The Daily Stoic

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 greatness, though? What if the person who has it is actually miserable? If every minute they’re awake they’re driven by demons or insecurities or the need to control and beat other people? How great is greatness if it is constantly on the edge of destroying itself through overreaching or over-doing?Seneca said that “nothing is great unless it’s also at peace.” What he meant was that stillness and greatness—true greatness, that is—are impossible to separate. It’s stillness that allows us to be great, on the court or in the public sphere or on the page. No one is able to push the bounds of accomplishment if they are distracted or disorganized. At the same time, it’s stillness that allows us to enjoy our accomplishments. What good is becoming a billionaire if all you can think about is how much more there is left to earn? If you’re just comparing yourself to richer people?Stillness is the key to greatness and the key to happiness (and it’s the title of Ryan Holiday’s new book!). There is little hope and little point to life without it. Stillness is what Stoicism seeks to instill in us—so that we can be better at our jobs, at our responsibilities, and in our quiet moments alone. Without stillness, we have no greatness. We have only franticness and insatiableness.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 get us. We spend money lobbying or setting up defenses. We call up friends or mentors, ranting and raving. The irony is that all this energy and anxiety is taking our eye off the ball. It’s a distraction from our day-to-day responsibility. And, more importantly, history shows that very few empires are destroyed by external forces. They’re usually undone by the hubris and arrogance and selfishness of their own people and leaders. As Pericles famously said, “I fear our own mistakes more than the enemy’s schemes.” It’s essential that we remember this. We should be far more concerned with our own ego and our own inadequacies than what someone else may do to us. Besides, which do we have more control over? Which can we 100% block? Someone else’s actions? Or our own? Marcus Aurelius put it definitively and adamantly, and which is why today we must chase…“The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 grandfather of Cato was once asked why there was no statue of him. His answer: I’d rather people ask why there isn’t a statue of me than why there is. The idea for the Greeks and Romans was to put up these statues so that we might look up and be inspired by the deeds and the principles of the great men (and women) who came before us. But today, what statues do we put up? Last year, Michigan became the home of a new statue of Robocop. Most people can agree that statues of Confederate generals (see: traitors) are not appropriate to maintain with public funds. That’s as far as we’re able to go though. We’re not building new statues, that’s for sure. We can hardly agree on who we admire enough to capture in stone or bronze. That’s really sad and really scary. Because each generation needs guidance. We need to be called to honor the greatness of our past (and in the case of some monuments, reminded of the failures and mistakes civilization has made). We need to see—in tangible form—the principles that we as a people hold dear, that we are aspiring to mirror in our own lives.A nation—an era—is judged by the monuments it erects just as a home is judged by the art that hangs on its walls. So that’s the question for the world and for you as an individual today: What statues are you putting up? And are you living by the example they stand for?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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, unnecessary pain and suffering. Taking charge of our lives means owning our lives and having a respond-ability to our lives.” ‘Respond-ability’ is a great word, and one we should add to our vocabulary today. The same goes with the distinction between taking charge and taking control. As the Stoics tried to teach us, only a fool thinks they can control fortune or prevent bad things from occurring through worry or endless work. Only a tyrant thinks they can determine everything other people do and say. A wise person, on the other hand, takes responsibility for themselves and says, “I might not be in control of what happens to me in life, but I am in charge of how I respond to it.” A wise person is both responsible and respond-able. And that’s exactly what we are going to focus on today.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”But there is also a way to read The Odyssey as illustrating the exact opposite lesson. Because basically every delay and impediment on Odysseus’s long journey home is completely his fault. He says he wants to get back to Ithaca, and then proceeds to constantly undermine himself. It’s only towards the end, when he finally stops and actually listens to the gods (most of whom favor him) that he quickly makes any real progress. In fact, they finally come out and tell him this when Odysseus tries to argue with their instructions for surviving Scylla and Charybdis (he wants to stand and fight, they tell him to dart through). “Goddess, please, tell me the truth, is there no other way?" Odysseus pleads. The goddess answers, "No, you fool! Your mind is still obsessed with deeds of war. But now you must surrender to the gods."Marcus Aurelius talked about practicing the “art of acquiescence.” Seneca and Epictetus spoke often about surrendering to fate—understanding that we are not in control, accepting that there is a larger plan for us spelled out in the logos. It seems like resignation, and it’s a very scary thing for us to try. So most people don’t. We refuse to yield, like Odysseus, and we never end up getting where we want to go.The concept of Amor Fati is quite paradoxical. It’s acceptance fused with determination. It’s the ability to go along and make the best of something—even if every ounce of your being would rather stand and fight. It seems crazy, but it works. Because there is more at work behind the scenes than we know. There is a bigger picture we cannot see. And even if there wasn’t, the universe is much stronger than we are.That’s why it’s better to flow with it than impotently resist it.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 out to try to convince the enemy to spare them.When Washington heard about this, he was not pleased. In fact, he wrote immediately to his staff: I’d rather my home be demolished than receive special treatment. Given our selfish and corrupt modern politics, it’s a remarkable sentiment. Here was a rich, powerful person turning down a favor, not only refusing to profit from his position but actually willingly accepting a potentially massive sacrifice because of it.Why? Because it was the right thing to do. And as Marcus Aurelius said, that’s all that mattersThe Stoics, were, as far as we know, similarly inclined as leaders. When Rome’s finances were in ruins, Marcus Aurelius sold off the treasures of the imperial palace to shore them up. He could have levied high taxes, he could have invaded another country—he could have used his power so that others suffered instead of his family, but he didn’t. Because that would have been unfair. James Stockdale and John McCain turned down special treatment as prisoners of war in Vietnam. They must have ached for even the slightest relief. They were desperate to get home. But they refused to abandon their duty—they would not undermine their country or deprive their fellow prisoners.This is not to say that a Stoic must decline every perk in life. Or that you can’t be compensated for your work or your success. However, we must always consider whether these perks come at the expense of somebody else, or if our special treatment means neglect elsewhere. What if everyone took advantage of their position? How would the world work? How fair would that be?We must always do the right thing...even if it comes at great cost.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 other is a blessing.Of course, Epictetus was not saying there is no such thing as “good” or “bad,” at least as far as morality is concerned. While morality is a judgment, it’s an acceptable one when we apply it to actions that are within our control (that is, our own behavior). The trouble is that we can’t seem to keep these judgments contained to that area of influence. We make up categories and then try to organize the world into them...and are often miserable when fate doesn’t get the memo. Death, of course, is the ultimate example. It’s neither good nor bad. It simply is. Each of us is going to die. That’s a fact. It’s not really a positive or a negative fact, particularly since it carries with it the end of our ability to have an opinion about it. Yet that doesn’t seem to stop us from worrying about it, from spending a lot of time trying to decide what it means and whether we like it or not. How miserable this makes people! How many awful and stupid things they do to prevent it, from betraying their friends to missing out on enjoying life in misguided attempts to prolong their existence. As Epictetus said, “Death...is nothing terrible, but the terrible thing is the opinion that death is terrible.”Hopefully you can chew on this a bit today. Death is not bad. It’s simply a fact. Indeed, everything is simply a fact. We’d be happier and more present if we could accept this. If we could stop fooling ourselves into thinking our opinions change anything (except to make stuff worse, most of the time). No judgment. No need to label or categorize. Just take life as it comes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 explanation had trouble holding up. Really? Nothing matters except virtue? We have to cut every little pleasure and stroke of good luck out of our lives? There’s no material item or position in the world that is useful or helpful to those pursuing or living with wisdom? That doesn’t sound right. It was Chrysippus who came up with a better formulation. Basically, he said that a better way to think about it was need vs want. If a person needs to be famous or needs to be rich, they are vulnerable and often unhappy. That’s obviously not wisdom. But does a wise person have to actively avoid making money? Must they live in obscurity? That seems silly. The wise man, he said, is in want of nothing, but can have and enjoy plenty. Meanwhile, the fool can make sure of nothing but desperately wants everything. Isn’t that perfectly said? And isn’t that the perfect admonishment for us today? Make use of everything we have while we have it and gratefully accept what comes our way…but be perfectly content to live without it if it were to disappear.