1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

Do you ever experience that old human problem: needing people while also finding people rather a lot?

It’s one of life’s great tensions: humans are social animals, but we’re also the sort of animals who hold loud conversations on trains, move through supermarkets too slowly, and behave as though pavements are self-cleaning.

When I encounter such things these days, I often say to myself, “How strange it is, what people do!”

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1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

Even the Spartans didn’t think anger was a good motivation for action.

That may initially seem surprising. One of the most feared and formidable military forces in the Greek world saw no battlefield advantage in getting worked up into a rage.

Surely that raw, venomous emotion would be effective in the fight to defeat an enemy?

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Seneca warns that fortune’s gifts often become traps, because external success can deepen dependence rather than satisfy the soul.

Anthony de Mello sharpens the same insight: many of our chains are imaginary, formed by false ideas about what we need before we can truly live.

If you’d like to continue the practice, you might also find this Micro Morning Meditation helpful:

☀️ Micro Morning Meditation: You're Free Already

https://whatisstoicism.substack.com/p/micro-morning-meditation-youre-free

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

This moment is bearable. And if continuing to read these words signifies the passing of more moments, those are bearable too.

The same is true for all the other moments in our lives.

Even if they’ve been difficult, even if we’ve described them as unbearable, we’ve been able to bear them. We’re here now, aren’t we? What more proof is needed of the successful endurance of all past moments?

The psychotherapist Anthony de Mello summarized this well:

The present moment, no matter how painful, is never unbearable. What is unbearable is what you think is going to happen in five hours or in five days; and those words you keep saying in your head, words like, “This is terrible, this is unbearable, how long is this going to last,” and so on.

We sometimes stir our interpretations up so much that we arrive at a conclusion of “this is unbearable.” The irony is that at the very same time, we’re bearing it.

The Stoic teacher Epictetus said that everything has two handles, one of which makes it bearable, the other unbearable.

In other words, there are different ways of dealing with the same situation.

• A delayed train can be a disaster, or unexpected time to read.

• A low mood can be a permanent panic, or passing weather.

• A mistake at work can be proof that you’re failing, or useful information about what to adjust next time.

So hold each situation by what makes it bearable. And, as De Mello advised, bear one day at a time:

Don’t be anxious about tomorrow, tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own.

2. Meditation

Find a comfortable and safe spot. Sit or lie down. Let yourself breathe.​​

🎧 Play the audio below for a short, guided meditation based on today’s contemplation.

Read more

1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

Private residences, members-only clubs, private events, first-class lounges.

Fine dining, luxury travel, yacht trips, private tours, bespoke shopping.

Drivers, chefs, housekeepers, personal assistants, stylists.

What characteristics of a luxurious lifestyle would you add to these lists?

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1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

Are we humans all of the same species? Yes.

Are we all furnished with the same conceptual tools and instruments of judgement? It would seem so.

Why is it, then, that the same event, concept, or circumstance doesn’t produce the same opinion in every person?

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Hi all,

This week’s snippets include some practical resources on self-discipline and restraint.

I hope you find something you can carry into the week ahead.

📌 Stoic Reminder

☀️ This Week’s Practice

Learning For Life
This episode strips philosophy back to something simple: learning how to live, then practicing what you learn. Pierre Hadot reminds us that philosophy is not measured by how much we write, explain, or display, but by whether our character actually improves.

That means facing fears, acting kindly, exercising restraint, and reviewing where we fell short.

⏸️ New Post on Substack

One More Won’t Hurt...
Temperance may be the least glamorous Stoic virtue, but it’s also one of the most practical. This piece explores the small “moment before one more”—another bite, episode, purchase, scroll, or angry reply—where pleasure can easily turn into compulsion. The Stoic aim isn’t deprivation, but freedom: enjoying what’s good without losing the ability to stop.

📚 Recommended Resource

Why preparation, not willpower, is the key to mastering self-restraint
This is a five-minute video exploration of self-restraint, beginning with temperance as an ancient virtue and moving into modern psychology and neuroscience.

Its central idea is particularly useful and pairs well with this week’s Substack post above: resisting temptation can depend less on heroic willpower in the moment and more on what we do beforehand.

