A beginner's guide to stoicism, and a journal of its modern application.
Three years of Stoic Week. For three years I’ve witnessed the stoic community grow and the team at Stoicism Today improve Stoic Week. The following is a recap of my personal Stoic Week 2015 and observations of my results over the years.
Personal Reflection Stoic Week
For the fourth year running, the team at Stoicism Today is putting together Stoic Week. Running from November 2–November 8, this year’s event promises to focus on the meditations of Marcus Aurelius; perhaps the most famous practicing Stoic in history. Stoic Week is an online course, community and handbook that introduces participants to the foundations of keep reading…
Personal Resources Stoic WeekMy birthday passed by recently and I found myself questioning how a Stoic would perceive birthdays. I haven’t read any classic texts on the topic so I can only speculate.
Personal ReflectionHot blooded, short fuse or simply a bad temper. Bad tempers runs in my family; my dad has a penchant for cursing up a storm when doing renovations and something goes awry. One of my sisters and I have the same temper. My kids get visibly angry and aggressive when upset, as opposed to simply keep reading…
Personal ReflectionThis year my boys were about 2½ years old for Christmas, providing an interesting setting to reconcile my views and values surrounding the holiday.
Parenting Personal ReflectionToday was a pretty poor start to Stoic Week for me. I had a few moments at work where I let myself get frustrated at clients and things outside my control. Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. Epictetus, keep reading…
Personal ReflectionStoic Week 2013 starts tomorrow; which is my first. I did the pre-stoic week questionnaires and have read the handbook and it sounds very interesting. It seems the organizers are trying to quantify the effectiveness of Stoicism for living a good life, so I’m on board with that. I found—as I tried to read the keep reading…
Personal Resources Stoic WeekDuty, from the broad stoic definition, I think, can be made more specific to the individual. Outside of the basic stoic duty of living in accordance with nature—whatever that actually meant tothe Greek and Roman Stoics of the past—I believe that through analyzing my desires and motivations over the last few weeks I’ve been able to keep reading…
Parenting Personal Principles ReflectionI became a designer for many reasons—a love of graphics and visuals, a natural attention to detail, interest in order hierarchy and organization. Recently, while thinking about the stoic view of fame and fortune, I began to think one of the underlying reasons I was drawn to design was to satisfy a desire somewhere inside keep reading…
Personal ReflectionI got a letter in the mail congratulating me on completely repaying my loan. We still have one more student loan left, but we are very close to getting debt free (not including mortgage)—about two years early of our five year plan. In hindsight, our path to debt reduction was actually quite stoic. We have keep reading…
Personal Reflection