Stoic Coffee Break

Erick Cloward
  • 4.6 (5)
  • Philosophy
  • Updated weekly

"Act on your principles, not your moods." A weekly meditation on how Stoic principles can help you be a better human. https://stoic.coffee Follow us on social media: https://instagram.com/stoic.coffee

  1. 19 hr ago

    The Game You Didn't Know You Were Playing | 388

    So much of our lives are governed by rules that we aren’t even really aware of. Many of them we never even really question because we just assume that’s the way things are. But what if by questioning those rules, we can live with more agency, leading to a life we choose? “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. “ — Marcus Aurelius The Problem I grew up in Salt Lake City, in the Mormon Church. And when I say my life was prescribed, I mean prescribed. Mission. Marriage. Career. Family. In that order, on that schedule. It wasn't a suggestion — it was presented to me as the truth. Not "this is one way to live." This is the way. This is reality. I followed the path that I thought I as supposed to. I played the part as best I could but always felt like I was just repeating the lines someone else wrote for me. I didn’t feel like I was being authentically me, just the me that everyone else expected I should be. When I would question things or have experiences that contradicted what I was taught, I was told that I just needed to have more faith. That it was my fault that my belief wasn’t strong enough. So I doubled down, trying to fit myself into a system that didn’t work for me. I tightened the mask, hoping that this time it might finally fit. What’s interesting in looking back on my time in the church was that tended I gravitated to others that didn’t wear the mask. I envied those that bucked the system and followed their own path. Being around them I found that I could be more of my authentic self. I didn’t have to pretend to be someone that I wasn’t. And here's the thing about growing up inside something that total — you don't experience it as a rule. You experience it as just how things are. You don't question the water you're swimming in. The last few years I was in the church, I would attend church infrequently. It was exhausting trying to fit myself into a way of living that was so ill-fitting. I was at odds with the doctrine. Told that obedience to the leadership was more important than anything else. I got tried of “you just have to have more faith” as the answer to questions they couldn’t answer. I finally reached the point where I asked: is this actually true, or is this just what I was taught? The day I finally left, I didn't just leave a church. I left a rulebook I'd mistaken for reality itself. It literally felt like a giant weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I felt free. Once I left, I still had a long journey. Leaving the church, I lost a big part of my identity. I lost a community. I lost a certainty in how I was supposed to be in the world. It took years for me to find my footing and create a life by my choice, not the script that was handed to me. But here’s something important that I learned, and it’s something that most people will never understand. You are allowed to do exactly what you want in life and be the person you want to be. But it also comes with some caveats: 1. Everyone else is allowed to do the same. 2. You are responsible for your choices and actions. 3. You don’t get to choose the consequences of your actions. Maybe you didn't grow up Mormon. Maybe you didn't grow up religious at all. But I'd bet you're living inside a version of the same thing right now. A career path you never chose so much as inherited. A way of dressing, or dating, or succeeding, or how you’re supposed to act as a man or a woman, a way of being that you copied because everyone around you was doing it and it looked like law. Here's the uncomfortable question: how much of what you're doing right now is because it's true — or because it's expected? We treat these two very different things like they're the same. There's what's actually true — gravity, death, the fact that actions have consequences you don't control. And there's what's agreed upon — how a man is supposed to act, what a "respectable" life looks like, how long you're allowed to be sad before people get uncomfortable. One of those doesn't care what you think. The other is just a bunch of people's habits, dressed up to look like law. But here’s the thing: when you’re younger you think that adults have it all figured out and that when you grow up, you’ll have it figured out too. But the real truth is this: we’re all just making it up. Most of the “rules” are just conventions. They’re habits that we’ve agreed to as a society. It’s just a game that we’re all playing. That's the trap. Not that the game exists — because it always will. The trap is forgetting you're allowed to notice you're playing it. The Philosophy Epictetus has a way of putting this that cuts through the noise: "Remember that you are an actor in a play, the character of which is determined by the author... whatever character he gives you, act it naturally. For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another." — Epictetus, Enchiridion 17 You don't pick your role. You didn't choose your family, the time you live in, your body, most of your circumstances. That part's not negotiable. That's fate. That's nature. But here's what people quietly assume, but Epictetus never said: that the script is fixed too. It isn't. How you play the role — that's entirely yours. And most of what we call "the rules" isn't the role. It's just the version of the script the people around us happen to be using. Why do we follow this script, even when it doesn't fit? Marcus Aurelius gets at the mechanism: "It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements." — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 The rule doesn't have power over you. Your agreement to it does. Take the agreement back, and the rule is just a suggestion somebody made up. This isn't just old philosophy. Brené Brown found the same thing studying belonging. She draws the line like this: "Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else. If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in." — Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness And she says it even sharper in one line: “the greatest barrier to belonging is fitting in.”  — Brené Brown Most of what we call "the rules of life" is just scaffolding for fitting-in dressed up as necessity. It isn't. Now — before this turns into an excuse to blow everything up, remember: you get to choose how you play your role. You do not get to choose what happens when other people react to it. That's still not yours. Dropping a convention doesn't mean the world applauds or changes for you. It might mean people are confused, annoyed, or gone. That's the actual price of the ticket — and it's worth paying, but only if you go in with eyes open. Practice Okay. So how do you actually tell the difference between a real rule and a made-up one? Step one: the nature-or-convention check. Take something you're currently obeying without question. Ask it one question: does reality enforce this, or does a group of people enforce this? Gravity doesn't need anyone's cooperation. It just is. "You should have your career figured out by 30" needs everyone around you to agree to it — and enough of them do that it feels like law. It isn't. It's consensus. Run a few things through it. Death is nature. Grief having a "proper" timeline is convention. Cause and effect is nature. What counts as a "respectable" job is convention. You'll be surprised how much of your daily anxiety is you enforcing a rule that nobody's actually holding a gun to your head about. Step two: name the fear underneath it. Once you've spotted a convention you've been treating like gravity, ask: what do I actually think happens if I break this? Say it out loud. Specify it. Not "bad things" but "My mother will be disappointed." "People will think I've failed." "I'll lose my place in the group." Usually what's underneath isn't catastrophe. It's disapproval. That's real, it costs something — but it's not the same category of thing as danger. Naming it strips the myth off it. Step three: one deliberate move. Pick one small, low-stakes convention this week and break it on purpose. Not to be reckless — to notice. Notice that the world doesn't end. Notice that some people react. That reaction belongs to them. It always did. This isn't about becoming a contrarian for its own sake. It's about finding out, in a small way, which parts of your life are foundational and authentic, and which parts you've just never tested. Conclusion Here's what this isn't: it's not permission to burn everything down and call it freedom. You're still in the play. You still have a role — family, work, responsibilities, people who depend on you. None of that goes away. What changes is why you're playing it. There's a difference between reciting lines someone handed you because you never thought to ask if they were true, and standing in the same spot, saying the same words, because you've actually chosen them. From the outside those two things can look identical. From the inside, they're the whole difference between a life you choose and a performance. What is this is really about is seeing the game for what it is. It’s understanding the difference between reality and the “rules” that society quietly enforces. Those rules can be bent or even broken. But remember, you can’t control the consequences. You don't get to control how people respond when you make that shift. Some will be confused. Some will be hurt. Some will leave. That was never yours to manage, and it never is. That's the price, and it's worth paying, because the alternative is spending your one life optimizing for a game you never actually agreed to play. So this week, find a rule. Ask if it'

