The Daily Stoic

There is a tradition in Stoicism that few notice, but is possibly one of the most inspiring and chilling parts of the entire philosophy. There’s no real polite way to describe it other than “badass last words.” Seneca tells the story of Julius Canus, a philosopher who was sentenced to death by Caligula. As he awaited his death sentence, he casually played a game with a fellow prisoner. When the ex...

In his essay Of Clemency , Seneca tells a story of a time Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire, had his temper severely tested. Augustus receives intelligence that a man named Lucius Cinna was conspiring against him. Augustus summoned a council of close friends to consult on his plan to have Cinna executed. When the group agreed unanimously against Augustus’s retaliation scheme, he blew...

When you listen to people talk about choices they regret, whether it was working for the guy who put on Fyre Fest or joining a gang or a cult, it’s remarkable how much it comes down to wanting to impress someone. Not their friends, not other people, but one person—usually the leader. That’s the theme in Michael Cohen’s testimony to Congress , for example. Over and over again, he reveals how badly...

There’s an old joke: When the Gods wish to punish us, they give us everything we’ve ever wanted. Look at most people who win the lottery. Look at most famous people. Look at most world leaders. To borrow an expression from one particularly unhappy world leader, what do they look like? They look like they’re tired of winning. Because winning isn’t actually as fun as it seemed like it would be...and...

Very few people, if they’re being honest, would want their kids to grow up to be like Donald Trump. And that includes the folks who had perfectly good reasons for voting for him and hope he will be a successful Republican president. Donald Trump is rich, sure, but he’s also vain. He’s mean. He’s paranoid and says cruel things for the fun of it. He wears being uninformed like a badge of honor (I br...

The great Athenian statesman Pericles once explained to his people that being a great naval power was not some hobby. It was the key to their survival. “Seamanship is an art,” he said, “just like anything else, and you cannot merely practice it ‘on the side’ whenever you feel like it. To the contrary, it leaves you no room for side pursuits.”  The Stoics believed philosophy was the same. That self...

The Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck thought the tug between good and evil was a necessary contradiction of human nature. There is no better demonstration of his world view than East of Eden . As Steinbeck wrote to a friend, “I finished my book a week ago...I have put all the things I have wanted to write all my life. This is ‘the book.’” It is from the character Lee, the Chinese immigran...

Fabius was one of Ancient Rome’s great generals, though he was not the bold, reckless type that usually gets all the attention in history books. No, he was the cautious type. He was strategic and reserved. He preferred to let enemies defeat themselves more than anything else. He was far less exciting than his most famous counterparts, but without him, Rome almost certainly would have been defeated...

It is certainly true that people can do some awful things to each other. We hear of a trusted representative who is stealing from their clients. We hear of a man who has been leading a second life, even starting a second family. We hear of a woman who commits an unspeakable crime. These gross violations of morality and law do exist. They are things we would never do, we’d never even consider doing...

Getting angry is not a good look. We know this because we see how ugly other people look when they get mad. How childish they seem. How pathetic their gesticulations look, how badly they seem to need our attention. We see how much it undermines their point too—we see their anger and think, “They are acting this way because it’s the only way they hope to win the argument.” We might even worry about...

A few weeks ago, a horse at The Preakness threw its jockey right out of the gate and kept running . Like really kept running. It ran the whole race twice! For a few seconds there during its first go-round, it was a real contender in the race. It’s actually not that uncommon for horses to complete a race without their rider, and sometimes even nearly win—a fact that must humble all jockeys.  Life i...

Traveling—that itch to get away, to hit the road, to see the world—feels like a distinctly modern craze. Yet it was common in Ancient Rome for people to escape the heat and the frenzy of the bustling city to get away for some time in the countryside. It is likely that those excursions influenced Marcus Aurelius’s belief in sympatheia —the belief in mutual interdependence among everything in the un...

Evan Thomas, in his incisive and humanizing biography of Richard Nixon , asks a penetrating question: How many great men of history were truly self-aware? Nixon surely wasn’t. Bill Clinton, caught red-handed—or rather, blue-dressed—philandering in the White House, surely wasn’t either. All one has to do is watch the video from his grand jury testimony, where he sought to litigate the definition of...

