The Daily Stoic

The way to make all your problems, even the really vexing and painful ones, seem less severe? It comes from Seneca. All you have to do, he says, is: “Draw further back and laugh.” When you zoom out far enough, almost everything becomes absurd. Think about it: We are monkeys living on a space rock. We are a split second of the infinity of existence. If humanity survives long enough, people will lau...

“I don’t have time to read a book that long,” you might say when someone recommends one of those epic volumes from the Ron Chernows and Robert Caros and Stacy Schiffs of the world. And Alban Butler’s The Lives of the Saints ? Or Plutarch ? Who has time to read that dusty old collection about the lives of the ancient Greeks and Romans ? The answer is that you do. Or rather, that you should make tim...

Last year, the writer Chuck Palahniuk received the kind of news that all of us dread. Someone he trusted—the book agent who had represented him for years—had been slowly but steadily robbing him blind. All the millions he’d earned from the royalties of his bestselling books were gone. All the financial security he thought he’d built up was an illusion—undone by the cruel deception and greed of som...

In his wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve , the Pulitzer Prize winning scholar Stephen Greenblatt spends a lot of time analyzing a pivotal moment early in the life of Saint Augustine, when he was at a Roman bath with his father. One of the observations Greenblatt makes is about the steamy, quiet, relaxing atmosphere of the baths, with its alternating hot and cold, the scrubbing and...

One of Seneca’s most powerful strategies comes from his time as a Senator. Speaking again of a thought from Epicurus, with which he only partly agrees, Seneca explains that he is so readily able to draw from the teachings of a rival school for his writing because of a trick he learned in the Roman senate. Whenever a fellow senator introduced a motion with which he was not in full agreement, he wou...

There is a beautiful passage on the last page of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, The Little House in the Big Woods . She writes of an evening in the cabin with her family, her father playing the fiddle, her mom knitting in a rocking chair.  “She thought to herself, ‘This is now.’  She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she th...

Although today we consider “passion” to be a good thing—as in find your passion— to the Stoics, the passions were something to be wary of. Desire, rivalry, excitement, infatuation, anger. These were powerful forces that, if left unchecked, were likely to hurt the person who had turned themselves over to them (and likely to hurt innocent bystanders too).  The warning against manufacturing or feedin...

In 2017, Good Morning Britain anchor Susanna Reid presented her co-anchor (actually she calls him her TV husband), Piers Morgan, a gift . It was a copy of the book Ego is the Enemy . She thought he could use the book because Piers was “irritating, annoying, divisive, over-opinionated,” and “ready to start a fight in an empty room.” She meant it both as a compliment and as good natured (and true) f...

Maybe you’ve had a hard time of it recently. That business project is three months over projections. Your book isn’t really selling. The comments in your performance review were brutal.  Life can be like that. It kicks us around. The stuff we expected to be simple turns out to be tough. The people we thought were friends let us down. A couple storms or unexpected weather patterns just add a whole...

Spring is here! While most of us unthinkingly set our clocks forward (or have devices that do it for us), how many of us take any steps to spring our lives forward? March is when we start to think of spring cleaning, but how many of us get our whole houses in order? Not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines, our assumptions? Think of how you spent the last week. Were those seven da...

As we’ve written about before , one of the most surprising parts of Seneca’s writing is how that avowed Stoic quotes Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism. Even Seneca knew this was strange as each time he did so in his famous Letters , he felt obliged to preface or explain why he was so familiar with the teachings of a rival school. His best answer appears in Letter II, On Discursiveness in Readi...

Eleanor Roosevelt had a great rule. We must do the thing we cannot do , she said. And if you look at her life, she more or less followed this rule. She conquered her shyness and became a leading public figure. She overcame sexism and preconceptions about the role of a First Lady—a job she never wanted—to turn it into a powerful pulpit for good. She forgave her husband’s betrayals and affairs, even...

