A Surprisingly Effective Stoic Technique For ...

This episode reflects on Seneca’s question of whether life is still worth choosing when its beauty and suffering come as a package. In Consolation to Marcia, he sets the marvels of existence—stars, mountains, rivers, forests, love—beside illness, grief, danger, and death, then as ...  Show more

This episode explores Marcus Aurelius’s ten reminders for keeping anger from taking control.His advice centres on perspective: remember that people act from their own beliefs, that we make mistakes too, that we rarely know the full story, and that anger often harms us more than t ...  Show more

Donald Robertson describes Stoicism as "a kind of psychological toolbox", full of strategies for handling anxiety, anger and pain, and that framing runs through this whole conversation. We trace the history of the philosophy and pull practical use out of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetu ...  Show more

I lived with intense anxiety for the better part of a decade. It sent me down a lot of rabbit holes in personal development and philosophy, and most of what I now teach came out of trying to find my own way through.Anxiety is hard to escape in modern life. The news is built to ma ...  Show more

It is easy to read a lot about Stoicism and mistake that for actually practising it. I put this to Donald Robertson, and we get into the gap between knowing the ideas and living them, what he calls the illusion of mastery.We also talk about the view from above as a practice, and ...  Show more

An insult only lands if you agree with it. That is the Stoic claim, and in this lesson I turn it into something you can actually use. I walk through a step-by-step way of meeting an insult so it loses its sting, drawing on how the Stoics thought about other people’s opinions of u ...  Show more