5 Stoic Lessons to Become Your Best Self in 2026 | Massimo Pigliucci

The very goal of Stoic philosophy, of Stoicism, is to make us into better human beings, into the kind of human beings that lives a life that is worth living. But what does that mean in practice? You might be tempted to think, this is just too simple. Some things are up to me, other things are not up to me. Yeah, sure, everybody knows that. So what? How is that going to make a difference in my life? But the issue is not that things are simple or not. The issue is, are you going to act on those things? Are you actually going to practice those things? I am Massimo Piagliucci. I am an evolutionary biologist and a philosopher of science, and my latest book is called Beyond Stoicism, co-authored with Greg Lopez and Meredith Koontz. The Stoic Toolkit I'm going to try to teach you a few basic Stoic techniques that hopefully are going to make your life better in the long run, maybe even in the very short run, because a lot of Stoic techniques tend to be efficacious almost immediately. You can see the difference yourself after a few days or a few weeks of practice. And perhaps there is no better way to start than with the connection between reason and emotions. How do we deal with emotions? Emotions are a big part, of course, of the human experience. They are inevitable. Even if we wanted to avoid them, we cannot. They are an intrinsic part of our biology and our psychology. Sometimes they're useful. They are alarm bells, for instance. They alert us to certain things going right or going wrong. Sometimes they deceive us and they create problems. They push us to react in ways that then we're later going to regret. The Stoics thought quite a bit about emotions. All of the major Stoic authors write about emotions, perhaps none more than Seneca, who was a Roman senator who lived in the first century. He wrote one of the best books on emotions I think ever written. It's called On Anger. And he focuses on that particular emotion because it's important. We all experience anger under different conditions. We all react in a way that is driven by anger. And sometimes we regret the way we have acted. So let's try to understand what the Stoics actually say about this. The fundamental idea is that emotions are not, in fact, distinct or sharply distinct from reason. A lot of people seem to think that reason is one thing and emotion is another thing. And they are sometimes in conflict with each other. So reason might have to overcome emotions. Or perhaps if you are a so-called emotional person, you actually prefer the other way around. But in reality, the two are actually highly interconnected. And this is one insight, one intuition of the ancient Stoics that is definitely confirmed by modern cognitive science. We do know that the anatomical area from where human emotions, many human emotions originate is the amygdala, which is the base of the brain. And we do know that our reasoning faculty resides mostly in the frontal parietal lobes of the brain. But we also know that those two areas are massively interconnected. There are literally billions of neuronal fibers that go back and forth between the two. So there is no such a thing as an emotional response independent of the way you think. And there is no such a thing as thinking independently of your emotional reactions. Well, if that's true, the Stoics say, there is your key to a better relationship with your emotions. What you need to do is a two or three step process that begins with cognition. It begins with thinking carefully before you get into any situation that might be emotionally complex about what you want to do and why. Once you set the stage in terms of thinking, then you try to behave accordingly to that particular way of thinking. If you think that one thing is right or wrong, then presumably you will want to behave according to that judgment. And it is this combination of cognition and behavior repeated over and over and over that eventually affects your emotions, sinks in at the emotional level, and in fact will alter your emotions. Let me give you an example. Let's say that somebody insults you. Epictetus talks a lot in his writings about insults and ways to deal with insult. And most of us would get upset at an insult. And in fact, we probably react. We start escalating things. You feel that rush of adrenaline. You're getting angry. How dare this person talk to me this way? And then you start raising your voice and then it escalates into a confrontation, possibly even a physical confrontation. The Stoics would say, well, before all of that, think about it this way. What exactly is an insult? An insult is somebody opening their mouth, saying certain words, those words arrive to your ears. You interpret them in a certain way. And because of that interpretation, you react. In other words, it's your thinking, it's your cognition that is the first step. If you think this is unacceptable, this is an insult, how dare that person talk to me like that, then your emotions will follow. Then you're now fueling your anger. You're fueling your aggressive reaction to those words. But if instead of going that way, you say to yourself, an insult is nothing. It's just air moving around. It doesn't actually touch me. It doesn't actually do anything to me. If that person is saying something about me that is insulting, what does that mean? Well, either that person is right and maybe he's