Who were the Stoics, and why does Burkeman believe it might be useful for people to cultivate the Stoics' "calm indifference towards one's circumstances" (3)? Do you agree with Burkeman? Why or why not?

The Stoics were Ancient Roman philosophers who claimed that the ideal state of mind was tranquility, which can not be achieved by pursuing enjoyable experiences, but by developing a calm indifference towards one's circumstances. This is a concept that opposes what Burkeman calls the modern-day cult of optimism, which forces us to try to find the good in bad situations.  Burkeman explains there´s an alternative “negative path” to happiness, through the acceptance of the things that could go wrong.

Explanation:

I personally agree with this philosophy, as it´s very similar to the kind of strategy I found to deal with my anxiety. Instead of constantly worrying about what could go wrong, I trained myself to recognize which fears were a real possibility and changed my mindset to accept that not everything is under my control, and that is ok.

samuel gompers was an extremely important person in the american labor movement, being him an employee all his life he devoted himself to fight for the rights of his pairs, he believed they all had the right to have better thing and that they all were working for them but the factory workers were greedy, ambitions and socialist people for him who he didn't have a good concept of.

he gave so many speeches and led so many strikes and protest to fight for equality which he considered employers didn't want to accept, so he had an absolutely negative opinion of them.