Practical Stoicism

In this episode, I’m challenging one of the most common assumptions in modern Stoicism: that journaling is somehow an inherently Stoic practice. Marcus Aurelius wasn’t keeping a daily diary, Epictetus wasn’t assigning journal entries to his students, and the kind of expressive writing we now associate with “Stoic journaling” is largely a modern self-improvement practice.
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That doesn’t mean journaling is useless. Regular reflection, planning your day, reviewing your behaviour, and expressive writing can all be helpful. But they’re no more uniquely Stoic than they are Christian, Buddhist, atheist, or useful to an anthropomorphised and literate potato.
So if we’re going to talk about “journaling like a Stoic,” I think we need to invent a better standard for what that actually means.
I break Stoic development into three parts: study, practice, and living. First, we learn the philosophy from people who know more than we do. Then we practise applying what we’ve learned until new patterns of thinking and behaviour become habituated. Finally, we put down the books and training aids and go out into the world to see whether any of it actually stuck.
That middle stage is where I think writing can be genuinely useful to a Stoic practice.
Rather than simply recording what happened during your day or writing about your feelings, I suggest explorative writing: take a difficult question or real-world situation and try to reason through it Stoically without reaching for a book, ChatGPT, or a cheat sheet. The purpose is to discover what you actually understand, where your reasoning falls apart, and what you need to return to your studies to learn.
That’s also the approach behind my year-long program at StoicJournaling.com, available for a one-time purchase of £72.
So, ironically, my advice for journaling like a Stoic is to stop journaling, at least in the conventional sense, and start using writing as a place to practise the philosophy instead.

In this episode, I take on the Lindsay Clancy case, but not to tell you what you should think about her. Instead, I use this extraordinarily difficult case to explore how a Stoic should think when confronted with terrible acts, mental illness, questions of responsibility, and our very human desire for punishment.
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I begin with the facts as I understand them and an important limitation: I don't know every detail of the case or trial. Clancy killed her three children and attempted to take her own life, but she had also sought extensive psychiatric help before the killings. The defence has argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and that her condition had previously been misdiagnosed.
For Stoicism, that raises an important question. The acts were hers in the causal sense, but to what extent were they hers in the moral sense? Stoic ethics places enormous importance on our capacity for rational assent. If someone's rational faculty is profoundly impaired by psychosis, then determining their responsibility requires us to consider how capable they actually were of perceiving, judging, and responding to reality rationally.
That does not mean pretending the acts didn't happen, nor does compassion require us to ignore the safety of everyone else. If someone remains dangerous, restraint may be entirely appropriate. Justice has obligations both to the person who is ill and to the people who require protection from them.
Drawing on Seneca, I distinguish justice from vengeance. Restraint or punishment may be appropriate when it protects others, prevents further harm, or contributes to correction and treatment. Making someone suffer simply because their actions caused suffering is something else.
Ultimately, I suggest three things we should hold simultaneously: Clancy is a seriously mentally ill human being; she may require restraint for as long as she presents a danger; and where treatment and restoration are possible, justice should concern itself with those things too.
Stoicism should make our responses to cases like this slower, not faster. We should resist the satisfaction of immediate condemnation, examine the context carefully, ask what Justice actually requires, and only then decide how we ought to respond.