expressing his opinion in a clumsy way, but he's actually right. In which case, why am I going to be upset about it? If somebody is right and it's setting me right, then it's a good thing for me to accept that counsel, to accept that observation and do something about it. Or the person in question is wrong. In which case, that's his problem, not mine. I'm not the one in wrong. He is the one that is wrong. He should be concerned with it, not I. Either way, it is in my power not to react because it is in my power to reframe the situation to myself and think, this is not an insult. This is just air bouncing off and it doesn't actually touch me. It doesn't actually hurt me. Once you do that, you're now deescalating your emotional response because your emotions will react, will go along with whatever way you're thinking about the situation. If you're thinking that you have been offended, your emotions will escalate. If you're thinking that, oh, this is funny, this is really ridiculous, doesn't the person in question know that he's embarrassing himself? Then your emotions will go in a different direction. It will deescalate. You're not going to get angry. Now, this is, of course, easier said than done. This is not going to happen on your first try. But the key here is to constantly ask yourself what exactly is going on here and what is a good reaction? What might be a good reaction to what is going on? Once you reframe whatever is happening to yourself that way, your emotions eventually will follow. The problem in dealing with situations as they are happening is that often we're not mentally prepared. So we react in the moment and then perhaps we misjudge the situation. Our emotions start running away from us and then we regret later on whatever we did or whatever we said. So the Stoics have a very important technique to help us prepare ourselves to a difficult situation, to deal with difficult situations. That technique goes under a number of names. Often it's referred to as philosophical journaling. And I say philosophical because it's a particular type of journaling. This is not a diary where you just write down, oh, today I went and did this or did that and it was fun, that sort of stuff. It's a journal of reflection and perhaps the best model of that journal available to Stoic practitioners is the Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The Meditations was never meant for publication, is in fact the emperor's personal philosophical journal. And if you read it, you'll see there is no particular structure. There are 12 chapters, but the 12 chapters don't have any particular subheadings, there is no particular topic because Marcus is going through his life and he's reflecting on whatever was happening at that moment and how he was reacting to what was happening. And so often people read the Meditations, for instance, and they come across with this notion that it's repetitive and it's a little preachy. Both of those things are true. It's repetitive because Marcus, just like the rest of us, kept running into the same problems over and over again. So for instance, he had an issue with anger management. And so you will see in the Meditations that there are several places where Marcus says to himself, why did you get upset about this today? What is a better way to answer that situation, to react to that situation instead of getting angry? And it's preachy because he's preaching to himself. He's not talking to an audience, he's talking to himself and he says, look, you really need to do things this way and not that way. So how does that work in practice? Incidentally, this is another thing where there is very good evidence from modern cognitive behavioral therapy in particular, but also cognitive science in general, that this technique of philosophical journaling, of reflection on your actions actually does work. It's a very good tool for self-improvement, for ethical self-improvement. There are different ways in which you can do philosophical journaling. Both Seneca and Epictetus actually give you details. There are bits in their writings where they say, this is how you do it. And as I said, Marcus Aurelius is a great example. There is a whole book there where you can read it and see how it is done. My favorite way of doing it is carving out a little bit of time at the end of the day before you go to bed, when you're not too tired, quiet down, open up your journal or your tablet or however you prefer to do it. This doesn't have to be a written exercise either. You can just think about it, but it's better to be done as a written exercise because then you have a record of what you've been doing and thinking over eventually a period of years. And then you can go back and check if you have improved in certain areas or if there are certain issues that are particularly problematic and recurring for you. And you ask yourself, you pick a particular example of something that happened during the day. For instance, let's say somebody came up to me and trying to insult me. And he said something that is rude or uncalled for. And I reacted in a certain way. So I described to myself in the journal, the situation as objectively as I can without using emotional language, as analytically as I can, because the point is not to relive the experience. The point is to analyze the experience and learn from it. In fact, if you notice, Marcus Aurelius writes his journal in the second person. He