was asked which one they would rather do.
Fourteen of sixteen chose the story of how they met. It felt obviously better, and it was the wrong pick.
What the Stoics Actually Built
None of this would have surprised Epictetus. Born into slavery, later freed, he ran his own school of philosophy in Greece around the turn of the second century, and a student named Arrian wrote his lectures down.
In one lecture, Epictetus instructed his students in loving the things they love. Handle it like a jar or a goblet made out of crystal; it is valuable and fragile.
He continued beyond that lesson. When you kiss your child, your brother or your friend, remind yourself that they are mortal, the way someone once stood behind a Roman general in his victory parade and kept reminding him of the same thing.
It is memento mori in practice. Remember that you will die, and remember that everything you love is on loan. Epictetus says what you love has been given to you "for the present, not inseparably nor for ever," like figs or grapes in their season.
Seneca emphasized the idea through the concept of time. In his 101st letter to Lucilius, he wrote: "Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's account every day."
This is where the old technique meets up with the recent data. Epictetus created subtraction as armor, such that when the goblet breaks, you do not break along with it. The 2008 experiment discovered a second use hidden beneath the same technique.
Imagining the thing gone does more than brace you for loss. It hands the thing back to you, brighter than it was a minute ago. The Stoics built a shield, and it turns out to be a lens as well.
Take It Away to Get It Back
You do not need a skull on your desk for this, and you do not need to think about your own death. You merely need something positive that is already in your life right now. The question is one line long: what if it had never arrived?
And here is the exercise, constructed by combining the scientific technique and the Stoic practice. It operates on people, spaces, objects and moments.
First, choose one good thing and be specific about it. "My sister's laugh on the phone last night" gives your mind something to hold. "My family" is too general to even visualize being gone.
Second, trace how it might never have happened: the train you almost missed, the job you almost did not apply for, the friend who almost did not make the introduction.
Third, recognize how surprising it was that this happened, and dwell for a moment on just how slender the thread was. That flicker of surprise may be the working part. In the second study, people who subtracted rated their good thing as more surprising, and the researchers found tentative evidence that surprise helps carry the mood effect.
Now try applying this trick to the jacket described in the beginning of the text. Consider the night when you nearly decided to stay at home, the friend that persuaded you to go out, and the conversation that almost did not happen. Now look at the jacket again.
There are several pieces of advice to follow in order to make the exercise work. Pick options that actually could have turned out differently. In the second study, people who picked something they had had for most of their lives, like having a family at all, rated it as far less surprising, likely because it was hard to imagine it gone.
Rotate the experience you select. Reflecting repeatedly on the same positive experience makes it more familiar, which is exactly the opposite effect you want to create. Thus tomorrow choose a different experience.
When it's important, put it in writing. This was done in the laboratory version, where in the first experiment, the participants were asked to write down half a page at their own pace. The fast version, done mentally with eyes open, is the way the Stoics practiced the art throughout the day.
"This Won't Work on Me"
If you can hear this part of you thinking that, consider who else thought it. In 2008, the forecasters were quite sure that the subtraction process would be less comfortable. However, the people who carried out the exercise felt better, hence the forecast was opposed to the result.
It does not require your belief in order to work. You are not asked to think positive, affirm something and consider a horrible week to be a good one. It asks one factual question about one real thing: how close did you come to not having it?
The magnitude of the effect matters as well. The researchers write that it did not make people ecstatic; it "made happy people a little happier." Most of their participants were already doing well and had little room to move up, which makes this a small, repeatable nudge and nothing larger.
A small nudge is not treatment. If low mood has stayed with you most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more, or if you have thoughts of not wanting to be here, talk to a doctor or a licensed therapist. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time of day.
Happiness Is Tactical
"Tactical" has a plain meaning here. It is the thing you can do right away, based on what is currently available to you without having to wait until your mood changes first.
And that is the entire argument for memento mori as the tactic for happiness. Your life is already full of things your mind has filed under normal. They didn't cease to be good; they ceased to be noticed.
Most of Tactical Happiness deals with the painful chapters, the memories and stories that keep hurting, and the book's core tool for editing them is the ReWrite Method. Subtraction works at the other end of the shelf. It takes a good chapter your mind has turned into background and puts it back on the page.
Epictetus put his goblet back on the shelf so that its breaking would not be able to break him. Keep yours there for a second reason as well. Once a day, look at it the way you would if it had never been yours, and notice that it is.