Seneca was a very rich man . He had nice stuff. Critics at the time, and ever since, have found this to be indisputable proof of his hypocrisy. How can a Stoic have expensive ivory tables? Isn’t it unphilosophical to have multiple houses? Or servants? In Seneca’s view, the answer was no. Nobody said that Stoicism meant a vow of poverty, or needless deprivation. As he wrote, “Philosophy calls for p...

So much has happened in the past. We’ve messed up. We’ve been hurt. We’ve missed opportunities and we’ve embarrassed ourselves.  So much can happen in the future, as well. Not only can all those same mistakes happen again, but we also have to contend with the uncertainty of the weather, the economy, family obligations, and politics—all of which loom in front.  It’s amazing that anyone can get anyt...

While we all hold up humility as an admirable trait , we’re not always sure it can get us to the goals we aspire to. We look at a Kanye West or a Donald Trump or a Steve Jobs and think: sure that person’s an egomaniac, but ego was clearly critical to their success. Success often comes with this temptation—to mythologize, to excuse, to gloss over the consequences and the difficulties.  Rivers Cuomo...

In the Book of Matthew , we are told of the parable of the talents. Three servants are left sums of money (talents) by their master. The first, who the master believed was most able, doubled his five talents into ten. The second was given two and used it to earn two more. The third was more cautious and less ambitious, and simply buried his in the ground. When the master came back, he was able to...

You’ve probably caught yourself doing it. Life has been rough or depressing, but your social media feed looks awesome. Someone asks how much money you make or how sales on your project were, and you round up quite a bit. Or maybe you’re similarly generous when you talk about your sexual conquests, or commensurately stingy with your weight.  Obviously this sort of deceit is not a good thing and we...

The Stoics were not unacquainted with awful people. They saw tyrants. They saw cheats. They saw toxic egomaniacs and insatiable ambitions. And what was their reaction to most of these people? Aside from a general wariness and a desire not to be corrupted by them, mostly the Stoics pitied these types. Certainly this is how Marcus Aurelius wrote about someone like Alexander the Great. He almost seem...

In 2006, Benjamin Mee bought a zoo . Literally a zoo. It was broken down and in desperate need of a caring owner. Mee and his family were struggling too. Things hadn’t been going well for them either. But in one scene —immortalized by Matt Damon in the movie version of the story—Mee explains to his son that our lives are defined by the moments when we put ourselves out there. When we take a risk t...

It’s very easy to get comfortable. To build up your life exactly how you want it to be. Minimize inconveniences and hand off the stuff you don’t like to do. To find what you enjoy, where you enjoy it, and never leave.  A velvet rut, is what it’s called. It’s nice, but the comfort tricks you into thinking that you’re not stuck.  The Stoics knew that this was a kind of death. That as soon as we stop...

The fact that America exists is the ultimate argument that Stoicism is not apathy and that philosophy is not mere theory. Because without Stoicism, it’s possible there would have been no revolution, no Constitution, no Bill of Rights and no Fourth of July.  Thomas Jefferson kept a copy of Seneca on his nightstand. George Washington staged a reproduction of a play about Cato at Valley Forge in the...

Unlike so many of the other philosophical schools, the Stoics were doers . The Epicureans might have been content to play in their gardens and the Cynics might have believed that most of the obligations of society were a scam, but the Stoics were responsible and public-minded. Marcus Aurelius lead the empire. Seneca was a writer and a political advisor and he ran the many estates his family owned....

If you were to run down the list of the great Stoics of history, who would come to mind? Seneca. Marcus Aurelius. Epictetus. Maybe if you really knew your stuff, you’d mention Zeno or Cleanthes or Chrysippus .  What do all those people have in common? They were all men. In fact, you really have to look—and stretch—to come up with even one or two “accepted” female Stoics . Does this mean that Stoic...

Twice, Seneca was exiled . Twice, he basically lost everything. Money. Access. Influence. It all went away, like *that.*  How did he handle it? The first time, not so well. We can read the thou-dost-protest-too-much letter he wrote to his mother...and we can see what he was willing to do in order to be recalled. By Stoic standards, it wasn’t pretty.   The second time, he did a little better—as lon...