Most philosophies teach us how to live.

Very few ask whether we possess the power to become the people they tell us to be.

At first, that distinction seems almost trivial. Surely learning how to live well and becoming a good person are the same project.

The longer I spend reading philosophy, the less convinced I am.

For thousands of years, humanity’s greatest thinkers have wrestled with the same enduring question: What makes a good human being? Their answers have varied, but they almost always point toward virtue. Courage. Wisdom. Justice. Temperance. Self-control. Humility. Across cultures and centuries, these qualities appear again and again as the marks of a life well lived.

The Stoics built an entire philosophy around them. Live according to reason. Govern your passions. Concern yourself only with what lies within your control. Cultivate a character so steadfast that fortune itself cannot shake it.

It is difficult not to admire such a vision.

In many ways, I do.

Then I read Mere Christianity.

C.S. Lewis did not dismiss courage, discipline, or virtue. If anything, he demanded them. Yet buried beneath his defense of Christianity was a question that has quietly unsettled me ever since.

What if virtue, remarkable as it is, cannot accomplish what we ask of it?

What if the problem is not that we lack courage, discipline, or wisdom?

What if the problem lies deeper than character itself?

That is where Stoicism and Christianity begin by sounding almost identical. Both insist that the quality of our lives depends less upon our circumstances than upon the kind of people we become. Both reject the modern obsession with pleasure, comfort, wealth, and reputation. Both call us toward lives of discipline, responsibility, and moral seriousness.

For a long stretch of road, they seem to be traveling in the same direction, but almost without warning they arrive at a fork where one believes virtue is the destination and the other believes virtue is only the beginning; the difference is subtle, yet it is also enormous.

Because hidden inside it is one of the oldest and most important questions philosophy has ever asked:

Can virtue save us?

The Enduring Appeal of Stoicism

There is a reason Stoicism refuses to die.

Empires have collapsed. Religions have risen and fallen. Political systems have come and gone. Yet nearly two thousand years after Marcus Aurelius filled the pages of his Meditations, people are still turning to the Stoics for guidance.

That alone should make us pause.

Philosophies survive because they answer questions human beings never stop asking. How do I face suffering? How do I endure loss? How do I remain calm when the world around me seems determined to unravel? How do I keep another person’s actions from controlling my own peace?

The Stoics offered an answer that was at once simple and revolutionary.

Separate what belongs to you from what does not.

Your reputation does not belong to you.

Your wealth does not belong to you.

Your health does not entirely belong to you.

The economy, politics, the weather, other people’s opinions, even the length of your own life ultimately remain outside your control.

Your judgments do.

Your choices do.

Your character does.

Epictetus, who spent part of his life as a slave, insisted that freedom begins with recognizing this distinction. Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations not as a manual for conquering the Roman Empire but as a series of reminders to conquer something far more difficult: himself. Seneca, one of the wealthiest men in Rome, repeatedly warned that riches, comfort, and status could never provide the stability people imagined they would.

Taken together, their message is remarkably consistent.

Stop trying to control the world.

Start governing yourself.

It is difficult to imagine advice more relevant to the twenty-first century.

We live in an age that monetizes outrage, rewards comparison, and encourages us to tie our happiness to forces we can neither predict nor command. Every day we are invited to surrender our peace to headlines, algorithms, markets, and strangers on the internet. The Stoics answer with the same quiet challenge they offered Rome centuries ago:

Why are you giving away what is yours to keep?

There is something undeniably liberating about that question.

Stoicism refuses to let us become victims of circumstance. It reminds us that while we cannot choose every event that enters our lives, we remain responsible for the person who responds to those events.

That insight alone has helped millions of people live with greater courage, resilience, and self-control.

And I count myself among them.

The more I read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, the more I found myself asking a different question. Less, “What does the world owe me?” and more, “What kind of person am I choosing to become?”

In a culture obsessed with changing the world, Stoicism quietly insists that the hardest work has always been changing ourselves.

It is a profound insight.

But it is also here, at the very height of Stoicism’s vision, that C.S. Lewis begins to ask whether self-mastery, remarkable though it is, can carry the weight we place upon it.

Lewis Agrees More Than We Think

If all you knew about C.S. Lewis came from Reddit threads, where he is often framed as a straightforward Christian critic of ancient philosophy, you might expect him to reject Stoicism outright.

He doesn’t.

In fact, one of the most surprising discoveries in reading Mere Christianity is just how much common ground Lewis shares with the ancient Stoics.

Like Marcus Aurelius, Lewis believed that our character matters more than our circumstances. Like Epictetus, he understood that pleasure, comfort, and success are unstable foundations upon which to build a life. Like Seneca, he recognized that wealth and reputation cannot satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart.

Even his understanding of virtue feels remarkably familiar.

Lewis praises courage, not merely because it helps us survive danger, but because every other virtue eventually depends upon it. He argues that self-control is indispensable, that justice is non-negotiable, that prudence requires us to think beyond the present moment, and that genuine morality demands habits formed through repeated choices rather than fleeting emotions.

In many respects, a Stoic could read those pages with quiet approval.

And that is precisely what makes the conversation so fascinating.

Lewis is not criticizing Stoicism because it asks too much of us. If anything, he believes it asks too little.

The Stoics rightly understood that becoming a good person requires discipline. They understood that virtue must be practiced before it becomes habitual. They understood that moral excellence does not happen accidentally. On all of this, Lewis stands beside them.

He, too, believes we are called to become different people than we are today.

But then he asks a question that slowly changes the entire conversation.

Where does the power to become that person actually come from?

The Stoics answer with remarkable confidence. Through reason, discipline, and the steady cultivation of virtue, the human person can gradually bring the soul into harmony with nature.

Lewis is far less optimistic, not because he thinks virtue is unimportant, but because he believes the problem is deeper than virtue can reach. That is the point where these two roads, after traveling together for so long, begin to separate. The Stoics diagnose a life that is out of order, while Lewis diagnoses a human nature that is wounded, and those are not the same diagnosis, meaning that different diagnoses inevitably lead to different cures.

Can the Self Heal Itself?

Every philosophy eventually arrives at the same unavoidable question.

Not simply, What is wrong with us?

But rather, Can we fix it ourselves?

This is where the conversation between Stoicism and C.S. Lewis becomes most interesting because they begin with remarkably similar observations. Both recognize that human beings regularly fail to live according to their own standards. We know we should be patient, yet we lose our temper. We value honesty, yet we shade the truth. We admire courage, yet fear often dictates our decisions. The problem is not that we cannot recognize virtue. The problem is that we struggle to embody it.

So far, they stand together.

Their disagreement begins with the cure.

For the Stoics, the path forward is education, discipline, and the steady formation of character. Human beings possess reason, and reason, when properly cultivated, can gradually bring our desires, emotions, and actions into harmony with nature. The work is demanding and lifelong, but it is possible. Every day becomes another opportunity to practice wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control until virtue becomes second nature.

Lewis never dismisses that work. In fact, he insists upon it.

What he questions is whether it can ever be enough.

One of the most compelling ideas in Mere Christianity is Lewis’s distinction between improvement and transformation. He does not believe Christianity merely calls people to become slightly kinder, more disciplined, or more moral versions of themselves. It calls them to become something altogether new.

That is a far more radical claim.

Lewis argues that the deepest human problem is not simply ignorance or weak habits. It is that our very nature has become bent inward. We do not merely perform selfish acts from time to time; selfishness has worked its way into the center of who we are. Left to ourselves, even our virtues can become occasions for pride. We begin to admire our own discipline, congratulate ourselves for our humility, or quietly measure our moral progress against everyone else’s.

In other words, the ego has an astonishing ability to hide inside the very virtues meant to restrain it.

That insight stopped me the first time I read Lewis.

Because it exposed a possibility I had rarely considered.

What if becoming more disciplined does not necessarily make me less self-centered?

What if it simply makes me a more disciplined version of the same person?

The Stoics place extraordinary confidence in the human capacity for self-governance. Lewis places extraordinary emphasis on the human need for transformation. Neither position encourages passivity. Both demand effort. Both require moral seriousness.

But they disagree on something fundamental.

The Stoics believe that through persistent practice the self can be brought into right order.

Lewis believes that the self cannot ultimately remake itself because the very thing doing the remaking is part of the problem.

That is not merely a disagreement about ethics.

It is a disagreement about what it means to be human.

Strength or Love?

If Stoicism and Christianity disagree about the nature of the human problem, it follows that they will also disagree about the highest expression of the human life.

For the Stoics, maturity looks like increasing freedom from the tyranny of external circumstances. The wise person cannot be manipulated by praise or crushed by criticism. Pleasure does not intoxicate him. Pain does not define him. Loss does not destroy him. Through years of discipline, he gradually becomes inwardly unshakable.

It is an inspiring vision, and in many ways one our culture desperately needs, but Christianity places its highest ideal somewhere else: the supreme example of human flourishing is not Marcus Aurelius writing calmly in a military tent, but Christ hanging on a cross. That difference is difficult to overstate. The Stoic sage demonstrates remarkable self-possession, while Christ demonstrates radical self-giving, one seeks freedom from being mastered by the world, the other willingly gives himself away for the sake of the world. Christianity therefore does not merely celebrate courage, but sacrificial courage; not merely love, but love of enemies; not merely forgiveness, but forgiveness offered while suffering; and not merely strength, but strength expressed through self-emptying.

Lewis returns to this theme repeatedly throughout Mere Christianity. The goal of the Christian life is not simply to produce people with admirable moral habits. It is to produce people whose lives become increasingly shaped by divine love. Virtue remains essential, but it is no longer the destination. It becomes the soil from which something greater grows.

This is why Lewis can admire so much about Stoicism while believing it ultimately stops short.

The Stoic asks, “How can I become the master of myself?”

Christianity asks, “How can I become the kind of person who forgets himself in loving God and others?”

Those are profoundly different ambitions.

One is primarily concerned with the ordering of the self.

The other with the gift of the self.

That distinction has challenged me more than any other idea in Mere Christianity.

For years, I naturally assumed that becoming a better man meant becoming more disciplined, more productive, more resilient, and more capable. Those are worthy goals, and I still believe they matter.

But Lewis quietly asks another question.

Disciplined for what?

Resilient for what?

Virtuous for what?

A philosophy can teach me how to master my anger.

Only afterward must I decide what kind of person I will become once that anger is gone.

That may be the deepest difference between Stoicism and Christianity.

The Stoics teach us how to become strong enough to stand.

Lewis asks what, or more importantly whom, we are willing to stand for.

After Virtue

The more I have read the Stoics, the more I have come to admire them, not only for the clarity of their philosophy but for the seriousness with which they approach the task of living. They teach, with a kind of quiet insistence, that responsibility for one’s character cannot be outsourced to circumstance, and that the quality of a life is determined less by what happens to us than by how we respond to it. In their writings, there is a steady reminder that peace is not something the world can guarantee through wealth, status, or external approval, but something that must be cultivated inwardly, often in defiance of those very things. Above all, they challenge us to turn our attention inward first, to govern our own thoughts and impulses before we attempt to impose order on the world around us.

For all of this, I find myself genuinely grateful. There is a kind of moral strength in Stoicism that feels both rare and necessary, especially in a world that so often encourages distraction rather than discipline. And yet, the more I have read C.S. Lewis alongside them, the more I have begun to wonder whether admiration alone is the same as completion. It is one thing to respect a philosophy for what it can do for the human spirit; it is another to ask whether it is meant to be the final word on what the human spirit is for.

Perhaps that is why Mere Christianity has stayed with me long after I finished it. Lewis never speaks as though virtue is unimportant or optional. On the contrary, he treats it as essential, as the very structure of a well-ordered life. Discipline, courage, justice, prudence, and self-control are not presented as abstract ideals but as lived necessities, without which a good life becomes almost impossible to imagine. And yet, Lewis is equally careful not to let these virtues become an end in themselves. He insists, gently but firmly, that they are not the destination of the moral life but its preparation, shaping us for something beyond self-mastery: a life directed outward in love of God and neighbor.

Seen in this light, Stoicism and Christianity begin to look less like opposing systems and more like fellow travelers for a significant stretch of the journey. Both reject the worship of comfort and the illusion that ease is the same as goodness. Both call us to moral seriousness, to the difficult work of self-examination and restraint. Both, in their own ways, affirm that character matters more than circumstance, and that what we become is more important than what we possess. And yet, as the path continues, a divergence slowly appears. The Stoic vision ultimately hopes that through reason, discipline, and repeated practice, the self can be brought into harmony with nature. Lewis, by contrast, suggests that the self is not merely to be refined but transformed, and that such transformation depends on a grace that cannot be generated from within the self alone.

Whether one ultimately agrees with Lewis or with the Stoics may not be the most important question. What matters more is the question that both traditions, in different ways, refuse to let us avoid: who are we becoming? Every decision we make, every habit we form, every moment of courage or compromise is quietly shaping an answer to that question, even when we are not fully aware of it. In that sense, the title of this essay has gradually ceased to feel like a question I can resolve and has instead become one I continue to carry with me.

Can virtue save us? The Stoics answer with confidence that virtue is not only sufficient but the highest human good. Lewis, on the other hand, affirms the necessity of virtue while denying its finality, suggesting that it is real and indispensable but not ultimate. After spending time with both perspectives, I find myself convinced of at least this much: learning to master ourselves is one of the greatest achievements available to us, but it may not be the ultimate purpose of our lives.

Perhaps, then, the aim of becoming virtuous is not to render ourselves self-sufficient, as though we could finally stand complete in isolation. Perhaps it is to form in us the kind of people capable of something more difficult and more generous than self-mastery alone: the ability to give ourselves away. And that, more than any settled conclusion, is the question I suspect I will continue to wrestle with for a very long time.

Works Cited

Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by Gregory Hays, Modern Library, 2002.

Epictetus. Enchiridion (or The Handbook).

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. HarperOne, 2001.

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When the credits began to roll on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, my first reaction was surprisingly simple: this felt like a watered-down Odysseus inside a watered-down Odyssey.

I wanted to love this movie, I really did. I had just finished reading Homer’s epic poem, a book that has quickly become one of my five favorite books of all time. I walked into the theater with Homer’s Odysseus still fresh in my mind: cunning, arrogant, emotional, resilient, dangerous, deeply flawed, and almost impossible to break. I had recently traveled with him past the Cyclops and the Sirens, through the halls of Circe, into the land of the dead, across Poseidon’s violent sea, and finally back to Ithaca, where the wandering king strings his bow and becomes one of the most terrifying men in ancient literature.

That was the Odysseus I wanted to see on the screen.

I didn’t expect Nolan to film Homer word for word. Nor should he have. The Odyssey is nearly 3,000 years old, emerged from an oral poetic tradition, and contains 24 books filled with gods, monsters, prophecies, stories within stories, long speeches, strange detours, and cultural assumptions completely foreign to a modern audience. Adaptation requires interpretation.

But interpretation is different from dilution.