According to the great Jesuit Monk, Anthony De Mello , there are three intellectual feats that we struggle with on a regular basis, that are harder than just about any physical activity on the planet. Just three. They are, he said, in this order: -Returning love for hate. -Including the excluded. -Admitting you are wrong.  This is not a modern affliction. De Mello, while certainly observing the wo...

Last fall, there was a New York Times profile on what’s called the FIRE movement . FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. The proponents of this movement have adopted some important Stoic principles. They believe that life is unpredictable and that working for years at a job you hate for decades to retire at 65 is a dangerous risk (what if you don’t make it to 65?). They believe tha...

If you’re born into certain religious faiths, you tend to be raised with strong views on sex that come from on high. You’re not supposed to have sex before marriage or do this or that because God wouldn’t like it. (How that entitles you to regulate what other people do is less clear, but we’ll leave that to another discussion). And if God doesn’t like it, well that’s trouble. It is a rigid and res...

Here’s the simple recipe for improvement and for happiness. It comes from Marcus Aurelius and the fact that it came from such a busy man with so many obligations and responsibilities should not be forgotten.  “If you seek tranquillity,” he said, “do less.”  And then he follows the note to himself with some clarification. Not nothing, less. Do only what’s essential. “Which brings a double satisfact...

No matter what your profession is, there are things you can say that will cost you. Speaking up against somebody’s pet project can get an officer passed over for promotion. Voicing a certain political viewpoint can cost you fans or endorsements. Challenging the status quo can bring a hail of critics and haters. And in those situations, what should we do? The answer to the Stoic is pretty simple: S...

Slavery is one of the most common metaphors in Seneca’s writing . He talks about people who are slaves to sex and slaves to work. He talks about people who are slaves to their anxiety. He even mentions-—without much self-awareness for such a generally compassionate person—about his fellow slave owners who are slaves to their slaves. So it might seem strange that there was something he said we shou...

How do you know you’re making progress in this philosophy? It’s a question that every person has struggled with at some point in their practice, including Seneca. When he was writing his famous letters , he meditated on this theme. What does getting better look like? How do you know any of this is working? Quoting one of his favorite philosophers, Hecato, Seneca comes up with a pretty good metric:...

Epicurus’s final letter begins with a rather remarkable sentence: “On this happy day, which is the last day of my life, I write the following words to you.” While the letter briefly touches on the painful symptoms of the disease that would soon kill him, Epicurus doesn’t dwell on that. Instead, he speaks of the joy in his heart—not caused by his impending death, obviously, but by the memories he h...

A few weeks ago, we ran an email about Austin Murphy, the former Sports Illustrated writer whose thirty year career (which included interviewing presidents and champions) somehow ended in a gig delivering packages for Amazon. There is always a variety of reactions to these kinds of stories. Some people feel a wave of pity for the person on the short end of it. Others politicize it— Look how terrib...

In Meditations , Marcus speaks passionately about escaping the “indelible stain” of power, of being changed by the purple cloak that the emperor traditionally wore. It is a timeless warning for anyone in a position of authority or acclaim: Be careful lest you be changed by your newfound bounty.  But let’s talk about a different indelible stain that is spoiling and ruining many people today: radica...

Our newest Daily Stoic coinSummum Bonum is an expression from Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator. In Latin, it means “the highest good.” And what is the highest good? What is it that we are supposed to be aiming for in this life? To the Stoics, the answer is virtue. If we act virtuously, they believed, everything else important could follow: Happiness, success, meaning, reputation, honor, love. The St...

In the winter of 1824, things were not looking good for Simon Bolivar. He was at one of the lowest points of his decade-plus long revolution of South America. Many of the countries he had freed from Spanish rule were in chaos or at risk of being re-conquered. His own health had begun to fail from so many hours in the saddle on campaign. He was haggard and gaunt--skeletal, really.  Would he give up...

Epictetus’s most powerful line is about how it’s not things that upset us, but what we think about things that does all the damage . What he really meant is that our sense of what an obstacle or a disadvantage or a trial is—our subjective understanding—is more powerful than the objective reality.  For instance, if you tell yourself that you were failed by your teachers and that’s why you’re not as...