The Daily Stoic

There is a famous moment in the history of Sparta, when they were threatened with invasion by Phillip, King of Macedon. Phillip, whose son was Alexander the Great, demanded the submission of the Spartans. It would be better to submit to him now, he said, because "If I conquer your city, I will destroy you all. The Spartans’ reply to this was just one word: “If.” They were not the kind of peop...

It makes sense that we avoid pain. We don’t want to cause it and we don’t want to feel it. We’d rather life be easy. This makes sense—at least in the short term. But the Stoics knew that in the long term, such an attitude made you weak, made you soft. The NASCAR driver and student of Stoicism, Brad Keselowski, recently talked about how Stoicism has taught him to take whatever is hardest or most di...

Time and time again, we hear the Stoics tell us to say what is right, to do what is right, to be comfortable swimming upstream or rejecting the choices of the mob. Marcus Aurelius said this . Seneca said it . Cato said it . Nassim Taleb says it still today . What usually goes unsaid alongside these inspiring calls—whether it’s “If you see fraud, say fraud” or “If it’s not right do not do it, if it...

If you ask most people to describe a philosopher, they end up painting a picture of somebody who works at Harvard and wears a lot of wool and tweed and corduroy. Maybe they’ll describe somebody from ancient history, dressed in a toga, talking about big ideas, oblivious to the everyday happenings around them. It’s an understandable impulse, because philosophy can seem so distant and the people who...

Marcus Aurelius said that pain either affects the body or the soul. What’s the difference? “The soul can choose not to be affected, preserving its own serenity, its own tranquillity. All our decisions, urges, desires, aversions lie within. No evil can touch them.” Pierre Hadot’s metaphor for this was the “inner citadel.” Hadot said that Marcus worked to create a soul, a core, an inner fortress tha...

Marcus Aurelius was clearly torn about his fellow man. He was loving and kind and spoke repeatedly of serving the common good . He was also clearly frustrated and disappointed with the flaws of the people around him. Like many great men, he had trouble understanding that not everyone had his gifts, not all of them were capable of what he was capable of.  You can see in Meditations how he wrestled...

One of the most haunting moments in all of literature is the moment when King Lear hits rock bottom. He has destroyed his kingdom. He has lost his family. He has lost his sanity.  He says to Gloucester as they stand on a cliff: “They told me I was everything. 'Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.” In short, all the illusions of the king have been shattered, his ego destroyed. Everything he had wor...

For nearly three decades, Tom Morris, one of the world's top public philosophers and pioneering business thinkers, has been on a mission to bring philosophy back to the center of daily life. Travelling the globe working with world-class business executives, athletes, coaches, administrators, and entrepreneurs, Tom realized that, regardless of the field or industry, everyone wanted the same thing:...

The little known Stoic philosopher Agrippinus was apparently the king of one-liners. There was the time he was informed he’d been exiled and responded, “Very well, we shall take our lunch in Aricia.” There was another time, we are told by Epictetus , that Agrippinus was asked by a fellow philosopher whether or not he should attend some banquet put on by the abominable Nero.  Agrippinus told the ma...

We’re busy. We’re tired. We have so much to do. We had dreams once, sure, but they slowly deflated. The mortgage, the kids, the job, watching TV, that’s how we fill our days.  It’s a slow downward spiral that Bruce Springsteen sang about in Racing in the Street :  Some guys they just give up living And start dying little by little, piece by piece If you’re not that guy, you at least know him or he...

In Marcus Aurelius’s time , Roman religion was a hodgepodge of different rituals and ideas, which were evident in Marcus’s own behavior. For instance, he deified his wife and his stepfather Antoninius, but at the same time spoke repeatedly about how this life we are living is all there is. It goes without saying that he also rejected the teachings of the Christians, who he thought of—as a product...

There was a Stoic named Diotimus who messed up. Like really messed up. Sometime around the turn of the first century BC, he committed what can only be described as an unjustifiable crime. He forged dozens and dozens of letters that framed the rival philosopher Epicurus as a sinful glutton and depraved maniac. It was an act of despicable philosophical slander, and Diotimus was quickly brought up on...