says, you did this and you reacted this way. This may sound strange and it may feel a little awkward to do it that way. But again, there is very good evidence from modern studies that it does help keeping the distance from your emotional responses, which is in fact helpful in trying to learn analytically from what you did and what you perhaps didn't do. Imagine you're just talking to a friend. You're writing to a friend. You say, you did this. How come you reacted this way or that way? So you pick a particular instance or something that happened, accident, an incident that happened during the day. You briefly describe that incident to your friend and then you ask yourself three questions. What did I do wrong? What did I do right? And what could I do next time? Why ask yourself those questions? The first one, what did I do wrong? The point is not to indulge in sort of regret and self-flagellation and things like, those are all useless according to the Stoics. Whatever you did, it's done. You cannot change it. You cannot go back in time and change it. However, you can learn from it. The second question is, what did I do right? It's essentially the same idea, only in the flip side of that coin. That is, you don't just want to remind yourself the kinds of things that you do wrong. You also want to set goals that you're going to achieve over and over. Here's where I don't want to go the next time. Here's where I do want to go the next time. Or here's what I want to do less and less moving forward. And here's what I want to do more and more. The third question is arguably the most crucial one. What could I have done differently? Again, this is not about regret because you can't change what you did. But it's about the fact that, as much as we think of our lives as endlessly fascinating and different and varied and all that sort of stuff, in fact, most of the times we tend to do the same things pretty much every day. That's an advantage as far as the Stoics are concerned. Because what that means is that whatever situation you did not handle properly today is likely going to happen again, possibly soon. So if a colleague, for instance, came in and said something insulting or rude or whatever, well, that person isn't going to go away very likely anytime soon. And his behavior is not going to change necessarily in any radical fashion. So you can expect reasonably then in a few days or next week or next month, something close to that will happen again. But now you're ready. You may not have been ready today when it happened. That's why you're doing this self-analysis in your philosophical journal. But you're going to be ready next time. You're telling yourself, okay, well, if this happens again, here is a better way to respond. That way you're prepared. And Seneca says a prepared mind handles difficulties, handles difficult, delicate situations much better. Perhaps not perfectly. The goal is not perfection necessarily, but better. You may have heard of something called the serenity prayer, which is not exactly the same thing that comes to mind when we talk about stoicism, but bear with me for a second. There is a connection. The serenity prayer, which is often recited at the beginning of meetings of 12-step organizations, such as Alcoholic Anonymous, goes something like this. It asks God to have the wisdom to tell the difference between what we can change and what we cannot change, the courage to change what we can, and the serenity to accept what we cannot. That notion, that serenity prayer, was written at the beginning of the 20th century by an American theologian. But in fact, it's a rephrasing of a fundamental insight by the Stoic Epictetus that goes back to the beginning of the 2nd century. The two are in fact connected historically because it turns out that Epictetus' manual for a good life was used throughout the Middle Ages by Christian monks as a source of spiritual exercises. Now, Epictetus doesn't quite phrase it that way, but the same idea holds, and it's one of the most interesting and most useful ideas in Stoicism. Epictetus talks about some things are up to us and some things are not up to us, and we should focus on the things that are up to us and act on them because that is where our agency is efficacious, and we should develop an attitude of acceptance and equanimity toward the things that are not up to us. Now, we all live in a complex world where there are all sorts of things that we don't necessarily control, both at a macroscopic level, let's say political change, social change, things like that, and at a personal level, things happen in our life that we don't necessarily have much to say or do about because they depend on a number of factors that we do not control. So how do the Stoics deal with those kinds of uncertainties and that kind of limited agency that at the end of the day we all have? Let's pick a specific example. Let's say that tomorrow morning I'm going to have a job interview, and it's a job that I really want. It's important for me to do well in that interview. Epictetus will say, well, the best way you can prepare yourself for that challenge is the day before, let's say, to ask yourself what under these circumstances is up to me and what is not up to me. And you can do this literally by making two lists. You can do it in your mind or better yet, you can write down a table, you can draw a table with two columns and say, up to me, not up to me. It's surprising