🎙 Latest Podcast Episode

Fearless Energy in an Uncertain Life
This episode reflects on what happens when life interrupts our carefully arranged plans.

The Stoic reserve clause—“if nothing prevents me”—helps us plan without pretending the future belongs to us.

Shakespeare, Seneca, and Suzuki Shōsan deepen the point by bringing death into view, not as a morbid fixation, but as a reminder that even ordinary days are not guaranteed.

📜 Quote For The Week

True confidence is kindled not by witnessing it in others, but from realising you aren’t alone in lacking it.

—Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals

Wishing you a great week ahead,
Allan

1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

How do you know when you’ve got a bit wiser?

How does a little bit of progress in your philsophical practice commonly reveal itself?

Answer: you find yourself having more good fortune.

It’s not that you suddenly become lavishly lucky—winning lotteries, skipping queues, never getting diverted by road works, that sort of thing.

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1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

How’s this for a good idea: a kind of social currency that gives people credits for helping others.

It works a bit like this. A willing and motivated person cares for someone older than them by assisting with everyday tasks, such as shopping, cleaning, cooking, transport, or companionship.

Read more

There’s a particular moment when pleasure changes character.

You’ve eaten enough, but there’s one slice left.

You’ve watched the episode, but the next one has already begun counting down.

You checked the message you picked up your phone to read, but your thumb has wandered elsewhere and is now apparently conducting independent research.

You’ve made your point in an argument. But there’s another point. There’s always another point.

This little moment—the moment before one more—is exactly where the Stoic virtue of Temperance wants to help us.

Of the four Stoic virtues, Temperance probably has the worst marketing department.

Wisdom sounds impressive. Courage gets statues. Justice makes incremental improvements in relationships and society as a whole.

But temperance sounds like someone asking whether you really need another biscuit. It looks like a disapproving glare, a silent judgment of your indulgences.

And yet the Stoics considered it essential to a good life.

Temperance is usually translated as moderation or self-control. But it’s not about making life deliberately dull. The Stoics weren’t trying to eliminate pleasure, confiscate dessert, or make everybody go home at nine.

The point is freedom.

Can you enjoy something without needing more and more of it?

Can you say yes while retaining the ability to say no?

Can you use the thing without eventually finding that the thing is using you?

That’s the test of temperance.

A glass of soda is one thing. A bottle with every meal is another.

Checking your phone is one thing. Reaching for it thirty seconds after putting it down is another.

Wanting to succeed is one thing. Discovering that each achievement merely creates a new requirement to acquire something bigger is another.

Pleasure isn’t the problem, losing choice is.

This is why an old-fashioned sounding term like Temperance becomes surprisingly relevant in ordinary modern life.

Few of us wake up intending to spend forty-five minutes scrolling.

We intend to check one thing. Then another thing appears. Then another. Eventually we look up and discover that someone has fast-forwarded the clock.

The same thing happens with work.

We tell ourselves we’ll answer one final email before finishing for the day. Then another arrives. Then a reply to the first one. Soon we’re sacrificing the evening to messages that would have survived perfectly well until morning.

Or perhaps it’s food, shopping, news, exercise, gaming, alcohol, praise, productivity, or the desire to win an argument nobody else remembers starting.

Appetite takes plenty of different forms. Temperance is the ability to notice when it’s starting to overreach.

And then to ask:

Is this still serving me or is it harming my character?

That question feels more useful than simply asking whether something is “good” or “bad.”

The Stoics recognised that many external things are neither. Food, money, comfort, entertainment, possessions, reputation—these can all be used wisely or badly.

The important thing is what we do with them.

There’s nothing particularly virtuous about refusing a second helping. But if you know the second helping will leave you uncomfortable and you eat it simply because it’s there, something worth examining has happened.

There is nothing morally wrong with checking social media.

But if you repeatedly sacrifice attention you meant to give to your child, partner, work, book, walk, or own thoughts, the exchange deserves scrutiny.

Temperance calls attention to these exchanges.

What are we giving up in order to have more?

Time?

Health?

Money?

Attention?

Peace?

The company of the person sitting opposite us?

And importantly, self-control affects more than ourselves.

Sometimes Temperance means not eating the thing. Sometimes it means not saying the thing. The angry reply. The sarcastic comment. The final little sentence designed not to clarify anything but to make sure the other person knows we won.