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 naive that they didn’t understand some people’s roles were to be shameless, to be evil, to be lazy, or whatever. (Marcus alludes to an idea in Meditations that even people who are sleeping are doing a job of some kind). But just because that is some people’s role, doesn’t mean it’s a good role or that it should be yours. It’s worth taking the time on a regular basis to stop and consider what you’re contributing to this whole crazy system we’ve been born into. Marcus said that we were made to do works for the common good. Well, are you? Are you helping people? Is what you sell actually worth people’s money (and therefore time) or are you such a good marketer that you trick them into thinking so? Decide to create value. Decide to give more than you take. Make the world better by being in it.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It must be said that the Stoics were cowardly when it came to slavery. Marcus Aurelius, who believed that we were all part of a common whole, that we were all equal before life and death, who so admired a former slave like Epictetus, who writes at one point about why it would be wrong to have sex with a slave, doesn’t see a problem with owning a person. He had the power to eliminate slavery in the empire, but he just couldn’t do it. Seneca is an even bigger hypocrite. He writes over and over again about the importance of freedom and kindness and fairness, yet how many slaves did he own? Too many to count. He writes about slavery often in his letters, and you can just feel that as wrong as he knows it is, he can’t come out and question the institution that defined Roman life. He even knows he’s being hypocritical and in Letter XLVII more or less admits it. All he can say is: “But this is the kernel of my advice: Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.” Perhaps part of the reason that many Stoics had so much trouble with slavery is that as much power as the Romans had over their slaves, there was someone who had that much power over them. The emperor (indeed Marcus for the entirety of his reign) could throw someone in chains, could kill them, could take their possessions or steal the fruit of their labors. This often happened with capricious and devastating cruelty. Selfishly, stupidly, the lesson they took from this was: If someone can do it to me, why can’t I do it to someone else?They should have really listened to what Seneca was saying, to that timeless and universal idea we see in countless religions and philosophies and now call the Golden Rule. How would you want to be treated by people with power over you? Now why on earth would you treat people you have power over differently than that?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It was not lost even on the Stoics that some parts of this philosophy come more naturally to some people than others. Some folks just seem chill by default. Some are so-called “old souls” who have wisdom and perspective, almost from birth. Others were not blessed (or cursed) with ambition or opportunities, and so there is very little challenge going on in their life anyway. Good for them. That’s their lot in life. It’s not ours. It certainly wasn’t Seneca’s. The rest of us have to struggle. We struggle against our impulses. We struggle to really internalize these teachings. We are struggling to manage our tempers or the envy that creeps up out of nowhere, into our souls, and then out through our hands and mouths as deeds we wish we could undo. It’d be nice if we didn’t have to struggle so much, but we do. And yet, this struggle—and the triumphs over it, however temporary—that is what’s impressive about us. Seneca wrote that he doesn’t admire the person who has it easy, who is naturally Stoic. No, he admires the man “who has won a victory over the meanness of his own nature, and has not gently led himself, but has wrestled his way, to wisdom.” Seneca reserved his deepest appreciation for the person who’d survived the crucible of ego, who’d navigated the gauntlet of envy and pride, who’d walked through the shadow of the valley of death, but with himself as his own shepherd. Today, we must continue to wrestle. We must continue to struggle and fight for victory. It won’t be easy—it never is—but that’s the whole point. It’s the man in the arena that we admire. It’s the one covered in dust and sweat that matters. And that’s who we are.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 LA, not a soul in sight, and feeling connected to all the different voices represented on the millions of pages that surround her. “A library is a good place to soften solitude,” she writes, “a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off the shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.” Books, in this way, are wonderful friends. They are always there. They speak wisdom, but offer their advice quietly. They have an unlimited capacity for listening. They offer so much and ask for essentially nothing in return. We can say the same about philosophy, which, of course, mostly comes to us in the form of books. As Seneca said, philosophy offers counsel. It does not yell. It levels no personal attacks. No, it calls for you to be better. It is there whenever and wherever you need it. It softens our solitude. It is a true friend. Books, especially those about philosophy, are that friend who should always be within arm’s reach, who we should turn to constantly. Today, when we have some downtime. Next week when we run into some trouble. In the morning when we are lonely or struggling to start the day. Pick up a book. Read a passage. Listen to the person who truly believed that if they spoke—if they wrote—someone would listen and that it would make a difference. They weren’t wrong.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s pretty incredible to think that Hadrian was able to see the potential in Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian somehow, even though Marcus was just a boy, could tell that this kid had something. That he might be able to withstand the stress and temptation and pressures of the empire. What did he see? How did he know?It’s a mystery. We know that at some point he nicknamed him Verissimus, a pun on his new name M. Aelius Aurelius Verus, meaning truest. But Marcus was a teenager then and there are plenty of “true” teenagers…that doesn’t mean they’ll all be good heads of state. In fact, what’s so impressive about the man that Marcus became is that he was selected so young and he stillturned out to be good. Imagine if you had been told that you would one day be king, imagine if the current king selected you as his favorite—what would that do to your head? (Just look at Marcus’s own son Commodus for a hint)The point is: A great destiny—which all of us have in our own way, since we are all capable of great things—is no trifling matter. It can be corrupting and distracting. It can be a burden. To fulfill it is not a simple matter of sitting back and waiting for it to happen. No, it must be worked for. It must be earned. We must fight against all the temptations and the entitlements. We must make good on what the world sees in us. Ultimately, that is what we can learn from Marcus Aurelius and what we should be most inspired by. Hadrian predicted that Marcus could become something special, but Marcus went out and proved him right. Hadrian put Marcus under nearly inhuman pressure and stress by choosing him, but Marcus is the one who decided that he would thrive in spite of it, that he would rise to the challenge and emerge stronger and better for it. Marcus went out and seized his destiny, and earned his crown.So must we.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marcus Aurelius, on nearly a dozen occasions in Meditations, speaks of reaching or achieving “stillness.” Most beautifully, he writes of trying to be “like the rock that the waves keep crashing over,” the one that “stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.” We shouldn’t be surprised to hear him use this word—which sounds Buddhist as much as it sounds Stoic—because it meant a great deal to him. The last word from Antoninus, Marcus’s beloved stepfather, as he passed power to him was simply: Aequanimitas. Equanimity. Intuitively, instinctively, we know what that means. Stillness. Equanimity. Ataraxia. We also know how rare those feelings are. How often are we still? How often are we able to reach that place of clarity and steadiness inside ourselves? Not often enough, considering the incredible feats of focus and creativity and determination we are capable of when in possession of it. Do you want more of it? Would you like to be cooler under pressure? Would you like to be like the rock in Marcus’s analogy, the one that can calm great oceans and endure the strongest currents and biggest waves? How much better would you be with more focus, more self-discipline, a happier soul?The good news is that this what Ryan Holiday’s new book is all about. It’s called Stillness is the Key. And the even better news is that you can preorder it right now. Barnes and Noble even has a limited run of signed copies for sale. At Daily Stoic we’re also offering some cool preorder bonuses for anyone that buys one, five or one hundred copies—in any format, anywhere in the world (details here, please follow the instructions!!).We live in crazy times. Stillness has been the secret weapon of the Stoics and the Buddhists, the Christians and the followers of Confucius, for thousands of years—for a reason. Because it can help us thrive in a world that’s spinning faster than ever. Stillness is the key to the good life, whatever that looks like for you. It’s the key to career success, to happiness, to enduring adversity, to appreciating the wonders of existence. You know you want more of it. You know how special it is. We have all felt its power.So let’s go find it together.