And somewhere in Nolan’s attempt to reinterpret The Odyssey for a modern audience, I think he lost some of what made the original story so extraordinary in the first place.

The movie is beautifully made. It is ambitious. It is enormous in all the ways we expect a Christopher Nolan movie to be enormous. There are sequences I loved and images that will probably stay with me for a long time.

But I walked out giving it a 6 out of 10.

My problem wasn’t primarily with the filmmaking.

My problem was that I kept looking for Homer.

More specifically, I kept looking for Homer’s Odysseus.

Instead, I found a distinctly modern version of him: softer, more introspective, more psychologically self-conscious, more interested in understanding and analyzing his wounds. At times, Nolan’s Odysseus seemed less like the ancient king Homer wrote about and more like a modern man sitting in therapy, working through his trauma and trying to understand what his experiences had done to him.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that character.

I’m just not convinced that character is Odysseus.

And the more I thought about the film afterward, the more I realized that this was also the source of my larger disappointment with Nolan’s adaptation. When you soften Odysseus, rationalize his world, and filter his journey through modern psychological assumptions, you don’t merely change the protagonist.

You take some of the epic out of the epic.

Nolan’s Odysseus Is Too Modern

My biggest problem with Nolan’s interpretation of Odysseus is not that he made him emotional. Homer did that nearly 3,000 years ago.

Homer’s Odysseus cries. He grieves. He is afraid. He misses his wife. He sits alone on Calypso’s island staring across the sea toward a home he cannot see and weeps because he wants nothing more than to return to Ithaca. He mourns the men he loses along the way. When the bard Demodocus sings about the Trojan War, Odysseus breaks down listening to the story of a war he survived.

This is not some emotionless ancient warrior.

Homer gives us an incredibly human man.

But he also gives us a dangerous one.

Odysseus can cry on the shore in one moment and start plotting his escape in the next. He can mourn his men and still command the survivors. He can be terrified and still descend into the land of the dead. He can lose his ships, his crew, his possessions, and eventually even the outward signs of his identity, yet continue clawing his way toward Ithaca.

That combination is essential to understanding him.

Homer never asks Odysseus to choose between vulnerability and strength. He can be both. He can love Penelope desperately while lying to nearly everyone he encounters. He can show tenderness in one scene and terrifying violence in another. He possesses extraordinary intelligence while occasionally making decisions so arrogant that they bring disaster upon everyone around him. He endures enormous suffering while also being responsible for a good deal of it himself.

Homer does not sand these contradictions down.

He lets Odysseus remain difficult.

Nolan’s Odysseus, by comparison, feels almost too neatly translated for us.

He has been pulled out of Homer’s ancient world and given the emotional instincts of a 21st-century protagonist. Every wound seems to require examination. Every act of violence demands an internal reckoning. Troy becomes something to unpack. His suffering becomes something to analyze. His journey increasingly turns inward, as though the real monster waiting for Odysseus at the end of every adventure is another unresolved piece of himself.

At times, I half expected someone to hand him a journal and ask him how the Cyclops made him feel.

That may be unfair to Nolan, but it captures the distance I felt between the two versions of the character.

The problem is not introspection itself. The problem is that Nolan filters a man from a radically different moral universe through our own assumptions about trauma, identity, violence, masculinity, and healing. Homer’s Odysseus comes from a world shaped by honor, glory, household, hospitality, fate, obligation, revenge, and the unpredictable will of the gods. Those forces do not simply decorate his story. They help explain who he is.

Replace too much of that with modern psychological self-examination and Odysseus inevitably becomes someone else.

Homer’s Odysseus certainly reflects. He remembers. He grieves. He tells stories. He disguises himself. He wrestles with loss. But he is fundamentally oriented toward action. When the world puts something terrible in front of him, his first instinct is usually not to ask what the experience reveals about himself.

It is to overcome it.

There is a Cyclops blocking the way? He devises a plan.

Circe has transformed his men? He confronts her.

The Sirens can destroy him with their song? He finds a way to hear them without dying.

Scylla waits ahead? He sails forward anyway.

He finally reaches Ithaca and discovers his household overrun by men consuming his wealth, disrespecting his son, and pursuing his wife? He disguises himself, studies the room, strings his bow, and goes to work.

That is Homer’s Odysseus.

Not perfect. Not emotionless. Not always admirable. Certainly not someone we should imitate in every respect.

But almost impossible to stop.

And that is why I don’t buy the idea that Odysseus needed to be softened in order to become more human for a modern audience. Homer had already accomplished something far more difficult. He created a man capable of weeping uncontrollably and killing mercilessly, loving deeply and deceiving constantly, displaying extraordinary wisdom and breathtaking arrogance.

The contradictions are the humanity.

Nolan seems more interested in asking, “What did all of this do to Odysseus?”

Homer seems more interested in asking, “What is Odysseus going to do about it?”

Those are both worthwhile questions.

But they produce two very different heroes.

And after spending hundreds of pages with Homer’s, Nolan’s version felt like a smaller man.

Where Did the Epic Go?

If Nolan’s Odysseus feels smaller than Homer’s, so does the world around him.

That may have been my larger disappointment with the film. The Odyssey is not merely the story of a man having a difficult journey home. It is an epic in the fullest sense of the word. Homer throws Odysseus into a world overflowing with gods, monsters, giants, witches, prophecies, shipwrecks, cannibals, seduction, divine grudges, visits to the dead, and a sea that seems personally offended by his continued existence.

Nothing about Homer’s world feels small.

Nolan certainly gives us spectacle. He knows how to make a ship look tiny against the sea and a man look insignificant against the horizon. The movie is physically enormous. But strangely, I found Homer’s poem to be the more expansive experience.

Because scale is not the same thing as epic.

You can fill an IMAX screen with an ocean and still make the world feel smaller.

Homer’s universe feels enormous because Odysseus is never entirely in control of it. There are forces operating above him, beneath him, and around him that do not care about his plans. Poseidon can turn the sea against him. Athena can appear beside him in disguise. Zeus can decide the fate of men from Olympus. Circe can transform sailors into swine. The Sirens can destroy a man simply by convincing him to listen. Scylla does not care how clever Odysseus is. The dead themselves can be summoned to speak.

Odysseus may be one of the cleverest men alive, but Homer’s world constantly reminds him that cleverness has limits.

That tension is essential to the epic.

Nolan seems less comfortable allowing that world to remain strange.

Again and again, the film pulls Homer’s mythology closer to the ground. Monsters become more comprehensible. The supernatural becomes more ambiguous. Ancient terrors are given enough realism that a modern audience can begin searching for explanations.

But I never wanted an explanation.

I wanted the monster.

There is something almost uniquely modern about encountering the Sirens and immediately wondering what psychological disorder explains why they sing men to their deaths. Homer would probably tell us to stop analyzing and start plugging our ears.

That is part of the joy of reading The Odyssey. Homer does not seem embarrassed by his own mythology. He does not wink at us from across 3,000 years as if to say, “Don’t worry, there is probably a reasonable explanation for all of this.”

There isn’t.

Poseidon hates this man.

Now get on the boat.

The same is true of the gods. In Homer, they are not metaphors conveniently waiting for us to decode them. They are characters and powers within the structure of reality. Athena does not merely represent Odysseus’s intelligence. She walks beside him. She disguises him. She advises Telemachus. She manipulates events. She argues for Odysseus on Olympus. Poseidon is not simply the psychological embodiment of Odysseus’s guilt or the uncontrollable forces of nature. He is Poseidon, and Odysseus blinded his son.

All of that matters.

Because once every god becomes a symbol, every monster becomes psychologically interpretable, and every supernatural encounter becomes something that can be explained away, the ancient world begins looking suspiciously like our own.

Just with better costumes.

And I don’t read Homer because I want ancient Greece to feel like modern America.

I read Homer because I want, for a few hundred pages, to enter a world that does not think like mine.

This is where I think Nolan’s modernization of Odysseus connects to his treatment of the larger story. He makes Odysseus’s inner world bigger while making Homer’s outer world smaller. The great mystery increasingly becomes what is happening inside Odysseus rather than what might be waiting beyond the next stretch of sea.

Homer looks outward, where there is always another island, another god, another temptation, another monster, another storm, another civilization operating according to unfamiliar rules, and another reminder that Odysseus is traveling through a cosmos far larger and stranger than himself.

And beneath those adventures are ideas equally large: hospitality and its violation, loyalty, kingship, temptation, pride, mortality, revenge, fate, family, civilization, home, and the complicated relationship between human freedom and divine will.

Even something as seemingly simple as hospitality becomes enormous in Homer.

Xenia, the sacred relationship between guest and host, runs through nearly the entire poem. Again and again, we encounter people and creatures partly through the way they receive strangers. Some feed them. Some protect them. Some abuse them.

And one of them tries to eat them.

Homer is nothing if not committed to making his point.

By the time Odysseus returns to Ithaca, the suitors’ occupation of his home is not merely annoying or disrespectful. They have violated one of the fundamental moral expectations of Homer’s world. They have consumed another man’s wealth, abused his household, threatened his son, pursued his wife, and turned the sacred obligations of hospitality upside down.

That is why the bow matters, why the slaughter matters, and why Odysseus’s return feels larger than revenge. The king is not simply coming home angry; a broken order is being violently put back into place.

Modern audiences are allowed to be disturbed by that. In fact, we probably should be. Homer’s moral universe is not ours. But I would rather wrestle with the uncomfortable morality Homer actually gives us than have it translated into something more familiar before I get the chance.

That is ultimately what I wanted more of from Nolan.

More strangeness, more danger, more gods who are actually gods, more monsters that do not need diagnoses, more of the uncomfortable moral universe of the ancient Greeks, and more willingness to trust Homer.

Because The Odyssey should occasionally make us feel as though we have washed ashore somewhere we do not completely understand.

Instead, Nolan too often brings Homer ashore in our world, hands him a change of clothes, and makes him explain himself.

The result is certainly easier to recognize, but I’m just not sure recognition is what an epic is supposed to give us; sometimes an epic should make the world feel bigger than we are.

Homer’s still does.

We Don’t Need Ancient Heroes to Think Like Us

Maybe this is the larger problem I had with Nolan’s Odyssey.

We have developed a strange habit when adapting old stories. We seem willing to preserve the swords, ships, armor, temples, costumes, and ancient names, but we become nervous about preserving the people themselves.

They must think like us, struggle like us, and explain themselves in ways we recognize.

Their morality needs qualification. Their violence needs psychological explanation. Their suffering needs processing. Their flaws need backstories. Their gods become symbols, their monsters become metaphors, and their heroes slowly acquire the emotional vocabulary of people born thousands of years after them.

Eventually, we are no longer visiting the ancient world.

We are watching ourselves cosplay inside it.

And I think that defeats one of the greatest reasons to read Homer in the first place.

When I pick up The Iliad or The Odyssey, I do not want Homer to confirm everything I already believe. I want him to challenge it. I want to encounter people who understand honor, courage, family, violence, hospitality, revenge, glory, death, duty, and the gods differently than I do.

Sometimes I admire what I find, sometimes I am horrified by it, but most often I am simply forced to sit with it and think. That friction is the point.

Achilles is perhaps the clearest example. Reading The Iliad, I was struck by how little Homer seems concerned with making Achilles conventionally likable. He is magnificent and infuriating, loyal and selfish, loving and murderous. His wounded honor causes him to abandon his fellow Greeks while they die by the hundreds. Then Patroclus dies, and Achilles’s grief becomes so enormous that it nearly consumes whatever humanity remains inside him.

A modern adaptation could easily reduce all of that to a familiar diagnosis: Achilles has anger problems. He is grieving. He is traumatized by war. He needs to process the death of his friend.

None of those observations would necessarily be wrong.

They would simply be too small.

The rage of Achilles is not interesting because we can diagnose it. It is interesting because Homer uses it to explore honor, mortality, friendship, glory, pride, grief, revenge, and what happens when a man’s entire understanding of himself collides with the certainty of death.

Achilles does not need our vocabulary to become psychologically complicated.

Neither does Odysseus.

That is one of the things I have come to appreciate most as I have worked my way through Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and The Odyssey. The ancients understood human beings remarkably well. They knew that men could be courageous and terrified at the same time. They knew ambition could become pride. They knew grief could turn into rage. They knew victory could feel empty. They knew men could spend their entire lives chasing glory only to discover that glory could not save them from death.

They knew men suffer, but they simply did not always explain suffering the way we do, and maybe we should resist the temptation to make them.

There is a certain arrogance in assuming an ancient character becomes truly “human” only after we have translated him into our psychological language. As though Achilles has been waiting 3,000 years for us to explain his anger to him. As though Odysseus could finally understand his journey if someone just taught him the word “trauma.”

Homer does not need our help making these men human.

If anything, we might need his help remembering how complicated human beings can be.

Homer allows contradictions to remain contradictions. Odysseus can love his wife while being unfaithful to her. He can be enormously intelligent and spectacularly foolish. He can be courageous and terrified. He can be a victim of the gods and the architect of his own suffering. He can be a loving husband and father while also being a liar, raider, killer, and king capable of terrible violence.

Homer does not rush in to reconcile all of this for us.

He hands us Odysseus and lets us wrestle with him.

That is what great literature does. And it is especially what old literature can do if we allow it.

Reading a book written thousands of years ago should occasionally make us uncomfortable. We should encounter assumptions we reject, virtues we have forgotten, moral codes we struggle to understand, and questions we still cannot answer. The distance between Homer’s world and ours is not an obstacle that needs to be removed.

It is part of the education.

This is why I think Nolan’s instinct to modernize Odysseus bothers me more the longer I sit with the film. By making Odysseus easier for us to psychologically recognize, Nolan also makes it easier for us to avoid confronting just how different Homer’s hero actually is.

I would rather struggle with the original.

Give me the arrogant Odysseus who cannot resist shouting his name back at the Cyclops even though doing so is catastrophically stupid.

Give me the cunning Odysseus who tells lies inside lies inside lies until sometimes even the reader has to remember which version of him is speaking.

Give me the homesick Odysseus crying for Penelope.

Give me the curious Odysseus who wants to hear the Sirens even after being told their song can kill him.

Give me the ruthless Odysseus standing in his own hall with his bow.

Let him confuse me, let him offend me, let him impress me, let him be ancient for goodness sake.

Because the purpose of encountering Odysseus should not be to discover that a Greek king from the distant past secretly thought exactly like we do.

The wonder is discovering that he didn’t.

And then, somewhere inside all that strangeness, finding pieces of ourselves anyway.

The Bow and the Blood

Eventually, every version of The Odyssey has to bring Odysseus home.

And this is where I think the difference between Homer’s hero and Nolan’s becomes impossible to ignore.

For most of the poem, Odysseus is trying to survive long enough to reach Ithaca, he loses his ships, he loses his men, he is held captive, he is shipwrecked, he is thrown naked onto foreign shores, and he begs strangers for help, while the great king who helped conquer Troy spends enormous portions of The Odyssey stripped of nearly everything that once made him powerful.