once you start paying attention to the question, how many things you actually will be able to list. For instance, actually getting the job, not up to me. It depends on the competition. It depends on who's doing the interview and how they're feeling that day and on a number of other things that are really not under my control, which means, according to Epictetus, that I have to be ready to accept the possibility that things will not go my way and accept that with serenity, with equanimity, because that's the way the world works. Sometimes job interviews are successful and other times they're not. And we are adults. We don't throw a tantrum when things don't go our way. What is up to me? Well, clearly to prepare myself as much as possible and as carefully as possible for the job interview. What else is up to me? Well, try to get a good night's sleep because we know that being rested and all that helps. But notice that I said to try to get a good night's sleep, not to actually get a good night's sleep, because it's possible that my neighbor in the next apartment is throwing a party into the late night and I will not be able to sleep as many hours as I should or want to because there are, again, circumstances that are outside of my control that are going to interfere with it, with my intentions. So the intention is good, is mine, but the outcome is not under my control. What else? Well, it's certainly a good idea to show up on time for the job interview. That means that you care, that you are professional and so on and so forth. But again, there, what is up to me is to try to show up on time. I live in New York. That's not a guarantee. I can get on the subway and the subway all of a sudden stops in the middle of the tracks and it's not going to move. Or I may take a taxi and there's a lot of traffic and I may actually get there late. So to try, to have the intentions, do my best in order to get there on time is up to me. Actually getting there on time is not up to me and so on and so forth. So we can come up with these lists that are actually fairly detailed. The more detailed, the better. And the idea is that once you have these lists of things that are up to me and things that are not up to me, you focus only on the one to the left side, the things that are up to me. Those are the ones that I want to rehearse, think carefully about, be as prepared as possible because my agency lies in that direction. All of the others, the other ones, I can still be aware of them and I can mentally prepare myself for the possibility that they are or they're not going to go in my preferred direction. But that's all I can do about it. The result is that you're much more efficacious in the things you do because your agency is in fact at play there. But it's also true that you accept things in a way that maintains calm, tranquility, serenity. You don't upset yourself over things for which frankly, there is no point in getting upset. The same approach of focusing on things that are up to us and accepting with equanimity things that are not up to us can be applied to pretty much every situation and every challenge or potential setback we might suffer, not just at an individual level, at a personal level, but also at a societal level or a political level. And the Stoics themselves lived in really turbulent times. The Hellenistic period, which went from the death of Alexander the Great and the collapse of the Macedonian Empire to the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, which basically marked the beginning of the Roman Empire, was in fact a period of major turmoil where things were changing very rapidly, seemingly completely outside the control of most individuals. While we might live in a similar situation, we're facing major challenges that all of us, most of us, feel unprepared and not particularly able to do anything about. You know, there's political change, there's social change. We're facing the possibility of climate catastrophe. We are still facing the possibility of a nuclear war, for instance, things like that. How does a Stoic deal with those kinds of situations? It's exactly the same approach. Again, you ask yourself, what here is up to me and what is not up to me? You make the two lists, you focus on the first one, and then you try to do your best to accept with serenity the second. For instance, let's say that I'm concerned about climate change, as I should be. Well, I can't change anything dramatically at that level for that kind of problem on my own. And this is not an individual level. Arguably, it's not even a problem that can be solved by an individual society. It requires literally global actions. But that doesn't mean that I cannot do anything about it. So if I start writing down the things that are up to me, I can come up, for instance, with the following partial list. Well, I can inform myself that the first basis for rational decisions is to get informed. I can also donate to organizations that actively work in that direction. I can vote. I can talk to people. I can go in the streets and join other people that are vocal about these kind of things. All of these approaches are in fact up to me. They're under my agency. And doing them by themselves, of course, will not solve the problem, but it will contribute toward the solution of the problem. And just as importantly, at a personal level, will make me feel better because I'm doing something about it. But by