    The Game You Didn't Know You Were Playing | 388

  2. 12 Aug

    The Danger of Certainty | 387

    Certainty and hubris have always been part of being human. It feels good to be certain, to believe that your opinion is the right one. We like leaders who sound certain and shun those that don’t. But sounding right isn’t the same thing as having the truth. What if the actual way to truth is not through being certain, but by embracing uncertainty? “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” ― Epictetus The Problem We live in an age of certainty. Open any social media app and within seconds you’ll be hit with confident declarations on politics, relationships, health, ethics, all delivered with the kind of conviction that leaves no room for doubt. Hot takes are presented and settled truth. The more confident the claim, the more it spread. Certainty is the currency of attention. But here’s the problem: certainty is is a trap. It’s one of the more dangerous traps that we can fall into. Not just personally, but as a society. When we’re certain, we stop questioning. We stop listening. We lose our ability to sit with complexity and nuance. To consider that we may not be seeing the whole picture. We trade wisdom for the comfort of feeling right. That comfort is seductive. We like certainty because it feels safe. Ambiguity triggers the same neurological response as physical danger. Your brain would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all. Uncertainty feels like we’re in the dark. Certainty feels like turning the light on, even if what we see is distorted. But the cost is enormous. Certainty damages relationships because if you already believe you have the truth, you can’t hear anyone who sees things differently. It damages communities because it turns disagreements into threats. And it damages your own capacity for growth. As Benjamin Franklin reminds us: “The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.” — Benjamin Franklin Being able to sit in uncertainty, to acknowledge your ignorance, is where wisdom starts. Wisdom only comes to someone who is willing to be wrong. We don’t live in a black and white world, but certainty insists that we do. This isn’t a new problem. The ancient world wrestled with it too, and in one of Athens most cautionary tales, certainty brought down one of the world’s greatest civilizations. The Philosophy To understand the danger of certainty, we need to got back to 5th century BCE Athens. What happened there maps almost perfectly to what we’re going through right now. Like us, Athens was a democracy, which meant that political power belonged to whoever could best persuade the crowd. In this environment were a group of professional teachers called the Sophist. The Sophists were the original political spin doctors. They traveled from city to city teach rhetoric, the art of persuasion. But here’s the critical distinction: the didn’t teach people to discover the truth. They taught how to win arguments. How to make the weaker case appear stronger. How to use language to emotionally manipulate people, regardless if what was being spoken was true. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates confronts the Sophist Grogias. Gorgias claims rhetoric is the greatest of all arts because it can convince anyone of anything. Socrates’ response is brutal: rhetoric without truth is flattery. It’s the difference between a doctor and pastry chef. One tells you what you need to hear. The other tells you what you want to hear. One of the more famous Sophist, Protagoras, said, “man is the measure of all things.” In other words, the truth is relative. There is no objective truth. Only what you can convince others to believe. That idea, weaponized by skilled rhetoricians and handed to skilled politicians, was extremely dangerous. And the politicians lined up to learn it. This was the environment that Socrates lived in, and he found it repugnant. Socrates had an entirely different starting point. When the Oracle at Delphi declared him the wisest man in Athens, he was genuinely baffled. So he went out to test it. He spoke with politicians, poets, craftsmen — anyone with a reputation for wisdom. And what he found was consistent: they all believed they knew things they didn't. They had mistaken confidence for knowledge. His conclusion was humble: his advantage was knowing that he didn't know. To Socrates, that awareness, that gap between what we think we know and what we actually know, is the beginning of all genuine wisdom. He even stated: “I know that I am wise because I know that I know nothing.” This is the practice we now call the Socratic method. Not debate. Not rhetoric. Disciplined questioning, that is designed to expose false certainty, including his own. The Sophists hated it. Because Socrates wasn't playing the same game. He didn't care about winning. He cared about truth. And in a culture increasingly addicted to persuasion, that made him dangerous. It eventually got him killed. The Trial of Socrates In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. His accusers used exactly the tools the Sophists taught — emotional appeals, crowd manipulation, confident declarations. And Socrates, true to his philosophy, refused to fight fire with fire. He wouldn't flatter the jury. He wouldn't perform certainty he didn't have. He argued his case with the same disciplined honesty he'd practiced his whole life. