A considered life also informs and improves that otherwise fickle thing: our self-image. We don’t pay much conscious attention to the mental picture we carry around of ourselves, but it dictates so much of how we feel about our strengths and weaknesses. It’s part of the story we tell ourselves about how we are and how we are likely to behave in any

our first question upon meeting people tends to be ‘What do you do?’, and because this is taken to mean ‘What do you do for a living?’, we are used to being judged on the basis of our jobs. When we ask this question, we rarely think to enquire what the person’s relationship to their job might be. Might they, for example, be indifferently employed,

When faced with the distress of others, we tend to assume a calming role. Commonly, this happens when we talk to a friend who is facing difficulty. We see their concern, acknowledge their view of events, but calmly present a different, less worrisome view. Were we to be facing a similar difficulty, a friend would be likely to do the same. She would

We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.

Kindness connects us; anger denies us all our humanity. ‘Love is wise, hatred is foolish,’ said the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell, as long ago as 1959: In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that

Hadot’s point is that Stoic thinking was designed to be life-changing; neither merely intellectually interesting nor simply amounting to some suggestions for change in behaviour. What it offered was something profoundly transformative. It’s worth noting that anyone who adopted these principles in the age we are considering was called a philosopher;

When we reduce complex ideas to nouns and categories in order to navigate swiftly through them, we start to become mindless. The important notion of transcendence, for example, is reduced to words like ‘God’ that no longer stand for anything and can be easily discredited. In the meantime, we might turn to addictive behaviour or waste our time on

The problem is that as we become successful, more and more people do begin to fuss around us, and embarrassed as we might be the first or second time this happens, we soon find ourselves making requests we would previously have never imagined could come from our lips. It is easy to grow accustomed to little luxuries and then soon generalise the

Unnecessary desires are ‘without end’ because that disparity will always push us forwards to desiring more and therefore towards further dissatisfaction, and they are ‘difficult to satisfy’ because they either come at a great cost or because of their never-ending and self-perpetuating nature. This is why people who live in simple circumstances