Around the world, millions of people are trained to respond to difficulty with calm. They are firefighters, who don’t flinch before running into a burning building. They are EMTs, who come upon a scene of total carnage and spring into action. They are military professionals, who run into gunfire, not away from it. Were these people born […]
Imagine what it must have been like to be Marcus Aurelius. He was the Emperor of Rome. People traveled from all the known corners of the world to pay him obeisance. Temples are erected in his honor. He led the Roman army to victory and was celebrated for it. He knew, even in his own time, […]
There is a term used to describe what might be called good problems to have: Problems like when you grab the wrong set of keys and your car automatically remembers the wrong seat settings. Or like when your business is going too well and you have to have an uncomfortable conversation about raising your rates. Or that your […]
One of the criticisms of some of the more modern writing about Stoicism is that it reduces the philosophy down to a mere “lifehack.” This is supposed to be a bad thing because the word evokes all the slocky, short-term, short-cut focused productivity tricks of the online world. If that’s what people are taking away from Stoicism, […]
Abraham Lincoln believed that slavery was a great evil—one of his most haunting memories was seeing a chain of black men being dragged off to be sold somewhere, like fish on a trotline. Yet when he was asked about the slave owners in the South, he refused to condemn them as people the way that […]
Another beautiful Stoic line from All The Pretty Horses: “I ain’t afraid to die.” “That is good. It will help you to die. It will not help you to live.” Let us not mistake the Stoic’s scorn for fear and mortality with recklessness or a death wish. The Stoic wants to live and wants to live well. How […]
Let’s face it: we’re all busy. Even a philosophy as simple as Stoicism can seem complicated and confusing. It’s easy to find reasons why tomorrow is a much better day to dig in and get serious about it. But as the saying goes “It works if you work it.” So below we have some very […]
In 1995, Pete Carroll was fired from his job as the coach of the New York Jets. He would say that his first reaction was disbelief. That it had happened. Why it happened. That it could have happened. But his second reaction was much more Stoic: “This might be the best thing that ever happened […]
The title of tomorrow’s entry in The Daily Stoic as well as today’s entry comes from the wonderful song by the singer/songwriter Jackie Greene, “Don’t Mind Me, I’m Only Dying Slow.” It’s a beautiful, lonely eight minute acoustic track, with a wheezing, bellowing harmonic chorus that evokes the sound of a man struggling to breathe. The entry that it […]