I don’t often confirm a "good day" unless a number of good things have happened. There needs to be a clear and heavy imbalance in favour of things going right, categorical and undisputed, before any contentment can ensue. I woke up early, I completed my work to-do list, I exercised,…
When you first get a puppy and you’ve owned it for a couple of days, your prevailing thought might be "what have I done?" Before you got her you watched just about every dog training video on YouTube, you read endless articles about what to feed her and how much…
Do you ever get a feeling of emptiness after spending hours binge-watching a TV show? I do, it can feel like eating junk food - enjoyable at the time but with no lasting benefit or satisfaction. Binge-watching is what Robert Greene would call "dead time": While people wait for the…
From an early age, largely thanks to advertising, we’re told it’s normal to be on a satisfaction treadmill. We feel dissatisfied when we develop desires that are unfulfilled. We strive to fulfil these desires in the hope of satisfaction. Before long, the fulfilled desire becomes the new normal and is…
Simon Drew is an alignment coach, a musician, and a trail runner, but if you have an interest in Stoicism you'll know him best as the host of the excellent Practical Stoic podcast. You can find Simon at https://www.simonjedrew.com/ and The Practical Stoic at https://practicalstoicpodcast.podbean.com/ It was great to be…
In the world of computer science, “If–then–else” is a conditional statement in a programming language that performs different actions depending on whether a boolean condition evaluates to true or false. In pseudo-code form, an If–then–else statement looks like this: If (boolean condition) Then (consequent)Else (alternative)End If In the non-computer world, when we…
It’s Friday and you’re out browsing the local stores. You see something you want to buy but don’t have the money for right now. A yellow pair of sneakers. They’re unique, perfect, you. They’ve been on the market for a while but you just became aware of them. You resolve…
Jim and Jamie Dutcher lived with a wolf pack for six years. The wolves were so comfortable with them that they were almost part of the pack. Jim would howl and the wolves would answer. Jamie was permitted by the alpha female to inspect her newborn pups. A wolf pack…
Bubbles burst and get blown again. Grass gets mowed and grows again. What’s short-lived often lives again. What’s done is done but invariably gets done again. Each keystroke I’m making right now is repeatedly lost forever and replaced by the next until words appear. The words may endure briefly but…
In Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, the main character, Binx Bolling, periodically muses on the concept of a repetition. He first explains it as follows (if you’re like me, reading the explanation will need several repetitions before it sinks in!): “What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past…