the same token, there's the second column, the things that are not up to me. Actually solving the problem of climate change is certainly not up to me. Actually even getting a particular politician that might contribute to the solution elected is not up to me. Actually achieving, in fact, all of those things that I just mentioned is not really up to me. And therefore, although I hope that things are going to go in a certain direction, I have to be ready for the possibility that they won't. And that's okay. Because again, not everything in life goes the way we prefer. And we need to accept as rational, reasonable adults that we may not have a choice. And we need to be okay with the notion that we don't have a choice on everything. We cannot act on everything. We cannot solve everything. I'm sure you noticed that one of the things in life is that sometimes we have to make tough decisions. And we second-guess ourselves. We tend to go one way and then think, maybe I should have gone the other way. We tend to think in a dichotomous fashion. We tend to think that it's either black or white, either this or that. The Stoics thought a lot about decision-making. In fact, Epictetus thought that our most important faculty was something that he called prohaeresis, which is Greek for will. The decision, the ability to actually arrive at a judgment, at an assessment of a situation, and then try to act on it, do your best to act on it. The problem is, of course, that life sometimes is complicated. There are multiple choices. We have a tendency to want to simplify things and go for something that is stark, that it's clear, that it's obvious. That's just not the way the world works. And according to the Stoics, it's much better to try to understand how the world works and then act accordingly rather than trying to impose on the world the way we want to think or the way we prefer things to be. There are several passages in Epictetus' discourses where he talks to his students and he reminds them, to design the world in a certain way that it's convenient for you. It's not up to you. At one point, in fact, it gets even pretty funny. One of the students apparently complained of having a cold and a running nose. And Epictetus looks at him and says, so what do you think? The universe should rearrange yourself so that you don't have a running nose. Why don't you just get a handkerchief and wipe it off? So sometimes it's about obvious things. Sometimes it's about things that are complicated. And there is no sure way to make right decisions. The only thing that we can do is to make sure that we fine-tune as much as possible our pro hiresis, that is our faculty of judgment. That is what the third discipline of Epictetus is about. The discipline of assent. Assent means to agree to something. According to the Stoics, we are constantly bombarded by impressions, what they call impressions. An impression is essentially a combination of a sensorial experience and an immediate, usually instinctive judgment. For instance, I might walk down the street and I have the impression that it's good to go by and eat that gelato that I just saw displayed because it tastes good, it looks good, it's attractive, I should do it. That's an impression. It's a combination of I am seeing something and I'm immediately arriving at a judgment that doing something about that object is a good thing. Epictetus says that that's the time when you want to stop and think. Ask yourself, in fact, talk to your impression. Say, well, wait a minute, is this really a good thing? Should I actually go on and get the gelato and eat it right now? Well, maybe not because I'm on my way to dinner, eating a gelato would spoil my appetite. Also, frankly, my waistline is not exactly in the best shape possible, so that's not going to help either. No. On second thought, a better decision is to ignore the gelato, keep walking and go home. That's a simple situation, but we face constantly these kinds of decision-making opportunities, so to speak. And we also constantly second-guess ourselves. Oh, man, I should have done this. I should have done these other things. The Stoics think that what is up to you is your intentions, not the outcomes of those intentions. So what you need to do is to work on why are you trying to do certain things more than on will I succeed in doing these things? And that might simplify our decision-making problems. For instance, let's say that I go and volunteer in my soup kitchen around the corner from my apartment. Is this a good thing to do or is not a good thing to do? Well, most people probably would say it's a good thing because I'm helping other people, I'm spending my time in a way that it's helpful to others and so on and so forth. But a Stoic would actually frame the question differently. The question would be not necessarily is the action itself good or not, but are your motivations virtuous or not? Why am I doing this? If it turns out that I generally want to help people, then that is in fact a virtuous action, whether I succeed or not. However, it's also possible that I decided to do that because I need a new line on my resume to look good the next time that I apply for a job so that I can show that I also volunteer for social causes. Well, that's not virtuous because now I'm using other people as a means to an end, to my own end, to self-aggrandize, to get my own benefit out of this thing, right? So it's not virtuous, even