The Daily Stoic

“Where are all the Stoic women? Surely this is not a philosophy only for and by men.”  It is a common and reasonable criticism of this philosophy, one that Daily Stoic seeks to understand and ameliorate whenever possible. Recently, we had the opportunity to interview Lauryn Evarts Bosstick, a wellness influencer who reaches millions of people—mostly adoring young women—through her blog, social med...

The Cynic philosopher Diogenes was once criticized by a passerby for not taking care of himself in his old age, for being too active when he should have been taking it easy and resting. As per usual, Diogenes had the perfect rejoinder: "What, if I were running in the stadium, ought I to slacken my pace when approaching the goal?"  His point was that we should never stop getting better, n...

Life is full of suffering, acute and benign. We come down with the flu. We are hit with a costly expense. Someone with power over us abuses their responsibility. Someone we love lies or hurts us. People die. People commit crimes. Natural disasters strike. All of this is commonplace and inevitable. It happens. Everyday. To us and to everyone else.  That would be bad enough, yet we choose to make th...

According to the philosopher Blaise Pascal, at the root of most human activity is a desire to escape boredom and self-awareness. We go to elaborate measures, he said, to avoid even a few minutes of quiet. It was true even of the people you think had all the reasons to be happy and content.  "A king is surrounded by people,” Pascal wrote, “whose only thought is to divert him and stop him think...

“What would you do if tomorrow you were diagnosed with terminal cancer?”  We’ve all had a hypothetical question like that thrust in front of us at one point or another. It’s supposed to make us consider how different life might be, how drastic a change we might make if we were suddenly told there was a limit to our time here and that limit was no longer over the horizon but within sight. It’s a ri...

There’s a great lyric in the bridge of the new Bruce Springsteen song, Tucson Train: We fought hard over nothin'We fought till nothin' remainedI've carried that nothin' for a long timeDoesn’t that just perfectly capture—in such a sad and telling way—many of our relationships and grudges? We turn nothing into something and then hold onto it like it’s everything until there’s nothing left. Then we w...

Here’s a way to feel good every single day, no matter what happens. A way to appreciate even a day stuck in the airport or putting out fires.  It’s an exercise from Seneca . He said that a person who wraps up each day as if it was the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, has a super power when they wake up.  “When a man has said, ‘I have lived!’,” Seneca wrote, then...

The philosopher and writer Nassim Taleb once said that , “Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel, or a private jet.” His point was that certain accomplishments are within the reasonable grasp of someone making incremental gains each day. Outsized success and outlier accomplishments require that and extreme luck or timing.  This is worth c...

In one of his letters , Seneca tells us of an old Roman pleasantry that friends would exchange when greeting each other: “If you are well,” one would say after inquiring how someone was doing, “it is well and I am also well.”  It’s a nice little custom, isn’t it? If you’re good, I’m good, and everything is good. Nothing else matters.  But of course, because this is Seneca, he couldn’t just leave i...

Why did Marcus Aurelius study philosophy? What were Seneca or Confucius or Buddha trying to achieve as they pored over their books or sat deeply in thought? What have archery masters and Olympic boxing instructors and generals tried to instill in their students and soldiers? Their aim was, and always has been, stillness.   These thinkers and doers and leaders and achievers, they all needed peace a...

Following today’s politics is easy. You turn on the news and a bunch of pretty people tell you that your side is good and the other side is irredeemably evil. You pull up social media and you get a bunch of rage profiteers telling you what to be outraged or angry about. Everything is simple and clear cut, compromise is unnecessary, and, in the end, none of it really matters anyway because the worl...

At the beginning of The Odyssey, Zeus utters a famous lament that must, one imagines, be shared by all gods and parents and presidents alike:This is absurdThat mortals blame the gods! They saywe cause suffering but they themselvesIncrease it by folly. At the heart of Stoicism is an admission that life is unfair and largely out of our control. Bad stuff happens to everyone, the vast majority of it...