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Marcus Aurelius was an incredibly lucky man. He was born a Roman and he was born a man in a time where to be anything other than a man or a Roman citizen was a position of extreme powerlessness. He was also born to a wealthy family who provided him the best tutors, tutors who loved him and taught him the philosophy that changed his life. He was then adopted into Antoninus’s family (at the request of Hadrian) to set in motion his ascension to the throne, a gift of enormous power, wealth, and responsibility. It says in the Bible that to whom much is given, much is required. Marcus took this idea quite seriously. Not only was he not one of those dilettante emperors, he also saw the gifts he had been given as an obligation to do good, to be of service—that it wasn’t about him, but about what he was called to do. So when Rome’s finances were shaky, he sold off imperial treasures to pay down the empire’s debts. When estates were left to him, he could have easily accepted them and increased his family’s wealth while in office, like so many politicians before and since have done. Instead, he found the deceased’s distant relatives and gifted it to them (when his own father died, Marcus passed his rightful inheritance to his sister). We can see in Meditations just how difficult and stressful all this responsibility was on Marcus...yet there was no complaining, no ethical lapses, no regrettable mistakes. Much was given to him at birth and in life, and he rose to the occasion. He did what was required of him and more. So today, think about your own good fortune and the gifts you have received—by nature of where you’ve been born (and when), because of who your family is or the success you’ve had. There is no such thing as a free lunch. There are always strings. In this case, you are now obligated. Much is required of you. You are required to be good. To give back. To help others, to sprinkle some of your stardust on other people. Starting now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s late summer now and you might be thinking it’s time to squeeze in a last minute vacation. Or maybe you’ve been looking forward to a long-planned one to some distant location. This is just what I need, you’re thinking. I can’t wait to get out there on the beach…or the mountains…or those beautiful ruins. We think we can escape from our job. From our problems. From our depression. From our low-grade dissatisfaction with our ordinary lives. But what do we find when we arrive to the exotic location? After we check in to the hotel or the Airbnb? We find, after the rush wears off, that we don’t feel any different. We brought ourselves with us…the true source of our unhappiness. Seneca was an avid traveler who saw how often his fellow tourists were in denial, how they foolishly thought a change of scenery could exempt them from the real inner-work they needed to do. He liked to quote Epicurus who said that “every man flees himself.” We can imagine Seneca enjoying the lyric from a song by Alice in Chains: heaven beside you…hell within.That’s why vacations often disappoint. Because as beautiful as they are, as much as we design them for relaxation, they are incapable of overriding our anxiety and our dysfunction. If our soul is tense, no amount of massages will relax it. If our mind is chaos, no amount of time in the water will order it. If our life is a mess, eventually we’ll have to return to it–and all the tours and long dinners will evaporate it in a minute. If you want to be happy, if you want to relax, look inward. Do the work. Not only will you be happier at home, but you’ll enjoy your time on the road more too.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

These are times of increasing political extremism. They are also times of corruption and rising inequality. Enormous, alarming trends are sweeping through culture, government, and the economy. In some sense this is new, but in other ways it’s a story as old as civilized society. So the question is not why or what or who or even how—it’s where. Where is the courage? Where are the people standing up to stop all this? Where are the heroes, big and small? The city council member who refuses to rubber stamp the pocket-lining policies of her fellow council members. The parent who turns in their own child for his alarming obsession with guns. The celebrity who uses their platform to speak truth, rather than pile onto whatever the mob has decided is right. To the Stoics, courage was the greatest of the virtues. Being brave enough to take a stand, to risk one’s own neck. To throw yourself in front of the car to save someone else. Or, as Mario Savio put it on the Berkeley campus in the 1960s during the Free Speech movement, “to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus…to make it stop.”Courage was also independence. Refusing to cow to the majority, and instead to hold oneself to a higher standard. That standard was justice, another essential virtue. That meant insisting on what was right. Attacking corruption, intolerance for unfairness. Protecting the downtrodden or the weak. Are there still heroes out there? Yes. We see it in Lori Gilbert-Kaye, who died protecting her rabbi from a gunman. We see it in James Melville, the ambassador who resigned on principle after Trump’s comments about NATO. We see it when people admit they were wrong. When academics challenge political correctness and orthodoxy. We see it when a classmate stands up to a bully. We see it when a fireman rushes into a building, or when a police officer runs towards the shooting. When the ordinary person says, “Hey, don’t say things like that. Don’t treat other people that way. It’s not right.”But we don’t see it enough. In part because we don’t do it enough ourselves.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In his new book, Comedy Sex God (as well as on his wonderful podcast and on his HBO show) the comedian Pete Holmes talks about the aftermath of the dissolution of his marriage. After his wife cheated on him and their subsequent divorce, he was hit with a long developing crisis of faith in the religion he had grown up with.He describes this period as many nights on the road. Lots of work. Lots of drinking. Lots of crying. Lots of Counting Crows songs on repeat. And while that all seems very tough, the interesting part about it, he says, looking back, is how easy it was. How comfortably he slipped into this depression and came to feel at home in it. He almost looks back at the period fondly now, as if remembering a long morning under the warm covers.This is something the Stoics were quite aware of as well, and why they urged us to be wary of our passions. It’s not that they felt that emotions were bad, it’s that they knew how easy it was to slip into them and be consumed by them. When we lose someone we love, grief is natural. It can also be tempting to simply take residence inside that grief as a way of protecting ourselves from ever getting hurt again. When we run into difficulty, it’s natural to be sad about it. And we can quite easily adopt this sadness as our new world view, when the braver thing is actually to make ourselves vulnerable again in the pursuit of something to be hopeful and happy about. One of the key virtues of Stoicism is moderation. Not too little. Not too much. Just the right amount. It’s easy to overindulge your emotions, as Pete Holmes did for so long on the road as a comic. It’s easy to block them off entirely, as Stoicism has been wrongly criticized for advocating for centuries.The truth is, neither absence nor abundance is the right path. Because neither is a path toward anything at all. And what is life but a path whose twists and turns are ours to carve with our own two feet. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The great C.S Lewis observed that we all find forgiveness to be a lovely idea...right up until we have someone to forgive. It’s true. Forgiveness is one of those virtues that’s easy to talk about, but incredibly hard to practice. Particularly when we are hurt, or when we have been seriously wronged. Yet, isn’t that sort of the point? Forgiveness wouldn’t be that impressive, it wouldn’t be that meaningful, if it came naturally. If it could be so easily tossed off.Think of Laura Tibbetts, whose daughter was killed by an undocumented immigrant in 2018. After the body was discovered, all sorts of letters poured in. People tried to stoke her passions to make her angry. This is why we need to build a wall, they said. Those people are animals. We need to protect ourselves. And what did she do? She opened her home to a young boy whose parents were also undocumented immigrants and had worked in the very same fields as the man who had murdered her daughter. That’s not just a lovely example of forgiveness, it’s a profoundly virtuous and impressive thing to do. There must be so much pain in Laura’s heart, so much anger. Yet she has risen above it. She has found a way to see through the rage and the hurt to find something common in their shared humanity. Something she could support and care for, rather than dismiss or rail against. The Stoics believed that these sorts of gestures were the essence of greatness. They believed these were the moments we train for. It’s easy to say that forgiveness is important. It’s easy to talk about sympatheia, or how we are all part of a larger whole, alongside our fellow humans. But it is so hard to do. Because life challenges us. Life throws tragedy at us. Instead of calling us to be better, to live up to a higher standard, the media and our fellow citizens often try to drag us down into the mud, encouraging our basest instincts. We have to keep reaching for that higher standard, though. We have to push through the pain and the anger. We have to pull ourselves out of the mud. We have to forgive. We have to try to be good...and in the process, be great. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The busier we get, the more we work, even the more that we learn and read, the further we tend to drift from our center. We get in a rhythm. We’re making money, being creative, we’re stimulated and busy. It seems like everything is going well. But if we’re not careful, those other things grow and grow until they take over completely; and what once felt like a rhythm now feels like a rut. It’s true for us now just as it was true for Marcus Aurelius. He had an awful lot to keep him busy, to distract him, to push him further and further, which in turn afforded him less and less time for that which really mattered to him: philosophy. We get a good sense of how he thought about his priorities with this analogy in Book 6 of Meditations:“If you had a stepmother and a real mother, you would pay your respects to your step mother, yes...but it’s your real mother you’d go home to. The court...and philosophy: Keep returning to it, to rest in its embrace. It’s all that makes the court—and you—endurable.”His point was that you should return to that which nourishes you. Sure, you have to earn a living and contribute to society (or deal with the court or the demands of office, in Marcus’s case). You may have hobbies and other obligations too. That’s perfectly fine. Just remember that those are your step-parents. Important, but they don’t change who made you. Philosophy is the essential, centering pursuit. It challenges us. It requires work and reflection and self-criticism. It requires that we hold ourselves to certain standards and that we hold ourselves to account when we fail to. It’s the real work, not the busy work. Philosophy is what birthed you, raised you, and continues to re-make you as life goes on. Don’t let some momentum in your other pursuits fool you into thinking you no longer need it. It’s home. Make sure you’re paying the proper respects. Make sure you’re going back often, so that today’s rhythm does not become tomorrow’s rut.