How To Be A Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living

What a remarkable figure, no? A crippled slave who acquires an education, becomes a free man, establishes his own school, is exiled by one emperor but is on friendly terms with another, and selflessly helps a young child near the end of a simple life that will continue until the very ripe age, especially for the time, of eighty. Oh, and most import

Epictetus was born in Hierapolis (present-day Pamukkale in Turkey) around the year 55 CE. Epictetus was not his real name, which is lost to us: the word simply means “acquired,” reflecting the fact that he was a slave.

Stoicism is about developing the tools to deal as effectively as humanly possible with the ensuing conflicts, does not demand perfection, and does not provide specific answers: those are for fools (Epictetus’s word) who think the world is black and white, good versus evil, where it is always possible to clearly tell the good guys from the bad guys.

‘You are condemned.’ ‘Exile or death?’ he asked. ‘Exile.’ ‘And my property?’ ‘It is not confiscated.’ ‘Well then, let us go to Aricia and dine.’” Agrippinus’s reaction may sound cocky, the sort of thing an unflappable hero in a Hollywood movie (perhaps played by Cary Grant, or Harrison Ford) might say, but unlikely to ever be uttered by an actual h

Our friend Epictetus developed his own highly original take on why the three Stoic areas of study are important: There are three departments5 in which a man who is to be good and noble must be trained. The first concerns the will to get and will to avoid; he must be trained not to fail to get what he wills to get nor fall into what he wills to avoi

It was while reading Slaughterhouse-Five that I first encountered these words, which are framed in Billy’s optometry office on Earth and also inscribed in a locket worn by Montana: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

The Stoics perfected this idea of ethical development and called it oikeiôsis, which is often translated as “familiarization with” or “appropriation of” other people’s concerns as if they were our own. This led them (and the Cynics who immediately preceded them and influenced them greatly) to coin and use a word that is still crucial to our modern

Epictetus tells us that regret is a waste of our emotional energy. We cannot change the past—it is outside of our control. We can, and should, learn from it, but the only situations we can do something about are those happening here and now.