Journal

Seneca on the Shortness of Life: You Have Time, You're Spending It
Most men say they don't have enough time. Seneca heard the same complaint two thousand years ago and didn't buy it. Around A.D. 49 he wrote a short essay to a friend named Paulinus, a busy official who ran Rome's grain supply. It's called On the Shortness of Life, and its argument fits in one sentence: life isn't short, we make it short. Everything quoted below comes from John W. Basore's 1932 Loeb translation, with the chapter for each line. Life is long enough Seneca opens by admitting the complaint... Read more...
Epictetus on Freedom: What's in Your Power, and What Isn't
Epictetus didn't learn about freedom from a book. He was born the son of a slave woman, somewhere around 50 to 60 A.D., in Hierapolis in Phrygia, and he spent his young years in Rome as the slave of one of Nero's freedmen. He studied Stoic philosophy while still in service, won his freedom, was later exiled from Rome with the other philosophers under Domitian, and ended up running his own school at Nicopolis in Greece. He never wrote anything down. His student Arrian did, taking notes in his classes... Read more...
Theodore Roosevelt on Courage: The Man in the Arena, and What He Actually Said
Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most quoted Americans who ever lived, and one of the most misquoted. Lines get trimmed, polished and pinned on him that he never said. That's a shame, because what he did say is better. This piece sticks to his own words, taken from his speeches and his 1913 Autobiography, with the source for each. Then it asks the useful question: what does a man do with them? He wasn't born brave Start here, because it's the part most people skip. Roosevelt was a sickly,... Read more...
Marcus Aurelius on Discipline: 7 Lines From the Meditations, and How to Use Them
Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from 161 to 180 AD. He spent much of that time at war on the northern frontier, and in the evenings he wrote notes to himself in Greek. He never meant them for us. The notebook survived anyway, and we call it the Meditations. What makes it worth reading isn't that an emperor wrote it. It's that he struggled with the same things you do: getting out of bed, staying on task, keeping his temper, doing the right thing when the easy thing was... Read more...
30 Days of Stoic Discipline: A Plain Plan for the Next Month
Most self-improvement plans fail the same way. They start big, ask for too much, and collapse the first bad week. The Stoics had a better idea, and it's almost boring: do a little, the same way, every day, until it's who you are. This is a plan for the next thirty days built on that idea. No app, no streak counter, no 5 a.m. ice bath required. One line in the morning, one action before night. Why thirty days Epictetus, the former slave who became one of the great Stoic... Read more...
Memento Mori: What It Means and How the Stoics Used It
Memento mori is Latin for "remember that you must die." Two words, and most people hear them as gloomy. The men who lived by the idea didn't. To them it was the most practical advice there is. You have a limited number of days. Act like it. Here is what the phrase means, where it comes from, what the Stoics actually wrote about it, and how to use it on an ordinary Tuesday. What memento mori means Memento is the command form of the Latin verb "to remember." Mori means... Read more...