It’s easy to whitewash history, to look back at a group of people who did an incredible thing and assume they were all on the same page when it happened. We forget the egos and the personality flaws. We forget their struggles and infighting. The Founding Fathers of America are a great example of this. They can seem like a unified group of wise superhumans—beyond the passions or tempers that rule o...

It’s a fitting warning about man’s nature that in the Old Testament , God would command his followers, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil,” and to resist the pull of the multitude when they persecute someone on false charges, only to find thousands of years later that this would be the fate of the man who claimed to be his son This idea that the judgements of the mob were dangerous and...

The Roman elite were constantly living beyond their means. Leaders like Cicero lived lavishly—he owned something like nine different villas at the same time. Other Romans believed the path to political power lay in essentially bribing the public with extravagant games and public spectacles. Julius Caesar was constantly spending money he didn’t have to impress people he didn’t respect. Even the Rom...

Imagine, one day you’re king and the next day you’re not. Literally. That's the story of Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, who was made King of Naples and Spain, only to be forced to flee in exile after the reversal of his family’s destiny. Napoleon was sent to an island prison, but Joseph had to move to New Jersey, where suddenly he was just another regular person—rich, sure, but far fr...

Yes, the Stoics talk a lot about death. How it’s inevitable . How life is fragile. How it can be taken from us at any moment. It’s in our power to live well, Seneca said , but not in our power to live long. It’s easy to take from these commentaries that the Stoics were completely fatalistic about their health, and that’s a mistake—one easily disproved by the evidence. Seneca talked about death, bu...

Keanon Lowe grew up in a family struggling to make ends meet. His father left when he was nine. When money was tight or when things were hard, his mother would try to encourage him by saying that it was alright. “You’re just where you’re supposed to be,” she said.  This would be hard to accept over the years. It was hard to accept his college career at Oregon ended when the team lost in the playof...

Here’s a humbling thought: Even if your life is amazing and successful, even if you mind your own business and are kind to everyone you meet, somebody , somewhere is going to be happy when you’re dead. Somebody who wants to buy your house, somebody who you pissed off in high school, an up and comer looking to enter the job market, some hater who doesn’t like your work—they’re going to smile when t...

Many “smart” people aren’t actually smart. They just know a lot of trivia. Sure, they can tell you all sorts of facts, they have a library of big thick books filled with enormous words, or they can give you the up-to-the-minute news about a political race. But can they tell you what any of this means? Do they do anything important with this information? Of course not. And these types have always e...

In 1961, Walker Percy published his great Stoic-inspired novel The Moviegoer . Like all classics, the book's success was by no means guaranteed. In fact, it became the subject of one of the strangest controversies in publishing history. You see, even though the novel was brilliant, its publisher, Alfred Knopf, was no fan. He even fired the editor who acquired it and had been so instrumental i...

Seneca wrote about our natural, involuntary physiological responses. Someone pours cold water on you, and you shiver. They jump out of nowhere to scare you, and you let out a scream. Someone drives rudely, cuts you off, prevents you from passing, and you get upset. These are natural and understandable reactions to external events. Who we are, Seneca said, is not revealed in how we react in those m...

Although the ancient world was filled with injustices and cruelty, we moderns flatter ourselves when we give ourselves (too much) credit for our enlightened notions of fairness and empathy, because the speeches and the arguments of the ancient Greeks and Romans sound strikingly familiar when quoted back to us now.  Take this line:  “I am convinced that people are much better off when their whole c...

It’s unlikely, given his feelings about the Christians, that Marcus Aurelius ever read any of the books in the Old Testament, but if he had read Ecclesiates he might have liked what he saw. Because like the Stoic observations that fill Meditations , over and over again, this book of the Bible comments on the timeless repetition of history.  “The thing that hath been,” we read in one part, “it is t...

Seneca wrote eloquently about how absurd the need to “get even” is. No one would think to return a bite to a dog or a kick to a mule, he writes, but when someone hurts us or pisses us off, that’s exactly what we do. We smile and laugh at this clever analogy. He’s right, we think, no one would bite a dog. Except anger actually does do stuff that dumb to us all the time—or worse! Who hasn’t thrown a...