The Daily Stoic

It can be deceiving to hear the Stoics talk about an indifference to external recognition or rewards. Marcus says that fame is meaningless. Seneca talks about how success or wealth is out of our control and therefore not to be prized. Don’t want what other people want, they say, don’t get sucked into meaningless competition. So does this mean that the Stoic doesn’t try? That the Stoic is resigned...

Laura Ingalls Wilder had a hard scrabble existence. From the Kansas prairies to the backwoods of Florida, she and her family eked out a life from some of the most unforgiving environments on the planet. That’s what being a pioneer was really like. It wasn’t glamorous, it was hard. Yet, what comes through in her work is the joy and happiness and beauty she managed to see despite all that hardship....

In a conversation on “You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes” about Martin Luther King Jr., the screenwriter and director Adam McKay talked about the distinction between two words (and concepts) that we commonly conflate:  Have you noticed the difference between dignity and respect is a big one? People that fly off the handle and get angry too much always talk about, ‘I’m not being respected.’ But res...

“They” hold up very poorly in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations . Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that Marcus holds up very poorly when “they” come up. Who is “they?” They are the people the Romans referred to as barbarians—the people who lived outside the bounds of the empire. It’s when Marcus speaks (and acts) derogatorily about them —the Christians or the slaves or even the opposite sex—that we...

When you begin to type “Marcus Lattimore” into Google, the first suggestion is “injury”. On October 27th, 2012, on live television, running back at University of South Carolina Marcus Lattimore suffered a horrific on field knee injury that he would never fully recover from. Lattimore was one of those once in a lifetime talents, but in one play, the football career Lattimore had built his entire id...

The funny thing about egotistical people is that—despite any power or wealth they might have—they are really easy to manipulate. All you have to do is tell them what they want to hear; make everything seem like it was their idea; play to their vanity and their delusions. The same goes for liars—who are usually quite easy to lie to. There’s even an old saying: You can’t con an honest man. Liars and...

At the core of legal theory is this idea that there are essentially two forms of liberty—positive and negative. Positive liberty is the freedom to do something, such as the freedom of speech or the freedom of worship. Negative liberty is freedom from something, which is a little more complicated. For instance, in the United States, the Third Amendment to the Constitution stipulates that the govern...

It was the great Athenian leader, Pericles, who said that there was nothing wrong with poverty . It could be caused by so many things—a business failure, the sudden loss of a family’s breadwinner, theft, even just plain old back luck. Like the Stoics, he knew that Fortune could swoop in, and, in the blink of an eye, undo years of hard work and careful planning.  But Pericles would not have said, a...

Few people have studied the life and writings of Seneca as deeply as James Romm has. Romm is the author of a great biography of Seneca, Dying Every Day , a translation of Seneca’s various thoughts on death, How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life , and his newest work, How To Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management , presenting one of Seneca’s most timely essays, On Anger. Eac...

Each of has been blessed by Fortune. We’re alive right now, instead of 50 or 500 years ago. We were born free, and not into slavery. We’re reading this email on a computer in our office or on our cellphones, because we’re not laying in a hospital in a permanent vegetative state.  Some of us are even luckier than all that. You might currently have the career you’ve dreamed of. Or you’re married to...

When we look at the lives of a great man like Marcus Aurelius or a great woman like the Catholic activist Dorothy Day , it’s easy to be intimidated. They seemed to always know what to do and seemed to always do it regardless of the stakes. It’s easy to be discouraged when you hold their examples up as inspiration—it seems impossible to live up to their standards (and easy to forget, of course, tha...

The point of memento mori is not to make you sad. It’s not to make you anxious about how few days you may have left. On the contrary, it’s supposed to free you. It’s supposed to inspire you. It’s supposed to give you that empowered, grateful, selfless, bonus-round attitude best captured by Martin Luther King Jr., who said these words on April 3rd, 1968, just hours before he would suddenly and fata...