There’s a moment before sending that message too.

One more.

Temperance gives us space to pause in that moment.

It allows Courage to remain brave without becoming reckless. It allows Justice to remain firm without becoming cruel. It gives Wisdom a few extra seconds to think.

The cool thing is that the Stoic virtues don’t operate independently of one another. They help regulate one another.

Marcus Aurelius wrote:

Anything which isn’t good for the hive isn’t good for the bee either.

Our excesses rarely stay neatly inside us. Neither does our restraint.

The drink we don’t need, the purchase we don’t make, the insult we don’t send, the hour we reclaim from a screen—these small decisions alter what becomes available to the rest of our life.

More attention. More patience. More money. More health. More presence. More room for other people.

Temperance, then, isn’t really about having less. It’s about preventing more from quietly taking everything else.

So today, look for your own moment before one more.

Before you refill the glass. Before you click “next episode.” Before you put something else in the basket. Before you reopen the app. Before you send the second message explaining why the first message was definitely correct.

Pause.

You don’t automatically have to say no. That would just be another rule.

Ask instead:

Do I still want this—or am I simply continuing?

Then make the choice deliberately.

Temperance may never be the glamorous Stoic virtue.

But there’s a lovely kind of freedom in being able to say: That was good. And it was also enough.

The Stoic reserve clause—“if nothing prevents me”—helps us plan without pretending the future belongs to us.

Shakespeare, Seneca, and Suzuki Shōsan deepen the point by bringing death into view, not as a morbid fixation, but as a reminder that even ordinary days are not guaranteed.

👇 👇 👇

📻 FOR MORE STOIC AUDIO CONTENT

Check out one of my latest daily Micro Morning Meditations here on Substack:

☀️ Micro Morning Meditation: When Others Judge You

https://whatisstoicism.substack.com/p/micro-morning-meditation-when-others

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

Philosophy can seem an intimidating task.

The word carries such weight. It represents centuries of serious thinkers, many of whom wrote book after book in efforts to better understand the human mind.

But it also represents many who wrote nothing at all.

Cato the Younger, Epictetus (whose surviving work is a transcription made by one of his students), and even the great Socrates: we have no books, treatises, or essays from these philosophers.

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1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

Adam Smith believed he knew the great source of both the misery and disorders of human life.

Smith wasn’t a Stoic. He was an 18th century Scottish economist and philosopher. He was even critical of some aspects of Stoicism. The philosophy did, however, influence him in certain ways.

When commenting on how we make ourselves miserable, for example, Smith pointed to our tendency to “overrate the difference between one permanent situation and another.”

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1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

A bad singer can’t sing on their own.

As long as they have the option of being accompanied by a choir, they’ll assimilate themselves into that safe number and become indistinguishable from the good singers.

Epictetus said this in one of his lessons. Almost every late-night karaoke performance disproves his assertion but let’s follow his point.

Read more

Hi all,

This week’s Snippets include some resources on listening like a Stoic, including a short experiment you can try today.

I hope you find something useful to take into the week ahead.

☀️ The Week’s Practice

Before You Speak
Gossip often feels harmless, but Epictetus saw careless talk about others as a distraction from the work that actually belongs to us.

This reflection explores why blame, comparison, and even praise deserve more restraint when we rarely know another person’s motives or full circumstances. The Stoic alternative is simple: speak less, listen more, and focus your judgment where you have real control—on your own words, intentions, and character.

📌 Stoic Reminder

☕️ A Small Sunday Experiment

As a little extension of this week’s practice, try this in one conversation today.

Let the other person finish speaking before you decide what you’re going to say.

Then, instead of immediately offering your own story, opinion, correction, or advice, ask them one more question. It sounds easy, but often it isn’t.

We may discover that quite a lot of what we call listening is actually waiting for our turn to speak.

📚 Recommended Resource

The psychologist Carl Rogers and the art of active listening
This Aeon essay continues theme of listening and explores what it really means to listen to another person rather than simply wait for our chance to speak. Through the work of psychologist Carl Rogers, it looks at curiosity, attention, and how much better conversations become when understanding matters more than having the next word.

