This is an account of day 1 of the 21-Day Daily Stoic Freedom Challenge, for accounts of other days please click here. In Theory On Day 1 of the 21-Day Daily Stoic Freedom Challenge, participants are asked to start with a cold shower or plunge. The point isn’t punishment, pain,…
Every few months, The Daily Stoic (of the book and journal of the same name) runs a challenge to help readers adopt a more Stoic mindset. These challenges focus on practices like gratitude and voluntary discomfort. The latest of these challenges, The Daily Stoic Freedom Challenge, is explained as follows:…
Today, I met someone new, and the first thing they said to me was, "I love you." Caught off guard, I panicked and blurted out, "Nice to meet you!" Luckily, they didn’t seem to mind my awkward response. Even though I hadn’t matched their enthusiasm, they happily accepted my greeting.…
Imagine you are 80 years old. Your skin is a little looser, your hair is whiter or thinner (or maybe gone altogether), and your teeth might not be where they used to be. If any of that already applies to you, no offense—it’s all perfectly natural. But if you’re just…
I confess: I love watching animals do nothing. It’s a good thing, too, because that’s how they spend most of their time. If you live in the countryside or visit often, you might enjoy this as well. It’s peaceful. When I watch sheep grazing in a field, my mind shifts…
The phrase “get away from it all” is so common that it has its own definition in the Collins English Dictionary. According to Collins, it means: If you get away from it all, you have a holiday in a place that is very different from where you normally live and…
In his Consolation to Helvia, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger asks: “Is it not madness and the wildest lunacy to desire so much when you can hold so little?” He argues it's unwise “to think that it is the amount of money and not the state of mind that…
I recently heard a song I hadn’t listened to in years. I say “heard” instead of “listened” because this time, the song moved me in a way it never had before. It’s easy to listen to something without really processing it. Truly hearing it—taking it in and reflecting on it—is…
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…
When the book A Million Little Pieces was published in 2003, it marked a major victory for James Frey. He had spent twelve years in France trying to become a writer, and now he finally was one. But for Frey, success wasn’t about getting published—it was about finally writing a…