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Certainty won. Truth lost. The Sicilian Expedition But the consequences of Sophist-influenced certainty weren’t limited to one man's execution. They played out at a civilizational scale in what historians consider one of the greatest strategic disasters in ancient history. In 415 BCE, Athens voted to invade Sicily. The campaign was championed by Alcibiades, a charismatic, brilliant, Sophist-influenced general who was absolutely certain the expedition would succeed. His confidence was intoxicating. The Athenian assembly, swept up in collective certainty, voted yes despite almost no strategic justification. The one voice of caution, the general Nicias, was overruled. The entire Athenian fleet was destroyed. Tens of thousands of soldiers lost. Athens never fully recovered. It was the beginning of the end of Athenian power. That is what happens when persuasion beats wisdom at a civic level. When certainty is more valued than careful thought. The Stoics The Stoics, who came roughly a century after Socrates, inherited his epistemic humility and built it into the foundation of their philosophy. The Stoics picked up Socrates' practice of questioning everything and formalized it. Epictetus makes clear that the first discipline is the discipline of assent. You don't just accept impressions, you interrogate them: “You can process in your intellect and senses a wealth of thoughts and impressions simultaneously. There are impressions that you assent to, others that you reject; sometimes you suspend judgement altogether.” — Epictetus Marcus Aurelius writes repeatedly about suspending judgment. The Stoic concept of kataleptic impression (a true, reliable perception) was important precisely because they understood how hard it is to actually know something. Where the Sophists said truth is whatever you can convince people of, the Stoics said the first obligation of a rational person is to interrogate their own impressions before accepting them. You don't just receive an idea and run with it. You examine it. You question it. You ask whether what you're seeing is actually true, or whether you're being moved by emotion, by habit, or by someone else's rhetoric. Marcus Aurelius, writing in his private journal, returns to this again and again. In Meditations, he writes something remarkable for the most powerful person on earth: "If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed." — Marcus Aurelius Think about that. The most powerful man in the world, holding his beliefs lightly enough to be corrected. That's philosophical courage. Seneca makes a parallel point about consuming ideas. In his Letters to Lucillius, he warns against absorbing too many opinions without digesting them or taking the time to develop you own discernment: “It is not how many books thou hast, but how good; careful reading profiteth, while that which is full of variety delighteth.” — Seneca It’s the ancient version of doom-scrolling through confident hot takes and mistaking exposure for understanding. And the politicians who traded in certainty? The Stoics were clear-eyed about them too. Thucydides, the great Athenian historian, wrote about a demagogue named Cleon with barely concealed contempt. Cleon was loud, certain, and crowd-pleasing. He argued for the extermination of the entire population of Mytilene after a revolt. The Athenians voted yes, whipped into certainty by his rhetoric. They reversed the decision the next day, barely in time to stop a massacre. The Sophist playbook hasn't changed in 2,400 years. We see it in our own politics today. Confident framing. Simple villains. No room for complexity or nuance. The certainty itself is the product. It makes followers feel safe, chosen, and correct. Questioning it feels like betrayal. You would think with all the advances we’ve made as humans we would have moved past this. That we would adopt a more logical and rational way of conducting ourselves. But while technology and society have advanced in many ways, human nature hasn’t. In fact, the ability to exploit human nature has gotten worse. The Sophists were dangerous to Socrates not because they were wrong about everything, but because they didn't care about being right. They cared about being convincing. That distinction matte