🎙 Latest Podcast Episode

The Road to a Happy Life
This episode uses Seneca’s image of the road to ask whether we are moving with purpose or merely following the crowd.

A clear destination helps us resist distraction, while Epictetus shows where our attention truly belongs: on our judgments, choices, desires, and actions.

The Stoic task is to be cautious with what depends on us and confident toward what does not.

📜 Quote For The Week

Everyone rushes his life on, and suffers from a yearning for the future and a boredom with the present. But that man who devotes every hour to his own needs, who plans every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears tomorrow.

—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

All the best for the week ahead,
Allan

1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

I’m being shown a lot of videos about people ditching technology lately.

You know how it goes: you watch one and the internet concludes that you have now made your life exclusively about this particular subject and would only like to see similar videos from now on.

These videos usually share a person’s success in preferring a notebook over a notes app, a physical book over an e-reader, or—most often—a “dumbphone” over a smart one. (What happened to phones whose intelligence didn’t need to be determined?)

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1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

In the words of Diogenes Laertius, the biographer of Greek philosophers, the Stoics applied the term “duty” to an action that, when done, can be defended on reasonable grounds, such as its consistency with life.

In words we might understand more clearly today, a duty is simply the right thing to do when you can give a good reason for doing it.

The Greek term was kathēkon. It was apparently first used by Zeno, the founder of Stoicism.

Diogenes goes on to explain that some actions are appropriate, some are inappropriate, and some are neither.

Read more

A clear destination helps us resist distraction, while Epictetus shows where our attention truly belongs: on our judgments, choices, desires, and actions.

The Stoic task is to be cautious with what depends on us and confident toward what does not

👇 👇 👇

📻 FOR MORE STOIC AUDIO CONTENT

Check out one of my latest daily Micro Morning Meditations here on Substack:

☀️ Micro Morning Meditation: The Stories of Insecurity

https://whatisstoicism.substack.com/p/micro-morning-meditation-the-stories

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

In one of his many lessons, the ancient Stoic teacher Epictetus counselled his students on the art of talking.

He essentially encouraged them to be more discerning, to say only what’s necessary and in a few words.

We can learn from this too. The more we talk, the more diluted our point of view becomes. The less we listen, the less we learn. Better to take a more balanced, attentive approach.

Above all, Epictetus said, don’t talk too much about other people in blame, compliment, or comparison.

In other words, limit your gossip. Limit all those precarious judgments we form and then scatter gun out into the world where we don’t know what consequences they might cause.

Massimo Pigliucci comments on this advice in Live Like a Stoic:

Most of the time we simply don’t know enough about others to arrive at judgments about their character or actions. And even if we did, what others do is their business, not ours. We should be focused on improving ourselves, because that’s the locus of our control.

Gossip is often formed in haste. It’s a quick conclusion about a person’s character that’s then passed on to the nearest ear. That momentum continues until someone is inclined to examine the evidence.

Do we need to spread blame around? Comparisons? Even compliments?

There will be occasions when each of these could be justified, yes. But if a person gets a reputation for gossiping, how seriously is their blame, comparison, or compliment then taken?

What’s more, we don’t know other people’s motives. We can only judge actions based on what we think a person’s intentions were. It’s easy to get this mixed up: bad outcomes might have had good aims, and vice versa.

As Pigliucci puts it, our locus of control encompasses only ourselves. That’s where our focus should lie. Our intentions, our actions, what we say.

Because every time we open our mouths, we reveal a little more about our own character.

2. Meditation

Find a comfortable and safe spot. Sit or lie down. Let yourself breathe.​​

🎧 Play the audio below for a short, guided meditation based on today’s contemplation.

Read more

1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 Prefer to listen? The audio version is below.

Good morning.

We’re social creatures and Stoicism is a prosocial philosophy.

There’s no debate: we exist for mutual support. We can’t live a good life if that life doesn’t include helping and being helped.

But with that need for interaction comes danger. When we spend a lot of time with other people, it’s inevitable they’ll start to influence us in one way or another. And if that influence is harmful, then we need ways to protect ourselves.

The Stoic teacher Epictetus used the example of coal: if you put by the side of a live coal one that has gone out, either the dead coal will put the live one out, or the latter will kindle the former.

Read more