"Although seated among children and grandchildren, she did not cease to wear clothes of mourning, treating all her family insultingly by thinking of herself as childless when they were still living", Seneca, Consolation to Marcia, 3 The goal of negative visualization is clearly not to make us think of other people as indifferent. It's a self-inflicted wake-up call to help us revise our priorities and make us more aware of the good things we have in our life right now. In other words, it's not about thinking "I could lose my daughter, but it doesn't matter because she's not all that important". It's about thinking: "I could lose my daughter, even though she's one of the most important things in my life. I had better get the best out of every single moment I have with her and stop wasting time on things that are not important" Obviously, you can't love someone if you think of them as a preferred indifferent. First of all it'
"We should not limit ourselves to either writing or reading; the former will depress one's powers and exhaust them, the other will relax and weaken them. One should pass in turn from one to the other and blend one with the other, so that the pen will shape whatever has been gathered from reading into a body", Seneca, Ep. Mor. 84.2 I realize that Seneca's letters are addressed to another writer - but I am pretty certain that Seneca wanted us all to write. The point he is making here is not that we should use Stoicism to become more successful authors but that we should think through writing. And I'm equally certain that this point has been overlooked entirely even by the recent practice-focused research on Stoicism (Foucault, Hadot and others). Which is strange even if we just look at Seneca - but even more extraordinary if we take Marcus Aurelius into account. Implicitly, his entire work makes the same point as Seneca is making here. It's difficult to fin