    The Danger of Certainty | 387

  3. 5 Aug

    Michael Lukich: The Stoic System Thinker | 386

    Michael has built a career at the intersection of data, teaching, and strategy. Always circling the same question: “How do we make better decisions amid a complex reality?” Throughout his career, he has helped people uncover the deeper structures beneath their most pressing challenges. Michael’s perspective draws from an uncommon combination of experience. Over twenty years in consulting, data, and technology taught him to think in systems. Five years as an adjunct professor sharpened his ability to make complex ideas accessible to anyone willing to learn. Nearly twenty-five years as a poker player gave him a visceral understanding of variance, probability, and the limits of control. Those lessons echo throughout these pages. He is the creator of The Stoic Systems Thinker, a newsletter where ancient Stoic philosophy meets modern systems thinking, and new book by the same title. At the core of his work is a belief he keeps testing: wisdom isn’t a mystical gift reserved for the few, but an emergent property of a well-designed life system. The ideas in this book have been tested in conference rooms, classrooms, and at the poker table, and they’ve shaped the way he lives his own life. The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment! My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!Find out more at https://stoic.coffeeWatch episodes on YouTube!Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.Thanks again for listening! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    Michael Lukich: The Stoic System Thinker | 386

  4. 29 Jul

    Keystone Habits: How One Good Habit Can Change Everything | 385

    Habits are a key part of our lives. We have helpful habits that help us accomplish what we set out to do. We also have some that we’d like to get rid of. But what if I told you that sometimes one good habit is all it takes to reorient our lives and make lasting changes? In this week’s episode we’ll discuss the importance of keystone habits and how you can find yours. "All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits." — William James I love to cycle. Ever since I watched the Kona Ironman competition on TV on 2003, and decided that I wanted to be that hardcore, cycling has become become a key part of not just my weekly workout routine, but a core part of my identity. While for some it may sound like torture, a 35 mile ride on a warm Saturday is my idea of an afternoon well spent. But what this one habit brings to my life is far more than just fresh air and great legs. It influences other areas of my life in profound ways. You see, when I started training for triathlons, I was not what a triathlete should look like. I was out of shape. At 195 pounds (about 88 kilograms for you non-Americans) and only 5’7” (170 cm) tall, I was carrying a lot of extra weight. I had bad eating habits, preferring Mt. Dew over water. I could barely run a 5k in under 35 minutes. In high school I could do it in half that time. But once I started down that path, it became the centering principle of my life. I would ride my bike to work, often taking the long way home. I changed my diet to healthier food and smaller portions. When I would go out to eat, I would divide my meals in half, setting aside the second half for home, so I wouldn’t overeat. Because I was working out more, I slept better. And while I only competed in a single short course triathlon before focusing on just cycling, it changed the direction of my life. My gym routine, my diet, my alcohol consumption, and my sleep are all in service to helping me maintain my fitness for the bike. This in turn keeps me healthy, functional, and feeling better mentally. This is what Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habits, calls a “keystone habit”. In short, it’s a core habit that influences other behaviors. It reenforces other habits making them easier to follow. Once you find that habit, it orients the rest of your life around it. The Philosophy A keystone habit isn’t necessarily the most important habit from a moral sense. Cycling doesn’t make me a more virtuous person in itself. A keystone habit is the habit with the highest leverage. It creates an identity shift that makes virtuous choices easier by default, not through willpower. In my case because I consider myself a cyclist, my other choices are filtered through the question: “what would a cyclist do?” In my case: eat less dessert, skip the beer, and get a good nights sleep. A keystone habit doesn’t have to be physical one. It can also be a cognitive one as well. Marcus Aurelius had a keystone habit of writing in his journal. That habit grounded him in way that had an influence on everything else in his life. How he ruled, the books he read, the people he spent time with, how he treated other people. It was a high leverage habit that helped him be the kind of person he wanted to be. Seneca had a habit each night of reflecting on his day. He would take stock of what he did well that day and what he could improve. This simple habit of taking time each day became an anchor for finding his weak spots and resolving to do better tomorrow. Creatures of Habit So why are good habits such an in important part of of lives? Because we are creatures of habits. Literally. Humans develop habits so that we don’t have to think through how to do something every time we do it. Think about if you had to consciously manage each step in getting dressed? If we had to give our full attention to each button or zipper, or each time we had to tie our shoes? It would be tiring. Habits save us time and energy. Think about the