Then he gets home.

And Homer reminds us exactly who this man is.

Odysseus does not march into Ithaca announcing his return. That would be far too simple for him. Athena disguises him as an old beggar, and Odysseus immediately does what Odysseus does best: he lies, he watches, he waits, he tests people, he gathers information, and he endures the suitors’ humiliation while quietly sorting the household into those who remain loyal and those who have already condemned themselves.

This is the same man who, after a timely assist from Hermes, resisted Circe’s magic and somehow managed to turn an attempted transformation into another victory. The same man who ordered himself tied to the mast because he wanted to hear the Sirens without surrendering to them. The same man who has spent twenty years surviving through a mixture of intelligence, endurance, deception, audacity, and occasionally outrageous arrogance.

The wandering has ended, but the scheming has not, and then Penelope brings out the bow; I love this moment because the bow is more than a weapon—it is almost a signature.

The suitors have spent years eating Odysseus’s food, drinking Odysseus’s wine, occupying Odysseus’s hall, pursuing Odysseus’s wife, insulting Odysseus’s son, and treating his kingdom as though the man himself has already become a ghost.

Then they try to string his bow. They cannot. There is something wonderfully Homeric about the simplicity of it: these men want Odysseus’s household, his wealth, his wife, and one of them will presumably become king. They would very much like to become Odysseus, yet they cannot even string his bow.

Then the old beggar asks for a turn, and suddenly the entire poem changes. The broken wanderer disappears. The king is home.

This is where I wanted Nolan to let Odysseus become terrifying.

Because Homer’s slaughter of the suitors is not a clean, sanitized heroic victory. It is brutal. Once the doors are secured and Odysseus reveals himself, there is nowhere for the suitors to go. The man we have watched suffer for hundreds of pages begins killing them.

And he does not seem particularly conflicted about it.

That is uncomfortable.

It should be.

But discomfort is not always evidence that an old story needs fixing.

Within Homer’s moral universe, the suitors have done far more than flirt with another man’s wife. They have violated xenia, consumed Odysseus’s household, dishonored his family, threatened Telemachus, abused strangers, plotted murder, and attempted to seize a kingdom that does not belong to them.

They have overturned the order of the house, and Odysseus restores it with arrows. Homer was not known for subtle consequences.

And yet this is precisely why the scene is so crucial to the story. The violence cannot be separated from the world Homer has spent the entire poem constructing. Odysseus is king, husband, father, warrior, host, and master of this household. His return is not complete simply because his feet have touched Ithacan soil.

He has to reclaim it.

This is where a modern adaptation faces a temptation that Nolan, in my view, does not entirely resist: the temptation to make Odysseus sufficiently uncomfortable with his own violence that we can remain comfortable watching him commit it.

We want hesitation. We want guilt. We want the film to keep turning back to us, almost pleading, to make sure we know the hero knows how terrible all of this is. That he feels it. That he suffers for it in a way we can emotionally process. But Homer offers no such safety rail, no comforting pause where morality is neatly acknowledged and contained. He simply gives Odysseus the bow and lets the consequences speak for themselves.

That does not mean Homer asks us to celebrate every drop of blood. Some parts of the ending are genuinely difficult to read through modern eyes, particularly the punishment that follows the suitors’ deaths. Nor should reading Homer require pretending that everything an ancient Greek audience accepted must therefore be morally acceptable to us.

But neither should adaptation require quietly rewriting the ancient Greeks until they pass a 21st-century ethics seminar.

Sometimes the distance between their world and ours has to stay visible, not smoothed into modern comfort. Homer is not writing for moral clarity or emotional reassurance. He writes a world where order is fragile, hospitality is sacred, and its violation demands an immediate, absolute response. The bow marks that threshold where identity, authority, and violence collide without softening.

This is why I resist reading Homer’s Odysseus as a simple masculine power fantasy. That reading flattens him into admiration for strength alone. But the man who strings the bow is the same man who once sat alone by the sea and cried for home, who was repeatedly reduced to nothing and rebuilt himself through endurance and intelligence. His emotional range matters as much as his violence, because Homer holds both in tension.

Homer does not replace the weeping Odysseus with the warrior Odysseus. He keeps both in the same body. The husband who longs for Penelope is the same man who reclaims his hall; the father desperate for Telemachus is the one who fights beside him; the exhausted survivor of the sea is still the conqueror of Troy. Homer refuses to simplify him.

He offers no “true” Odysseus beneath the rest. They are all real at once, and that contradiction is the point. That is what makes him larger than the softened version I felt Nolan gave us, where emotional clarity sometimes replaces internal multiplicity.

The climax of The Odyssey should not feel like Odysseus resolving his relationship with violence. It should feel like twenty years collapsing into a single fact: Odysseus is home. And everything he has been—lover, beggar, king, survivor, killer—arrives with him at once, without explanation.

And someone has been sitting in his chair.

Nolan Still Made One Hell of a Movie

After all of that, I should probably make something clear: I did not hate Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Far from it.

There were moments when I sat in the theater completely absorbed by what I was watching. Nolan remains one of the few directors alive who can convince a studio to hand him an enormous budget and then use it to make something that actually feels enormous. The ships, the sea, the landscapes, the battles, the sheer physicality of the journey all carry a weight that few blockbusters can manage anymore.

You can feel the wind, the water, and the sheer misery of crossing the ancient Mediterranean in a wooden ship while Poseidon seems to hold a personal grudge against your captain, and there is something genuinely exciting about seeing The Odyssey treated as an event because this is Homer, after all.

One of the foundational stories of Western literature has been handed to one of the biggest filmmakers in the world and projected onto some of the biggest screens ever built. In an age when so much blockbuster filmmaking depends upon franchises, sequels, superheroes, and intellectual properties designed primarily to sell the next installment, there is something wonderful about millions of people buying tickets to watch a story that was already ancient when Rome was young.

I want more of that. No, I demand more of that. Stop funneling every dollar into the same recycled franchises and start treating the ancient world like it still matters. Give filmmakers $200 million and let them wrestle with Homer, with Gilgamesh, with The Iliad, with Herodotus, with the Aeneid. Let them risk something real instead of playing it safe with intellectual property that already has a marketing department built in. I will show up. I will buy the ticket. And I will keep buying the ticket until Hollywood remembers that stories existed before social media told them what to make.

If Hollywood wants to turn ancient epics into billion-dollar cinema, I am not going to complain. And Nolan deserves credit for treating The Odyssey like it matters. He does not frame it as a museum piece or a homework assignment. He wants it immediate, physical, dangerous. At its best, the film does the one thing Homer always does well: distance. I already knew Ithaca was waiting. I already knew how it ends. And still, there were moments where home felt absurdly far away.

That is the real achievement here. Nolan understands scale in a way most directors do not. Not just making things big, but making you feel small inside them. The sea is not scenery. It is pressure. It is geography that pushes back. Ships feel temporary. Survival feels like luck that can run out at any second. And when the film stops explaining everything and just lets Odysseus deal with what is in front of him, you can see the better version of this movie trying to break through.

Which is why the disappointment hits harder. This is not a bad adaptation you can dismiss. It is too ambitious, too polished, too clearly built by someone who respects the source. Nolan did not misunderstand Homer. He just chose to smooth him out. And that choice matters, because I did not want a safer Odysseus or a cleaner myth. I wanted the ugly one. The cruel one. The liar. The man who survives by being hard to like and impossible to fully explain.

Instead, Nolan gave us something enormous. But Homer was still bigger.

Let Odysseus Be Odysseus

Maybe my expectations were unfair, but I don’t think they were unreasonable. I had just finished The Odyssey, and Homer was still sitting in my head like a storm that hadn’t fully passed. I had spent hundreds of pages walking beside this strange, frustrating, brilliant man, watching him outthink monsters and outlast gods, lose his crew one by one, tell lies so elaborate they start to feel like truth, make decisions that are both astonishingly clever and catastrophically short-sighted, cry for his wife across oceans, sleep with other women without ever quite stopping his longing for home, and survive things that should have ended him ten times over. And then, after all of that, I walked into a theater and asked Christopher Nolan to give me that man back.

Maybe no film could have done that. Maybe the very act of translation across time makes it impossible. But I still think Nolan could have trusted him more than he did.

That is what I keep circling back to when I think about this adaptation. Not the structural changes, not the scenes that were compressed or rearranged, not even the question of whether the monsters looked “right” in any literal sense. I can forgive all of that without much effort. Adaptation always demands change, and fidelity is never as simple as reproduction.

What I struggle with is something more subtle, and more important: the instinct to make Odysseus easier for us to understand.

Because I don’t think he is supposed to be easy.

He is not a self-help lesson wrapped in a tunic, waiting patiently to be decoded. He is not a modern protagonist with a slightly archaic wardrobe. He is not a man waiting across three thousand years for us to arrive and finally explain him to himself.

He is Odysseus.

King of Ithaca, whose throne is empty for twenty years.

Husband of Penelope, whose loyalty becomes its own kind of myth.

Father of Telemachus, who grows up in the shadow of a man he barely knows.

Sacker of cities, whose victories are never clean and never costless.

Inventor of lies so convincing they begin to reshape reality.

Favorite of Athena, who sees in him something like herself.

Enemy of Poseidon, who turns the sea itself into punishment.

And above all, a man clever enough to escape a Cyclops and arrogant enough to make sure the Cyclops knows exactly who escaped him.

That contradiction alone tells us more about him than any psychological monologue ever could. He is not a puzzle to be solved; he is a tension to be held.

And maybe that is why Homer’s version has stayed with me so much more powerfully. Homer does not rush to explain Odysseus. He does not flatten him into consistency. He lets him remain unstable, contradictory, sometimes admirable and sometimes deeply uncomfortable. The poem trusts that we can sit with that without needing it resolved.

Homer gives us the man and steps aside.

We are the ones who have to decide what to do with him.

And I find myself doing exactly that, over and over again. I admire him, and I distrust him. I am impressed by his intelligence, and unsettled by how often that intelligence is used to justify harm. I want him to make it home, and I also understand why the world he moves through seems determined to delay that homecoming. At times I even find myself thinking, uncomfortably, that Poseidon’s anger is not entirely irrational.

That is not a flaw in the character. That is the point of him.

And it is why he has survived.

Because Odysseus is not a moral instruction. He is not a fixed idea. He is a figure who can hold contradiction without collapsing under it, and that makes him endlessly reusable without ever becoming reducible. Every generation can look at him and see something slightly different, without ever fully exhausting what he is.

That, to me, is what adaptation has to be careful with. These are not ordinary stories. They are not just “old texts” waiting to be modernized. They are works that have survived the collapse of languages, the rise and fall of empires, the rewriting of entire belief systems. People have kept telling them not because they were simple, but because they were durable in their complexity.

Odysseus kept sailing through all of that.

He survived because each generation found something in him without needing to turn him into themselves.

That should make us careful. And it should make us humble.

Our job is not to rescue The Odyssey from its age, as if it were incomplete without us. Its age is not a limitation; it is part of its force. The strangeness is not a problem to be solved. It is the reason it still feels alive.

We should not drag Odysseus three thousand years forward, smooth out his contradictions, translate away his brutality, explain away his gods, or turn his world into something that feels comfortably familiar. We should not congratulate ourselves for making him “accessible” if what we have actually done is make him smaller.

He was never waiting for us to make him relevant.

He already was.

And he will continue to be, long after our particular way of understanding him has faded.

The harder task is not updating him. It is allowing him to arrive in our world without stripping away what makes him foreign in the first place.

Let Poseidon remain angry, not symbolic, and Athena remain divine rather than reduced to metaphor. Let the monsters stay monsters, and the ancient morality stay uncomfortable, even when it resists our instincts. Let Odysseus cry beside the sea without turning it into a lesson, lie without explanation, boast without apology, fail without redemption, love without simplification, and kill without pretending it is clean. Let him string the bow and feel the full weight of that moment, and then let us decide what we think.

That is what Homer trusted his audience to do, and that trust is part of the poem’s genius. Nearly three thousand years later, I wish Nolan had trusted us with the same.

So yes, Christopher Nolan made a good movie. I gave it a 6 out of 10, and I mean that without hostility. I will probably watch it again. I am glad it exists. I hope it sends people back to Homer, because that is where the real weight of the story still lives. And I hope Hollywood notices that there is still an appetite for narratives that do not immediately explain themselves, that do not flatten their own strangeness in the name of clarity.

But when I want The Odyssey, I will go back to the poem.

Back to the wine-dark sea that does not care whether I understand it, back to gods who are not metaphors, monsters who are not psychology, and a world that refuses to translate itself into my comfort, back to a man who cries for home yet becomes terrifying the moment his bow is placed in his hands, and back, finally, to the reminder that Nolan gave us a modern Odysseus.

I just wish he had trusted us with Homer’s.

What do you think? Where did I go wrong in my analysis of the book vs. movie? Have you read The Odyssey by Homer? Seen Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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From Reader to Writer

Many of these same themes inspired my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria. Set in one of the ancient world’s greatest centers of learning, the story explores questions of knowledge, legacy, ambition, duty, and what is worth preserving when the world around us begins to change. If you’re drawn to history, philosophy, and the timeless questions found in books like The Iliad and The Odyssey, I think you’ll find something to enjoy in Smoke Over Alexandria. It is available now wherever books are sold.

Get Smoke Over Alexandria Here!

For a long time, I thought the life I wanted was somewhere out in front of me. It was waiting on the other side of a bigger paycheck, a finished book, a stronger deadlift, a growing business, or whatever goal happened to occupy my mind at the time. I spent years believing happiness was something you eventually arrive at if you worked hard enough and accomplished enough. Then I became a husband. Then I became a father. And somewhere along the way, I started noticing that the moments I treasure most aren’t the ones I spent years chasing. They’re moments like this one I’m experiencing right now. A quiet morning. A smiling daughter. A cup of coffee before the day begins. The kind of moment that would have seemed ordinary to an earlier version of me but now feels like the very thing I was searching for all along. The older I get, the more convinced I am that a good life isn’t built from extraordinary days. It’s built from thousands of ordinary moments that we learn to appreciate before they become memories.

Many of these same questions about happiness, meaning, and what is truly worth preserving found their way into my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria. If you've been following along on this journey through history, philosophy, and the pursuit of a good life, I think you'll enjoy it.

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For most of my life, I thought learning was about accumulating answers…

Read enough books, gain enough experience, listen to enough experts, and eventually you would arrive at a place where things became clear. You would understand how the world works. You would understand success, happiness, relationships, and what it means to live a good life.

At least that was the assumption.

The older I get, however, the more I realize that learning often has the opposite effect. Instead of making the world simpler, it reveals how much complexity exists beneath the surface. Instead of making me more certain, it often makes me more aware of how much I don’t know.

One of the ideas I’m encountering as I listen to podcasts and read about Plato is that wisdom begins with recognizing the limits of your own knowledge.

