Stoicism in daily life

The pattern behind every example

The Stoic writers we can still read were practical about small things. Epictetus’s Enchiridion talks about dinner parties and who gets greeted first. Marcus Aurelius, who governed an empire, wrote himself notes about bitter cucumbers and people who looked down on him. The method in those notes is the same whether the trouble is large or small, and it starts with what you add to an event.

Marcus doesn’t say the pain is imaginary. What he takes away is “thy opinion about that which appears to give thee pain” (Meditations 8.40), the second sentence you say to yourself after the first thing hurts. The short exchange that follows keeps the claim honest. To the protest “But I am not reason,” his reply is “Be it so,” and whatever part of you is suffering may “have its own opinion about itself.” Nothing in the note asks you to feel fine. It asks you to drop the verdict you bring to the hurt.

Every walkthrough below follows the same four steps:

1. Notice what you are adding. Describe what happened the way a camera would record it, then name the judgment on top of it: this is a disaster, she did it on purpose, I’m falling behind. Epictetus calls that first look at an event an appearance, and says the use you make of appearances is what is truly your own (Enchiridion 6).
2. Sort what is up to you. Your judgments, your words and your next action are. Other people, the traffic and how things turn out are not. This division opens Epictetus’s Enchiridion; its modern name is the dichotomy of control.
3. Choose the virtue the moment asks for. The Stoics named four: wisdom (seeing the situation accurately), justice (being fair to the people in it), courage (doing the right thing when it is uncomfortable) and temperance (restraint and proportion). Most moments call for one more than the others. The four virtues page explains each.
4. Take one step. Something small enough to do today. Epictetus told his students not to explain at dinner how a person ought to eat, but to eat as a person ought (Enchiridion 46).

The free Anger exercise on I Need Perspective follows these steps in order, with room to write, and the Worry and Outside My Control exercises use the same sorting. The eight situations below are worked examples. Your details will differ; the questions don’t.

Running late in traffic

You left on time. Twenty minutes later you are still three exits away, the meeting starts at nine, and the car in front keeps braking for no reason you can see.

Marcus answers a bitter cucumber and a thorny path the same way: “There are briers in the road—Turn aside from them.” That is the whole response. What he forbids himself is the follow-up: “why were such things made in the world?” A traffic jam needs a message and some patience. A grievance against traffic, your city and your luck takes the whole morning.

• What you add: This always happens to me. The day is ruined. They’ll think I’m unreliable. The facts are a slow road and a meeting you will join ten minutes late.
• What is yours: one message to the people waiting (by voice, or once you have stopped), how you drive, and what you do with the time. Not yours: the traffic, the start time, and whether anyone minds.
• The virtue: temperance, in its plain sense of proportion. A late arrival is a small thing, and you can let it feel like one.
• One step: Tell the person who is waiting, once. Then put on something worth listening to and stop checking the clock.

The same sorting works for bigger things that can’t be changed; see things you can’t control.

A sharp email you want to answer now

At 4:50 on a Thursday, a colleague replies to everyone on your proposal: “Not sure this was thought through.” Your answer is already written in your head, and it is very good.

Marcus’s note sorts the situation in a few lines. Someone else’s contempt: “Let him look to that himself.” His own share: not being caught “doing or saying anything deserving of contempt,” and staying “mild and benevolent towards every man.” The note doesn’t end in silence, though. He stays “ready to show even him his mistake,” and the conditions he sets are about tone: no reproach, and no display of how much he can put up with.

• What you add: She wants to embarrass me in front of the team. Perhaps. What you know is that she wrote one sentence.
• What is yours: when you answer, whether you reply to everyone, and what you say about the substance. Not yours: what she thinks of you, and what the others read into it.
• The virtue: justice. Answer the point, not the person. If she is wrong, saying so plainly takes a little courage, and Marcus would have you say it.
• One step: Write the reply tonight and don’t send it. In the morning, delete every sentence that is about her rather than the proposal, then send what is left.

The anger guide explains why Seneca and Epictetus both made delay the first remedy, and includes the free Anger exercise.

Someone takes the credit

In the quarterly review, your manager presents the analysis you spent two weeks on as “what the team pulled together,” and a colleague who checked one slide is thanked by name.

Marcus describes two helpers who keep score, one out loud and one in private, and sets against them a third who is “like a vine which has produced grapes.” The vine doesn’t wait to be thanked for the harvest. After a good act, a person like that “goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season.”

That doesn’t mean you have to stay silent. Your name on your own work is a reasonable thing to want, and a calm correction is honest. What the passage changes is your reason for speaking up, and how much of your week the slight gets to take.

• What you add: Nobody sees what I do. I’m being used.
• What is yours: the quality of the work, whether you raise it with your manager, and how you behave toward the colleague, who didn’t ask to be thanked. Not yours: who gets named in a meeting, and what the room believes.
• The virtue: justice, toward the colleague and toward yourself; an accurate record is fair to both. Temperance keeps it to one conversation rather than a campaign.
• One step: Ask your manager for ten minutes this week. Say plainly which parts were yours and that you would like to present the next one. Then get on with the next piece of work, the way the vine does.

When the problem is a person rather than a single meeting, see difficult people.

Waiting to hear news

You interviewed on Tuesday. They said you would hear by Friday. It is Thursday night, and you have refreshed your inbox forty times.

Marcus asks “What need is there of suspicious fear” when it is in your power to ask what ought to be done. If you can see what to do, do it “without turning back.” If you can’t, “stop and take the best advisers.” The night before someone else’s decision, the honest answer to his question is often that nothing more is yours to do tonight, and that counts as an answer.