first time you learned how to tie your shoes. How much time and effort did that take? It wasn’t easy. But once you got it down, then you could do it without having to really think about it. Bad habits come about the same way. We often pick them up without thinking about them, only to find that they are much harder to put down. I’ve had plenty of friends who picked up smoking because they hung around friends that were smokers. It was easier just to go along to get along. But years later, when trying to quit, they routinely complained about how hard it was, wishing they have never started. Your eating habits were probably shaped by the household you grew up in. As a child you really didn’t have a choice in what food was available in your house. But those choices influenced you and created habits that you probably carried into adulthood. Until we become aware of our habits and interrogate them, we can run on autopilot. If the habit is helpful it can lead to great results and happier life. The habits that don’t serve us, can keep us stuck, holding us back from reaching our highest potential. Excellence is a Habit There’s a quote that is often misattributed to Aristotle, which goes: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” And I admit that I have misattributed as well on this podcast. It’s actually from Will Durant, the author of The Story of Philosophy, as a commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. When researching quotes for this episode, I found the whole passage from the book and it’s well worth reading the whole thing: “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; "these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions"; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” — Will Durant (commentary on Aristotle in inner quotes) Think about that. We don’t act because we have virtue or excellence. We act and then develop virtue and excellence. Most people have it backwards. They think you need to be motivated to do the right thing. Aristotle claimed it’s the other way around. Musonius Rufus One of the most under appreciated Stoics is Gaius Musonius Rufus, a prominent Stoic philosopher in the 1st century AD, and mentor to Epictetus. Like many of the great philosophers of his day, we don’t know a lot about him because we have very little of his writings. But the writings and references we have about him are of a disciplined and principled man, who taught more about ethics than logic or physics. He was also a farmer who believed that physical labor was essential to building good character. Musonius believed that the greatest impediment to living a moral life were prejudices we carry from childhood. He saw philosophy as the mental art of healing, and that our actions are indicators of our mental well-being. He taught that right action was more important than discussion. As he put it: “Practice is more important than theory... because it more effectively leads humans to action than theory does.” — Musonius Rufus For him, it didn’t matter what you knew, or what you said, but what you did. Your Habits Control You One of the key aspects of Stoicism is the dichotomy of control. This is where we clear understanding of what we can control and what we can’t. Habits are a way that we give up some control to make things easier. We end up with behaviors that we’re often barely aware of that control many aspects of our lives. Since we’re driven by habits, it’s important that we choose the habits that drive our lives. Musonius Rufus recognized that we often err not because we don’t understand the right action, but that we act out of habit: “So in the majority of other things, we address circumstances not in accordance with the right assumptions, but mostly by following wretched habit.” — Musonius Rufus Even 2000 years ago, he saw that our habits were incredibly influential on the actions that we take. Bad habits can overcome good intentions. We might have keystone habits that are detrimental to our lives. People who are addicted to drugs or alcohol have turned something that might have helped them cope in the short-term into something that controls their live. They have a negative keystone habit because everything in their lives revolves around it. We can also have negative mental keystone habits. Have you ever been around someone that complains all the time? They are not fun to be around. They find something in everything to complain about. Or if you’ve been around someone who is constantly playing the victim. Everything is out to get them and make their lives miserable. In each case, they’ve let this become the organizing principle of their lives. A good keystone habit is something that gives you the leverage to make a greater impact on all areas of your life. The Practice So how do you find your keystone habit? There are really two kinds of keystone habits. The first is what I have with cycling — a physical habit that becomes an identity. You don't just do the thing, you become someone who does the thing. Once you're "a cyclist," your diet, your sleep, the time at the gym, are not separate disciplines you have to white-knuckle through anymore. They're just what a cyclist does. The identity does the work that willpower used to have to do. The second kind is a practice that becomes a lens. For me, that's this podcast. Recording an episode every week doesn't just produce content. It changes what I read, because I'm always on the lookout for ideas for the next episode. It keeps me journaling, because half my ideas start as a scribbled note. It's made me pay closer attention to my own reactions, because I need real examples, not just theory. The podcast isn't one habit sitting next to my other habits. I

