This Is How They Treat You After You’re Gone
07 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Da Vinci painted his brilliant fresco, The Last Supper, and how did they respond? They nagged at him...
What Would You Do?
06 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
News reports re-surfaced earlier this month that the teenaged son of Jeff Flake, the Republican Sena...
The Powerful Are Not Free
05 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s funny that we spend so much time being jealous of people whose lives we do not even begin to ...
It’s All In How You See It
03 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Seneca said that the growth of anything is a long process, but its undoing can be rapid, even instan...
These Are Life Choices You Control
30 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If you haven’t heard of George Raveling, you should. This a guy that Michael Jordan addresses as “...
It’s Always Been This Way, Always Will Be
29 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We like to think that we’re so advanced. That things have changed so radically since the ancient d...
Power and Success Can Make You Better
28 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lord Acton’s line is so famous and so undeniably true that most people don’t even know that it’...
Making A Difference IS Up To You
27 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Look, there’s no way around it: Part of Stoicism is accepting that a lot of what happens in the wo...
What Is Sympatheia? (And Why It’s So Damn Important)
26 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Book Six of Meditations, Marcus gives himself (and us) a command to keep an important idea in min...
Do Not Avoid This Thought
23 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene concludes his final chapter with this medit...
What Marcus Learned From Antoninus
22 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Where did Marcus learn to be Marcus? Ernest Renan writes that Marcus was very much a product of his ...
Don’t Get Upset By What You Disagree With
21 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The response to the Daily Stoic emails can be a fascinating peek into human psychology. One email, b...
Write And Think Clearly
20 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his short new edition of How To Be Free, A.A Long observes the relative ease he had translating E...
The Best Way To Fight Evil
19 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tolstoy believed his most essential work was not his novels but his daily read, A Calendar of Wisdom...
The Dance We Each Will Dance
16 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It would be hard to find a deeper, darker yet more philosophically interesting short film than the “...
The Perils of ‘Comfort Inflation’
15 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s so easy to take progress and luxury for granted. Warren Buffet has talked about how somebody ...
The Most Important Ritual You Can Practice This Year
14 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Why did Marcus Aurelius spend those precious hours in his tent, writing by the lamplight, even on th...
Be A User, Not A Loser
13 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. D.T. Suzuki, a 20th century Japanese author who was largely responsible for popularizing Buddhis...
You Become Like Your Friends
12 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Nature gave us friendship,” Cicero wrote, “as an aid to virtue, not as a companion to vice.”...
Get Yourself Under Control
09 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It was Heraclitus--a favorite of Marcus Aurelius--who said that “to be self-controlled is the grea...
We Have So Much In Common
08 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In a very short period around 2003, the musician Rosanne Cash lost her sister, her step mother, her ...
Your Hunger For Money Is Starving You
07 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
William MacAskill is a fascinating guy. He is the youngest Associate Professor in Philosophy at the ...
Each Of Us Has A Duty
06 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In one sense, it’s hard to argue with the statistics that any individual’s vote makes a differen...
Let Us Argue With Reality No More
05 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
So much of what we do as a society could be described as arguing with reality. Turn on cable news an...
Don’t Borrow Suffering
02 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Here’s a line from Seneca: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” Meaning, we spend ...
Let It Go, You’re Plenty Guilty Yourself
01 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Like you’ve never cut in line, on purpose or on accident. Like you’ve never done something self...
Don't Be A Snowflake
31 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago, conservative commentators in America began using a term for young college students-...
Is Anxiety Playing Tricks On You?
30 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
You’ll likely know Charlamagne Tha God as the host of the nationally revered radio show The Breakf...
The Present Is Pleasurable Enough
29 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On one of his more arduous hunts, after days of patiently tracking (and weeks of planning before tha...
We Are So Soon Forgotten
26 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A few miles outside Rome, along the still-smooth stone-paved Appian Way, is a tall brick tomb that i...
Time Doesn’t Make Everything Better...It Just Makes Them What They Are
25 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When we get dumped or we fail or we lose someone, we often hear that “Time heals all wounds” or ...
Be Severe Only With Yourself
24 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One of the things that separates us from other people--indeed that has been responsible for our succ...
We All Have The Same Nature
23 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Greene’s five international bestsellers earned him descriptions like genius and master of h...
We Take The Bitter To Get To The Sweets
22 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“The hunter worthy of the name always willingly takes the bitter if by so doing he can get the swe...
How To Be A Winner and a Loser
19 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Lombardi is a former NFL coach, GM and front office strategist who is largely responsible fo...
Accepting The Little Facts of Life
18 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1800s, Theodore Roosevelt was on a hunting trip in Big Hole Basin in Montana. The trip d...
Don’t Make This Mistake
17 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There is a repeated pattern of failure in Marcus Aurelius’s life, and no matter how much we might ...
Are You A Coward? Or Are You Brave?
16 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Varlam Shalamov was a brilliant writer who was sentenced in 1937 to years of hard labor in a Soviet ...
Why Ego Is Your Enemy
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One of the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous defined ego as “a conscious separation from.” F...