• What you add: If I don’t get this, I’m stuck for another year. That is a forecast, not a fact.
• What is yours: how you spend tonight, a short follow-up if Friday passes without word, and a plan for either answer. Not yours: their decision and its timing.
• The virtue: courage, enough to let an honest attempt stand whatever they decide. Marcus sets the bar at the attempt, “if thou dost fail, let thy failure be in attempting this,” where this is the course that appeared just. You prepared and you interviewed in good faith. That part is finished.
• One step: Decide when you will check for news tomorrow, say at noon and at five. Write one line about what you will do if the answer is no, then close the laptop.

If waiting is turning into a habit of dread, worry covers what Epictetus said about anxiety and has the free Worry exercise, which separates what you know from what you imagine.

A friend’s good news stings

A friend from college messages the group: she has made partner. You type your congratulations and feel something small and sour that you would rather not have felt.

Epictetus takes this to the market (Enchiridion 25). Someone who paid for the lettuce has lettuce; someone who didn’t still has the coin. In his examples the price is flattery and attendance, and your friend may simply have worked hard for ten years, but the logic holds either way. Whatever making partner cost her, she spent it there, and you spent the same years on other things. The envy and jealousy guide reads the whole chapter, with what Seneca added about the price of a title.

• What you add: Her success means I’m behind. That is a comparison, and you are the one making it.
• What is yours: how you answer her, and what you do with your own work this week. Not yours: her career, her timing, and how the group reacts.
• The virtue: justice. She is your friend, and good news for her is good news for someone you care about.
• One step: Send a real congratulation, specific and without a joke at your own expense. Then give an hour to something you actually want.

Too much in one day

The list has fourteen items, three meetings and a school form due tomorrow. The inbox is at 140, and some part of you thinks you should also be exercising more.

Meditations 4.24 supplies a test you can run on every item on the list, and on the thoughts that come with each one: is this actually necessary? The overwhelm guide reads that entry closely, alongside Marcus’s advice not to picture the whole of your life at once (Meditations 8.36).

• What you add: All of it has to happen today, and all of it has to be done well. Some of it isn’t yours, some of it isn’t necessary, and some of it isn’t today.
• What is yours: which items you keep, which you decline or hand back, and the order you do them in. Not yours: meetings other people booked, and how fast everyone else would like an answer.
• The virtue: temperance, which here means proportion: doing the necessary things properly instead of everything badly. Wisdom is telling which is which.
• One step: Read down the list and ask Marcus’s question of each item. Cross off or hand back at least two. If what remains still feels tangled, sort it with the free dichotomy of control exercise.

A choice between two decent options

You have been offered a job with more money, a longer commute and a manager you liked in the interview. Your current job is fine. Both choices are defensible, and you have written the list of pros and cons three times.

In Enchiridion 29, Epictetus tells a would-be Olympic champion to look first at the strict diet, the training in heat and cold, the sprains and the real chance of losing anyway, and only then to enroll. A list of pros and cons stalls when both options are decent, because it compares outcomes, and outcomes are not up to you. Epictetus turns the question to what each path involves from day to day, and whether your own nature can sustain it. The hard decisions guide goes through the chapter, with Seneca on weighing a load against your strength.

• What you add: There is a right answer, and if I miss it I’ll regret it forever. Often both options are reasonable, and the regret is borrowed from a future that hasn’t happened.
• What is yours: your reasons, and the way you show up in whichever job you end up in. Not yours: the market, the next reorganization, or whether your old team misses you.
• The virtue: wisdom first. The free four virtues check then asks what justice requires of you here, and where you need courage and where restraint, before you settle on a next action.
• One step: Before you decide, find out what an ordinary week in the new job involves by asking someone who has done it. Epictetus’s athlete should know about the diet before he enrolls.

A relationship ends

A relationship of four years ends without drama: a conversation on a Sunday afternoon, then the logistics. The apartment is quiet, and your mutual friends are working out whose friends they are.

Seneca’s Letter 9 is about friendship rather than romance, but it asks a question that carries over: if a wise person doesn’t depend on anyone for happiness, why want anyone close? His answer, in our words, is that a friend is someone to look after, not someone to be looked after by. Stoicism doesn’t ask you to stop wanting someone near. It asks what you want them near for. The breakup guide takes this further: whose choice it was, the friends you share, and the hard evenings.

• What you add: I wasted four years, and no one will want me now. One verdict on the past and one forecast.
• What is yours: how you speak about the other person, especially to the friends you share; how you fill the evenings; who you reach out to. Not yours: their choice, what they tell people, and how quickly the feeling fades.
• The virtue: justice toward the other person, who doesn’t become a villain because it ended, and temperance with your phone at midnight.
• One step: Message one friend tonight and set a day: a walk, a meal, anything with a date on it. Ask about their week as well as telling them about yours.

The end of a long relationship is a real loss, and the Stoics wrote about loss at length; the grief guide gathers what they said. At night, the Evening Examination asks, among other things, what outside your control disturbed you today, which gives the hard parts of the day somewhere to go. If you feel unsafe or can’t see a way through, reach out now: contact local emergency services, or in the U.S. call or text 988.

Guides by situation

Each guide takes one hard moment further, with what the Stoics wrote about it. The anger, worry and things-you-can’t-control guides include the app’s free exercises, which you can do on the page.

What Stoicism is, and what it isn’t

If you are new to this, two questions usually come next: what Stoicism actually is, and whether it means not feeling things. The short answer to the second is no. Seneca says the first jolt of feeling is involuntary (On Anger 2.4); the practice is about the judgment that follows it.

Work through one now

If one of these situations is happening today, do an exercise instead of reading further. I Need Perspective has the free Anger, Worry and Outside My Control exercises. Each takes a few minutes, every step is optional, and nothing you type leaves your browser.