    Keystone Habits: How One Good Habit Can Change Everything | 385

  5. 23 Jul

    The Virtue of Reading | 384

    When was the last time that you read a book. A serious book. Something stretched your mind? Something that you had to stop and go back and reread a sentence or paragraph to make sure you understood it? Maybe even learned some new words? New ideas? In this episode, let’s talk about why you should read deeper — not just so you can check another book off your list, but as a tool to help you deal with the complexities of life. “Friends, the school of a philosopher is a hospital. When you leave, you should have suffered, not enjoyed yourself.” — Epictetus The Problem Last year, only 60% of Americans read at least one book. Almost 57% of Americans placed a bet. That's not a statistic I'm making up to be dramatic. It's from a piece in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch called "The End of Reading Is Here." She's not calling us illiterate. She's calling us something worse, in a way — post-literate. Still surrounded by words. Words everywhere. Just losing the capacity, and the appetite, to sit with the hard ones. The top selling books today are simpler and less complex, with young adult novels taking the lead, even among adults. Libraries are following this trend getting easier to read books for patrons. In 1958 the English translation of Doctor Zhivago was the best selling book. Boris Pastenak wrote in long complex sentences, demanding your attention. Last years top novel? Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games series. Nothing wrong with that book, but nobody's calling it a wrestling match. I want to be clear about something before I go further: this isn't me being a snob about it. This isn't "kids these days" or "nobody reads anymore, sad." This is me pointing out something specific — we are choosing, at scale, to stop training the one muscle that everything else in a thinking life depends on. And I don't think that's a coincidence that it's happening at the exact moment we need that muscle most. Difficult reading, as Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA points out, strengthens the cognitive abilities of comprehension and synthesis—the ability to read something and integrate it into real life situations. And here's why it matters. When you stop reading hard things, you don't just read less. You lose practice at friction. At hitting a sentence you don't understand and going back over it instead of scrolling past it. At holding two conflicting ideas in your head at once instead of picking a side in the first four words. You start expecting to be handed the conclusion. Told what to feel. And when real life doesn't hand you the conclusion, when it just hands you the mess and expects you to work it out, you're out of practice for the one skill that job requires. Why is Reading Hard? Reading and writing is not something that comes naturally to us as humans. Our brains don’t naturally have a space set aside for processing the written word. This is a skill that we have developed as humans. Writing allowed us to preserve ideas that otherwise would have been handed down orally, and changed in each telling. But in that development we’ve also developed logic, grammar, rationality, mathematics, emotional complexity. In order to put something down on paper, the author has to think through their arguments and clearly articulate what they are actually trying to say, so they can best communicate their ideas to the reader. On the reader’s side, it means that the arguments and ideas don’t disappear as they do when a conversation or video ends. It’s still there on the page, allowing you to go back and dive deeper, consider other possibilities, find rebuttals, and poke holes the flaws you might find. Reading doesn’t just give you information. The act of reading literally changes the way that you think. Reading helps you construct mental models in a way that no other medium can. Reading also places you in the mind of other people. It’s like you experience the world as another person. You read their thoughts and observations. You understand a completely different perspective on that world that you otherwise couldn’t. If you only stick to books that are easy, or ones that speak to your worldview, then you never understand how others experience the world. As we become a more oral and visual world, thanks to social media, we lose something. Social media, while at times can be instructional, is meant to be entertaining and hook your attention, not to deeply educate you. It’s too short for the reader (or watcher) to really engage in the material, to challenge their own thinking. It’s simplified down to soundbites and that’s not a way to educate yourself. If it doesn’t catch your attention, you skim past it looking for something to amuse rather than inform. Videos are a more passive form of engagement, requiring less imagination and reasoning. In a study by University of California San Francisco, they found that reading actually increases the size of the cortex in the brain. Those that spent more time reading performed better on cognitive tests. Those that spent more time watching videos actually had regions of the brain decrease and performed worse on the same cognitive tests. This weakens our ability to handle the complexities of the world, other people, and even ourselves. We reduce things down to simple narratives and assumptions. Things become more black and white, eliminating the shades of gray and nuance that are part of the complex world we live in. The Thinking Class A few months ago, I listened to an interview with Brené Brown where she noticed an interesting disconnect. She talked about how in her work that she meets with leaders from all kinds of companies, including some of the top tech firms. Every leader she talks to tells the people under them to learn to code, learn data science, get the technical skill that'll survive the future. Yet, when pressed on the books that they read that actually shaped them the most, they all mentioned books on philosophy, critical thinking, literature, psychology, history, even art. None of them pointed to a technical book. That's not hypocrisy. That's a class system, and it's an honest one, whether anyone means it that way or not. One class gets trained to execute, the other gets to keep the skill of deciding what's worth executing in the first place. And the interesting things is that a YouGov study on reading in America backs this up. They found that that just 19% of Americans read 82% of the books. So the question is, which class do you want to be in? If you’re not expanding your mind, if you’re not challenging yourself to consider alternate viewpoints and new ideas, then you’re making that choice. When we meet challenges in our lives we can either lower the bar, or increase our capacity. Lowering the bar is easier. Increasing your capacity is harder. But which one has a higher likelihood of being successful? Attention What this comes down to is not only are we losing our ability to think about complex things, we’re losing our ability to pay attention. SAT and ACT scores have been falling each year as students struggle with long reading passages, even as the test creators have been shortening the passages for reading comprehension. College students, even in Ivy League schools, regularly complain about having to read long books for their classes. Not just because they are difficult, but because they struggle with the capacity to finish reading them. Teachers are being instructed to use shorter passages from the books, basically dumbing down the curriculum. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, even talked about how some students see reading as a burdensome way to acquire knowledge. Think about that. Isn’t that what higher education is about? Increasing your capacity and skills? Challenging yourself so that you’re better, smarter, more creative than when you started? If we as a society aren’t even just keeping up, but are actively lowering the bar, how do we expect to continue advancing, not just technologically, or as a society, but as human beings? As Neil Postman wrote in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: "When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments... a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility." — Neil Postman The Philosophy Here's the thing the Stoics understood about the mind two thousand years before anyone ran an fMRI study on it: attention isn't a background feature. It's the kernel of the operating system. They had a word for it, prosoche, which is usually translated as attention, but it’s really closer to vigilance — a trained, sustained watchfulness over your own mind. They treated it as the foundational discipline. Not a nice-to-have next to the "real" Stoic work. It’s the foundation everything else stands on. Because before you can sort what's in your control from what isn't, before you can choose a response instead of reacting, you have to actually be there long enough to see the choice in front of you. No attention, no discipline. No discipline, no Stoicism. Epictetus points this out directly: "When you relax your attention for a while, do not fancy you will recover it whenever you please; but remember this, that because of your fault of today your affairs must necessarily be in a worse condition in future occasions." — Epictetus So when I say we're losing the ability to sit with a hard sentence, I'm not being precious about literature. I'm saying we're losing the raw material the whole practice runs on. You cannot examine an impression you scrolled past. Seneca saw his own century's version of this. Not video, not doomscrolling. For him it was people bouncing from scroll to scroll, author to author, never landing anywhere long enough to actually digest it. He wrote to his friend Lucilius: "You m

