The Daily Stoic

Ryan talks about the new Daily Stoic offices, reads a selection from The Obstacle is the Way, and answers your questions.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Courage. Temperance. Justice. These are the critical virtues of life. But what situations call for courage? What is the right amount? What is the right thing? This is where the final and essential virtue comes in: Wisdom. The knowing. The learning. The experience required to navigate the world. Wisdom has always been prized by the Stoics. Zeno said that we were given two ears and one mouth for a reason: to listen more than we talk. And since we have two eyes, we are obligated to read and observe more than we talk as well. It is key today, as it was in the ancient world, to  be able to distinguish between the vast aggregations of information that lay out there at your disposal—and the actual wisdom that you need to live a good life. It’s key that we study, that we keep our minds open always. You cannot learn that which you think you already know, Epictetus said. It’s true. Which is why we need to not only be humble students but also seek out great teachers. It’s why we should always be reading. It’s why we can

Being brave. Finding the right balance. These are core Stoic virtues, but in their seriousness, they pale in comparison to what the Stoics worshipped most highly: Doing the right thing. There is no Stoic virtue more important than justice, because it influences all the others. Marcus Aurelius himself said that justice is “the source of all the other virtues.” Stoics throughout history have pushed and advocated for justice, oftentimes at great personal risk and with great courage, in order to do great things and defend the people and ideas that they loved. Cato gave his life trying to restore the Roman Republic.And Thrasea and Agrippinus gave theirs resisting the tyranny of Nero.George Washington and Thomas Jefferson formed a new nation—one which would seek, however imperfectly, to fight for democracy and justice—largely inspired by the philosophy of Cato and those other Stoics.Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a translator of Epictetus, led a black regiment of troops in the US Civil War.Beatrice Webb, who helped to

Yesterday we discussed the Four Virtues, and talked about the primacy of courage. Of course, life is not so simple as to say that courage is all the counts. While everyone would admit that courage is essential, we are also all well aware of people whose bravery turns to recklessness and becomes a fault when they begin to endanger themselves and others. This is where Aristotle comes in. Aristotle actually used courage as the main example in his famous metaphor of a “Golden Mean.” On one end of the spectrum, he said, there was cowardice—that’s a deficiency of courage. On the other, there was recklessness—too much courage. What was called for, what we required then, was a golden mean. The right amount.That’s what Temperance or moderation is about: Doing nothing in excess. Doing the right thing in the right amount in the right way. In Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, the emperor Hadrian writes to Marcus Aurelius that “overeating is a Roman vice.” He explains that far too many of his fellow citizens “poi

The Stoics believed that a life well lived was one which always countered adversity with virtue. And they believed in four aspects of virtue: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Each and every situation calls for one or more of these four Stoic virtues, and nothing in life exempts us from their power. Today, we begin with one of the most important: Courage. If you’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s dark and beautiful novel All the Pretty Horses, you’ll remember the key question that Emilio Perez asks John Grady, one that cuts to the core of life and what we all must do to live a life worth living.“The world wants to know if you have cojones. If you are brave?”The Stoics might have phrased this a bit differently. Seneca would say that he actually pitied people who have never experienced misfortune. “You have passed through life without an opponent,” he said, “No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”The world wants to know what category to put you in, which is why it will occasionally send diff

The Stoics said it over and over: the most important thing to remember about pain and suffering is that it is inevitable. It can’t be avoided, so don’t make it worse by fearing it, worrying about whether it will come, wondering how bad it will be. Seneca’s line was that we suffer more in imagination than in reality. The essential insight from Epictetus was: It’s not things that upset us, it’s our opinion about them. And Marcus Aurelius too: If you choose to feel like you’ve been harmed, you have been. At just eight years old, Verity Smith was told that, due to a rare genetic disorder, she would soon lose her eyesight. She didn’t have a choice. She would be blind. All that was left to her was how she would respond to this demand of fate. In our interview with Verity, we asked her to take us back to that diagnosis and how she came to terms, mentally and emotionally, with the painful realities of losing her vision. Her answer is extraordinary:I saw going blind as a challenge, a game...I understood that the darkn