though it might still be useful to others, I might still be helpful to others. This is not really the right thing to do because it actually undermines my character. So to shift perspective from the outcome, is this a good thing or a bad thing, to my intentions and therefore my character, is this good for me? Does this make me a better person? Or does it actually undermine my character? It makes me a worse person. Very often, we'll simplify our decision making because it turns out that the answer to why am I doing this is often much simpler than the answer to is this really, truly a good thing to do or not a good thing to do? The very goal of stoic philosophy, of stoicism, is to make us into better human beings, into the kind of human beings that lives a life that is worth living. But what does that mean in practice? Well, it means a number of things, but one way in which the stoics answered that question, what sort of life we should live, is that they say we should live according to nature. Now, to live according to nature doesn't mean running naked into the forest and hugging trees, although, of course, there's nothing wrong with that necessarily. It means to look at the kind of living being, of organism that a human is, and what actually makes that organism flourish, makes it do good things, better things, have a happier life, as opposed to the kinds of things that get in the way of human flourishing. This turns ethics, remember that for the stoics, ethics is the study of how to live a good life, into essentially an empirical discipline, because it's about human nature. You have to observe things about what makes human beings better or worse, what makes a human life better or worse. The stoics drew an interesting analogy. They thought that ethics is like medicine, medicine, of course, being concerned with the body, ethics being concerned with the mind, with our psyche. Now, there are some things, some behaviors that are natural for us, but they're not good from a medical perspective. For instance, we have a natural attraction to sugar and to fatty foods. That probably evolved by natural selection in a period of human evolution where there wasn't a lot of food around. And so every time that we run into a source of fat or sugar, we were better served by actually taking advantage of it, right? But we don't live in that kind of environment anymore. We don't live in the place the scene anymore. We live in cities where you can find food 24 hour a day, seven days a week. And so having these natural craving, because it's natural for fat and sugar, it's actually not good for us. It undermines our physical health. It causes all sorts of problems, diabetes and so on, heart attacks, etc. So a doctor will look at this and say, look, this is in fact a natural craving, but the healthy thing to do would be to resist that craving, to reorient your priorities elsewhere. The Stoics make exactly the same argument in terms of the human psyche. There are some things that are natural to human beings, that come natural to human beings in terms of behavior. For instance, anger. Anger is a natural response to a perceived injustice. But the Stoics argue anger is the psychological equivalent of a fatty food or a lot of sugar. It's just not good for you mentally. It doesn't lead to a good life. Then what is good for you at a mental level, at a psychical level? Two things. To reason your way through your problems instead of bulldozing or just reacting in the moment. And most importantly, to be social, to cooperate with other people. Because we are, of course, social animals and we thrive in a society, in a social group. Now, from there, the step is not very far to realizing that it's not just my immediate group, it's not just my family, my friends, or perhaps the people that live in my city. It makes sense to cooperate, to be good, to be positive about any human being that lives anywhere because, after all, we live in an interconnected world. Now, one of those early Stoics, a guy named Hierocles, in the second century, wrote a book called Principles of Ethics. Hierocles says what we should try to do is to metaphorically bring people, all the people, closer and closer to us. Imagine that you are the center of your own world. As soon as you do that, you immediately realize that you depend on other people, your parents, for instance, your siblings. And then eventually, you realize that you depend on other people that you start calling your friends. And then you depend on further, larger group of people outside, you know, acquaintances or people that you don't necessarily directly come in contact with but that indirectly affect your life. What Hierocles said was what you need to do is to bring all those circles, which extend eventually all the way to the entirety of humanity, closer and closer to yourself. You should think of your friends as if they were your family. You should think of your acquaintances as if they were your friends. You should think of strangers as if they were your acquaintances and so on and so forth. Bring them closer. Your circles of concern should shrink and your concern should expand to all of these people. And Hierocles actually goes so far as giving practical advice of how to do that. This is not just a way of thinking about stuff. You actually can behave in a way that is cosmopolitan because that's ultimately the word that the Stoics used. And the way you do that is Hierocles says, just