    The Virtue of Reading | 384

  6. 14 Jul

    Interview with Jon Brooks: Stoicism and Emotions | 383

    Jon Brooks is the host of the Stoic Handbook podcast and Substack page. In this episode we talk about the dangers of over-managing your emotions and finding ways to be a good Stoic while not shutting yourself off emotionally. You can find out more about Jon and his work at stoichandbook.co The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment! My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!Find out more at https://stoic.coffeeWatch episodes on YouTube!Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.Thanks again for listening! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    Interview with Jon Brooks: Stoicism and Emotions | 383

  7. 21 Jun

    What Does It Actually Take to Be Courageous? | 382

    Courage, one of the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism, is what I consider the fuel for virtue, and really for living a good life. But what does courage actually look like? Are we born courageous or it it something we can develop? In today’s episode we’re going to dive into what Stoics taught about courage and how it’s backed up by modern science. What Does It Actually Take to Be Courageous? "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." —C.S. Lewis The Problem When I started this podcast, I was scared. Not just nervous. Scared. I was convinced that at any moment, someone was going to figure out that I didn't belong — that I wasn't qualified enough, smart enough, or interesting enough to be talking about Stoic philosophy to strangers on the internet. Imposter syndrome was ever present. Every episode I recorded in those early days, I'd finish it and think, "That’s probably the one where people are going quit listening." But here's what I've come to understand after years of doing this work — that feeling wasn't a warning. It was an invitation. An invitation to do something that takes real courage: to show up honestly, even when you don't feel ready. Today I want to talk about courage. Not the Hollywood version — the battlefield moment, the heroic leap. Real courage. The everyday, grinding, unsexy kind that determines the actual quality of your life. Researcher Brené Brown has spent twenty years studying this. The other day I was listening to a podcast where she was a guest, and they were talking about what it takes to be courageous. What she found in her research cuts against everything we think we know. Courage, she says, isn't a personality trait. It's not something you have or don't have. It's a collection of four learnable skills. And when I dug into her framework for the first time, I kept stopping because the Stoics had already mapped the same territory two thousand years earlier. So that's what we're doing today. Brown's four skill sets of courage, paired with the Stoic philosophy that's been teaching the same lessons since before Rome fell. And I'll tell you where each one showed up in my own life, because if it's worth talking about, it's worth being honest about. Let's get into it. PHILOSOPHY & PRACTICE SKILL SET ONE: Rumbling with Vulnerability Brown's first skill set is what she calls "rumbling with vulnerability." She defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. And the rumble part matters — it means staying in the discomfort instead of tapping out. Not performing openness. Actually sitting with the hard thing. Most of us don't do this. We armor up. We get busy, get sarcastic, get certain — anything to avoid the exposed feeling of not knowing, of being seen, of possibly being wrong or hurt or rejected. Brown's research shows that without this foundational skill, the other three are impossible. You cannot be courageous while armored. The armor has to come off first, because vulnerability is a prerequisite for courage. You can’t be courageous if something doesn’t scare you. The Stoics called this prosoche — self-examination. The practice of looking honestly at yourself, not to punish yourself, but to see clearly. Socrates felt this was so important that he said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” He would often practice self-questioning, cross-examining his own thinking about something. Once, while on campaign with the Athenian army, he stood still on a beach for 24 hours, lost in deep thought. The other soldiers, curious about what was going on, gathered around keeping vigil. Then as the sun rose, be woke from his trance-like state, said a prayer to the day, then went on as if nothing had happened. Epictetus pushed his students toward self-examination constantly. And Seneca in his treatise On Anger describes his own nightly practice in first person. He wrote: “When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that’s now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” And then, crucially, he doesn't spiral into self-condemnation. He says: “For why should I be afraid of any of my mistakes, when I can say: ‘Beware of doing that again, and this time I pardon you.’” That's the practice. See it clearly. Don't hide from it. Just let it go and do better. When I started this podcast, the vulnerability wasn't optional. I was putting my voice, my face, my actual beliefs out into the world with no idea if anyone would care. That exposure, was scary. But the harder vulnerability, the one that took more courage, was admitting to myself that I was afraid. That I felt like a fraud. Because as long as I kept that hidden, even from myself, I couldn't do anything about it. The Stoic practice of self-examination gave me a framework for that. Not "beat yourself up at the end of the day." Look honestly. What did you avoid? What did you do from fear instead of from your values? See it. Correct it. Move on. Doing so allowed me to see myself not as some sage that knew everything, but a fellow traveler along the road, sharing what I’ve