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“If it is not right, do not do it,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “if it is not true, do not say it.” But it’s worth pointing out that as a philosophy, Stoicism demands more of us than just this negative. As Marcus would also point out, “Often injustice lies in what you aren’t doing, not only in what you are doing.” So, first, do not lie. But, second, sitting by and allowing a lie to stand? These can both be injustices. No Stoic would argue that fraud is permissible. But what if you witness fraud? What if you suspect a fraud is occurring at your work or in your industry or in government? Nassim Taleb bridges these two quotes from Marcus perfectly: “If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”Be the person that stands up. Be the person that lends a hand. Be the person that actively does good, that is courageous and generous. It’s not enough to simply not do wrong. We are called to do more than that, we are held to a higher standard. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” is the line. It’s true. Don’t turn a blind eye. Don’t make it someone else’s problem. Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

One way to look at an iconic or important landmark like the White House is with reverence. This is the seat of a global power. This is where Kennedy stared down the Cuban Missile Crisis. It represents freedom, justice, and the pursuit of happiness. Another way would be with a slightly more cynical eye: This is a house built by slaves. It’s actually not even that old—most of it was torn down and rebuilt during the Truman Administration. Look at all the idiots who have lived there, this house allowed the Civil War to happen, it perpetuated Vietnam, it’s where sleazebags preyed on interns.Which of these two attitudes is correct? The Stoics would argue that they both are and that both perspectives—at different times—are key to doing the right thing. A person working in government service at the White House can use the positive legacy of the institution as a form of inspiration, as a call to a higher standard of behavior. This is a special place. I must do it justice. This kind of reverence can draw the best out of a person, even in difficult or tempting situations. But at the same time, a person who is too reverent, or who has projected too much of their own idealism onto a place or an organization can find themselves bending the truth to protect it. Or doing unethical things to maintain their job inside it. I’m not going to jail because the guy holding this office for four years is asking me to lie for him. The President isn’t a king—he’s a public servant like every other person in the government. We can use cynicism productively. It, to use Marcus Aurelius’s phrase, helps strip things of the legend that encrusts them and gives us an objective view. A person who understands the legacy of the White House from both perspectives is less likely to do something wrong, more likely to be courageous than a person who has just one view. And the same applies for so many different things. How do you see marriage? How do you see money? How do you understand the history of your country or your race or your industry? Being written about in the New York Times or winning a Nobel Prize? You want to see the higher essence of things...and their lower nature. You want to see the ideal...and the reality. Be blinded by neither. Deceived by neither.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In several of Seneca’s letters he speaks about the power of bloodletting as a medical practice. In one, he actually remarks—with some superiority—how earlier generations had not yet discovered bloodletting and suffered for it. Marcus Aurelius hints at some other medical practices. He speaks of the treatment for ophthalmia—inflammation of the eye—and how doctors treated it with a bit of egg yolk. We also know that his doctor Galen gave Marcus opium for various pains and illnesses in old age.Needless to say, none of these treatments are accepted or prescribed anymore. It’s interesting that the Stoics, who were so good at extrapolating out from the past, didn’t take a lesson from this—that so much of what we are certain about today will be disproven in the future. That the so-called ‘wisdom’ of the present is often embarrassingly wrong and nothing illustrates this better than medicine. Imagine: We used to take really sick people, cut open their veins and pour their blood out as a form of healing. Do you think it finally occurred to Seneca as he was forced to commit suicide using basically that exact methodology just how absurd the practice was?The point is (and it’s a point well made in Chuck Klosterman’s book But What If We’re Wrong?) that we should always be questioning the status quo—and majority opinion. Not because it’s always wrong, but because it sometimes is. We should be intellectually humble because science and time have a way of humbling us. So too do history and ethics. Seneca thought he was superior to his fellow Romans because he treated his slaves kindly...a distinction we no longer give much credit for.Take it as fact that much of what we think we know will be proven wrong. Much of what we think makes us vastly more informed than the generation of our parents will not hold up well by the time our children are our age. Question everything. Don’t be too attached to anything.It’s all changing. And we are so, so wrong.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There are different kinds of ambition. There was, on one end of the spectrum, the ambition of someone like Abraham Lincoln. This was the ambition that taught him to read, that braved the wild Mississippi River, that learned the law, that worked his way up from poverty into the presidency, and, eventually, kept America from permanently tearing itself apart. Then there is Seneca’s ambition. He too was driven and talented and yearned for a chance to change the world. But it’s also clear that he wasn’t always principled, that he was perhaps a bit too in love with power, and possibly with money. Lincoln’s ambition ended slavery. Seneca’s enabled Nero. In the contrast between the two—and between pure and self-interested ambition everywhere—we find the truth of the observation in the novel What Makes Sammy Run?—“What a tremendous burning and blinding light ambition can be where there is something behind it, and what a puny flickering sparkler when there isn’t.” We’ve talked before here about Marcus Aurelius’s view on ambition. But the truth was that he was ambitious too. He wanted to be a great emperor. He swore that no senator would be executed in his reign. He wanted peace to reign. He wanted to resist the corrosive corruption that power had on other Stoics, including Seneca. This is clearly good ambition. The world needs more of that. It needs people who want to improve the world and themselves. Who, above all, are committed to virtue—to justice, temperance, wisdom, and courage. More directly we need you to be one of those people, to have that kind of ambition and to set about your life doing whatever it is you are called to do. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There is a balance to Stoicism between awareness and anxiety. The Stoics want you to be prepared for an uncertain—and oftentimes dangerous—future, but somehow not worry about it at the same time. They want you to consider all the possibilities...and not be stressed that many of those possibilities will not be good. How exactly is that supposed to work?The answer lies simply in the idea of presence. As Seneca writes: “It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives.”It may well rain tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you have to get wet in advance. You can enjoy the sunshine today, while still bringing in your furniture just in case. It’s important not to take the phrase premeditatio malorum (a premeditation of evils) too singularly. When Seneca says that all the terms of the human lot should be before our eyes, and then lists only the bad things, he’s accidentally doing that. Because of course good stuff can happen too. Bad stuff can not happen also. The point is that the future is out of our control. It is uncertain, and also vast. We have to be aware of that, yes, but we don’t need to suffer, particularly not in advance. Because we have plenty of time to prepare, and plenty of wide open present before us still as well. Enjoy it. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What is wealth? It’s having plenty, right? The variables in the equation are pretty simple. What you have, what you’ve got coming in, and what’s going out. If those are in proper proportion to each other, you’re covered. Except what we tend to miss in this equation is another set of hidden variables that most often take the shape of our relative needs and wants.Most people accumulate their wealth by earning as much as they can. That’s why they work so hard. Why they take so many risks. Why they invest. But the reason they do this is not to be covered—it’s because they have told themselves that what they need is more, more, more, and that what they have already is not enough. Seneca, himself a very rich man, did that. The astounding financial benefits of working for Nero had to be partly what attracted him to the tyrant’s service. If only he could have listened to his own advice (which he borrowed from Epicurus): “If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.” The Stoics would say that for a virtuous person, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be wealthy. It can provide comfort, security and, quite possibly, a platform to do good for the world. They would just urge you to take a minute to think about what your definition of wealth is—and whether you might already have everything you’ve always wanted. There’s more than one way to solve this tricky wealth equation, and in your case it may just be that subtraction is easier than multiplication. That changing your understanding of what it means to be rich might be more important, and easier, than changing the number of digits to the left of the decimal point in your bank balance. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There is a morbid theme running through the music of Johnny Cash. His deep, haunting voice is rarely far from a lyric about death or murder or loss or grief. He has songs about soldiers killed in Vietnam, songs about dying cowboys on the streets of Laredo, about tragic rifle accidents, songs about salvation and damnation, songs about tragedy and war. Famously, he performed almost his entire career dressed in black—like he was on his way to a funeral. So it’s not a stretch to think he might have been a bit preoccupied with the idea of mortality. In an interview with Neil Strauss, Cash explained that this was the wrong way to see it: "I am not obsessed with death. I'm obsessed with living. The battle against the dark one and the clinging to the right one is what my life is about. In '88, when I had bypass surgery, I was as close to death as you could get. The doctors were saying they were losing me. I was going, and there was that wonderful light that I was going into. It was awesome, indescribable — beauty and peace, love and joy — and then all of a sudden, there I was again, all in pain and awake. I was so disappointed. But when I realized a day or so later what point I had been to, I started thanking God for life and thinking only of life.”There’s a similar tendency to think that the Stoics were obsessed with death, particularly Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. (Seneca talked about death so much that there is a recently published collection of his writings on the topic actually titled How To Die). But if they were given a similar chance to comment, like Johnny Cash did, about their fixation with death, we might expect a similar response. They weren’t obsessed with dying but with living. They wanted to get the most out of every minute of this uncertain existence we have all been given. It happens that meditating on our mortality is a powerful way to do that. Memento Mori is an exercise that makes sure we are awake, grateful, and at peace. It prepares us for the inevitability of what is to come, while allowing us to seize every second between now and then. That might seem counterintuitive, but it actually makes perfect sense. If you know death is inevitable, and that there is nothing you can do about it, and you have no idea when it will come, well then what’s the alternative? Or as Andy Dufresne says to his friend Red, in The Shawshank Redemption, when they’re talking about what they’d do if they ever got out: “I guess it comes down to a simple choice: get busy living or get busy dying.” Which is why we should start this morning with gratitude and urgency, with appreciation and awareness. How much time any of us have left is not up to us—but what we do with that time? That’s our call. That’s our song to sing. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

One of the undeniable realities of the history of religion is persecution. The Christians have been persecuted. So have the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Mormons, even the Buddhists and Confucians. In some cases, these religions persecuted each other. In other cases, it was tyrannical governments that tried to stamp out all faiths with equal zeal. Although less common, philosophy and philosophers have been persecuted too (and persecuted others, as Marcus and other emperors did with early Christians). Epictetus, for instance, was banned from Rome as part of a blanket ban on philosophers by Emperor Domitian in 93 AD. Later, as the Christians took over Rome, philosophers were subjected to persecution and sometimes mob justice. The point is: Although it is less common today, ‘believing’ in something can cost you everything. We are not—and have not been—as tolerant as we like to think we have been and having faith in something in this world can be a revolutionary act. Which calls to mind an interesting question posed by a Christian theologian. He asked, as a kind of test to people who liked to call themselves Christians but ignore the actual tenets of the religion: If you were arrested and tried for being a Christian, would you be convicted? Or do your actions speak louder than any profession of belief?That’s a question for all of us today, whatever we believe, and most of all for this philosophy we are studying. Could you actually be convicted of being a Stoic? Does your behavior match what you claim to be? It was obvious that Epictetus was a philosopher, even if he’d denied it. Same with Marcus, same with Seneca. But you? Are you guilty of truly practicing philosophy? Or just the minor crime of association?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Stoics believed that stressful and dangerous situations unfold like this: Something happens—we wake up to reports that the stock market has taken a dive, we get screamed at by our boss, the doctor raises an eyebrow and recommends we go in for further testing…And this provokes a reaction—not a good one either. A scared one. Or an angry one. Something emotional. Or we go the opposite way and we just shut down, paralyzed by the events. The Stoics called these involuntary and immediate impressions that we form in response to bad news or stress phantasiai. Contrary to what you might think, the Stoics were quite sympathetic to these reactions. They understand them as natural, and largely out of our control. You throw something surprising at someone...and they’re going to be surprised. That’s how it works. That’s why it’s called ‘surprise.’Stoicism is not a philosophy meant to show you how to stop that. Instead, what Stoicism is about is what to do next. What to do after the involuntary first impression has been given its moment. As Donald Robertson writes in his wonderful book, How To Think Like a Roman Emperor, “The Stoic tells himself that although the situation may appear frightening, the truly important thing in life is how he chooses to respond.” It’s perfectly reasonable to tremble in the face of danger, he says, and it was likely that Cato and Marcus Aurelius were scared on the eve of battle or before an important speech. But we don’t hold that against them, because what mattered is what they did next.They led the charge. They gave the speech. They did the right thing anyway. They transcended their phantasiai. And so must you.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Perhaps you remember reading The Odyssey in high school or college (or possibly you picked up Emily Wilson’s fabulous new translation). Even if you haven’t, you’re probably familiar with the cyclops scene. Odysseus and his men find themselves trapped in a cave with Polyphemus, the deranged, man-eating, sheep herding, one-eyed beast. Odysseus hatches an ingenious escape plan: they wait for the cyclops to fall asleep and then stab him in the eye with a sharpened log. Enraged and blinded, Polyphemus staggers to remove the stone he had rolled in front of the entrance of the cave, which frees Odysseus and his men.It’s brilliant and, best of all, Odysseus, never having given the cyclops his real name, is off scot-free. But then, just out of reach of the bleeding, angry, shouting cyclops, he turns back and taunts:“Cyclops! If any mortal asks you howYour eye was mutilated and made blind,Say that Odysseus, the city-saker,Laertes’ son, who lives in Ithaca,Destroyed your sight.”Odysseus just couldn’t help himself. He wanted the credit. And he stupidly forgot that Polyphemus’ father was Poseidon, and that the lord of the sea was unlikely to act kindly towards someone who had blinded his son. This moment of hubris cost Odysseus something like ten years of his life, as Poseidon threw up countless obstacles, one after the other, between Odysseus and his wife, Penelope, back home in Ithaca. It’s a lesson that many people have heeded (and plenty of others have painfully forgotten) ever since. Marcus Aurelius, for his part, talked often about the worthlessness of credit. So you did a good thing, he says, why do you need to be thanked for it? It felt good to do, it helped someone else, why do you need the third thing of credit or recognition or gratitude? The same goes for a clever plan or successful business deal. Do you really need people to know you pulled it off?The answer is that you don’t. In fact, it’s usually better not to get credit (because the ‘right thing’ is not always appreciated, because other people might get jealous, because it puffs up your ego). Think about that today, and remember it always. You don’t need credit. That’s not what should motivate you. Do the right thing because it’s right. Pursue excellence because that’s what you do. Leave the recognition and the rewards alone. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Seneca was exiled once in AD 41 and then again from Nero’s service at the end of his career. Epictetus was exiled in Nicopolis, Greece by the Emperor Domitian. Publius Rutilius Rufus, the Roman tax official who was convicted on false charges, was exiled to Asia. Stoicism and exile seems to go hand in hand. Winston Churchill, who himself spent about 10 years in political exile after WWI, once wrote that:“Every prophet has to come from civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give, and then he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.”The period of difficulty and loneliness and loss that Seneca and Epictetus went through—this was not simply some bad period in their life. No, it was a formative, soul-strengthening, priority-clarifying experience that made them who they were. Publius Rutilius Rufus not only wasn’t bitter about the slanderous accusations and the trumped up political attack he was a victim of, he chose Asia as his exile—where he could go back to be with the citizens who actually appreciated his honesty and hard work. It was an awful experience, to be sure, but he accepted it with cheerful Stoicism. Psychic dynamite is not just handed to us. We aren’t born resilient or with confidence. We have to earn it. We have to make it. And that is only possible in difficult circumstances, it can only be found in the wilderness, where we are alone, where we are forced to adapt and adjust to circumstances outside our control.It won’t be fun, but it is essential.