The Daily Stoic

Seneca wasn’t fond of philosophers  you could recognize. Not by their fame, but by their uniform. In his time, just as it is in ours, there was a type of person who, in reading about the Diogenes types or the tough Stoic types, thought that philosophy required that they give up their worldly possessions or start dressing like a bum. Today, these types try to signal their virtue by driving a b...

Ryan speaks with Professor Massimo Pigliucci about his new book The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders , what Alcibiades’s magnetism and lack of moral compass can teach us about what we look for in leaders today, the tension between being virtuous and being pragmatic, and more. Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at...

Ruby Doris Smith died at age 25 of cancer. It was an unfair death, concluding a short, unfair life. For two and half decades on this earth – from 1942 to 1967 – she experienced the brutal day-to-day realities of Jim Crow segregation. Yet her tombstone laments none of this. Instead, it codifies into stone one of the most basic principles of the SNCC, the civil rights organization she had been so de...

We know what we want to do–or need to do. We need to quit that job. We need to have that hard conversation. We need to be more active in our community. We need to stop smoking or start eating healthy. We need to tell our crush we like them. But when? That’s the question. Or at least, we tell ourselves that it is a question. --- Today, Ryan recounts one of the greatest stories in human history and...

The writers Kurt Vonnegut ( Slaughterhouse Five ) and Joseph Heller ( Catch-22 ) were at a glamorous party outside New York City. Standing in the palatial second home of the billionaire host, Vonnegut began to needle his friend. He described the exchange in a poem published in the New Yorker in 2005: I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more mo...

Today’s reading features an excerpt from The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello . Anthony was an Indian Jesuit priest, psychotherapist, and spiritual teacher, writer, and public speaker who wrote several books on spirituality, including this collection of his last meditations on love and awareness. In today’s excerpt, Anthony explores the origins of our wants and desires, and ho...

Ryan speaks with Dr. Samantha Boardman about her book Everyday Vitality: Turning Stress into Strength , how you can improve your life by changing small daily habits, why feeling stressed is not necessarily a bad thing, how to deal with catastrophizing, and more. Samantha Boardman is a Positive Psychologist based in New York. She received a B.S. from B.A. from Harvard University, an M.D. from Corne...

In Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll made a decision that will be remembered in sports history for decades. The headlines called it “the worst play call in NFL history,” the “dumbest call in Super Bowl history,” and a “terrible Super Bowl mistake.” Carroll would of course disagree with this Monday morning quarterbacking, believing it was the right call based on the...

When horrible things happen to us, our instinct is always to ask why me? Why this? Why now? It’s understandable, but it’s also irrelevant and unhelpful , because those questions have no answer. At least no answer that you can do anything about or take any comfort from. Besides, life has a better question. One it is constantly asking us, one that Michael Lewis to his credit has fully embraced: what...

Ryan speaks with John Hendrickson about his new book Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter , how Stoicism and Ryan’s work influenced him to open up about his stuttering, how stuttering being diagnosed as a neurological disorder changed his perception of himself, how his daily struggles can be found in the lives of many other people who don’t have disabilities, and more. John Hendrickson is an...

In her beautiful book about the Los Angeles Public Library fire , Susan Orlean captures the magic of what libraries can offer. She describes walking through the empty library in Downtown L.A., not a soul in sight, and feeling connected to all the different voices represented on the millions of pages that surround her. Books, in this way, are wonderful friends. ✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic...

Things go wrong. We get screwed over. We make mistakes. It happens . The idea that it shouldn’t affect a Stoic? Preposterous. No amount of training, Seneca writes, takes away natural feelings. So it’s OK that you don’t like what happened. What matters is what happens next . --- Ryan also talks about how Stoicism has improved his mental health and how it can improve yours too. ✉️ Sign up...

Marcus Aurelius was a busy man. He was a smart and able and talented man. So why did he need to spend so many precious hours in his tent, writing by the lamplight, practicing philosophy in his journals? It wasn’t for our benefit. No, he never expected Meditations would see an audience. He was writing for himself, to himself, trying to get better by himself. He was journaling as a means of self-imp...