In his wonderful new book How To Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius , cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, historian, and Stoic Donald Robertson charts the fascinating development of Marcus as a person over the course of his life. He artfully weaves in his insight as a working psychotherapist into how we can draw from both the life and writings of Marcus to improv...

One of the benefits of being an artist is that everything that happens to you—no matter how traumatic or frustrating—has at least one hidden benefit: It can be used in your art. A painful parting can become a powerful breakup anthem. Melancholy mixes in with your oil paints and transforms an ordinary image into something deeply moving. A mistake creates an insight that leads to an innovation, to a...

By now you may have read the viral story about the unexpected friendship between Charles Barkley and the late Lin Wang , a cat litter scientist from Iowa. It’s a pretty moving example of the power of connection, how one of the greatest basketball players of all time met and befriended a stranger in a hotel bar, and how despite their two very different lives, they became sources of great comfort an...

Life is pretty great, usually. Until you start thinking about what’s on the other side. That’s when things get less certain; when the fear of death kicks in. Nobody wants to die, after all. That much is understandable. But life is what it is, and with life comes death.  To acknowledge death, however, is not to fear it. The latter is much worse, because in fearing death we tend to avoid things that...

Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy in the United States and an unsung hero in the history of the world, was once asked by a Congressman if he was prepared for the upcoming hearing in which Hyman needed to speak about a number of complex, important issues. "Yes," Rickover replied, "I shaved and put on a clean shirt."  Rickover didn’t need to prepare because h...

AJ Jacobs is known for his unique style of immersion journalism. He’s lived, literally, according to the Bible. He’s went out and met every obscure relative he could find in his family tree. In his new book, Thanks A Thousand , he went on a quest to personally thank every person who had a hand in making his morning cup of coffee—the farmers, the woman who does pest control for the warehouse where...

It was said that Socrates saw his difficult marriage as a sort of challenge that life threw at him—that the fact that his wife’s personality and interests were often at odds with his own was something he could be made better by for being patient with. Certainly, Marcus Aurelius was tested by his difficult son, and likely spent many sleepless nights worrying about what would become of this boy who...

The German poet Friedrich Schiller supposedly liked to write with a drawer filled with rotting apples tucked into his desk. The smell was overpowering, but he couldn’t write without it. Apparently, it got the words flowing. How could that possibly be the case? Maybe it was just a weird quirk or a fetish. Maybe it was a weird part of his writing routine ( more on those here ). Or maybe, the proximi...

All of us are trying to find something. Trying to find meaning, love, contentment. Because we feel like something is missing. That’s why we keep ourselves so busy, why we kill ourselves with work, why we can’t be still. This drive is what allows us to accomplish things. So it’s not all bad. The problem is that when we do accomplish things, we often don’t feel that much better. We look back at the...

Gretchen Rubin is one of the most thought-provoking and influential experts on habits and happiness. She has written several New York Times best sellers, which have sold millions of copies, including The Happiness Project and Happier at Home . She also hosts the award-winning podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin . In short, Gretchen Rubin has thought a lot about what it means to live a happy life....

Seneca tells the story of the philosopher Crates , who was walking in Athens when he saw a young man talking to no one around. “What are you doing?” Crates asked. “I am talking to myself,” the man replied. “Be careful,” Crates told him, “for you are communing with a bad man!”  Whether this young man was in fact a bad kid or not, Seneca doesn’t say . One suspects Crates was joking—unless it was his...

Epictetus was born a slave . Quite literally, his name means, in Greek, acquired . Ultimately, he came to be the property of a man named Epaphroditus, who kept Epictetus chained up long enough that he became disabled by it and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. His body and his time and his labor were controlled by someone else. That’s what slavery is. But what’s remarkable is that even...

Let’s take a second to meditate on this observation from John Cage, the experimental musician and student of Zen philosophy: “That one sees that the human race is one person (all of its members parts of the same body, brothers—not in competition any more than hand is in competition with eye) enables him to see that originality is necessary, for there is no need for eye to do what hand so well does...