At first, that seems like a strange definition of wisdom.

Yet the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Plato was pointing toward something important.

The Danger of Thinking We’ve Arrived

One of the recurring themes in Plato’s dialogues is the illusion of knowledge.

Again and again, Socrates encounters people who are completely convinced they understand justice, courage, virtue, leadership, or happiness. They speak with confidence. They believe they possess wisdom.

Then Socrates begins asking questions.

The deeper the conversation goes, the more obvious it becomes that their certainty exceeds their understanding.

What fascinates me is that Socrates rarely presents himself as the smartest person in the room. Instead, he approaches conversations with curiosity. His reputation for wisdom comes not from claiming to know everything but from recognizing how much remains unknown.

That idea feels increasingly relevant in a world where everyone seems encouraged to have an opinion about everything.

Life Has a Way of Humbling Us

When I look back on my own life, I can see countless examples of this.

There were seasons when I thought I understood success. Then my definition changed.

There were seasons when I thought I understood happiness. Then becoming a husband and father taught me something entirely different.

There were seasons when I thought I understood writing. Then I finished a novel and realized how much I still had to learn.

The same pattern keeps repeating itself.

Every time I think I’ve arrived at certainty, life reveals another layer beneath the surface.

What once seemed simple becomes more nuanced. What once felt obvious becomes more complicated.

Rather than discouraging me, I’ve come to see this as one of the gifts of learning.

The goal is not to arrive.

The goal is to continue growing.

The Difference Between Information and Wisdom

We live in a time when information has never been more accessible.

At any moment, we can search for answers, listen to experts, watch lectures, and consume more content than previous generations could have imagined.

Yet wisdom seems increasingly rare.

Perhaps that is because information and wisdom are not the same thing.

Information fills the mind.

Wisdom shapes the person.

Information can make us feel knowledgeable.

Wisdom reminds us to remain humble.

Plato appears far more interested in wisdom than information. His philosophy encourages us to keep questioning, keep examining, and keep pursuing truth without becoming arrogant enough to believe we possess it completely.

Becoming a Lifelong Student

One of the reasons I continue reading history, philosophy, literature, and theology is because these books constantly remind me how much remains to be learned.

Every great book expands my perspective while simultaneously exposing the limitations of my own understanding.

In many ways, that is what I want my life to become.

Not a quest to prove that I am right.

Not a quest to convince others that I have all the answers.

But a commitment to remain a student.

A husband still learning how to love well.

A father still learning how to lead well.

A writer still learning how to communicate clearly.

A man still learning how to live wisely.

The moment we believe we’ve arrived may be the moment we stop growing.

The older I get, the less impressed I am by certainty and the more attracted I become to curiosity.

The wisest people I have encountered rarely speak as though they have reached the end of the journey. They ask questions. They remain teachable. They continue learning long after they could have convinced themselves there was nothing left to learn.

That may be one of the most valuable lessons Plato has given me so far.

Never become so satisfied with what you know that you stop searching for what you don’t know.

Wisdom begins not with certainty, but with humility.

And perhaps the first step toward understanding life is recognizing how much of it still remains a mystery.

From the Archives of Alexandria

The scholars of Alexandria collected books from across the known world because they believed knowledge was worth pursuing wherever it could be found. Yet the greatest thinkers of the ancient world often shared a common trait: intellectual humility.

The more they learned, the more they recognized how much remained unknown. That spirit of curiosity helped build one of history’s greatest centers of learning and continues to inspire readers thousands of years later.

If this essay resonated with you, you’ll find many of these same questions woven throughout my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria.

Set against the backdrop of ancient Alexandria during one of history’s most turbulent eras, the novel explores timeless questions about knowledge, wisdom, ambition, and what is worth preserving for future generations.

Smoke Over Alexandria is available now on Amazon.

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For years, I believed my biggest obstacles were external. If I had more time, more

money, more opportunities, or a little more certainty about the future, I assumed everything else would fall into place. I would write more consistently, become more disciplined, make better decisions, and finally build the life I wanted. The solution always seemed to exist somewhere outside of me, waiting to be solved before I could move forward.

Over time, however, I began to notice something uncomfortable. Even when I had the time, I didn’t always use it well. Even when I knew exactly what I should do, I often found myself doing something else entirely. I would sit down intending to write and somehow become distracted. I would plan to spend an evening reading and choose easier entertainment instead. I would tell myself I wanted to be fully present with my wife and daughter, only to catch my attention wandering toward work, my phone, or the next challenge I believed needed solving.

The contradiction bothered me because it revealed something I didn’t want to admit. The obstacle wasn’t always a lack of resources or opportunity. Sometimes the obstacle was me. More specifically, it was the conflict between what I knew was best and what I felt like doing in the moment.

More than two thousand years ago, Plato offered an explanation for this struggle that has stayed with me ever since.

The War Inside Every Person

One of Plato’s most fascinating ideas is that the human soul is not a single, unified thing. Instead, he believed it consists of three distinct parts that constantly compete for influence over our thoughts and actions. He called these parts reason, spirit, and appetite.

Reason seeks truth and wisdom. It thinks beyond the present moment and asks what is ultimately right. Spirit seeks achievement, honor, and recognition. It is the part of us that embraces challenges, wants to prove itself, and strives for accomplishment. Appetite seeks comfort, pleasure, entertainment, and immediate gratification. It is concerned with what feels good now rather than what might be beneficial later.

What makes Plato’s insight so compelling is how recognizable these competing voices still are. Most of us have experienced all three within the span of a single day. Reason tells us to write the essay, read the book, save the money, or have the difficult conversation. Spirit urges us to build the business, pursue excellence, and achieve something meaningful. Appetite encourages us to take the easier path, postpone the work, and choose comfort over effort.

The conflict feels familiar because Plato wasn’t describing a uniquely Greek problem. He was describing a human one. The circumstances of life have changed dramatically since his time, but the internal struggle remains remarkably similar.

Why Discipline Feels So Difficult

This framework changed the way I think about discipline because it explains something many people intuitively feel but struggle to articulate. We often assume that discipline is primarily a matter of knowledge. If we knew enough, understood enough, or found the right system, we would naturally make better choices.

Yet most people already know what they should be doing.

The father knows he should spend less time staring at a screen and more time engaging with his children. The writer knows he should sit down and write. The athlete knows he should train consistently. The reader knows he should open the book instead of scrolling through another feed. Information is rarely the problem.

The real challenge is that different parts of us want different things. One part wants growth while another wants comfort. One part wants meaning while another wants ease. One part is willing to sacrifice for a future reward while another is focused entirely on the present moment.

When I think about my own life, I can see this tension everywhere. Part of me wants to wake up before sunrise to write. Another part wants another hour of sleep. Part of me wants to become the best husband, father, writer, and man I can be. Another part wants the rewards without the sacrifice required to earn them. The struggle itself is evidence that multiple desires are competing for control.

Plato helped me realize that discipline feels difficult not because something is wrong with us, but because we are human. Every worthwhile pursuit requires learning how to navigate these competing forces and deciding which voice deserves to lead.

When the Wrong Part Takes Control

Plato believed that a healthy life required more than simply possessing all three parts of the soul. The crucial question was whether those parts existed in the proper order. Just as a city becomes unstable when the wrong people hold power, a person becomes unstable when the wrong part of the soul assumes control.

The first danger is allowing appetite to rule. When comfort becomes the highest good, life gradually begins to revolve around convenience, pleasure, and the avoidance of discomfort. We choose entertainment over growth, consumption over creation, and distraction over reflection. The challenge is that appetite rarely announces itself as a problem. It often feels pleasant in the moment. Another hour of scrolling feels harmless. Another excuse feels reasonable. Another delay seems insignificant. Yet over time those small decisions accumulate into a life that feels increasingly comfortable and increasingly empty.

Modern life is particularly effective at feeding appetite because so much of the world is designed to capture our attention and satisfy our impulses. We can entertain ourselves endlessly, purchase almost anything with a few clicks, and avoid boredom more easily than any generation in history. Yet despite all of these comforts, many people still find themselves restless, anxious, and dissatisfied. Plato would likely argue that the problem is not the existence of pleasure itself. The problem is allowing pleasure to become the ruler.

Spirit presents a different danger. Unlike appetite, spirit often appears noble. Spirit is the part of us that embraces challenges, pursues excellence, and strives to accomplish difficult things. Without spirit, very little of significance would ever be achieved. It is the force that drives athletes to train, entrepreneurs to build, writers to create, and leaders to step forward when responsibility calls.

The problem arises when achievement becomes the highest good. A person ruled entirely by spirit can spend his entire life chasing the next accomplishment without ever asking whether the pursuit itself is worthwhile. There is always another milestone to reach, another goal to accomplish, another mountain to climb. Success becomes a moving target that continually retreats into the distance. The result is often a life filled with achievement but strangely lacking in peace.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that both of these temptations exist simultaneously. Part of me wants comfort. Another part wants accomplishment. Both voices are powerful, and both can lead me astray if left unchecked. Neither is meant to sit on the throne.

The Role of Reason

For Plato, reason was meant to govern the soul because it alone possesses the ability to see the larger picture. Reason is concerned not merely with what feels good today or what brings recognition tomorrow, but with what ultimately leads to a good life. It asks questions that appetite and spirit often ignore.

What is worth pursuing?

What kind of person am I becoming?

What matters most?

What sacrifices are worth making?

What does a flourishing life actually look like?

These questions have become increasingly important to me as I’ve gotten older. When I was younger, I tended to measure success through external achievements. I focused on goals reached, milestones accomplished, and progress made. While there is nothing inherently wrong with ambition, I have come to realize that achievement alone is an incomplete measure of a life.

A person can accumulate accomplishments while neglecting relationships. He can build a career while losing sight of his family. He can achieve recognition while becoming someone he no longer respects. Success without wisdom is often far less satisfying than we imagine it will be.

Reason serves as the guide that keeps ambition pointed toward worthwhile ends. It does not eliminate spirit. It directs it. It does not destroy appetite. It places it within proper limits. Wisdom allows each part of the soul to contribute without allowing any one part to dominate.

Plato’s vision was not a life devoid of pleasure or ambition. It was a life in which pleasure, ambition, and wisdom exist in harmony under proper leadership.

The Question That Changed Everything

Most self-improvement advice begins with a familiar question. How do I become more productive? How do I become more successful? How do I achieve more in less time?

Those questions are not necessarily bad, but they are incomplete. They focus almost entirely on outcomes while largely ignoring the person pursuing them.

Plato asks a different question. He asks which part of you is in charge.

The more I reflect on that question, the more profound it becomes. Every decision we make is, in some sense, an answer. When we choose discipline over distraction, we answer the question. When we choose growth over comfort, we answer the question. When we choose wisdom over impulse, we answer the question. The shape of our lives emerges from thousands of these small decisions, many of which seem insignificant in isolation but become enormously important over time.

What I appreciate most about Plato’s framework is that it shifts the focus inward. Rather than obsessing over circumstances, it encourages us to examine the condition of our own souls. It reminds us that the most important battles are often not the ones taking place around us but the ones taking place within us.

Ordering the Soul

As I approach my thirties, I find myself thinking less about conquering the world and more about becoming the kind of person capable of living well within it. I still have goals. I still want to write books, provide for my family, continue learning, and pursue meaningful work. None of those ambitions have disappeared.

What has changed is my understanding of where the real battle takes place.

For a long time, I believed that life’s greatest struggles happened in boardrooms, courtrooms, battlefields, businesses, or gyms. Increasingly, I suspect they happen somewhere much quieter. They occur in ordinary moments when no one is watching. They happen when we decide whether to open the book or reach for the phone. They happen when we choose whether to do what is meaningful or what is easy. They happen when we decide what kind of person we want to become.

Every day reason, spirit, and appetite compete for influence. Every day we choose which voice will guide our actions. Every day those choices shape our character, our relationships, and ultimately the course of our lives.

That is why Plato’s insight remains relevant more than two thousand years later. The technology has changed. The world has changed. The challenges we face often look different on the surface. Yet beneath those changes, human nature remains remarkably familiar.

The struggle to govern ourselves is still the central challenge of a meaningful life. A disordered soul creates a disordered life. A well-ordered soul creates the foundation upon which everything else can be built.

From the Archives of Alexandria

Long before modern psychology attempted to explain human behavior, philosophers like Plato were wrestling with the same questions that continue to confront us today. The scholars of Alexandria preserved works such as The Republic because they believed these writings contained enduring truths about human nature, virtue, and the pursuit of a good life.

More than two thousand years later, readers are still finding wisdom in those pages. The circumstances of life may change, but the challenge of governing ourselves remains remarkably familiar. The questions Plato asked are still worth asking because the human soul has not changed nearly as much as our technology has.

Continue the Conversation

If this essay resonated with you, you’ll find many of these same questions woven throughout my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria.

Set against the backdrop of ancient Alexandria during one of history’s most turbulent eras, the novel explores timeless questions about knowledge, character, ambition, wisdom, and what happens when competing visions of the good life collide.

Smoke Over Alexandria is available now wherever books are sold.

A few weeks ago, I came across a line from Seneca that has been difficult to shake.

“Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.”

Like many of the Stoics, Seneca had a remarkable ability to compress an uncomfortable truth into a single sentence. The line is simple enough to understand immediately, yet the longer I sit with it, the more profound it becomes.

Most of us live as though we have an unlimited supply of tomorrows.

We assume there will be another opportunity to call a friend, another family vacation, another Christmas, another chance to start the project we’ve been postponing. We talk about the future as though it has already been promised to us. Deep down, we know that isn’t true, yet we often organize our lives as if it were.

The Stoics had a name for this tendency.

Memento Mori.

Remember that you will die.

To modern ears, the phrase can sound pessimistic. It seems like the sort of idea that would make a person anxious or fearful. Yet the more I have reflected on it, the more I have come to believe the opposite. Properly understood, Memento Mori is not an invitation to obsess over death. It is an invitation to appreciate life.

One day I will read my last book.

As someone who loves reading, that thought strikes me more deeply than it once would have. Right now, there are hundreds of books I hope to read. Histories, biographies, novels, philosophical works, and stories that have survived centuries because generation after generation found something valuable within their pages.

Yet the reality is that I will never read all of them.

One day there will be a final chapter, a final page, and a final book. I won’t know it at the time, but eventually that moment will arrive.

The same is true for writing.

One day I will sit down and write my final sentence. There will be a last essay, a last journal entry, a last chapter. For years I thought about writing primarily in terms of goals and accomplishments. I wanted to publish books, grow an audience, and build a body of work I could be proud of. I still care about those things, but mortality has a way of changing the conversation.

When time is viewed as finite, writing becomes less about achievement and more about stewardship. The question is no longer simply what I can build. It becomes whether I am using the limited time I have been given wisely.

Fatherhood has made this lesson impossible to ignore.