Late last year, a man named Ken Watson died at age 87, but before he did, he made sure to gift wrap fourteen presents for his two year old neighbor .  He’d always told her that he’d live to be 100, and when that looked like it wasn’t going to happen, he decided he’d need to plan ahead. Which is why, after his death, his own daughter came around with a large bag of presents—enough to provide one pe...

You know sometimes you hear a quote or an aphorism and you think, That’s it. That’s me. That’s my philosophy for life.  Well it turns out that is a pretty common and timeless thing. At the very least, we know it goes back to the time of George Washington. Washington’s favorite play was the play Cato , about the Roman Senator and Stoic philosopher by Joseph Addison . This play, which was written in...

You try to turn on your television, only to find that the batteries in the remote are dead and no one bothered to replace them. Your computer freezes in the middle of finishing something important and you lose hours of work. You’re running late for your child’s soccer game because they’ve been fooling around instead of getting ready to play. You’re trying to change lanes on the freeway, but anothe...

When one looks at the dark moments of history, it’s hard not to be a little afraid. Look at what people have done to each other—look at how bad things have gotten. In Seneca’s time , many horrific acts were not only common but commonly accepted. Like decimation, a common enough practice, where one in ten people were killed just to send a message. And that word lives on in the lexicon two thousand...

When we think of greatness, we think of success. We think of strength. We think of influence. We think of the man or woman exerting their will over the universe, or dominating on the athletic field, or dazzling us with their creative brilliance. We think of the trappings of this greatness: ornate mansions, peak physical conditioning, confidently strolling the halls of power. Is this really greatne...

We spend a lot of time worried about what other people are going to do. Will that colleague muscle you out of the way for the promotion? Will another coffee shop or yoga studio or accountant open up on the block and steal your customers? Is so-and-so out to get you? Is the government plotting to raise your taxes or regulate your industry? From these fears come many actions. We get them before they...

Nobody cared more about statues than the Greeks and the Romans. In fact, the only reason we know what many of the Stoics looked like is because they were preserved in marble by sculptors many thousands of years ago.  The Stoics knew that statues were important. Aristocreon, a nephew of Chrysippus, put up a statue of his uncle—to honor his memory and his role in the founding of Stoicism. The grandf...

In her page-a-day book Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, the writer Anne Willson Schaef makes a distinction that the Stoics would have certainly agreed with—there is a difference, she writes, between trying to control everything in your life and taking charge of your life .  “Trying to control our lives puts us in a position of failure before we start,” Anne writes, “and causes endless, unnec...

One way to read The Odyssey is that it’s a story of human perseverance. Odysseus is cunning and determined, he’s willing to do everything and anything to get back to Ithaca...and eventually, because of that, he finally does. That’s certainly the interpretation of Tennyson in his poem “Ulysses”: “We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One e...

During the American Revolution—as in any war—the British quite rightly targeted the estates and the landholdings of the leadership on the American side. Because to them, these men weren’t founders—they were instigators. At one point in the war, George Washington’s estate was threatened by advancing troops. Thinking he might be able to save his boss’s property, one of Washington’s overseers rushed...

Epictetus could not have summed up Stoicism better than when he said: “It’s not things that upset us, but our judgement about things.” What he meant was that the world is neither positive or negative, it is simply objectively indifferent. A hurricane is a hurricane. Striking gold is simply discovering metal in the ground. It’s our opinions of those events which decide that one is horrible and the...

This was a big argument amongst the early Stoics: What was necessary for the good life? What was actually important to the wise man? They came up with a pretty straightforward but almost impossible to obtain answer: All the wise man should care about is virtue. Everything else—money, fame, family, power, sex—was meaningless. Indifferents.   But as the Stoics went off and lived their lives, this ex...

Here’s a question to ask yourself about your work and your life: Do you create value for society or do you extract it? Are you a giver or a taker? Do you make the world better with your choices and actions and lifestyle? When the Stoics talk about sympatheia , they are referring to this idea that we all have a role, that we’re all part of a larger whole. And, of course, the Stoics were not so naiv...