The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that courage, as a quality of mind, is “very essential to happiness.” This is in-keeping with the outlook of the Stoics, who Schopenhauer studied in depth. Courage was one of their four cardinal virtues, the guidelines that good intentions and actions should follow. We...
1 day ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. In How to Think Like Socrates, Donald Robertson describes a useful decision-making technique that goes all the way back to the great Greek philosopher. Robertson says Socrates spoke of a method of “rational measurement.” Carrying it out was simply a matter of comparing the longer-term consequences of our actions, in...
2 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. In his biography of Montaigne, Stefan Zweig was attempting to do what the French philosopher had done many years prior in his study of the Stoics: plunder past wisdom to inform a present-day approach to the art of living. Just from reading his work, Zweig came to see Montaigne as a brother who “granted me his aid,...
3 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. We begin today’s contemplation with a poem by the 19th-century Transcendentalist poet William Ellery Channing. It’s called My Symphony, and it goes as follows: “ To live content with small means.To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion.To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not...
6 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. I was recently asked a great question by a reader: Did the Stoics have a sense of humour? It doesn’t seem to be an aspect of Stoicism that’s talked about often, and when it is, it’s liable to be misrepresented. This can lead to the common misconception that the Stoics sought to suppress these kinds of positive...
7 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. From a Stoic point of view, every external has the potential to bring its own sort of strife. Or rather, our desire and pursuit of said externals are what invite the strife. One such external, routinely pursued just as much as things like money and pleasure, is status. We think wide renown would be a comfortable...
8 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. Although Epicurus was the head of a rival school to Stoicism, the Stoic Seneca was happy to quote lines from the philosopher that he liked. One such line of Epicurus’s he found conducive to his own philosophy was the following: “ The fool’s life is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward...
9 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. Ancient Stoics were clear about their philosophy of life: There’s no way to live a good life and be a good person if one doesn’t love mankind. They taught individual responsibility and resilience, but that wasn’t at the expense of a disregard for other people. The writer Kurt Vonnegut made the point that human...
10 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. Being prepared for the worst doesn’t necessarily equate to perpetual pessimism. Just because we retain an awareness of what could go wrong doesn’t mean we believe that bad outcomes will always come to pass. This can of course be taken too far. In considering that our hopes may be dashed or that some unexpected...
13 days ago • 2 min read