Every week, Aubrey June changes a little more. She learns something new. She says a new word. She becomes a slightly different version of herself. The changes are often so gradual that they are easy to miss in the moment, yet when I look back even a few months, the difference is remarkable.

The other day I found myself thinking about something I had heard years ago. One day, parents pick their child up for the last time and don’t realize it is the last time.

That thought has stayed with me.

Not because it is sad, but because it is true.

Life is filled with final moments that arrive without announcing themselves. The last bedtime story. The last walk with a loved one. The last conversation. The last ordinary afternoon that later becomes a cherished memory.

Most of the things we treasure are not dramatic. They are ordinary moments we only recognize as extraordinary after they are gone.

Perhaps that is why Marcus Aurelius wrote:

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

For years, I interpreted happiness as something waiting for me in the future. It existed on the other side of the next accomplishment, the next milestone, the next version of myself. Like many people, I spent a great deal of time chasing happiness rather than noticing it.

The older I get, the more I believe Marcus Aurelius was pointing toward something deeper.

A good life is rarely built from spectacular moments alone. More often, it is built from ordinary days filled with things we eventually realize were never ordinary at all.

A quiet morning with a cup of coffee.

A chapter from a good book.

A walk with your family.

A conversation with your spouse after the house has gone quiet.

The opportunity to do meaningful work.

The chance to tell someone you love them.

Memento Mori does not diminish these experiences. It magnifies them.

When we remember that our time is limited, we stop treating life as something that begins later. We stop postponing gratitude. We stop assuming there will always be another opportunity.

The awareness of death has a strange way of teaching us how to live.

Perhaps that is why the Stoics returned to the idea so often. They understood that remembering our mortality is not primarily about death. It is about attention. It is about recognizing that this moment, however ordinary it may appear, will never come again.

One day I will read my last book.

One day I will write my last page.

One day I will hold my daughter for the last time.

I do not know when those days will come.

What I do know is that remembering they will come makes me more grateful for today.

And perhaps that is one of the great secrets of happiness.

Not getting more.

Appreciating more.

From the Archives of Alexandria

One of the great tragedies of history is that entire libraries, civilizations, and bodies of knowledge have disappeared. The ancient world constantly reminds us that nothing material lasts forever. Buildings crumble. Empires fall. Scrolls burn. Even the greatest achievements eventually fade.

Yet the awareness of impermanence can serve as a gift. It reminds us to value what we have while we have it. The people of Alexandria understood that knowledge was precious because it could be lost. The same principle applies to life itself.

What is fragile is often what is most valuable.

Continue the Conversation

If this essay resonated with you, you’ll find many of these same questions woven throughout my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria.

Set against the backdrop of ancient Alexandria during one of history’s most turbulent eras, the novel explores timeless questions about knowledge, legacy, mortality, and what is worth preserving when the world around us begins to change.

Smoke Over Alexandria is available now wherever books are sold.

Thank you for reading.

Leave a comment

One of the strangest things about life is that people are often learning from us when we have no idea they are watching.

As a new father, that thought has begun to occupy my mind more than almost anything else. My daughter is still young, but I already know there will come a day when she remembers less of what I told her and far more of how I lived. She will remember whether I kept my word. She will remember how I treated her mother. She will remember whether I remained calm when life became difficult or allowed frustration to dictate my actions. Long before she understands my advice, she will be studying my example.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that character is rarely taught through speeches. It is absorbed through observation. We become examples long before we become teachers.

The Lessons We Never Intend to Teach

Most of us think about influence as something intentional. We imagine giving advice, sharing wisdom, or having an important conversation that changes someone’s life. Those moments certainly matter, but I suspect they are far less influential than the ordinary moments we barely notice.

People watch how we respond to inconvenience. They notice whether we speak respectfully about people who are not in the room. They remember whether we apologize when we are wrong or quietly protect our pride. They observe whether we continue showing up when the work becomes difficult and whether our actions consistently match our words.

Character is revealed in those ordinary moments because those are the moments least likely to be performed. They expose who we are when no audience is expected.

Perhaps that is why the greatest lessons we ever teach are often the ones we never intended to teach at all.

The life we live is often the lesson we teach.

Aristotle Understood This Long Ago

One of the reasons I recently began reading Aristotle every morning is because he understood something that feels increasingly rare in the modern world. He believed that virtue was not an abstract idea to admire but a habit to practice. We do not become courageous by talking about courage. We become courageous by repeatedly choosing courageous actions. We do not become honest by appreciating honesty. We become honest by telling the truth, especially when it is difficult.

That way of thinking has changed how I look at almost every part of my life.

Writing is no longer simply about finishing another book. It is an opportunity to practice discipline.

Marriage is no longer simply about companionship. It is an opportunity to practice patience, humility, and sacrificial love.

Fatherhood is no longer simply about raising a child. It is an opportunity to become the kind of man I hope my daughter will one day admire.

In each case, the goal is the same. Character is formed through repeated action, not isolated moments of inspiration.

Becoming Worth Following

Our culture spends a great deal of time encouraging people to become successful. There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition, and I certainly have ambitions of my own. I hope to write many more books. I hope to continue building a meaningful body of work. I hope to provide well for my family and leave something behind that outlives me.

But success and character are not the same thing.

History is filled with talented people who lacked integrity and powerful people who lacked wisdom. They accomplished remarkable things while quietly destroying the relationships closest to them. Their achievements survived. Their example did not.

The people I admire most are different. Whether I read about Hector standing before the walls of Troy, Marcus Aurelius writing in his journal, or ordinary men and women who quietly fulfilled their responsibilities without recognition, I find myself drawn to the same quality again and again.

Consistency.

They became the same person in private that they appeared to be in public.

That is the kind of man I hope to become.

The Legacy We Leave

When people think about legacy, they often imagine monuments, wealth, or accomplishments that will survive long after they are gone. Those things may have value, but I suspect our greatest legacy is much quieter than that.

It lives in the habits we pass on.

It lives in the values our children inherit.

It lives in the integrity our friends remember.

It lives in the example we set when nobody thinks history is being written.

Character has a way of multiplying across generations. One person’s patience becomes another person’s instinct. One father’s honesty becomes his daughter’s expectation. One mother’s kindness becomes the standard by which an entire family learns to treat others.

Perhaps that is why character matters so much.

It never belongs only to us.

The habits we practice today become someone else’s inheritance tomorrow.

From the Archives of Alexandria

While writing Smoke Over Alexandria, I kept returning to a question that seemed larger than the novel itself.

What survives when everything else is lost?

Libraries preserve ideas. Families preserve character. Both depend on one generation deciding that something is too valuable to disappear.

That realization eventually became one of the central themes of the novel. Buildings may burn, kingdoms may fall, and civilizations may eventually become ruins, but wisdom survives whenever ordinary people decide it is worth preserving.

I think the same is true of character.

Every day, whether we realize it or not, we are preserving something for the people who come after us.

The question is not whether we are leaving a legacy.

The question is what kind of legacy we are leaving.

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, you’ll find many of these same questions woven throughout my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria.

Set against the backdrop of ancient Alexandria during one of history’s most turbulent eras, the novel explores timeless questions about knowledge, ambition, sacrifice, and what is worth preserving when the world around us begins to change.

Smoke Over Alexandria is available now wherever books are sold.

Leave a comment

One of the things that has surprised me most while reading The Iliad is how quickly Homer gets to the point.

I expected a story about war.

I expected heroic speeches, famous battles, and legendary warriors. I expected a grand tale about the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans. Those things are certainly present, but they are not where Homer begins.

The very first word of The Iliad is often translated as “rage.”

Not courage.

Not glory.

Not honor.

Not victory.

Rage.

For nearly three thousand years, readers have opened this book and immediately been confronted with a warning about what happens when anger is allowed to govern a human life.

That is not an accident.

Achilles is the greatest warrior in the Greek army. He is stronger, faster, and more talented than the men around him. If this were a modern story, he would possess every advantage we typically associate with success. Yet Homer does not introduce him as a hero to be admired. Instead, he introduces him as a man whose anger unleashes suffering on everyone around him.

The conflict begins when Achilles feels insulted by Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces. His pride is wounded. His sense of honor is challenged. In response, Achilles withdraws from the war entirely. What follows is a chain reaction that affects not only Achilles but thousands of other people.

That is what makes the story so compelling.

The greatest threat facing Achilles is not a Trojan warrior standing across the battlefield. The greatest threat is the part of himself he cannot control.

The older I get, the more relevant that lesson feels.

Most of us will never stand on a battlefield. We will never command armies or fight for ancient kingdoms. Yet we face our own versions of Achilles’ struggle every day. We feel overlooked, disrespected, misunderstood, or wounded by the actions of others. Pride whispers that we deserve better. Anger tells us we are justified. Ego encourages us to make decisions based on emotion rather than wisdom.

Sometimes the consequences are small. Sometimes they are not.

A careless comment damages a relationship. A moment of anger becomes a lasting regret. An unwillingness to forgive creates years of distance between people who once cared deeply about one another. The battlefield looks different today, but human nature has not changed nearly as much as we like to imagine.

That may be why The Iliad continues to endure.

Homer understood that the greatest conflicts in human life are often internal before they become external. Long before cities burn and wars begin, something happens inside the human heart. Pride takes root. Anger grows. Resentment lingers. The struggle that unfolds on the battlefield is often the visible result of an invisible conflict that began much earlier.

As I read The Iliad, I find myself thinking less about ancient Greece and more about the ordinary moments of everyday life.

What kind of father am I when frustration gets the better of me?

What kind of husband am I when pride prevents me from admitting I’m wrong?

What kind of writer am I when criticism feels personal?

What kind of man am I when my emotions begin making decisions that wisdom should be making?

These are not questions unique to Achilles. They are questions every generation must answer for itself.

The lesson Homer offers is not that anger is always wrong. Anger can sometimes point us toward injustice or reveal something that genuinely needs attention. The danger comes when anger becomes our master rather than our servant. Achilles’ tragedy is not that he experiences anger. It is that he allows anger to govern him.

Three thousand years later, that remains a remarkably relevant lesson.

The strongest person in the room is not always the fastest, wealthiest, or most talented. More often, it is the person who has learned to govern himself. The person who can remain steady when circumstances invite outrage. The person who can choose wisdom when pride demands retaliation.

That is a lesson worth remembering, whether we are reading Homer, raising children, building businesses, writing books, or simply trying to live well.

From the Archives of Alexandria

One of the reasons great books survive is that they continue asking questions every generation must answer for itself. The details change, but the underlying struggles remain remarkably familiar.

While writing Smoke Over Alexandria, I found myself returning to many of the same themes that appear throughout ancient literature. Questions of pride, ambition, loyalty, sacrifice, and character seem to follow humanity across centuries. The settings change. The technology changes. The people change. Yet the internal struggles often remain the same.

Perhaps that is why books like The Iliad still matter. They remind us that human nature has always been both our greatest strength and our greatest challenge.

Continue the Conversation

If this essay resonated with you, you’ll find many of these same questions woven throughout my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria.

Set against the backdrop of ancient Alexandria during one of history’s most turbulent eras, the novel explores timeless questions about knowledge, ambition, sacrifice, and what is worth preserving when the world around us begins to change.

Smoke Over Alexandria is available now wherever books are sold.

Thank you for reading.

Leave a comment

A few months ago, I started working my way through Aristotle’s writings in the early morning hours before the rest of my house wakes up. Most days begin the same way. A cup of coffee. A notebook. A few pages of reading before I sit down to write. Over time, I’ve realized that Aristotle has a way of making ordinary questions feel much more important than they first appear.

One of those questions has stayed with me long after I closed the book.

What is a human life for?

It is a question we rarely ask directly. Instead, we tend to ask smaller questions that orbit around it. How do I become more successful? How do I make more money? How do I advance my career? How do I accomplish my goals? None of those questions are unimportant, but Aristotle would likely argue that they all depend upon a deeper question that comes first. Before asking what we want to achieve, we should ask what kind of person we are trying to become.

The older I get, the more I find myself wrestling with that distinction.

For much of my twenties, I thought success was primarily about accomplishment. I wanted to write books, build a business, become financially independent, and create a life that felt meaningful. Looking back, there was nothing wrong with those ambitions. In many ways, I still have them. I want to become a full-time author. I want to provide well for my family. I want to continue building a life filled with meaningful work, great books, and worthwhile pursuits.

What has changed is my understanding of what those goals are supposed to do for me.

For years, I treated them as destinations. I imagined that somewhere on the other side of the next achievement was a version of myself that would finally feel satisfied. Yet every time I reached a goal, another one appeared in the distance. The finish line moved, and the feeling I was chasing moved with it.

Aristotle would not have been surprised.

He believed that human flourishing could never be found solely in external achievements because the deepest purpose of life is not accumulating accomplishments. It is developing excellence of character. The central question is not what we possess, what we earn, or what we achieve. The central question is who we are becoming through the process of pursuing those things.

That idea has become increasingly important to me since becoming a father.

Every day, Aubrey June is watching the way I live. She watches how I respond to frustration, how I treat her mother, how I approach work, and how I carry myself when things do not go according to plan. One day she will learn lessons from my words, but long before that happens, she will learn from my example. The realization that another human being is studying your life has a way of clarifying what matters.

It has forced me to think differently about personal growth.

I still care about becoming stronger. I still care about writing books. I still care about building a business and creating financial freedom for my family. But beneath all of those goals sits a deeper aspiration. I want to become the kind of man my daughter can admire, the kind of husband my wife can rely on, and the kind of person who consistently lives according to the values he claims to believe.

Aristotle believed that this transformation happens through virtue. Courage, patience, discipline, wisdom, generosity, and humility are not traits we are simply born with. They are habits cultivated through repeated action. We become disciplined by practicing discipline. We become courageous by acting courageously. We become patient by choosing patience when impatience would be easier.

In many ways, this is one of the most hopeful ideas in all of philosophy.

Most of us imagine transformation as a dramatic event. We think there will be a breakthrough moment when everything suddenly changes. Aristotle offers a different vision. He suggests that character is built gradually through countless ordinary decisions that seem insignificant when viewed individually. A morning spent reading instead of scrolling. A workout completed when excuses would have been easier. A difficult conversation approached with honesty rather than avoidance. A decision to remain calm when frustration would feel more natural.

Viewed in isolation, none of those choices appear remarkable. Viewed across years, they become a life.

That is why I find myself returning to Aristotle again and again. He reminds me that excellence is not a destination reserved for a fortunate few. It is the product of daily choices repeated over time. The person I become tomorrow is being shaped by the habits I practice today.

The challenge, then, is not merely to accomplish more. It is to become better.

A better husband.

A better father.

A better writer.

A better friend.

A better man.

The ancient philosophers understood something that modern life often encourages us to forget. Success is not ultimately measured by what we accumulate. It is measured by what we become.

And that is a pursuit worthy of a lifetime.

