Stoicism

“Your teen years are just a prime time for you to develop stoicism, because that's when you really have to deal with your fellow human beings up close. You can't get away with them. You're stuck with them. You encounter them every day, and then you can have sto…”

“So it's a flickering thought that you have, and you can fill in some detail on that flickering thought. So imagine that you've lost your job. Then you allow yourself to kind of think about that for a sec, fill in some of the details, and then snap out of it an…”

“First surprise was they are headed at approximately the same grand goal in living. And that is a life that's full of to the extent possible of positive emotions like delight and even joy and relatively without negative emotions like anger and anxiety. And regr…”

“I can give you the reason why stoicism is popular, and that is because it's very hackable. And I hate the word hackable, but it's hackable. It gives you specific psychological techniques that you can use to change the way you're living your life. There's a han…”

“And at present, there are books on Stoicism Written for general audiences coming out at the rate of more than one per day.”

“In fact, a very prominent theme in stoicism is that we are coordinated, we're connected, and we live in a cosmos that's makes us cosmopolitan citizens of the universe, a global world.”

“The stoic lesson here is that he's got to take on the perspective of someone else to become his own friend, to find self-compassion.”

“I am not the kind of stoic that says accept and acquiesce by any means. I think that's pernicious. I'm very much about exerting my agency and will to change the world as much as I can, but when it comes to those that are near and dear to me and have their own …”

“Wisdom is not just the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. But particularly the almost intuitive sense of, like, how much courage is required, how much temperance is required, right? What is the right thing? So wisdom, the final virtue is the virtue that k…”

“And I think when the Stokes thought about joy and happiness, they were thinking about a more resilient form of that emotion, not Fun smiling, cheerfulness, happiness, but like a happiness of a person who is surviving the blows of fate and flourishing as a huma…”

“Journaling is to stoicism as meditation is to Buddhism. It is the practice of having a conversation with yourself about your thoughts, and beliefs, and values, and actions”

“And so I think, to me, Stoicism is a set of exercises and insights and practices to help you understand those emotions, process those emotions, and not be ruled by those emotions.”

“How I got here is separate and independent from the fact that I currently am here. I might need to, at some point, examine those causes so I can learn from it, but my impulse to dissect And blame and question what has happened is actually just a really conveni…”