Memento Mori for my Birthday
My 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 Reflection-
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Tempered Temper
Hot 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 Reflection -
A Frugally Stoic Christmas
This 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 Reflection -
Living In Accordance with Nature
Part of living a virtuous life, to a Stoic, is to live in accordance with nature; which is one of the central Stoic ideas. Like our foot is part of our body, we are part of a whole and we must live our role. Epictetus describes this in one way by saying of a foot keep reading…
Principles Reflection -
Stoic Week in Review
Stoic Week was a weeklong exercise in practicing Stoicism with structure provided by the Stoic Week Handbook. There were questionaires before and after; with the goal of quantitatively measuring the effectiveness of Stoicism. I’m not privy to exactly how that works , but I recorded my own results and am going to interpret them here. keep reading…
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Philosophy of Toddlers
I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned already of Stoicsim to the task of raising my kids. More specifically, right now I just want to make life easier for my wife and myself—dealing with irrational and emotional toddlers. I think I’ve got some of it, but I expect this topic is in a constant state keep reading…
Parenting Reflection Resources -
Control & Conflicting Duties
Today 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 Reflection -
Preparing for Stoic Week 2013
Stoic 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 Week -
Modern Duty
Duty, 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 Reflection -
Fighting the desire for fame and fortune
I 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 Reflection