go around and when you meet strangers, address them as brother and sister or perhaps uncle and aunt depending on their age and their gender and so on. In other words, remind yourself and others that we are in fact all on the same boat together and that we depend on each other for a good navigation. Now at this point, you might be tempted to think, this is just too simple. Some things are up to me. Other things are not up to me. Yeah, sure. Everybody knows that. So what? How is that going to make a difference in my life? Well, but the issue is not that things are simple or not. The issue is, are you going to act on those things? Are you actually going to practice those things? Ethics after all, it's not rocket science. You're not, you're not going to have to build a rocket that goes to the moon. You just have to improve your life bit by bit, action by action, thought by thought. Here's an analogy that the Stoics themselves made very often with athletics. They thought, you know, if you go into a gym and somebody's going to show you, a trainer is going to show you how to lift weights, for instance, you might be tempted to say, oh, is that all there is to it? It's a simple action. Pick up the weights in a certain way. I make sure that my posture in a certain way, and then that's it. I'm done. Yes, the action is conceptually simple, but the difference is going to come only if every day or several times a week, you come to the gym and you actually do that action. That's how you're going to get your muscles. That's how you're going to get your physical, your physical ability improved. Not by the fact that you understand something that is simple to do, but by the fact that once you understood it, you actually practice it over and over and over. The same goes for the kind of stoic advice that we've heard so far. Yes, it's very simple to say that, you know, some things are up to me and other things are not up to me. What is difficult is to actually follow through every time that you face a challenge. Every time that you face a difficult situation, you go through that exercise and then you focus your attention on what is up to you and trying to develop a good attitude of acceptance and equanimity toward that that is not up to you. That is the difficult part. It's not the conceptual understanding, it's the actual practice. I did not start my life or my career as a stoic or a stoic practitioner. In fact, I was something quite different. I began my academic career as an evolutionary biologist. I've always been interested in science ever since I was a kid. I decided that biology was my passion and I went through all of the steps, formal and otherwise, that eventually built a career in that field. But then, like many people, at some point, I got to a moment of crisis. Call it a midlife crisis, if you will. So you get to a point where you say, well, this was fun, this was interesting. I've been doing this for let's say 20 years, 25 years. Do I really want to do this same thing for another 25, 30 or however much time I have? And my answer was, no, I need to do something different. When I was back in high school in Rome, in Italy, I had a wonderful teacher of philosophy for three years, really made the field come alive and it really developed a passion for philosophy in me. So when the crisis came, the answer was almost immediately obvious. It's like, oh, well, I need to go into philosophy then because that is the other thing that I'm passionate about. So I went back to school and I got my degree, graduate degree in philosophy and I moved, I switched career to philosophy of science. But the midlife crisis was still going and it wasn't concerned just with the academic career, just with the job aspect of things. A number of things happened more or less at the same time in my life. My father died, for instance. I knew that this was going to happen, but when it did happen, it really hit very hard. I was hit by an unexpected divorce, for instance. I moved across country because of my career change. Now, any psychologist would tell you that one of those things is pretty stressful. If three or four happened as they did to me in the span of a few months, that can actually trigger a crisis. That can make you really reconsider your priorities and that is exactly what happened to me. So I thought, well, I'm studying philosophy. I'm becoming a professional philosopher. Philosophy means love of wisdom, literally. Surely, if there is an answer to my current predicament, surely if there are tools that will allow me to overcome these challenges and to move forward, they're going to come from philosophy. Yes, but where from philosophy? Which part of philosophy? Philosophy is a huge field. So I started more or less systematically. I looked into Buddhism, for instance, because several friends told me that Buddhism was a good approach if you're looking for a philosophy of life. It didn't quite click, however. It didn't speak to me at a deep level as I was hoping and expecting. So eventually I figured out that the answer, whatever was going to be, was going to come from Virtuetics. Virtuetics is the general Greco-Roman tradition that has to do with self-improvement understood as improvement of your character. But even that is a large field. We have Aristotle. We have Epicurus. We have all sorts of ancient authors, all of whom have something interesting to say. And I did read some of these, but again, nothing