Hope this finds you well.
As for me – it will find me very well, thank you – sunbathing in Croatia, proving once again that rest is research (sort of).
This week’s edition is shorter. And slightly more philosophical. Reader’s patience for ancient wisdom is advised.
Lately, I’ve caught myself putting in quite a bit of effort to be unbothered, which, I suspect, completely defeats the point. Not performatively, not for effect, but in that quiet, invisible way we try to build inner walls. I’ve been trying not to care what people think, say, or forget to do. Trying not to flinch, not to spiral, not to take anything personally, which is difficult, since most things feel vaguely personal. I wanted to achieve a kind of graceful detachment. What I got it's more like a full-time job with no salary and very unclear KPIs.
My cat Nora, just being. This is the unbotheredness at it’s finest.
Naturally, this led me to the Stoics, because when modern coping mechanisms fail, we turn to dead men in sandals to advice. And when its not the religious type, its usually the philosophical one.
For context: Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded in Athens around 300 BC and it lasted for centuries. Its legacy rests on the writings of Epictetus (a former slave who became a lecturer), Seneca (a Roman playwright with political entanglements), and Marcus Aurelius (an emperor who journaled his way through the decline of an empire).
At its core, this philosophy is insultingly simple. You divide the world into two categories: what you can control, and what you can’t. Then (and here’s the hard part) you stop wasting energy on the last group. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No manifestations, no twelve-step process. Just a quiet, relentless effort to care about fewer things, more precisely. Which sounds obvious until you try it. Because most of us spend our days catastrophizing weather forecasts, interpreting tone in text messages, and reliving arguments that didn’t even go that badly. The Stoics would call this irrational. I call it a normal Tuesday.
When I finally read Meditations, I wasn’t expecting much. Mostly because I don’t usually take lifestyle advice from Roman emperors. But to my surprise, it wasn’t insufferable. In fact, it read less like a philosophical treatise and more like the internal monologue of someone white-knuckling their way through power, stress, and other people’s incompetence.
Between military campaigns and philosophical posturing, Marcus Aurelius kept returning to the same idea: that our suffering rarely comes from events themselves, but from the weight we assign to them. “If you are distressed by anything external,” he writes, “the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it.” And that hit harder than I care to admit. Especially now, when so much of our distress is manufactured at the surface: by appearances, by glances, by clothes. We dress to express, of course, but also to control the narrative. To manage perception. And when it fails, when the outside doesn’t protect us from the inside, we feel exposed, not because the outfit was wrong, but because the story we told ourselves about it cracked.
There’s another Stoic idea I’ve grown strangely fond of: the notion that we shouldn’t wish for things to be easier, but for ourselves to be stronger. It’s not very comforting, which is precisely why it works. No fantasy of control, no promise of relief. Just the suggestion that resilience isn’t something you find, it’s something you train, usually in silence, usually while no one’s looking. And maybe that’s the whole point. You don’t get to curate difficulty. You just get to meet it, hopefully with a little more composure each time.
No, I didn’t manage to stay unbothered. But I didn’t escalate either. I didn’t invent extra meaning, or chase closure where none was offered. I just let things sit, mildly uncomfortable, but intact. And maybe that’s what strength looks like some days: not a dramatic refusal, just the quiet decision not to make it worse.
Some days, surviving your own reaction is the real accomplishment.
For a daily dose of Stoic wisdom (with slightly more optimism than the originals intended), The Daily Stoic is worth subscribing to. Just manage your expectations: it’s Marcus Aurelius, but with email marketing. Subscribe here: https://dailystoic.com/email
That’s it for this week.
Next time, I’ll be back with ideas on how to wear water shoes stylishly. (I won’t. There’s no such thing.)
Thanks for reading.
Julia