We think we need a lot to be happy. We think we need piles of money. And power. And fame. And to get that perfect house and to marry that perfect person. There are so many things we tell ourselves we have to have.

They are nice to have. But it’s not what we need. For centuries, the wisest minds have been saying some version of what Marcus wrote in Meditations, “Very little is needed to make a happy life.” A little less than two thousand years later, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote,

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

Seneca similarly suggested that each day, we should find a good quote or read a good story or have a good exchange with a friend. That’s it, he says. “That will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.” It’s inspiration. Guidance. Reassurance. Clarity.

​Just a few things. A good quote to start the

If Memento Mori is there to remind us of how little time we have, how temporary our existence can be—then what do we have to remind us of how powerful we can be, what we can draw on even in the face of events completely outside our control? It’s another Latin phrase embodied and practiced by the Stoics: Amor Fati or “a love of fate.”

Friedrich Nietzsche said that amor fati was his formula for greatness: “That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it….but love it.” Marcus Aurelius would say: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” And it would be the great Robert Greene (48 Laws of Power, Mastery) who would make the connection between these brilliant ideas. Robert describes Amor Fati as a power “so immense that it’s almost hard to fathom. You feel that everything happens for a purpose, and that it is up to you to make this purpose something p

No one likes to be found at fault. In fact, this is what many of us walk around fearing–that we’ll be exposed as imposters, we’ll be put on the spot in front of people, we’ll have to admit error. This makes us defensive, it makes us play it safe, and in some cases, it even makes us dishonest.

It’s a cure, you could say, that’s worse than the disease.

Gandhi, once being interviewed by a reporter, dispensed with all that. “I am very imperfect,” he said. “Before you are gone you will have discovered a hundred of my faults and if you don’t, I will help you to see them.” Why would he do such a thing? Perhaps it was because he knew that as a leader, egotism and an outsized sense of one’s abilities was dangerous and destructive. Perhaps he was inoculating himself against the fear in advance–taking away the power of the reporter to control Gandhi’s fate by disclosing up front what might otherwise be investigated (or even misconstrued).

There is a line from Epictetus who, after being critici

It takes a lot of flying time to become a certified pilot. It takes years on stage for a comedian to learn how to command an audience. It takes time to get sober, time in therapy to heal a marriage. No book is written overnight, and few fortunes are made in one swoop. No, they start small and accumulate, the power of compounding interest working on them.

All great things take time. You know this. You know where you want to end up, and yet, and yet still you have not started the clock.

The Stoics say it’s foolish to expect figs in winter. More foolish is expecting outputs without the inputs, final results without basic beginnings. The Stoics say that if you don’t know what port you’re sailing for, no wind is favorable. If you never get on the boat, if you never leave the harbor, no port is possible.

It’s going to take a while–to lose the weight, to acquire the mastery, to turn things around. It’s probably going to take longer than anyone would like it to. You don’t control that. You

Oh, you’ve read the works of Heidegger? You finished all of Infinite Jest? You made it through all of Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, all of Faulkner’s lesser works, Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses?

You must be pretty proud of yourself.

​Epictetus once spoke with a student who was pretty proud of themselves for the same reason. They had managed to make their way through a particularly dense work by the Stoic philosopher Chryssipus. They expected Epictetus to be proud. Instead he looked at them and said, “You know, if Chryssipus was a better writer, you’d have less to brag about.”

This is an important Stoic expression for two reasons. One, it reminds us that the Stoics valued clear, straightforward writing. It’s not impressive to use big words or complicated sentences that go over the reader’s heads. In fact, it’s a failure. But two, it’s a reminder to us as readers: There’s also nothing impressive about grunting our way through this bad writing. Life is short. We can quit bad books.

Life may have big challenges in store for us. What’s more certain, as we talked about recently, is the ‘petty hazards of the day.’ We may find ourselves thrust in some crisis–a big political moment or some emergency that unfolds in front of us on the street. We will definitely experience traffic and obnoxious people and temptation and burnout.

It’s important we understand that whether the moment is big or small, the Stoic is supposed to respond the same way. That is to say: Calmly. Courageously. With the common good in mind.

In the email we mentioned earlier, we drew on the work of the novelist Jean Webster, who remarked that it may well be easier to respond to crisis or tragedy than it is to respond to the ordinary or mundane. Because we know what’s expected of us, because people are watching, because we understand the stakes.

But again, Stoicism isn’t just about being great in the big moments but also great in the little moments. And perhaps one way to do that is to remove the ide

1. Continue to act thus, my dear Lucilius – set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands. Make yourself believe the truth of my words, – that certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose. 2. What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death's hands.

Therefore, Lucilius, do as y

You may well have said it yesterday, or overheard someone else saying it, “Oh, I’ll do it in the morning…I’ll do it after I wake up…I’ll get to it later…I just need to do this other thing first.”

It’s one of the oldest, most insidious lies in the world. Yet it’s so common that we don’t even notice it. We don’t even realize that it is a vicious untruth that deprives us and the world of potential, of awareness, of understanding.

As Marcus Aurelius observed 2,000 years ago, it’s the lie that we’ll be good tomorrow. It’s what Seneca said all fools–and all of us are fools–have in common: That we’re getting ready to start.