Don’t Be All About Business
12 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Is there anything sadder than a person whose work is their life? They neglect their family, they put...
Why Do You Care What They Think?
11 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a moment that almost everyone remembers from their childhood. They have just received some...
What You Think You’re Lacking Is The Problem
10 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
George Ball, the diplomat and advisor to President Kennedy (one of who David Halberstam would call ‘...
Love Always
09 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
1981 was a tough year for tennis great Billie Jean King. That year, she sat down to write her memoir...
Things Worse Than Dying
08 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Death and dying are the worst parts of life, right? After all, they do end the whole thing. So whil...
If Today Was Your Last Day
05 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We put a lot of thought into making distinctions about what’s urgent and what’s not. We put a lo...
We Pay The Iron Price
04 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Game of Thrones, the people of the Iron Islands believe they have been entitled by God to steal a...
Nothing Exempts You From Hard Work
03 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s interesting, if you think about Greek and Roman mythology, that the Gods were so active and b...
Nothing Can Touch The Soul
02 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun and the song it inspired, One by Metallica, tell the story of ...
It’s Time To Get Up. It’s Time To Get Up
01 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One of the best passages in all of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is the opener to Book V. In it, M...
Another Reason To Journal
28 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Walter Isaacson’s wonderful new biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, he spends a lot of time dissect...
Don’t Make This Mistake (Or Stop Before It’s Too Late)
27 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Why are good people attracted to serving bad people or bad causes? Aristotle taught Alexander the Gr...
Love Not Hate
26 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy to stir up resentment, harder to create common ground. It’s easy to point out what’s...
Make Sure You're Coming Home
21 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
All of us have day jobs. Even professional philosophers are still professors or authors, which means...
Different Folks Need Different Strokes
20 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Confucius was once asked for advice by a student, and in replying essentially urged him to wait and ...
What To Do When You’re Not Naturally Perfect
19 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It was on this day in the year 86 AD, that Antoninus Pius, the man who would become best known as th...
Approach Your Troubles Like Doctor
18 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s famously said that you should learn from the mistakes of others because you can’t live long...
This Will Help You Get Rid Of Crazy Thoughts
17 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Aaron Thier’s novel The World Is A Narrow Bridge (the title is a proverb we have written about ...
Virtue Is Contagious (and Has Obligations)
14 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The line from Confucius was that “Virtue is never solitary; it always has neighbors.” What he me...
It Comes For All, Young And Old
13 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The New York Times Obituary section this past weekend featured a somberly diverse list of losses: Wi...
What Should Good People Do?
12 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Confucius, like Seneca, was an interesting hybrid of philosopher and politician. For instance, in ad...
The Ideal Weapon For Spiritual Combat
11 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Michel Foucault has a fascinating essay on journaling entitled “Self-Writing.” In it, he describ...
You Are Worth Fighting For
10 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. Given that a number of prominent Stoics committed suicide, an...
Study The Lives of The Greats
07 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It would be this Sunday that in the year 1813, General William Henry Harrison sent three volumes of ...
The Only Kind Of Comparison Worth Doing
06 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It is said that comparison is the thief of joy and is, therefore, mostly to be avoided. This is true...
How Are You Still Not Doing This?
05 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in Vita Antonii that the reason he did his journaling--his conf...
This Message Is Waiting For You
04 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On April 24th 1924, the pioneer writer Laura Ingalls Wilder got a note that he mother, aged 84, had ...
In This Way You Are Unstoppable
03 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Acceptance? Resignation? That’s not me, we say, when we hear the Stoics preach those concepts. I n...
Your Heart Shouldn’t Be Getting Harder As You Go
31 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The old joke--which dates back to the 1870s--is that if you’re not a liberal when you’re young y...
This Is The Only Thing That Matters in Life
30 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 1940, while he was struggling as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel H...
Why You Do This Work
29 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There is an element of this philosophy that is a lot of work. You do all this reading. You do your m...
There Is Always Something To Be Grateful For
28 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most stunning things about Anne Frank’s diary is how indefatigably happy it is. One mig...
Why You’re The Luckiest Person In The World
27 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“It’s unfortunate that this happened,” Marcus says in one of his imaginary dialogs. Then he co...
How To Make The World A Better Place
24 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The line from George Bernard Shaw was that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” He is...
Everything Hangs By A Thread
22 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most misleading things about our world today is the increased sense of comfort we feel. Y...
Here’s Why Worry Is Pointless
22 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Humble people worry less than the arrogant. Why is that? Because they aren’t so conceited as to th...
It Helps To Be A Little Deaf
17 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was given a little piece of advice on her wedding day by her mother in law: "In ...
Be Tough On Yourself and Understanding To Others
17 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Remember that Stoicism isn’t about judging other people. It’s not a moral philosophy you’re su...
You Always Have a Move to Make
17 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Today you might find yourself dealing with something tough. Stuck in a new situation. Hit with a sit...
Exploring the Softer Side
17 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There is a harshness and a hardness to the Stoics. But there is also a softness and a grace, the vel...
Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own
17 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There’s no way around the fact that the Stoics talked about suicide. A lot. To the Stoics, suicide...