Ryan uses eight Stoic lessons to teach us how to have the best week ever.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week's extra-long Saturday episode of Ask Daily Stoic features Ryan talking about, and speaking with, author Steven Pressfield, writer of classic books such as The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and The War of Art.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Life is a dirty, dusty affair. It was that way in Rome and it’s that way today. The puddle in the street splashes us. Someone else’s nasty mood sullies our demeanor. The heat makes us sweat. The news of the world makes us worried. We spill some food, we spill out some frustration. We wake up in the morning fresh and ready to go and by the end of the day, we are covered in dust. The dust of emotions, of work, of stress, of everything. The Stoics knew this and they knew also that it was critical to find ways to, as Marcus Aurelius put it, wash away the dust of earthly life. There were many ways to do this, literally and figuratively. Seneca noted that Socrates liked to play music and to play games with children to relax and have fun. Cato liked to have long meals over wine where philosophy was discussed. We also know from stories that he would frequent Roman baths, as did Seneca, where the grime of the city could be scrubbed away, but where also they might have some time to think. Even that observation from Mar

The Stoic writings alternate between reminding us of our humility and our power. For humility, we have the concept of amor fati, for example—we should learn to love our fate, “good or bad” because we’re powerless to do anything about it. And with equal sincerity, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that if something is humanly possible, he should believe he is capable of doing it. Humility and power. Power and humility. It’s not a contradiction. It’s a balance. On some days we need a reminder of the former, and on other days, the latter. Today, let’s do the latter. How’s this: The Stoics believed each of us was a god. As Cicero writes in his dialog, Scipio’s Dream: “The true self of each person is the mind. Know therefore that you are a god. For a god is someone who moves, who feels, who remembers, who looks to the future, who rules over and guides and directs the body he is master of, just as that Supreme God directs the universe. And just as this eternal God controls the universe, which is partly mortal, so too

“Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams once said, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” How true it is. It’s an idea that goes to the very essence of what Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus spend so much time talking about.Reality is a stubborn thing. As much as we might want events to go or be one way, this has little bearing on the way they are. We wish we had been born tall, to a rich or royal family, we wish that special someone we fell head over heels in love with would return the feeling (or be the person we idealized them to be in our hearts) and yet, that is not how things are. We put in the work and yet, somehow, the person who was less talented won. We held our nose and voted for one candidate and, still, somehow the greater of two evils ended up winning. What do we do? It’s so unfair. It’s so frustrating. It’s just not right. Yet, yet, yet...In ex-Marine Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, a novel based

It’s no secret that John Adams is one of history’s brilliant minds. He was widely respected as a lawyer, a politician, a president, and as a husband, a father, and a friend. But for all this, he was often overwhelmed by anguish, despair, discontent, loneliness, doubt, fear, uncertainty, and the rest. “I can as easily still the fierce tempests or stop the rapid thunderbolt,” he once lamented in his journal, “as command the motions and operations of my own mind.” Like many of us, Adams longed for stillness, for “tranquility of mind,” vowing to one day “wear out of my mind every mean and base affection.” But it was a long time coming—indeed, it nearly came too late. In 1819, the year after the death of his treasured wife of fifty-four years, the devastated Adams turned to Cicero’s essay on growing old gracefully, De Senectute. It was an essay he had read “for seventy years, to the point of nearly knowing it by heart,” but somehow, now, in the quiet stillness, he found something new in it. As he wrote:I never del

Steven Pressfield, whose historically-driven novels about ancient Greece have sold millions of copies, wrote a recent post that posits that there are two kinds of people in the world—Zero-Sum and Non-Zero-Sum. Hitler was zero-sum. He believed that the Aryan race could only survive if it took from and eliminated other races. Abraham Lincoln was non-zero-sum. Yes, he believed that slavery was a horrible evil and needed to end, but he did not believe that the North needed to crush and destroy the South. In fact, his famous Second Inaugural Address is all about how both sides shared the blame and both could be redeemed by the suffering they had endured in this horrible Civil War. Martin Luther King was non-zero-sum. So were the Spartans at Thermopylae, who sacrificed their lives just to buy a little more time for their Greek allies to prepare. Almost all villains in history and in fiction, on the other hand, are zero-sum. They believed that someone else’s loss was their gain—and that their own pain justified the