Today, Ryan presents a reading of Epicurus’s Letter to Menoeceus in which the philosopher and father of Epicureanism lays out to his friend why he believes that living a life of pleasure based on virtuous acts is the greatest good. This greatly influential work offers insights into ethics that can still be applied to our lives thousands of years later.  To learn more about Epicurus and his wo...

Ryan speaks with Ian Happ about how practicing Stoic principles helps him play better baseball, the mindset of a professional athlete, how he uses discipline to overcome self-doubt, and more. Ian Happ is a professional baseball player who plays for the Chicago Cubs. Ian made his MLB debut with the Cubs in 2017, and since then he has hit 108 home runs, driven in 308 RBIs, and accumulated a batting...

Why did Marcus Aurelius write his  Meditations ?  It wasn’t for an audience. It wasn’t simply to practice his Greek or his rhetorical abilities—he was already good at all those things. The book lacks an author’s note and he never seemed to have told anyone about his intentions, so we can’t know for sure. But there are two clues that, when put together, provide an answer as good as any. H...

We think we need a lot to be happy. We think we need piles of money. And power. And fame. And to get that perfect house and to marry that perfect person. There are so many things we tell ourselves we have to have. They are nice to have. But it’s not what we need. --- And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan discusses the strategies he uses to identify when declining an offer is the best course of acti...

Ryan looks back on some of the best discussions of 2022 that he and his guests had about building better habits. Featuring Dr. Nate Zinsser on looking for the positive aspects of your life while maintaining objective awareness, Josh Peck on his journey getting sober, Annie Duke on the power of walking away from things that don’t align with your beliefs, Amy Morin on overcoming mentally challenging...

We think if we just make enough money, someday we won’t have to worry about it anymore. We think if we just get big enough, strong enough, we won’t have to worry about being pushed around. We think if we can just get through this or that rough patch, we can relax and not be so worried anymore. Of course, it never works out that way. Does that mean worry is just a part of life? Well, no – unless yo...

Obviously, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The earlier you get started on something that takes time, the bigger and better the results will be.  As Seneca once said about the days that pass us by, "They are gone never to return." And that's sad. But as the second half of that expression about trees goes, the next best time is now. Today. Now is an opportunity to start. This is...

History is the same thing happening over and over again, Marcus Aurelius said. There’s nothing new under the sun. And yet, like all things in philosophy, the opposite idea must also be held true at the same time. The Stoics would also agree with what Stanford professor Scott Sagan once said, “Things that have never happened before happen all the time.” --- In today's Daily Stoic reading, Ryan disc...

Ryan presents the first of six readings of Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes . Cicero was considered Rome’s greatest politician, and he has survived as one of history’s most enduring chroniclers of Stoic philosophy and the Stoics themselves. As Ryan explains in Lives of the Stoics , these paradoxes are designed to question commonly held beliefs in order to promote reflection and discussion. In that spirit,...

Ryan speaks with Paul Woodruff about his book The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness, and Rewards , the ancient purpose of justice, reflections on a lifetime of studying philosophy, what serving in Vietnam taught him about justice, and more. Paul Woodruff is a classicist, professor of philosophy, and dean at The University of Texas at Austin, where he once chaired the department of philosophy. Before...

People have different definitions of greatness or success. Maybe you think yourself powerful because you have a lot of people working for you. Or successful because you have a full calendar. Or important because you’ve been on TV. Or happy because you go from one pleasurable activity to the next. But do you know what Seneca considered the sign of greatness? --- In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan pre...

He had considered not going public with it. He had wanted so badly to be able to keep saying, to get credit for being the guy who says, ‘I’m sixteen years sober.’ But he could not. So in September of 2020, the actor Dax Shepard opened up on his podcast about relapsing . The episode was titled “Day 7”—because after a streak of a decade and half he was effectively back at the beginning. “Today, I ha...