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you look at any of the great Stoics, you’ll notice that philosophy was just one of their many diverse interests. Seneca was a philosopher and a playwright and a political advisor. Marcus Aurelius was dabbling in philosophy...as he had the most important job on the planet. Cato was a senator who led the opposition to Julius Caesar. Cleanthes was a boxer and a water-carrier. And Zeno, the founding teacher of the philosophy, began his career as a successful merchant voyager. The stereotype of the philosopher is one who spends all day and night with their dense textbooks and their denser thoughts. When the truth is that the great philosophers we hold up as having made these brilliant insights into human nature and the human experience were reading and studying philosophy in addition to many other endeavors and activities. They, David Epstein would say, had “range,” they were “generalists.” In his new book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, Epstein put to bed the myth that going all in on a particular field is the key to lasting success. As he told us in our interview for DailyStoic.com:We miss out on wisdom if we’re too narrow...Specialists become so narrow that they actually start developing worse judgment about the world as they accumulate knowledge...Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. Transfer is your ability to take knowledge and skills and apply them to a problem or situation you have not seen before. And your ability to do that is predicted by the variety of situations you’ve faced...As you get more variety, you’re forced to form these broader conceptual models (in the classroom setting called “making connections” knowledge), which you can then wield flexibly in new situations. One can imagine Zeno translating things he learned on the open sea as a merchant into lessons for his students at the Stoa. Maybe Cleanthes discovered something about himself during his manual labors. It's unquestionable that Marcus Aurelius's real world responsibilities provided insights for his philosophical studies and vice versa. As for Seneca, his philosophy influenced his politics and his bloody and dark plays are undoubtedly influenced by what he experienced walking the halls of power.The more things we open ourselves up to, the more we experience, the better philosophers we’ll be, the better leaders, employees, individuals we’ll be. Today, put an emphasis on variety, on opening yourself up to the opportunity of being a little outside your comfort zone. Read philosophy. Read subjects outside your field. Pursue those curiosities you’ve been postponing. Say yes to the experience you’re reluctant to make time for. You’ll be better for it.P.S. Check out our full interview with David Epstein and if you haven’t already, check out his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized WorldSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

One gets the sense that Seneca, like many smart and active people, was often frustrated by other people. It is inevitable that someone like him—someone creating art, actively participating in government, managing properties, etc—would have regularly found his interest and his will thwarted. Perhaps a neighbor opposed some changes he was making to his land. Or an intriguing enemy at the palace sought to undermine him with the emperor. Maybe his brother jostled for an inheritance. Maybe he bumped into a rude person in the street. These are timeless and common occurrences. And, quite naturally, they are prone to make us angry—especially if we impute the least charitable motivations on the other party. My neighbor is trying to screw me over. So and so wants my job. My brother is up to his old tricks. This guy is a selfish jerk.When we think this way, we get angry. It’s hard not to. Which is why Seneca—from experience—said that we have to resist. Instead, we should try to go through life like a lawyer...or rather like a public defender. We must, he said, “plead the case of the absent defendant despite our own interests.” That is, really take the time to think about what is motivating other people. Take the time to act as if we are trying to help them escape punishment from the judge and jury that is the emotional and vindictive part of our mind (Oh, he really just wants what’s best for everyone. My brother doesn’t know better. This guy didn’t mean to bump into me—he’s just having a hard day). Don’t just fight to see the worst, fight to see their side. When we do this, when we give people the benefit of the doubt—the presumption of innocence instead of the presumption of guilt and ill-motives—everything relaxes. We can forgive. We can find common ground. We can focus on what is actually important...our own behavior. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When did Jesus deliver his famous Sermon on the Mount? We don’t know. But we know that Seneca and Jesus were born at roughly the same time and were part of the same massive empire. As far distant as the Mount of Beatitudes was from Rome, the men were thinking and speaking about very similar things. Certainly Seneca, who wrote so much about the futility of anxiety and fear and the inevitability of death, would have agreed with that famous line from the sermon:“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? So if you cannot do such a small thing, why do you worry about the rest?”Jesus believed that what happened to human beings was more or less up to God. Seneca that it was more or less up to fate. Both agreed—and even used the same word—the logos. The Way. To worry, to think that biting your nails accomplished anything? This was to doubt the logos. This was to break faith, and to abandon the considerable power that God (or the Gods) had already given us: to focus on what was in our control, to take advantage of the free will and the life we do have in this very moment. This is a two-thousand-year-old, cross-cultural, philosophical, and religious insight. And yet what are most of us wasting our time with today? With worry!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 executioner came down to take him from his cell, Canus simply got up and said, “You will testify that I was one piece ahead” and then went off to his death. As he waited to die, he saw his weeping friends. “Why are you sorrowful?” he said. “You ask if souls are immortal: I shall soon know.” Seneca, for his part, received a similar sentence. As his friends and family wept around him, he joked, “Who here is surprised at Nero’s cruelty?”There are many other such lines in the history of Stoicism. Theodorus was threatened not only with death but a particularly undignified one. “‘You have the right to please yourself,’ Seneca relates of Theodorus’ last words, “‘and the power to take half a pint of my blood; for as far as burial is concerned, what a simpleton you are, if you think it matters to me whether I rot above or below ground!’” Even in the American Revolution, lines like “I regret I have but one life to give for my country,” were directly inspired by the Stoics—in fact, they were cribbed from the play Cato, which was extremely popular at the time. In his essay on heroism, Emerson would comment, “that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit.” He quotes this passage from a famous 17th century play:Jul: Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye. Master: Very likely, 'Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.Another badass line for sure. The ultimate victory then is not just to be unafraid of being challenged or beaten. It’s to transcend the situation—to so keep our wits about us in the moment that we can even joke about it. To find humor in even the darkest and worst of situations. And when humor doesn’t suffice for the situation, we can instead stand calmly yet defiant in the face of Fate.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 a fuse, racked equally with anger and fear.His ranting and screaming met only silence from the group he gathered, broken only by more ranting and screaming. Finally, Augustus’s wife intervened: “Will you take a woman’s advice? Do what doctors do when the usual prescriptions have no effect: try the opposite remedies. Strictness has gotten you nowhere...Now try and see how far clemency gets you: forgive Lucius Cinna. He’s been caught and now can do you no harm, though he can do your reputation some good.”Augustus thanked his wife, called the meeting adjourned, and summoned Cinna to make amends. Cinna became Augustus’s “most grateful and loyal adherent,” Seneca reports. “And no one ever again formed any plot against him.”Even if you never find yourself the ruler of an empire or the target of a murder plot, this advice applies to so many circumstances. “What assistance can we find in the fight against habit?” Epictetus asked. Then answered, “Try the opposite!” Viktor Frankl liked to cure neurotic patients with a method called “paradoxical intention.” For insomnia, for instance, instead of standard therapies, his cure for the patient was to focus on not falling asleep. Whether the enemy is a conspirator, a bad habit, or trouble falling asleep, sometimes the best course of action, the best remedy, is to do the last thing they (or it) would ever expect you to do. Break the pattern. Try the opposite. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 he wanted the approval of Donald Trump. He wanted to be at the center of it. He wanted to be indispensable. He was willing to do just about anything to achieve it. And now he’s in jail. Seneca’s story is similar. He started off as Nero’s tutor, but as Nero became emperor and grew more and more powerful, it’s hard not to see how the dynamic shifted. Seneca remained in service to this deranged ruler, doing his bidding, helping him with things he knew were wrong. Why? He likely told himself that he needed Nero to like and trust him so that he would be able to temper his worst impulses and steer him toward goodness. That was part of it. But also, he must have enjoyed the power and influence. He liked knowing that he was needed by the most powerful man in the world. It was a costly bargain, one that destroyed Seneca’s reputation and, in the end, took his life. If only he could have remembered his own advice, it would have helped him snap out of it—“The favor of ignoble men can be won only by ignoble means,” Seneca had written. Yet that’s precisely where his job took him. We should learn from all of these examples. There is no way to work for bad people without becoming at least a little bit like them. There is no way to not be discombobulated by the reality distortion fields of these types, and this, as James Comey recently explained, is the first step in the slippery slope of corruption. We must be very careful about who we work for, who we associate with, and who we try to impress. Because it puts into motion a process that once begun is impossible to stop...and rarely ends well. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 most of what we want to win turns out to not really be worth it.This was Marcus Aurelius’ point. When we look at history and other people, it’s hard not to see “how trivial the things we want so passionately are.” But what if you don’t realize that yourself? Or rather, what if you don’t realize that the presidency or a billion dollars isn’t that meaningful until after you’ve given up everything for it? After you’ve traded your marriage or your principles or your youth to get it?"Now you're free of illusions," says a character in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. "How does it feel to be free of one's illusions?" The protagonist can only answer, "Painful and empty." In this way, we are almost lucky not to get everything we want, to not be allowed our trivial passionate yearnings. Because we are allowed to continue in ignorance. We don’t have to do the hard work on ourselves, and really look in the mirror. Of course, this is what a philosopher does all the time. Instead of hiding behind luck’s protection, or instead of continuing to lie to themselves that more, more, more will make them happy, they actually probe themselves. They question their desires. They look into the future and ask, “What would happen if all my dreams did come true? Why would I suddenly be happy then? Why can’t I be happy now instead?”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 brief myself, he once said), and he cheats on his wi(ves) and lies. A lot. And if the reports on his taxes are even half true, he’s actually not a particularly great businessman, having lost so much money year after year that were it not for the largesse of his father and the extreme negligence of the IRS and the media, he would probably be living under a bridge or in a jail cell. That he is president--a job that looms large in so many people’s daily lives--concerns many parents. What should I tell my kid about this? What do I teach them about what they’re seeing on the news? (Again, let’s focus on the fact that this is a problem shared by all parents, even the ones who have decided his personal vices are worth trading for important policy gains). The Stoics have a lot to say about this, because they too lived under imperfect politicians as well as amidst corruption and excess. Seneca saw his share of Donald Trumps (and worked as best he could with them.) Epictetus was exiled from Rome by a paranoid and petty emperor. Marcus Aurelius himself battled with the corrosive effects of power on his own person. The Stoics also looked regularly at history to study these types. They didn’t simply bury their head in the sand, they weren’t naive. They knew that aggression and ego and insatiableness was a combination often found in kings. Their writings reflect all of this—warnings against avarice, instruction to avoid capriciousness and greed, reminders of how easily we can fall into the same patterns ourselves. “Robbers, perverts, killers and tyrants,” Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, “gather for your inspection their so-called pleasures!” He wanted to learn from Nero, and even from Hadrian whom he had both admiration and disgust for, and to never follow in their footsteps. One suspects he spent a lot of time instructing his children about this as well. He wanted them to know that being a Donald Trump is no fun, even if it does make you rich or famous or feared. That as a story, it might seem impressive for a while, but inevitably the end is never pretty. Marcus’s own son Commodus didn’t heed this lesson and became proof of its universal truth. But at least he was warned. And so too should every young person thinking about what kind of person they want to end up being.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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-improvement and the pursuit of wisdom was not this extra thing we did with our spare time when we were finished working or putting our kids down to bed. No, it was the main thing. Everything else was the hobby. That was Seneca’s line (which we talked about in March): “Devote yourself wholly to philosophy. You are worthy of her; she is worthy of you; greet one another with a loving embrace. Say farewell to all other interests with courage and frankness. Do not study philosophy merely during your spare time.”And what was true in March was true in the first century AD when he wrote it, and it’s an important reminder again here today. If someone with a great track record had a great investment opportunity for you, you’d clear your schedule and seriously research it. If you got the call you’ve been waiting for, the one that would let you pursue your dream career, you’d do anything to say yes. You’d quite everything else. But wisdom seems less urgent. Less important. Something you can get around to later, if you so choose. No. If the end goal is happiness, strength in adversity, perspective, virtue—the kinds of traits you see in the people you truly admire—then philosophy has to be the priority, not the side hustle. It has to be the main thing. Everything else can come after, if there is even room.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 immigrant housekeeper, that Steinbeck delivers the novel’s main theme: timshel—“thou mayest”—the Hebrew belief in our power to choose between good and bad. Lee offers sage-like advice throughout the novel, including this beautiful monologue on what it means to be human:“We’re a violent people, Cal...Maybe it’s true, that we are all descendants of the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers, and brawlers. But also the brave, and independent, and generous....We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left. All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It’s a breed—selected out by accident. And so we’re overbrave and overfearful—we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic—and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture? That’s what we are, Cal — all of us. You aren’t very different.” Epictetus said that our “most efficacious gift,” what distinguishes humans from other animals, the essence of human nature, is the faculty of choice. Each person has the choice to be good or bad, to love or hate, to be strong or weak, brave or cowardly. Marcus Aurelius’s writings are, in a sense, his wrestling with making the right choices. They are his attempt to answer the incredibly difficult question he had been confronted with as a result of circumstances he didn’t choose: You have been made emperor, what kind of emperor will you be? What kind of person will you be?“I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil,” Marcus wrote, “and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.” We have good and evil, beauty and ugliness, in each of us. The question today is which are you going to choose to lean toward? What are you going to choose to cultivate? The choice is yours.And the answer is everything.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 by Hannibal in the 200s BCE. In the book Of Anger, Seneca draws on Fabius to teach a lesson from war that every citizen and leader and business person should be familiar with: “Fabius used to say that the basest excuse for a commanding officer is ‘I didn’t think it would happen,’ but I say it’s the basest for anyone. Thinking everything might happen; anticipate everything.”When the Stoics talk about the exercise of premeditatio malorum, that’s what they’re trying to train into you. To make sure you’re not surprised by the twists and turns of life, or by the moves of the enemy. Because there is no excuse.But what about black swans? you say. True black swans are rare. They have never happened before. That is what makes them black swans. Most of what we are unprepared for are not those kind of freak occurrences. Look at Fabius’s quote closely: To say “I didn’t think it would happen,” means you’re already aware of the possibility and have dismissed it. When that happens, it’s not bad luck—it’s ego come home to roost. We must keep our eyes open. We must consider all the potential consequences, even the unlikely or the unusual or the unintended ones. We must be ready. Fortune behaves as she pleases. So do our opponents. Don’t be surprised. There’s no excuse...except that you haven’t been doing your work. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 them. However, the truth is that most of the wrongs committed day to day are done by ordinary people in ordinary ways. Even most of the wrongs done to us are not done with any particular malice, but instead stem from ignorance or fatigue or simple selfishness. Moreover, most of them are mistakes we have made ourselves in the distant or not so distant past. As Seneca writes:“A good look at ourselves will make us more temperate if we ask…‘Haven’t we ourselves also done something like that? Haven’t we gone astray in the same way? Does condemning these things really benefit us?’”When we realize that more errors are relatable and human, we are more likely to understand and forgive. We will not take personally a slight or a screw-up we have been guilty of ourselves—because we remember that when we did it, it was not personal or even intentional. When we recall how dumb we were when we were young, we won’t be so quick to judge the generation coming after us. When we consider all the current beliefs we will be judged for by that generation, perhaps we can be a little more tolerant of the older generation in front of us. We’ve all messed up. We will all continue to mess up. Does it really benefit us—is it really fair—to go around condemning people for mistakes we’ve made ourselves? For going astray as we have gone astray?No. It doesn’t. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 someone’s health when we see their anger, fearing that they might have a heart attack. Seneca, referencing a thought from the philosopher Sextius, writes, “it has often been useful to angry people to look in a mirror. The great transformation in themselves has disturbed them; they have no longer recognized themselves, yet how little of their true deformity was displayed in the image reflected in the mirror.”Spot on. Yet, like so many things we are critical of, it’s rare that we apply this gaze back at ourselves. Notice Seneca doesn’t describe how his anger looks in the mirror. In fact, almost nowhere in his essay, Of Anger, does he discuss his own temper and the problems it has caused him. Your job today is to look in the mirror. To think about how unflattering anger is on you, how much it transforms and deforms you when you allow it to take hold. Anger is not a good look on other people, which makes it very unlikely that it is a good look on you. So don’t waste any more time thinking about their bad fashion choices. Fix your own. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 is full of examples like this. Monkeys randomly picking stocks will often outperform the market. Index funds beat world class hedge fund managers almost more than average. Warren Buffett made and won a decade-long bet to this effect: putting his money on a boring, low-cost stock index fund outperforming a collection of hedge funds. The lesson of these little oddities is in their lack of oddness. Marcus Aurelius took pains to remind himself just how common he was, just how many emperors came before him and would come after. Surely he must have noted to himself that if Hadrian hadn’t chosen him, somebody else would have filled in. If he had worked less hard or retreated from Rome, like his predecessor Tiberius, life would have carried on without him and history would have been only imperceptibly different. The same goes for us. Yes, it’s wonderful that you’re here. Yes, you’re very talented and good at what you do. But also...you’re just not that important. Even the very best of us are just tiny dots on the graph, and we’re all replaceable. Like those jockeys, we’re all riding on the backs of horses that are doing most of the work. We all have the wind of progress pushing us forward, we’re all just one of many people capable of helping things along. Let this humble you a little. Let it help you take things a little less seriously. Don’t let it stop you from trying, of course, but allow it to erase your ego when you start to think you’ve got this thing beat. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 universe, that we are all one.Marcus Aurelius liked to say that he wasn’t a citizen of Rome, but of the world. Matt Kepnes, or better known as “Nomadic Matt,” quite literally is a citizen of the world. Matt spent a decade living out of a backpack, traveling the world. He captures the journey and everything it taught him in Ten Years A Nomad, which released this week. In our interview with Matt for DailyStoic.com, we were curious to find out if—given all the different cultures he’s lived in and the people he’s met—it’s been his experience that we really aren’t all that different from each other. Matt said:People really are the same everywhere. Interacting with people, watching them commute, pick up laundry, go grocery shopping, and do all the other everyday things you did back home—you really internalize the idea that, fundamentally, we all just want the same things: to be happy, to be safe and secure, to have friends and family who love us. The how of what we do is different but the why of what we do is universal. This is true not only right now, but it’s true for the past and the future. Humans are humans are humans—for good and for bad. How much better a place would the world be if we could all remember this? If the Stoic concept of sympatheia was never far from our minds (it’s why we created a reminder of it to carry in your pocket)? Certainly we'd get along better, collaborate better, and be more understanding of each other. If you’ve done any bit of traveling, Matt’s answer likely reminds you of your own experiences of being far from home but finding comfort in realizing that the people are just like you. Doing their best. Just wanting to feel happy, safe and secure, loved—and around the people who put them there the most. That is universal.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 the word “is,” for evidence of that fact. Few presidents have been self-aware. In a way, the job selects against it: The kind of person who thinks they deserve to be the most powerful person in the country—or in the world—isn’t usually the one who stops and thinks critically about themselves. Marcus Aurelius had a little bit of an advantage. He didn’t exactly choose to be emperor. It was thrust upon him. He knew he was a regular person—not a god—and this allowed him to escape what he called imperialization, being changed by the office. And still, Marcus, like all of us, struggled with self-awareness. Surely his trusted advisors talked privately amongst themselves about his flaws, and had to try to work around his ego, or convince him not to react emotionally or personally to things, in order to do what was best for the empire. The battle for self-awareness is an endless one. The ability to step back and see yourself from a distance, to analyze your own flaws and weaknesses, to understand your own motivations? This is not only not easy, it’s basically not natural. We were given—cursed with—all sorts of biases and blind spots that work against self-knowledge on a daily basis. Yet we must continue to aim for self-awareness, at knowing ourselves as fully as possible. Nixon’s lack of self-awareness might have helped him become president, but it also cut his second term painfully short. Marcus undermined his own legacy with his persecution of the Christians and his helplessness when it came to choosing a successor. And so will we destroy ourselves and undermine our own legacy if we are not always working to understand ourselves better, to question our biases, and to look at ourselves...objectively.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 plain living, not for penance...our lives should observe a happy medium between the ways of the sage and the ways of the world at large.” Plain living is, to a certain degree, relative. A $100 steak dinner to one person is an insane luxury. To a person with a much larger salary and in a different social setting, having dinner at that same restaurant might be an unassuming and convenient choice (especially if all their friends are chasing reservations somewhere fancier and even more expensive). That Mercedes they bought with cash, that is both really safe and gets great gas mileage, might actually be plainer living than it is for the person of more modest means who is driving a brand new Nissan on a no-money-down lease (when really they ought to be taking the train). Stoicism is not, as Seneca said, a form of self-flagellation. It’s about responsibility and sobriety. It’s possible to be sober and rich, just as it’s possible to be middle class and reckless. You only live once. Money is earned to be spent. Just make sure you’re spending it smartly and philosophically. And living, as best you can, plainly. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 anything done with all that occupying their mind. Indeed, that’s sort of the point the Stoics were trying to make. They knew that a person busy kicking themselves over what has happened in the past, or biting their nails over what might happen in the future, is a person who is not busy with life. It’s a person who is not able to be philosophical, productive, or present. As Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself—and by extension, to us:“Remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present—and even that can be minimized. Just mark off its limits. And if your mind tries to claim that it can’t hold out against that…well, then, heap shame upon it.”We have to limit our focus. And the key is to focus on what is immediately in front of you. Don’t be paralyzed by the past or intimidated by the future. Don’t be distracted by them either. Even the troubles on your plate can be minimized if you break them into smaller pieces—don’t worry about the big, busy “day” you have to get through, just get through the morning. Just get through the first item on your to-do list.And if your mind wanders, if you start to get distracted, say to yourself, “C’mon. I’m better than this. I’m just going to focus on what’s in front of me. That’s plenty.” That’s what Marcus meant by heaping shame, after all. So get out there and get after it!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 achieved exactly what he always wanted. The frontman for Weezer was the bonafide rockstar he dreamed of being—sold out crowds, mansions in Beverly Hills, assistants catering to his every wish, groupies, parties, fame. You might have said he had it all. Except while Cuomo “had it all,” his band members didn’t talk to him and he hated the music he was making. Producer Rick Rubin called Weezer one of the most dysfunctional groups he’s ever worked with. Cuomo was steeped in, as he put it, a “life of ego and vice.” But it got him to where he wanted to go. Unlike most disillusioned egomaniacs, when Cuomo came out on the other side he was vocal about dispelling the myth that success necessitates ego:“I needed to stop being that person...It took awhile for me to realise this—an ego is the biggest menace to a songwriter. It can destroy you. It takes away your ability to step outside of yourself, which I feel is important if you want to make music that means something to people.”The Stoics said that hubris—ego by its other name—was the ultimate enemy. That “it can ruin your life,” Marcus would say, because “it ruins your character.” Again, even if it might make you successful in the meantime. To the Stoics, humility and self-awareness are not only stronger, but better and more virtuous. That’s why ego must be conquered. For our art, for our happiness, for the sake of the world. We must remember that you become great by stripping yourself of pretenses and ego. You can have a stadium full of fans, but if your band members hate you, how great, how successful are you? And how long is it likely to last? How can you make anything that matters to other people if the only thing that matters to you is yourself? When you step outside yourself, when you put things bigger and more important than yourself first, when you see ego for the menace it is--for the enemy that it is—you will be great and do great.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.