Ryan talks about speaking to service members at Aviano Air Base in Italy. Ryan reads a passage from Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit. You can also find these videos on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It was a somber scene as the pallbearers marched down Pine Street carrying the coffin of General William Tecumseh Sherman on this day 129 years ago. It grew more somber still as the rain started to drizzle and then rain steadily. The temperatures dropped as the procession winded through the streets. Repeatedly along the seven mile walk, the former Confederate General Joe Johnston, then old and frail, but who had faced off in battle against Sherman many times, was asked if someone could take his place so that he might go inside and warm up. No, Johnson said, I’m fine. An aide suggested that he at least put on a hat to keep dry. Once again, Johnson refused. It would be impolite. It would be disrespectful to the dead. “If the positions were reversed,” he said, “Sherman would not do so.” So he continued to carry the coffin, bare-headed in the rain, in honor of his former enemy, the man who had beaten and dominated him.  Marcus Aurelius wrote of how we should do the right thing, whether it’s cold or warm, whether

One of the most remarkable traditions of ancient Rome—and one for which we have no real modern analog—was the tradition of wealthy, successful families adopting and raising young men (sometimes women) to be their heir. Scipio Aemilianus, one of the early patrons of Stoicism, for instance, was adopted into the famous Scipio family, while his elder brother Quintus was adopted by the Fabii family, an equally grand legacy. Seneca was not adopted (nor did he adopt anyone), but his brother Novatus was adopted by Lucius Junius Gallio, an admired rhetorician, and eventually changed his name accordingly. You might be familiar with it, in fact, because Gallio—Seneca’s brother—appears in the Bible, having fairly adjudicated a legal case against the apostle Paul. Marcus Aurelius himself underwent a similar process when Hadrian (adopted by Trajan) adopted Antoninus who in turn adopted Marcus Aurelius. The point of today’s email is not to tell you to rush out and sign up to be a foster parent—although it would be wonderful

It’s another mess. It’s not your fault, but you’re dealing with it. It’s another rude person— representing a company you are paying money to—who doesn’t seem to get how this is supposed to work. It’s another example of disrespect, or bias, or plain discrimination. It’s precisely the kind of thing that pisses you off. So you’re angry. It shouldn’t be like this. It doesn’t need to be like this. When will it stop?The Stoics have an answer. It might not be the one you want to hear, but it’s an answer. The answer is that this will stop soon. It always does. Everything does. As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations:Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone — those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the ‘what’ is in constant flux, the ‘why’ has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indign

Imagine writing a book that sells millions of copies over the course of nearly a decade, and then, out of nowhere, another author comes along and challenges it. What would you do? In Malcolm Gladwell’s massive bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success, he posits that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is required to master any skill. Implicit in Gladwell’s argument is that success is the manifestation of specialization. If you want to be among the best at something, you have to focus solely on that singular skill. David Epstein first disputed the 10,000-hour rule in his book The Sports Gene. He was then invited to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to debate Gladwell on this topic of specialization. Neither they or their critics would have predicted the friendship that came out of the debate. But their discussions spawned the ideas that became Epstein’s second book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World—which doesn’t just challenge the 10,000-hour rule, it may well debunk it. How did G

Cicero and Cato both refused to take bribes, despite how widespread the practice was for politicians at the time. Cato refused to be enriched by his office in any form, even though that was even more common. Marcus Aurelius refused inheritances that were offered to him, much the same way. Although they never gave us their exact reasons, it’s pretty easy to deduce. Because corruption is a betrayal of the public trust. Even if it weren’t, Marcus and Cato would likely have declined all the same. Why? Because to accept the money would have been to sacrifice their autonomy. They lived along the same principle so brilliantly expressed, thousands of years later, by the photographer Bill Cunningham: “If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.”Just look at Seneca. While there is no evidence he took outright bribes, he did accept a paycheck from Nero. He accepted piles and piles of gifts. He couldn’t see that Nero was slowly buying him, trapping him in a gilded cage. Seneca’s fortune grew—soon, he wa

Ryan talks about putting the finishing touches on his upcoming book, Lives of the Stoics. Featuring today's entry from The Daily Stoic. You can also find these videos on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.