From the Archives of Alexandria

While researching Smoke Over Alexandria, I spent countless hours reading about the scholars, philosophers, and intellectuals who once walked the streets of ancient Alexandria. The city possessed one of the greatest collections of knowledge the world had ever seen, yet history repeatedly reminds us that knowledge alone is never enough. A civilization can possess brilliant ideas and still decline if it lacks the character required to preserve and apply them wisely.

The same may be true of our own lives. Information has never been more abundant. Wisdom remains far more difficult to acquire. Aristotle understood that the gap between knowledge and wisdom is often bridged by character. What matters is not simply what we know, but what kind of people that knowledge is helping us become.

Continue the Conversation

If this essay resonated with you, you’ll find many of these same questions woven throughout my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria.

Set against the backdrop of ancient Alexandria during one of history’s most turbulent eras, the novel explores timeless questions about knowledge, ambition, sacrifice, and what is worth preserving when the world around us begins to change.

Smoke Over Alexandria is available now wherever books are sold.

Leave a comment

For most of my twenties, I believed success would look much bigger than it does today. If you had asked me what I wanted from life, I probably would have talked about achievement, recognition, financial freedom, and building something significant enough that other people would notice. I wanted to write books, build a business, make more money, and create a life that felt important. None of those desires were necessarily wrong, but they carried with them an assumption I didn’t fully recognize at the time. I believed that happiness was waiting for me somewhere in the future. It existed on the other side of the next accomplishment, the next milestone, or the next version of myself.

The older I get, the less convinced I am that life works that way.

I still have ambitious goals. I want to become a full-time author. I want to build financial freedom for my family. I want to continue investing, growing, and creating. I want to write books that people are still reading long after I’m gone. Those ambitions haven’t disappeared. If anything, they’ve become clearer. What has changed is my understanding of what those goals are supposed to provide.

For years, I treated them as destinations. I imagined reaching a certain point where the uncertainty would finally disappear and life would begin to feel complete. Now I see them differently. They are simply directions. They give shape to the journey, but they are not the source of meaning itself.

When I picture the life I truly want, it looks surprisingly ordinary.

It begins in the quiet hours before sunrise when the house is still asleep and I can sit alone with a notebook, a cup of coffee, and a few uninterrupted moments to think. It includes long stretches of reading books that challenge me, conversations with people I love, hard workouts that remind me what my body is capable of, and evenings spent sitting on the floor playing with my daughter. It includes building a marriage that grows deeper with each passing year and creating work that reflects the values I hope to live by.

None of those moments would appear particularly impressive from the outside. They won’t make headlines. They won’t earn awards. Yet when I imagine myself looking back decades from now, those are the moments I suspect will matter most. The ordinary days are not interruptions between the important events of life. More often than not, they are the important events.

Perhaps that is one of the lessons adulthood teaches if we’re willing to learn it. The things we spend years chasing are rarely the things that ultimately satisfy us. We imagine fulfillment arriving in dramatic fashion, only to discover that it was quietly available all along in the people we love, the work we care about, and the habits that shape our days.

I spent a long time believing that happiness lived somewhere ahead of me. These days, I’m trying to pay closer attention to what is already here. A good book. A meaningful conversation. A walk with my family. A page written before sunrise. A daughter laughing in the next room. These moments are easy to overlook because they seem so small, but I increasingly suspect they are the very substance of a good life.

Maybe wisdom is learning that a meaningful life is not built from extraordinary moments alone. It is built from ordinary days lived with purpose, gratitude, and attention.

That is the life I’m trying to build.

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People often say that history repeats itself. It is one of those phrases we hear so often that we rarely stop to question whether it is actually true. The more I have studied history, however, the less convinced I have become that civilizations simply repeat the same events over and over again.

Wars are fought with different weapons. Governments rise and fall under different circumstances. Borders shift. Technology transforms the way we communicate, build, trade, and wage conflict. Every generation inherits a world that looks different from the one before it.

History rarely repeats in the literal sense.

Human nature does.

That realization has completely changed the way I approach the past. I no longer read history because I expect Rome to return or because I believe modern society is destined to replay every event of antiquity. I read history because I believe the same pride that influenced emperors, the same ambition that built civilizations, and the same fear that destroyed kingdoms continue to shape people today. The scenery changes. Human nature rarely does.

We Are Not Studying Dead People

When most people think about history, they picture timelines, memorized dates, battles, and lists of rulers whose names they struggled to remember in school. Those details have their place, but I have become convinced that they are not the real reason history matters.

History matters because it allows us to observe human nature from a distance.

When we read about Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, we are reading about ambition. When we study the rise of Augustus, we are studying leadership, power, and political compromise. When we watch the Roman Republic slowly unravel, we are watching ordinary human desires grow large enough to reshape an entire civilization.

The names may change, but the underlying questions remain remarkably familiar. How much power should one person possess? What happens when pride becomes more important than wisdom? Can a civilization survive if its people lose sight of the virtues that made it successful in the first place?

These are not ancient questions.

They are human questions.

“The people change. Human nature rarely does.”

Why I Keep Returning to the Ancient World

Last week I released my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria. While writing it, I spent years immersed in the history of the ancient Mediterranean, the Library of Alexandria, and the final centuries of the Roman Republic. What began as research for a novel gradually became something much more personal.

The more I studied history, the more I realized I was not really studying ancient civilizations.

I was studying myself.

I was studying ambition, fear, courage, loyalty, pride, sacrifice, and responsibility. I was trying to understand why people make the decisions they do, especially when the stakes are high. Those same questions exist in every marriage, every family, every business, and every community. They simply play out on a different scale.

History became less about the past and more about learning how to live wisely in the present.

That is why I continue reading Homer, Plutarch, Aristotle, and the Stoics. They are not valuable because they provide perfect answers. They are valuable because they continue asking the right questions.

Character Outlives Every Civilization

Every civilization eventually leaves behind ruins.

Its monuments crumble. Its governments disappear. Its borders change. Even the greatest empires become chapters in history books. Yet something always survives.

Ideas survive.

Virtues survive.

Stories survive.

The best books continue teaching long after the people who wrote them are gone.

Perhaps that is why I have become so fascinated with the ancient world. It reminds me that our greatest contribution is rarely the buildings we construct or the wealth we accumulate. More often, it is the character we develop and the wisdom we choose to pass on.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” I think history offers a similar lesson. A civilization becomes dyed with the character of its people. Long before an empire collapses, its habits begin to reveal its future.

The same is true of our own lives.

Long before success or failure becomes visible, our daily choices are quietly shaping the people we are becoming.

The Real Purpose of History

For most of my life, I thought history was about understanding the past.

Now I think it is about understanding ourselves.

Every biography is an opportunity to examine ambition. Every war invites us to consider the cost of pride. Every political revolution forces us to wrestle with questions of justice, leadership, and responsibility. Every great civilization leaves behind both warnings and examples for those willing to pay attention.

That is why I keep reading history.

Not because I want to live in the past.

Because I want to become wiser in the present.

“History is not a collection of dates to remember. It is a mirror that reveals who we are.”

From the Archives of Alexandria

One of the questions that stayed with me while writing Smoke Over Alexandria was surprisingly simple: What is worth preserving?

The Library of Alexandria represented more than shelves filled with scrolls. It represented a civilization that believed ideas were worth protecting because ideas shape people, and people shape history.

That question sits quietly beneath the surface of the novel. What happens when knowledge becomes expendable? What responsibility do ordinary men and women have to preserve truth when the institutions around them begin to fail?

Those questions belonged to Alexandria two thousand years ago.

I suspect they still belong to us.

If those questions interest you, I hope you’ll consider reading Smoke Over Alexandria. It is a historical novel, but more than anything, it is an exploration of the timeless ideas that continue to shape every generation.

Get your copy of Smoke Over Alexandria here!

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Somewhere inside every adult is a younger version of themselves who believed something extraordinary was possible.

Before the bills, responsibilities, disappointments, and endless stream of opinions from people convinced they knew what was realistic, there was a child who imagined a future so vividly that it felt less like a dream and more like a promise. It was not merely wishful thinking. It was a vision of who they might become and the kind of life they might build.

Most people do not lose that dream all at once. The process is usually far quieter. It happens through a thousand small compromises that feel reasonable in the moment. A practical decision here. A safer choice there. An opportunity declined because the timing was not right. A risk postponed until some future season when life finally settles down. Years pass this way, and eventually many people wake up wondering why their lives feel disconnected from the person they once hoped to become.

The tragedy is not that the dream was impossible.

The tragedy is that it was forgotten.

As I get older, I find myself thinking about this more often. Perhaps it is because I am now a husband, a father, and a writer. Perhaps it is because I spend so much time reading history and discovering that nearly every remarkable life began with someone refusing to abandon an idea that others considered unrealistic. Whatever the reason, I keep returning to the same conclusion: most people are not defeated by failure. They are defeated by surrendering before failure ever has the chance.

The World Wants Comfortable Dreams

One of the greatest lies we tell ourselves is that maturity requires abandoning ambition.

At some point, many people begin treating their dreams as childish fantasies rather than serious possibilities. They convince themselves that wisdom means lowering expectations and accepting limitations. Society often encourages this way of thinking because comfortable people are predictable people. They fit neatly into existing systems. They ask fewer difficult questions. They stop pursuing things that might disrupt the ordinary.

History tells a different story.

The men and women who shaped civilizations, advanced ideas, built businesses, wrote books, and transformed the world were rarely the people who chose the comfortable path. They were the people who continued moving toward something larger than themselves despite uncertainty, criticism, and the very real possibility of failure.

While reading Homer’s Iliad, I have been struck by how often the story returns to questions of destiny and purpose. Achilles stands before a choice that is far more profound than a military decision. He can remain home and live a long, quiet life, or he can pursue greatness knowing the cost may be everything. Most of us will never face such dramatic circumstances, but the underlying question remains remarkably similar.

Will we spend our lives pursuing comfort or meaning?

The specifics may differ from person to person. One individual dreams of building a business. Another wants to write a book. Another hopes to raise an extraordinary family, serve their community, or leave behind work that matters. Yet beneath every worthy ambition lies the same choice. We can pursue what is easy, or we can pursue what feels meaningful.

The two are rarely the same.

“A person does not become what they wish for. They become what they repeatedly choose.”

The Ancient Question

The ancient philosophers understood something that modern culture often forgets. A meaningful life is not discovered through comfort. It is discovered through action aligned with one’s deepest convictions.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”

What strikes me about that line is its simplicity. Marcus was the most powerful man in the Roman world, yet he understood that philosophy meant very little if it never left the page. Wisdom was not something to admire. It was something to practice.

I think many of us already know far more than we pretend to. We know the habits we should build. We know the conversations we need to have. We know the work we have been avoiding. We know the dream that continues appearing in our thoughts despite every attempt to dismiss it.

The challenge is rarely a lack of information.

The challenge is courage.

The challenge is deciding that the life we want is worth pursuing even when progress feels slow and success remains uncertain.

The Dream Is Still There

One reason I think so many people feel restless is because they are trying to silence something that refuses to disappear.

The dream remains.

It waits beneath the obligations, distractions, fears, and excuses. It appears when you encounter a great book that awakens something inside you. It appears when you watch someone pursuing the life you once imagined for yourself. It appears during quiet moments when the noise of the world finally subsides and you are left alone with your own thoughts.

The dream survives because it is connected to something deeper than ambition.

Many childhood dreams were not merely fantasies. They were early glimpses of identity. They pointed toward the things that naturally fascinated us, challenged us, and made us feel most alive. Over time, responsibilities may reshape those dreams, but the deeper calling beneath them often remains remarkably consistent.

This is why certain ideas never fully disappear. They continue returning because they are attached to who we are becoming.

Not who we were.

Who we could still become.

Choose It Again

The encouraging truth is that dreams rarely require dramatic beginnings.

Most are rebuilt through small acts of courage repeated consistently over time. A chapter written before sunrise. A business plan drafted after work. A difficult conversation that has been postponed for too long. A commitment to improve one area of life by one percent each day.

The future is rarely transformed by a single decision. More often, it is transformed by thousands of ordinary decisions made in the same direction.

That is what history teaches us. Great accomplishments almost never arrive suddenly. They are usually the result of years spent choosing the same worthy path over and over again when no one is watching and no guarantees exist.

The dream you had as a child may not look exactly the same today. Life changes us. Responsibility changes us. Experience changes us. Yet the deeper calling beneath that dream often survives every season of life. It waits patiently for us to notice it again.

The question is not whether it is still there.

The question is whether you are willing to choose it again.

“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” — Marcus Aurelius

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Over the past several months, I have spent my mornings reading Homer’s The Iliad. Like many people, I initially approached the poem expecting a story about war, glory, and heroism. Those things are certainly present. The poem is filled with legendary warriors, bloody battles, wounded pride, and some of the most famous scenes in all of literature. Yet the farther I get into the story, the more convinced I become that The Iliad is not primarily about war.

It is about character.

I am currently reading Book 18, one of the most important turning points in the entire poem. Achilles has just learned that Patroclus, his closest companion, has been killed. The news crushes him. His grief is overwhelming, and the anger that has simmered beneath the surface throughout much of the story erupts once again. The man who spent much of the poem refusing to fight suddenly prepares to return to the battlefield.

What interests me most is not the battle that follows. It is the revelation that comes before it.

Pressure has a way of exposing who we already are.

One of Homer’s greatest strengths is his ability to place his characters in situations that strip away pretense. When everything is comfortable, almost anyone can appear disciplined, courageous, patient, or wise. Those qualities are easy to claim when life is going according to plan. The real test comes when circumstances become difficult, when loss arrives unexpectedly, or when fear and uncertainty begin to cloud judgment.

Achilles reveals himself through grief. Agamemnon reveals himself through pride. Hector reveals himself through duty. Again and again, Homer places these characters under enormous pressure and allows their choices to reveal the virtues and flaws that have been shaping them all along.

The same thing happens in our own lives.

Most of us will never stand before the walls of Troy or lead armies into battle, but every one of us will face moments that test our character. We will experience disappointment. We will lose people we love. We will encounter failure, uncertainty, and fear. When those moments arrive, they often reveal habits and beliefs that have been quietly forming beneath the surface for years.

That realization has caused me to think differently about the ordinary decisions that fill most of our days.

Modern culture tends to focus on outcomes. We celebrate achievements, promotions, championships, and milestones. We become fascinated with results because results are visible. Character, by contrast, is much harder to see. It develops slowly, often unnoticed, through countless decisions that seem insignificant at the time.

Character is formed when you choose to read instead of scroll.

It is formed when you keep your word even when it becomes inconvenient.

It is formed when you tell the truth despite the potential cost.

It is formed when you train even when motivation disappears.

It is formed when you show patience with your spouse after a long day.

It is formed when you put down your phone and give your full attention to your child.

None of these moments appear particularly important in isolation. Most will never be remembered. Yet they are shaping the person making them. Long before our choices change our future, they change us.

