The Daily Stoic

There is a harshness and a hardness to the Stoics. But there is also a softness and a grace, the velvet glove over the iron first. Think of Marcus talking about how we must come to our “journey’s end with a good grace, just as an olive falls when it is fully ripe, praising the earth that bore it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.” First, it’s just beautiful language (and all the more impressive if you consider it was just a thought he jotted down to himself). Yet it is also an important example of that other side of Stoicism. The one that expresses gratitude and thanks and awe about the universe. As you toughen yourself up in this life—reading these emails, practicing these exercises—make sure you don’t lose touch with that. Make sure that you practice gratitude for what has made you in this life and the things you experience while you’re here. Make sure you practice that good grace. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-s

There’s no way around the fact that the Stoics talked about suicide. A lot. To the Stoics, suicide was famously the “open door”—the option available to anyone, at any moment. Cato, one of the most vaunted and towering Stoics, went through that door, gruesomely and bravely. So too, did Seneca. But it is worth pointing out, in a summer that saw the world lose two truly great musicians to suicide, and in a world that loses over 2,000 people to suicide every day (on average, a U.S veteran commits suicide nearly every hour), that the Stoics knew that life was hard and they knew what depression was like. It’s very unlikely that they would have ever encouraged suicide from despair or depression. Because they knew that as real as these feelings were, as deep as that pain might be, that life was worth living and how easily the mind can become temporarily trapped in prisons of its own making. The Stoics believed that we needed to be here for each other, that we were made for cooperation, and that sometimes we have trou