Every few months, the Daily Stoic (of the book and journal of the same name) run a challenge to help their readers adopt a more Stoic mindset by practising things like gratitude and voluntary discomfort. The latest of these challenges, The Daily Stoic Freedom Challenge, is explained as follows: The…
I was introduced to someone today and the first thing they said to me was: “I love you.” This took me aback and I panicked and replied with, “Nice to meet you!” Luckily for me they seemed to happily accept my fumbled greeting even though I hadn’t reciprocated their more…
Imagine something for a second. Imagine you are 80 years old. Your skin’s a bit looser, you have whiter/thinner/no hair, your teeth are in a different room. If those things apply to you already I mean no disrespect — they’re all perfectly natural. But if you have to imagine, ask yourself these…
I enjoy watching animals doing nothing. Just as well really, they can be found doing nothing most of the time. If you live in the countryside, or travel there often, you might enjoy this too. It’s peaceful. Gazing into a green field at grazing sheep, I can focus on something…
The phrase “get away from it all” is so common that it warrants its own definition in Collins English Dictionary. The Collins website explains it as follows: “If you get away from it all, you have a holiday in a place that is very different from where you normally live…
“Mari, you have to go,” Keller says. “I admire what you’re trying to do, I admire the hell out of what you’re trying to do, but it’s not possible. You and a half dozen women cannot go up against the Sinaloa cartel!” “Because the people who are supposed to protect…
In his Consolation to Helvia, Seneca The Younger posits the following: “Is it not madness and the wildest lunacy to desire so much when you can hold so little?” He goes on to say how unwise it is “to think that it is the amount of money and not the…
Shaun Attwood is a former stock-market millionaire and Ecstasy supplier turned public speaker, author and activist, who is banned from America for life. While incarcerated in Arizona from 2002–2007 for drug crimes, he developed a close relationship with a man known as Two Tonys. On his prison blog, Attwood described…
Recently I heard a song that I hadn’t listened to in years. I make the distinction between heard and listened because this time the song moved me in a way it never did before. It’s easy to listen to something without really processing it, it’s more difficult to hear it…
When Chinese author Zhang Wei paid £7,600 to drink the world’s most expensive dram of whisky, he said, “In a nutshell, it tasted good. I was drinking not so much the whisky but a lot of history.” 139 years of history to be exact. Or so he thought. It was…