Most of my listeners are somewhere between 35 and 45, which means quite a few of us are reaching the age when mortality starts feeling a little less theoretical. In this episode, I explore one reason the idea of death can trouble us that has less to do with fear and more to do with something deeply human: the desire not to feel disposable.
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I begin with a conversation I recently had with a private coaching client about why believing in something after death can be comforting. My suggestion was that the comfort may not necessarily come from imagining rewards, avoiding punishment, or even continuing our conscious existence. It may come from believing that we remain important to something beyond ourselves, that we continue to have a place.
Stoicism offers an interesting answer to this without requiring a supernatural afterlife. The Stoics understood the Cosmos itself as God: the complete, contained system of Nature of which every one of us is presently a part.
Within that system, nothing simply disappears. The matter and energy that presently constitute us return to the Cosmos and continue participating in it. The individual person, with their name, memories, career, possessions, and personality, may not continue indefinitely, but that from which the individual is constituted remains part of the whole.
In that limited but meaningful sense, I suggest there is something resembling immortality available within the Stoic worldview. Stoicism doesn't promise a celestial city, an eternity spent with deceased relatives, or reincarnation as some other creature. Instead, it offers the idea that we were never separate from the Cosmos in the first place, and that what constitutes us continues to belong to and participate in that same whole.
If what troubles you about death is the thought of becoming irrelevant or disposable, perhaps there's some comfort in that. You aren't something the Cosmos eventually throws away. You are part of it now, and what constitutes you remains part of it after the particular arrangement presently called "you" is gone.
Mentioned in this episode:
Equanimity Talk
Attend the equanimity talk by visiting the link below. I want to make it clear that this was very last minute, that I don't know this organiser particularly well, and that there's no financial incentive involved here. I was simply presented an opportunity to speak on equanimity and thought it might be worthwhile. Cheers.
Equanimity Talk

Marcus Aurelius famously reminds himself that we don't need to retreat to the countryside or the seashore to find peace. In this episode, recorded from my new office in an old textile mill in Dundee, I reflect on why I think Marcus was theoretically right but practically wrong, at least for those of us who aren't sages.
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Inner peace may ultimately be a state of mind, but we're not perfect practitioners. Our surroundings affect us. Sometimes getting away from the noise, finding somewhere that feels comfortable, familiar, and peaceful, genuinely makes practicing Stoicism easier.
Since moving to Dundee, I've noticed a quieting in myself that I can't really attribute to anything else. Life hasn't become less demanding. I'm currently cramming roughly 40 hours of work into Monday through Wednesday, then spending Thursday and Friday as a full-time dad while protecting my weekends for my family. If anything, I'm doing more than ever.
Yet something about this place feels different. My little office overlooking Dundee, the seagulls and church bells outside the window, our flat beside a park, the city's working-class character, and even the coastal air remind me of places and people from my childhood. After several enormously busy years of marriage, fatherhood, building a business, raising investment, working full-time, and moving repeatedly, I feel unexpectedly at home here.
So this episode isn't really a lesson. It's a reflection on the role our environment can play in our ability to find some peace. Theoretically, Marcus was right: the perfect Stoic shouldn't need a particular place in order to achieve tranquility. But none of us are perfect Stoics, and sometimes finding the right place can make the work of becoming better considerably easier.
I also share a few updates at the end of the episode, including a request for help choosing the subject of a TED talk I'm working on, some early details about my forthcoming book Living Stoicism, and an invitation to a free community Q&A.

A healthy Stoic practice requires an accurate view of yourself. Think too little of yourself and you misunderstand your capacities; think too much of yourself and you do the same. In this episode, I explore self-esteem through a Stoic lens and explain why accurate self-knowledge matters to our pursuit of eudaimonia and sagehood.
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I begin by separating self-esteem from the popular idea that “ego is the enemy.” Rather than treating a positive view of ourselves as something inherently suspect, I argue that Stoic practice requires us to understand ourselves accurately: our capacities, our roles, our duties, our individual nature, and the ways we are positioned to contribute to the world.
That means avoiding two extremes. A depressive view of ourselves causes us to underestimate what we are capable of and what our duties require. A grandiose view causes us to overestimate our importance and abilities. Neither gives reason an accurate picture of the person whose life it is trying to direct.
I also look at criticism and the effect other people's judgments can have on our self-understanding. Marcus Aurelius reminds himself in Meditations 2.1 that we will encounter difficult, arrogant, ungrateful, and mistaken people because they misunderstand good and evil. Criticism can contain useful information, and we should examine it when it does, but another person's judgment of our value is not automatically authoritative simply because they have expressed it.
Finally, I offer a practical Stoic basis for healthy self-esteem using four areas of reflection: our shared nature as human beings, our individual nature, the circumstances and contexts we have been given, and the roles and paths we have deliberately chosen.
The goal is neither humility for its own sake nor inflated confidence. It is accuracy. Understand what you are, understand what is appropriate for you, and then work seriously to fulfil those roles and duties well.