Stoicsm

The central claim of Stoic ethics is as stark and uncompromising as any position in ancient philosophy: virtue is the only good, vice is the only evil, and everything else is indifferent. Health, wealth, pleasure, reputation, relationships, even life itself, are not genuinely good in the Stoic sense, though some of them are preferred and […]

The concept of amor fati, Latin for love of fate, represents one of the most psychologically demanding and philosophically sophisticated ideas in the Stoic tradition. It is not merely the acceptance of what happens, which is difficult enough. It is not merely the absence of complaint about adverse circumstances, which is already a considerable achievement. […]

Sometime in the middle of the first century AD, a slave named Epictetus was born in Hierapolis, a city in what is now southwestern Turkey. He was the property of a man named Epaphroditus, a freedman who had himself risen to become a secretary to the emperor Nero. At some point during his enslavement, Epictetus […]

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born around 4 BCE in Cordoba, in the Roman province of Hispania, and spent most of his adult life at the center of Roman power at exactly the moment that Roman power was at its most treacherous. He served as tutor and later as chief advisor to the emperor Nero, the […]

Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 CE, presiding over one of the most powerful political entities in human history at a time of almost continuous crisis: devastating plague, relentless military campaigns on multiple frontiers, economic strain, and the constant pressure of court politics. He is remembered by historians as one of […]

Seneca, one of the wealthiest men in Rome, regularly practiced poverty. Not involuntary poverty forced on him by circumstance, but deliberate, chosen poverty: a few days each month living on the simplest food, wearing the roughest clothing, sleeping without the comforts his considerable fortune could easily provide. He described this practice in a letter to […]

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius described a mental exercise he returned to repeatedly throughout his reign as emperor. He would imagine lifting himself out of his immediate situation, the palace intrigue, the military campaigns, the petitioner waiting outside his door, the pain in his joints, the grief over a dead child, and rising above it […]

In ancient Rome, when a general returned from a victorious military campaign, the city celebrated with a triumph, an elaborate public procession through the streets, with crowds cheering, prisoners displayed in chains, and the general riding in a chariot at the center of it all. But riding beside the general, standing just behind him in […]

The modern self-help industry is built almost entirely on the logic of positive thinking. Visualize success. Picture your goals as already achieved. Fill your mind with images of what you want and trust the universe to deliver. The implicit premise of this approach is that the human mind functions best when oriented toward positive futures […]

There is a passage in Epictetus’s Enchiridion, his handbook of Stoic philosophy, that has survived two thousand years and remains one of the most operationally useful ideas ever written down. It is the opening line: ‘Some things are in our control and others are not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and […]