learned. That my experiences, both my successes and my failures, could be of use to others. Practice: Tonight, before you sleep, spend five minutes doing this. Not a gratitude list. An honest review. Where did you avoid something you knew you should face? Not to shame yourself — to see clearly. That's the beginning of courage. SKILL SET TWO: Living into Our Values Brené’s second skill set is living into our values, and to be precise about what those values are. She says most people have vague, aspirational values. Integrity. Honesty. Courage. But vague values don't guide behavior under pressure. She pushes people to get specific: what does integrity actually look like in a hard conversation? What does honesty cost you when it's inconvenient? That gap between stated values and actual behavior is where courage lives or dies. The Stoics made this the center of their entire philosophy. Virtue, excellence of character, wasn't an abstract idea or an aspiration. It was how you acted, specifically, when it was hard. Marcus writes in Meditations: "No random actions, none not based on underlying principles." Every action either expresses your values or betrays them. There's no neutral ground. And Marcus knew how easy it is to betray them. He was the most powerful man on Earth. He had every excuse to let himself off the hook. He wrote the Meditations as a daily practice of bringing himself back to his values because he knew that without that discipline, the gap widens without you noticing. One of the things I committed to early on with this podcast was honesty. Not just talking about Stoic philosophy in the abstract, but being real about where I struggle with it. That meant talking about my failures on air. Not as a performance of humility — that's its own kind of armor. But because the show is built on the premise that this work is hard and real, and pretending otherwise would be a lie. It would go against the actual virtue I’m trying to teach. That was harder than it sounds. There's a version of a podcast host that looks like they have everything figured out. I knew my audience might be more comfortable if I projected that image. But it would have been a betrayal of what I actually believe, which is that the messy, uncertain, still-figuring-it-out life is the only honest one. Living into your values means it costs you something. If it doesn't cost you anything, you're not really being tested. Practice: Name two values that are genuinely yours. Not what sounds good, but what actually guides you at your best. Then find one moment from the past week where you acted against them. That's not dwelling on failure. That's useful information. That's where the work is. SKILL SET THREE: Braving Trust Brown's third skill set is braving trust. She breaks trust down into specific, observable behaviors — she has an acronym, BRAVING, that maps it out. B — Boundaries: Say no when you need to; respect others' no R — Reliability: Do what you say, consistently, without overpromising A — Accountability: Own your mistakes, apologize, make amends V — Vault: Keep confidences — don't share what isn't yours to share I — Integrity: Choose courage over comfort; what's right over what's easy N — Non-judgment: Ask for what you need without judgment; others can do the same G — Generosity: Extend the most generous interpretation of others' intentions But the core insight is this: trust is not a feeling. It's not something that just happens between people. It's built through consistent, specific actions over time. And it requires courage because trusting someone means accepting that you can be hurt. Most of us either over-trust, where we hand ourselves over and get burned, or we under-trust, we armor up, and we end up isolated. Neither is courage. Courage is the willingness to be in genuine relationship, with your eyes open, knowing the risk. The Stoics were deeply committed to this idea, even though we don't always talk about it. They believed that humans are fundamentally social, that we are made for community, for relationship, for mutual care. Marcus returns to this again and again. We are not isolated units managing our own inner states. We are connected to each other, and our obligations to that connection are part of what it means to live well. Justice (dikaiosyne) one of the four cardinal virtues, is entirely about relationships with others. You cannot be fully virtuous alone. I took two breaks from this podcast. Both times, it was because I needed to deal with personal challenges in my life. And both times, the hardest part wasn't the break itself. It was trusting my audience to still be there when I came back. That'

    What Does It Actually Take to Be Courageous? | 382

  8. 15 Jun

    Interview with Kelly McGinnis: What it Takes to Really Lead | 381

    Kelly McGinnis has a long and storied career working her way up the corporate ladder to CFO and later President of Thermo Fischer, a Fortune 100 company. In this episode we discuss ideas around what it takes to be good leader, company culture, and stepping out on your own. The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment! My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!Find out more at https://stoic.coffeeWatch episodes on YouTube!Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.Thanks again for listening! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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About

"Act on your principles, not your moods." A weekly meditation on how Stoic principles can help you be a better human. https://stoic.coffee Follow us on social media: https://instagram.com/stoic.coffee

Information

  • Creator
    Erick Cloward
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    389
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Stoic Coffee Break
  • Show Website
    Stoic Coffee Break

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