This is one of the reasons I continue returning to ancient books. The technology changes. Political systems rise and fall. Entire civilizations appear and disappear. Human nature, however, remains remarkably consistent. The same pride that existed in Agamemnon exists today. The same ambition that drove Achilles exists today. The same sense of responsibility that made Hector admirable continues to inspire people nearly three thousand years later.

The ancients understood something that modern society often forgets. The purpose of life is not merely to achieve success. The purpose is to become the kind of person capable of handling success, failure, responsibility, loss, and everything in between. In other words, the goal is not simply accomplishment. The goal is character.

That lesson feels especially relevant to me right now.

Last week I released my novel, Smoke Over Alexandria. Like every meaningful project, the book was built through hundreds of small decisions that nobody ever saw. Early mornings spent writing before work. Long stretches of reading and research. Days when progress felt painfully slow. Moments when it would have been easier to quit and move on to something else. The finished book is visible. The thousands of choices that created it are not.

The same principle applies to fatherhood.

The same principle applies to marriage.

The same principle applies to fitness, business, writing, and every worthwhile pursuit.

We often become obsessed with outcomes because outcomes are measurable. Character is harder to quantify. Yet character is what ultimately produces outcomes in the first place. It determines how we respond when life becomes difficult. It influences the decisions we make when nobody is watching. It shapes our ability to persevere when circumstances are less than ideal.

Every choice matters. Not because every choice changes your future overnight, but because every choice changes you.

Character Before Destiny

That is what The Iliad continues to teach me.

We spend much of our lives focused on outcomes. We think about the future we want to create, the goals we hope to achieve, and the milestones we hope to reach. We imagine the house we want to buy, the business we want to build, the books we want to write, and the legacy we hope to leave behind. There is nothing wrong with ambition. There is nothing wrong with pursuing meaningful goals. The problem arises when we become so focused on the destination that we neglect the person we are becoming along the way.

Achilles did not become Achilles in a single moment. Hector did not become Hector in a single moment. Their choices, habits, virtues, and flaws were forged long before the events of the poem revealed them to the world. The same is true for us.

The decision to read instead of scroll. The decision to tell the truth when it would be easier not to. The decision to keep your word. The decision to be patient with your family. The decision to continue when progress feels slow and nobody seems to notice. These moments rarely feel significant when they happen. Most will never become stories we tell. Yet they are quietly shaping our character day after day.

Over time, the person you become creates the future you experience.

That may be one of the most important lessons hidden within the pages of The Iliad. Character is not built in a single heroic act. It is built through thousands of ordinary decisions made when nobody is watching. Long before pressure reveals who we are, our daily choices have already been deciding it.

The ancient world understood this. Homer understood it. The Stoics understood it.

Three thousand years later, we are still learning the same lesson.

Character comes before destiny.

I’m currently reading Book 18 of The Iliad and documenting what I’m learning along the way. If you’re interested in great books, history, philosophy, fatherhood, and the pursuit of becoming a better husband, father, writer, and man, subscribe and follow along.

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I'm currently reading Book 18 of The Iliad and documenting what I'm learning along the way. If you're interested in great books, history, philosophy, fatherhood, and the pursuit of becoming a better man, subscribe and follow along.

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In Book 6, Hector briefly returns to the city before rejoining the war. There he finds his wife Andromache holding their son, Astyanax. She begs him not to go back. She knows Troy is losing, and she understands what will happen if the city falls. More importantly, she knows there is a very real chance that this conversation will be their last. Hector understands this as well. Yet after embracing his family, he turns and walks back toward the fighting.

When I first encountered The Iliad, my attention was fixed almost entirely on Achilles. Most young men are naturally drawn toward him. Achilles is stronger, faster, more famous, and more gifted than anyone around him. He embodies excellence, achievement, and the pursuit of greatness. He is the warrior whose name survives thousands of years after his death.

The older I get, however, the more I find myself paying attention to Hector. While Achilles spends much of the poem wrestling with wounded pride and personal glory, Hector carries a different burden. He is a husband, a father, and the defender of his city. He does not return to battle because he loves war. He returns because there are people depending on him. His family, his city, and his fellow Trojans all stand behind him. In many ways, Hector understands something Achilles never fully learns: responsibility gives meaning to sacrifice.

Responsibility is not a particularly fashionable word today. We live in an age that celebrates freedom, self-expression, personal fulfillment, and endless choice. Yet when I look at the things that have brought the most meaning into my own life, almost all of them arrived in the form of responsibilities I willingly accepted. Marriage is a responsibility. Fatherhood is a responsibility. Writing a book, keeping your word, caring for your family, and showing up when you are tired are all responsibilities. None of them are glamorous, but they shape us in ways comfort never can.

What strikes me most about Hector is the clarity of his identity. He knows who he is. His sense of worth is not built upon public recognition or the admiration of others. It rests upon his duties and obligations. Achilles, by contrast, ties much of his identity to honor and glory. When those things are threatened, his world begins to unravel. Hector’s foundation is far more stable because it is rooted in service rather than recognition.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that many of our modern frustrations stem from building our lives around things that can be taken away. Status disappears. Money comes and goes. Public approval shifts constantly. Even success has a way of fading into the background once it is achieved. Responsibility, however, remains. It continues to call us forward long after applause has ended.

Perhaps that is why Hector’s story continues to resonate nearly three thousand years later. Most of us will never stand before the walls of Troy, but every day we face our own smaller battles. We must choose between comfort and duty, between self-interest and sacrifice, between chasing recognition and serving those entrusted to our care. Those decisions may seem insignificant compared to the fate of an ancient city, but they ultimately shape the kind of people we become.

As I read The Iliad today, I find myself asking a different question than I did when I was younger. Not, “How can I be more like Achilles?” but rather, “What would it look like to become more like Hector?” To know what matters most. To accept responsibility willingly. To protect the things entrusted to my care. To understand that a meaningful life is not measured by the glory we accumulate, but by the people we faithfully serve.

Glory fades. Duty remains.

I’m reading through The Iliad one book at a time and sharing the lessons that stand out along the way. If you’d like to follow along, subscribe below. In the coming weeks, I’ll continue breaking down each book and exploring what this nearly three-thousand-year-old story still has to teach us about family, leadership, responsibility, and the pursuit of a meaningful life.

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I used to think happiness was waiting for me somewhere in the future.

Now I think it was sitting beside me the entire time.

The Finish Line that Keeps Moving

For most of my life, I thought happiness was a destination.

Not in an obvious way. If you had asked me directly, I probably would have given the same answer most thoughtful people give. I would have talked about gratitude, relationships, purpose, and family. But underneath those answers was a quieter belief that shaped the way I approached life for years. I believed happiness was waiting for me somewhere in the future. It existed on the other side of the next accomplishment, the next milestone, the next version of myself.

When I finally made more money.

When I finally got stronger.

When I finally wrote the book.

When I finally built the business.

When I finally arrived somewhere better than where I was standing.

The specific goal changed over the years, but the underlying assumption remained the same. Happiness was always just a little farther ahead. Close enough to imagine, but never close enough to reach.

I think a lot of people live this way. The entrepreneur believes life will finally become enjoyable once the business reaches a certain level. The young, ambitious college grad believes satisfaction is waiting on the other side of a promotion. The athlete believes happiness will arrive with the next personal record or championship. The writer believes it is hidden inside the next book contract. Everyone seems to be carrying around an invisible finish line that promises fulfillment once they finally cross it.

The problem is that the finish line never stays where you put it.

Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon. They call it hedonic adaptation, which is a complicated way of describing a very simple truth about human nature. We get used to things. The raise becomes normal. The new house becomes normal. The achievement becomes normal. The accomplishment we once obsessed over eventually becomes part of the background of everyday life.

You get the thing you wanted.

You feel good for a while.

Then you adapt.

Then you start wanting the next thing.

This is why lottery winners often report similar levels of happiness a year after winning as they did before they won. It is why people who spend years pursuing a major goal sometimes experience an unexpected emptiness after achieving it. The goal itself was real. The accomplishment was real. But happiness was never hiding inside the achievement. We simply convinced ourselves that it was.

The goal was never the problem.

The belief that happiness lived inside the goal was.

Life Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

One of the longest studies ever conducted on human happiness followed participants for more than eighty years and arrived at a conclusion that feels almost disappointingly simple. The people who reported the highest levels of happiness were not the wealthiest, the most accomplished, or the most successful. They were the people with the strongest relationships, the deepest connections, and the clearest sense of meaning in their lives.

Think about how different that conclusion is from the story most of us have been told.

We live in a culture that constantly encourages accumulation. More money. More status. More followers. More recognition. More cars. More houses. Yet one of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted on human flourishing found that the people living the happiest lives were not distinguished by what they accumulated. They were distinguished by the quality of their relationships and their ability to find meaning in ordinary life.

The Ordinary Things We Overlook

The older I get, the harder it becomes to ignore that lesson because I keep finding evidence of it in my own life.

Some of the happiest moments I have ever experienced would look completely unremarkable to an outside observer. They are not dramatic. They are not impressive. They are not the kinds of moments people spend years trying to create.

They are evenings sitting on the couch with Lindsay after Aubrey June has finally fallen asleep and the house has grown quiet. They are slow Saturday mornings where coffee is brewing in the kitchen, books are scattered across the table, and nobody has anywhere urgent to be. They are long walks with Goose as the sun begins to disappear below the horizon. They are conversations that last an extra thirty minutes because nobody wants to be the first person to leave.

For years I thought those moments were the reward waiting at the end of the journey.

Now I think they were the journey.

Training Yourself to Notice

Marcus Aurelius practiced something he called negative visualization. He would intentionally imagine losing the things he loved so that he could see them more clearly while they were still present. At first glance, the exercise sounds almost pessimistic. In reality, it is one of the most powerful reminders of gratitude I have ever encountered.

Imagine coming home and hearing your wife’s laugh from another room.

Imagine your daughter asking you to read the same book for the tenth time.

Imagine your dog following you from room to room.

Imagine an ordinary Tuesday filled with all the routines and inconveniences you barely notice anymore.

Now imagine it all gone.

Suddenly the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The life that felt repetitive becomes precious. The moments that seemed forgettable reveal themselves as the moments you would give almost anything to experience one more time.

Modern neuroscience suggests that this practice works because our brains are naturally wired to notice problems more quickly than blessings. We remember criticism longer than compliments. We fixate on inconvenience more easily than beauty. We notice what is wrong before we notice what is right. That tendency helped our ancestors survive, but it also means we often overlook the goodness that is already present in our lives.

Which is why gratitude is not simply an emotion.

It is a discipline.

And like every discipline, it becomes stronger through practice.

Not vague gratitude.

Specific gratitude.

The conversation with family around the dinner table, The workout, the bedtime story, the quiet drive in the car, the cup of coffee in the morning, the moment nobody else notices or cares about.

The more specific gratitude becomes, the more powerful it becomes because it forces us to pay attention to what is actually happening rather than what we wish was happening.

Happiness During the Climb

I still have ambitious goals. I want to write books and become an author. I want to continue to workout and get stronger. I want to create new and exciting opportunities for my family. I want to buy the house. I want to keep building, creating, learning, and climbing for as long as I can.

But I no longer believe happiness is waiting for me at the top of the mountain.

I think happiness is sitting beside me during the climb.

It is present in the day-to-day itself. It is present in the people sharing the journey. It is present in my relationships with my family that make the struggle worthwhile. It is present in the ordinary moments that surround the pursuit of ambitious goals. The happiest people are not waiting until they arrive to appreciate life. They have learned how to appreciate it while they are still building it.

Life is Beautiful

You are allowed to find life beautiful right now.

Not when you have more.

Not when you have arrived somewhere better.

Not when you finally become the person you think you need to be.

Right now.

In the middle of a season of life struggles.

In the middle of uncertainty.

In the middle of the climb towards your next goal.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that this is what the happiest people understand. They do not postpone joy until some future destination. They find a way to appreciate the life they already have while continuing to pursue the life they want.

And honestly, I keep coming back to the same conclusion.

Idk man.

Life is beautiful.

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“The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach.” — Marcus Aurelius

Aubrey June,

When I was younger, I thought an extraordinary life would look different than it does now.

I imagined adventure, achievement, success, and accomplishment. I imagined writing books that people would read long after I was gone. I imagined building something meaningful enough that it would outlast me. I imagined financial freedom, a beautiful home somewhere surrounded by nature, and the satisfaction that comes from turning difficult dreams into reality through years of hard work and persistence.

I still want many of those things.

In fact, I hope by the time you read this I have achieved some of them.

But becoming your father has changed the way I think about what makes a life extraordinary.

Because somewhere along the way I started noticing that the moments I treasure most are almost never the ones that would impress anyone else.

They are the ordinary moments that most people rush through without realizing how valuable they are.

They are mornings before the sun comes up when the house is completely quiet and I am sitting alone with a cup of coffee, a stack of books, and a notebook, trying to understand the world a little better before everyone else wakes up.

They are evenings sitting on the couch with your mother after you have finally fallen asleep, talking about our day while Goose stretches out across the floor nearby and the house settles into that rare kind of silence that feels peaceful instead of empty.

They are Saturday mornings when all three of us are together with nowhere important to be, reading books, taking walks, making breakfast, and enjoying the kind of slow moments that somehow feel insignificant while they are happening but become priceless in memory.

The older I get, the more I realize those moments are not interruptions to life.

They are life.

And your mother has taught me that better than anyone.

One day I hope you understand how much of the warmth in our family comes from her.

Long before you were born, your mom taught me that happiness is not something you discover at the end of a long journey after every goal has been accomplished. It is something you learn to recognize in the middle of ordinary days.

She has this incredible ability to make a house feel like a home.

To make people feel welcome.

To make difficult seasons feel manageable.

To remind me, often without saying a word, that the people sitting around the dinner table matter more than almost anything happening outside the walls of our home.

Some of my favorite memories have no achievement attached to them at all.

They are simply memories of being together.

Watching movies on the couch.

Going for walks.

Laughing about something completely ridiculous.

Reading beside each other in the evening while the world outside keeps moving.

Looking across the room and realizing that the life I spent years hoping for is already sitting right in front of me.

That realization changes a person.

Because the world is constantly trying to convince you that meaning lives somewhere else.

The next promotion.

The next house.

The next accomplishment.

The next milestone.

The next version of yourself.

Always somewhere over the horizon.

Always one more achievement away.

But some of the wisest people who have ever lived understood something different.

They understood that if a person cannot appreciate the life directly in front of them, no amount of success will ever be enough.

That lesson took me a long time to learn.

And I am still learning it.

I still have ambitious dreams. I still want to write books that matter. I still want to build a business that creates opportunities for our family. I still want to give you experiences, adventures, and opportunities that I never had.

But I no longer believe those things are the point.

They are tools.

The point is the people.

The point is loving your family well.

The point is becoming someone your wife can depend on when life gets difficult.

The point is being present enough to notice when your daughter asks you to read her favorite book for the tenth time.