You won’t get to it tomorrow. You’re deceiving yourself. And even if you somehow weren’t, if you were truly sincere, who is to say you are guaranteed to get a tomorrow?

Procrastination is not just dishonest, it’s arrogant. It’s an old and timeless and terrible vice. You must crush it. Not tomorrow. But today. Now.

It is not enough, of course, to simply tune out the noise around you. One can turn off social media. One can cultivate the quiet country life, as the Stoics did on occasion. One can ignore what is inessential, pay no attention to what makes no difference.​

And still there is noise.

Because the calls are coming from inside the house, so to speak. We have the voices of doubt and anxiety, of envy and ambition, of fear and frustration. We have that ceaseless, running monologue that worries about this, resents that, wonders about this, obsessed over that.

To get to ataraxia, or a place of stillness and peace, the Stoics knew that controlling for externals was not enough. We had to develop an inner calm too, an ability to recognize our own destructive thought patterns and stop them.

This is what Marcus Aurelius was really doing in Meditations: he was trying to turn down the voices inside his head. The ones that made him afraid, the ones that made him angry, the ones that annoyed him or i

The Stoics were towering figures of their own time. Marcus Aurelius was cheered in the streets. Cato was widely admired. Musonius Rufus was called the Roman Socrates. Their reputations preceded them, as it should with anyone who takes their commitment to the virtues of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom seriously.

But how do we square these reputations, which the men obviously cultivated and worked hard not to betray, with the idea that a Stoic isn’t supposed to care about what others think? How can one simultaneously try to protect their good name…and be indifferent to what their name means to others? After all, isn’t being respected by people, being well-known for our skills and talents and character, something that’s outside of our control?

This paradox is perfectly solved, fittingly, in a play about Cato. Written by Joseph Addison in 1712, Cato was immensely popular in its time, in fact, it was constantly quoted by the Founding Fathers in pivotal moments during the Ame

To the Stoics, there wasn’t anything wrong with having money. Marcus Aurelius came from money. So did Cato. Seneca came from money and also made a lot of it. In fact, pretty much all the Stoics except for Cleanthes and Epictetus were incredibly rich.

​Money, nice stuff, living the comfortable life…this was not necessarily the problem.

The problem was the dependence it engendered. The problem was the insatiability that seemed to come along with it. The problem was the fear and jealousy it encouraged–the fear of losing it all, the lust to have more than someone else. It didn’t make you freer, as we talked about last month, but less free, less risk-averse, less connected.

“Slavery,” Seneca would write, “lurks beneath marble and gold.” The things we own…end up owning us. Because now we can’t live without them, now we identify with them, now we’re worried someone will take them from us.

For the Stoics, money, success, and power had to be viewed with a kind of detachment. It was fine if

The girl couldn’t have been much older than four or five. It was one of those lazy, boring days and she was bothering her mother. She wanted attention. She wanted to be entertained.

But instead of giving her that, Joan Didion’s mother gave her a gift that would last a lifetime…and change the shape of modern literature. Handing the girl a blank notebook, her mother said if she was bored, then she ought to go write a story which she could then read. “I had just learned to read,” Didion later explained, “so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something–and then read it!”

We can imagine Epictetus having similar exchanges with the young students he taught. A philosopher must “blow their own nose,” he used to say. They must understand that they hold in their hands, in their minds, the solutions to almost all of their problems. No one but ourselves can truly alleviate our boredom or our anger. No one else can make us feel better, no one else is responsible for o

There was a message there in the mirror this morning. Did you see it? It must have been a strange experience for Marcus Aurelius the first time he saw it…waking up, looking at his reflection, and noticing his hair turning gray. Feeling his body creak. Looking at the crows feet at the corners of his eyes and the wild hairs jutting this way and that in his eyebrows. Even for someone who had so actively practiced and meditated on the idea of memento mori, it would have been a rather vivid reminder to him that he was getting older, that each day a little more life left him, never to return.

“The only way to get through this life without losing your mind is to make peace with the fact that you’ll lose everything else at some point—maybe your mind too—and there’s nothing you can do about it,” writes Mary Laura Philpont in her book Bomb Shelter. “You can’t hold onto anything, even your own face, which makes it awfully insulting that you have to look at it all the time. But maybe that’s the j

Everything seems fine. Everything seems better than fine. Your life is going great. You’re happy. You’re in love. Your finances are great. But will it last? Or will Fortune, as Seneca said she is wont to do, surprise you with a reversal?

“Could you have seen, had you been walking on Amsterdam Avenue and caught sight of the bridal party that day, how utterly unprepared the mother of the bride was to accept what would happen before the year 2003 had even ended?,” Joan Didion writes hauntingly in her beautiful book Blue Nights (a must read). “The father of the bride died at his own dinner table? The bride herself in an induced coma, breathing only on a respirator, not expected by the doctors in the intensive care unit to live the night? The first in a cascade of medical crises that would end twenty months later with her own death?”

No one can see what Fortune has in store for us, the Stoics remind us. And that’s the point. We are in the dark. We are not in control. We live in an unwalle