clicked. Then one day I was scrolling on my phone on the thing that at the time was called Twitter and now called X. And I saw a tweet that said, help us celebrate Stoic week. And I thought, that's odd. Why would anybody want to celebrate the Stoics? Because of course I thought, like many people, of the Stoics as stiff upper lip and suppression of emotion kind of people, as sort of a Mr. Spock from Star Trek. But then I realized that, wait a minute, hold on. The Stoics, that Stoicism also was a type of Virtuetics. So it was in the general ballpark of what I was already interested in pursuing. Then I remember one of the Stoics was Marcus Aurelius. And I read the meditations when I was in college and I found it an interesting, provocative book. I also remembered that Seneca was another Stoic and I translated Seneca from Latin when I was in high school. So I thought, okay, maybe there is something here that might be worth investigating. So I signed up for Stoic week, which by the way, is something that happens every year, usually in October or November. In fact, now I'm on the board of the organization called Modern Stoicism that actually organizes Stoic week. But at the time I signed up and I downloaded their guide and their material, their readings. And the first thing that I read was by a guy who I never heard of before named Epictetus. And one of his students said, you know, wouldn't it be good for me to become rich and powerful? That way I can help my family, my friends. I can even perhaps do something good for my country. And Epictetus answers was interesting. He said, well, who is going to tell you what the right thing to do is for your family, for your friends, and for your country? The money or the power are not going to tell you. Your faculty of judgment is going to tell you. Your prohiresis in Greek, your ability to think carefully and rationally about things, which is the very thing that Stoics tend to cultivate and try to improve throughout their lives. That did it. I almost heard the click at the back of my mind. This is my guy. Epictetus has talked in a way that is no nonsense. It's very clear what he says and what he means. He doesn't suffer fools easily. He has a sense of humor that borders onto sarcasm, perhaps, and that I respond to that kind of approach. And so I started devouring everything that I could possibly find by Epictetus and about Epictetus. And here we are now, a dozen years later, we're still talking about Stoicism. The decision to start studying and, most importantly, practicing Stoicism had an immediate effect on my life. In a matter of days, I was thinking about certain issues that had plagued me for a long time in a very different way, and I was beginning to act differently about those issues. For instance, ever since I was a kid, I struggled with weight. It's never exactly what I wanted in fact, even close to what I wanted. But, you know, as a biologist, I understand that weight is a complex matter. It depends on a large number of causes, some of which I can influence and some of which I don't. My genetic background and my early development are certainly not up to me. That means that there are limits to what I can do 40 years later, 50 years later about that particular problem. So I accept those limits. At the same time, however, there are things that I can do. I can and certainly do now eat a much more healthy diet. I go and exercise more often and so on and so forth. Those are things that are up to me. Now, these are not heart-shattering things, but the important difference is that they sunk inside me in a way that I never did before. It's not that I never heard before of exercise or healthy lifestyle or genetics. I'm a biologist after all. But I never really incorporated those things deep into my thinking and therefore they were not reflected into my actions. Another thing that my friends and family noticed immediately was that I was getting much less angry and upset about things. Just like Marcus Aurelius, I did have an anger problem. I was sometimes stupefied by how people can say or do certain things without considering the effect that they have on others. And I would get upset. I would get angry at the perceived injustice either toward me or toward people I care. But Stoicism made me realize that that's just the way the world works. That doesn't mean you cannot do anything about it. You can certainly talk to people about certain things. You can certainly reframe things in your own mind so that they will not upset you. But as Marcus Aurelius says, to expect that people are not going to do stupid things or that people are not going to say things that are hurtful is just to expect that the world is going to be completely different from the way it is. And if there is anything about the Stoics is that they're very realistic about the world. They accept the world the way it actually is, not the way you would want it to be. Again, let's be clear here. This is not a counsel for being a doormat and just take whatever comes your way without reacting. Reactions, actions and reactions are important. It's the fabric of human life. But those actions and reactions need to be thought carefully so that they're most efficacious and they need to be carried out in a way that is realistic. You do not expect miracles to happen because unfortunately that's not the way the world works. Want to support the channel? 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