The point is having meaningful conversations around the dinner table instead of everyone staring into separate screens.

The point is creating a home filled with books, curiosity, laughter, and enough love that people always want to come back.

Most people spend their lives trying to become impressive.

I hope you spend yours trying to become dependable.

Dependable people rarely become famous.

History books do not spend much time talking about them.

But families are built on them.

Communities are strengthened by them.

And the people who love them are grateful every day that they exist.

Be the kind of person who keeps their word.

Be the kind of person who shows up.

Be the kind of person who reads good books, asks thoughtful questions, works hard, and does the right thing even when nobody is watching.

Be the kind of person who makes other people’s lives better simply because you are in them.

Because the truth is that most extraordinary lives do not look extraordinary from the outside.

They look like a husband who loves his wife deeply after decades of marriage.

They look like a mother creating warmth and stability for her family year after year.

They look like a father who comes home.

They look like children who grow up knowing they were loved.

They look like dinner tables, bookshelves, long walks, family traditions, and ordinary days that slowly become cherished memories.

That is the life I hope you build someday.

Not because it is easy.

But because I have come to believe it is one of the rarest and most meaningful accomplishments a person can achieve.

The world will always tell you to chase attention.

I hope you chase meaning instead.

Love,

Dad

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Over the last few mornings, before the world fully wakes up and before the noise of the day starts pulling at me from every direction, I’ve been sitting with Book One of The Iliad and trying to understand why a story written nearly three thousand years ago still feels painfully alive, almost uncomfortably so at times, especially once you begin realizing that Homer is not really writing about war as much as he is writing about human nature, pride, ego, honor, leadership, insecurity, and the private emotional battles that quietly determine the fate of men long before swords are ever drawn.

What struck me almost immediately is that Homer does not begin The Iliad with some grand heroic victory, nor does he spend time glorifying the spectacle of battle in the way modern retellings often do, but instead opens the entire epic with rage, specifically the rage of Achilles, which already tells you something important about what this story is truly interested in exploring, because Homer understood thousands of years ago that the greatest threat to powerful men is often not the enemy standing across the battlefield from them, but the chaos growing unchecked within themselves.

Homer Begins with Rage for a Reason

Book One is, on its surface, a relatively simple conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, but the more time I spent with it, the more I realized how devastatingly human the entire situation actually is, because what begins as a disagreement over honor slowly reveals itself to be a collision between two men who are both incapable of surrendering their pride, both desperate to preserve their identity in front of others, and both willing to let entire armies suffer rather than endure humiliation publicly.

Agamemnon humiliates a priest named Chryses by refusing to return his daughter, which brings a plague upon the Greek camp after Apollo intervenes, and when Achilles confronts Agamemnon and pushes him toward doing the right thing, Agamemnon finally agrees to give the girl back, but only if he can take something from Achilles in return, namely Briseis, who represented not simply affection or companionship, but Achilles’ honor, reputation, and standing among the Greeks.

That part feels critical to understand because modern readers often miss the emotional weight of what is actually happening there, interpreting Achilles as immature or overly emotional, when in reality Homer is writing from a world where honor was inseparable from identity itself, where glory was one of the only forms of immortality men believed they could achieve, and where public humiliation could feel almost indistinguishable from annihilation.

The Danger of Wounded Pride

Still, the more I thought about Achilles throughout Book One, the more complicated my feelings became toward him because although his anger is understandable, it also becomes deeply destructive, and that tension is what makes him feel so real to me as a character, because Achilles is not weak, lazy, cowardly, or untalented in the slightest. In fact, he is extraordinary in almost every measurable way imaginable, and yet despite all of that greatness, he remains completely vulnerable to the oldest human weakness there is: the inability to govern his own emotions once his pride has been wounded.

There’s a moment in Book One where Achilles nearly kills Agamemnon on the spot before Athena intervenes and restrains him, and sitting with that scene for a while made me realize how many lives throughout history have probably been destroyed in the brief space between anger and self-control, between impulse and restraint, between what a man feels like doing in the moment and what wisdom demands that he do instead.

The older I get, the more I think adulthood, leadership, marriage, fatherhood, writing, and even ambition itself all require this exact kind of emotional discipline far more than most people realize, because eventually every man will encounter moments where he feels unseen, disrespected, overlooked, misunderstood, or unappreciated despite how much he sacrifices, and in those moments there is always a temptation to let bitterness take control, to withdraw, to become resentful, or to quietly hope others fail simply so they finally understand your value.

Achilles and the Desire to Be Recognized

That is exactly what Achilles does.

He withdraws from the war entirely and even prays for the Greeks to suffer losses so they will realize how badly they need him, which is simultaneously understandable and tragic because beneath all of Achilles’ greatness is still a deeply human longing to be recognized, respected, valued, and acknowledged by the people around him.

And if I’m honest, I think that desire exists inside nearly all of us to some degree.

We want people to notice our effort.
We want our sacrifices to mean something.
We want the weight we carry privately to be understood publicly.

But Book One left me wondering whether real strength may actually have far less to do with recognition and far more to do with steadiness, humility, and self-mastery, because pride seems to possess an almost bottomless hunger that can never fully be satisfied no matter how much achievement, status, praise, or validation a man accumulates over the course of his life.

That may be one of the most timeless lessons buried inside this ancient story.

Agamemnon possesses authority and still craves more affirmation.
Achilles possesses greatness and still feels insulted beyond repair.

Neither man finds peace.

And maybe that is because peace cannot be found externally by men who have never learned how to govern themselves internally.

Why Ancient Stories Still Feel Modern

As I read Book One, I kept thinking about how little human nature has actually changed despite all of our technological advancement and modern sophistication, because the same forces that drove Achilles still drive people now: ego, insecurity, envy, recognition, wounded pride, ambition, fear of irrelevance, and the desperate desire to matter.

The setting changes.
The armor changes.
The weapons change.

But human beings remain astonishingly similar across time.

That’s why stories like The Iliad endure while countless others disappear.

They reveal something permanent about us.

And maybe that’s also why I find myself increasingly drawn toward these ancient books and histories lately, because they force you to confront realities about yourself that modern culture often tries to soften or ignore entirely, especially the reality that some of the most dangerous wars a man will ever fight take place entirely within his own soul long before they ever spill outward into the world around him.

What Book One Left Me Thinking About

Book One of The Iliad reminded me that greatness without self-mastery eventually becomes dangerous, that pride can quietly poison even the strongest men, and that sometimes the difference between wisdom and destruction is found in whether or not a man can control himself in the moment immediately after his ego has been wounded.

And honestly, I think that may be one of the reasons I want to spend more time reading works like this slowly instead of rushing through them simply to say I finished them, because books like The Iliad are not meant to be consumed quickly and forgotten a week later. They are meant to be wrestled with, reflected on, argued with, and carried around in your mind long after you close the pages.

So over the next several weeks, I’m going to keep reading through The Iliad one book at a time and writing reflections like this as I go, not as some kind of academic exercise, but as a way of thinking more deeply about leadership, ambition, fatherhood, discipline, human nature, meaning, pride, mortality, and the timeless flaws that have followed mankind from the ancient world all the way into modern life.

Because the more I read these ancient stories, the more convinced I become that they are not really about the past at all.

They are about us.

And I think there is still something deeply valuable about sitting quietly with old books that force us to confront the uncomfortable parts of ourselves we would often rather ignore.

So if you’ve never read The Iliad before, or if you read it years ago and barely remember it, I’d love for you to follow along with me as we move through it together, one book at a time, trying to understand not only the story Homer was telling, but also what it still reveals about human beings thousands of years later.

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“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” — Marcus Aurelius

One day you will look at your mother and me and realize we are getting older.

Not all at once. Not in some dramatic movie moment where everything suddenly changes overnight. It will happen slowly, quietly, the same way most important things in life happen. You’ll notice a little more gray in my beard(If I ever actually decide to grow one out.) You’ll hear your mom say something that reminds you time is moving faster than any of us want it to. Holidays like Christmas & Thanksgiving will begin feeling different. The house will sound different. Life will keep moving forward whether you are emotionally ready for it or not.

And one day it will hit you that the people you love will not be here forever.

I think about that a lot now.

Much more often than I used to.

Not because I’m afraid of life, but because becoming your father has made me aware of how unbelievably fragile and temporary all of this really is. Some of the moments I already miss have not even ended yet. Sitting around and watching you giggle and explore your newfound hands. Reading to you before bed in a silly voice as if you’re hanging on my every word. Watching your eyes explore the house as if for the first time while trying to figure out exactly what Goose is. Slow weekend mornings. Quiet, peaceful evenings filled with family time. Small moments that probably would not look important to anyone else, but already feel sacred to me because I know they will not last forever.

That realization changes the way you see almost everything.

It makes a lot of what the world chases look incredibly empty.

People waste so much of their lives distracted by meaningless things. Endless scrolling. Attention and recognition from strangers. Stupid arguments that won’t matter in five years let alone five days.

Constant noise.

Constant entertainment.

Constant movement.

They move through life half-present while the people they love are slowly growing older right in front of them.

And by the time they finally understand what mattered, time has usually already taken some of it away.

Your mom has taught me a lot about this without ever needing to say it directly. There is something about her that makes life feel steady even when everything else feels chaotic. Some of my favorite moments in life have been painfully ordinary. Sitting with her watching tv, reading, or chatting after you fall asleep in your crib. Laughing together in the kitchen while we make dinner together. Driving in the car together listening to her favorite songs. Looking around at our small family and realizing that this, right here, is the life I once prayed for before I even knew what it would look like.

I hope one day you understand how much love can hide inside ordinary things.

I also hope you understand something else.

Make the people you love proud while you still can.

Call your parents back. Spend as much time as you possibly can with your family. Become someone disciplined, thoughtful, dependable, and good while the people who raised you are still here to see it. There is something deeply heartbreaking about waiting too long to become the person you were capable of becoming all along.

Do not assume there will always be more time.

There may not be.

I want you to chase ambitious things in life. I want you to build, explore, create, write, dream, and become someone strong enough to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders if you have to. But I also hope you never become so distracted by achievement that you forget what you’re actually doing it all for.

At the end of life, nobody wishes they spent more time staring at a screen.

They wish they had one more dinner with the people they loved. One more conversation. One more ordinary evening together at home while everyone was still healthy enough to laugh loudly, stay up late, and believe there would always be another tomorrow waiting for them.

That is why presence matters.

That is why attention matters.

That is why love must be expressed while people are still here to receive it.

One day your mother and I will be old. One day I will read to you for the last time without realizing it’s the last time. One day this version of life will exist only in memory.

So do not rush through it.

Look around more often. Stay a little longer at the dinner table. Put your phone down sometimes. Protect the people you love. Make them proud while you still can.

Because one day you will realize the most valuable parts of life were never the loudest ones.

They were the quiet moments you almost missed while life was busy trying to pull your attention somewhere else.

Love,

Dad

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“Nothing loved is ever lost.” — Toni Morrison

Aubrey June,

I do not think you will remember every bedtime story I read to you.

You probably will not remember every walk we took, every dinner we sat around together, or every quiet evening where nothing extraordinary happened at all. Most of life does not feel historic while you are inside it. It feels ordinary. Small. Repetitive. Easy to overlook while it is happening.

But the older I get, the more convinced I become that a good life is often built almost entirely out of those kinds of moments.

Not the loud ones.

The quiet ones.

The nights where your mom and I are tired but still lay down with you in bed anyway. The mornings where the house is slow and peaceful before the rest of the world wakes up. The afternoons spent reading books together while sunlight comes through the window. The sound of your laughter from the other room while I’m writing at the kitchen table. Goose stretched out somewhere nearby while dinner cooks and music plays softly in the background. The feeling of home after the door closes at the end of a long day and all four of us are finally together again.

I already know there will come a time when this version of life disappears.

One day the toys will be gone from the living room. One day you won’t reach for my hand automatically when we walk somewhere together. One day I will read to you for the last time without realizing it’s the last time. That’s the strange thing about life. Most endings do not announce themselves when they arrive. They pass quietly through ordinary days before we fully understand what we were standing inside of.

I think becoming your father has made me more aware of time than anything else ever has.

Not in a fearful way. In a sacred way.

You have made ordinary life feel important to me again.

Before you, it was easy to think meaning only existed in massive achievements, distant ambitions, or extraordinary moments somewhere out on the horizon. But now I understand that some of the best parts of life happen right in front of us while we are busy looking elsewhere. Sitting on the floor reading books together. Watching you discover something for the first time. Hearing you laugh so hard you can barely breathe. Carrying you back to bed after you fall asleep somewhere you weren’t supposed to.

And your mother is at the center of almost all of it.

I hope one day you understand how much love fills this house because of her.

There is a warmth to your mom that changes every room she walks into. She has this incredible ability to make life feel lighter, calmer, steadier, even on difficult days. Some of my favorite moments in life are not dramatic at all. They are just simple evenings with her and you at home while the rest of the world fades into the background for a little while.

I hope you grow up seeing the way she loves people.

The way she shows up.
The way she listens.
The way she makes others feel safe and cared for without ever needing attention for it.

There is so much strength in that kind of quiet love, even if the world rarely celebrates it loudly enough.

And if I am being honest, loving your mother has been one of the greatest adventures of my life.

Not because life has been perfect, but because she makes me want to become better. Better husband. Better father. Better man. She reminds me constantly that a meaningful life is not built through endless chasing and achievement alone. It is also built through loyalty, laughter, patience, forgiveness, sacrifice, and learning how to love people deeply over long periods of time.

I hope one day you find a love like that too.

The kind that feels peaceful instead of performative. The kind where silence is comfortable. The kind where home feels like the best place in the world simply because of who is inside it.

I hope you understand that the life we are building together right now is not accidental.

We are trying, imperfectly but sincerely, to build a home filled with books, conversation, laughter, discipline, curiosity, adventure, and love. A home where you feel safe enough to dream big but grounded enough to understand that character matters more than appearances ever will.

I also hope you understand how deeply loved you are.

Not because love means never expecting anything from you. Quite the opposite. I will expect a great deal from you as you grow. I want you to be disciplined, thoughtful, courageous, curious, and capable of carrying responsibility well. I want you to know how to think for yourself in a world that constantly pressures people not to. I want you to build a strong inner life that cannot easily be manipulated by noise, distraction, or whatever shallow, meaningless thing happens to dominate the culture around you at the time.

But underneath all of that will always be love.

Steady love. Quiet love. The kind that shows up repeatedly in ordinary moments long before it ever appears in dramatic ones.

The older I get, the more I believe love is often hidden inside very small things.

Reading to your daughter when you’re tired.
Sitting and listening when it would be easier to rush on to the next thing.
Staying present instead of distracted.
Protecting time together when the world constantly pulls families apart.
Coming home.
Being there.
Repeating it over and over again for years.

That is love too.

And if I do my job well, one day you will look back and realize how much of it was hidden inside what once felt like ordinary days.

Love,

Dad