Stoicism for Anxiety: Worry, Rumination and the Stories We Rehearse
Seneca's line about suffering more in imagination than in reality gets quoted everywhere. The letter it comes from is more careful than the quote.
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Each of these starts from something people actually struggle with now and works back into the texts, quoting Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and Musonius Rufus directly - follow any quote to read the passage it came from. If you would rather start from the ideas than the problems, browse the topics instead.
Seneca's line about suffering more in imagination than in reality gets quoted everywhere. The letter it comes from is more careful than the quote.
The Stoics had no phones. They did have a precise theory of what happens in the half-second between something appearing in front of you and you believing it.
The modern money worry is rarely about survival. It is about the person one rung above you - and Seneca, who was enormously rich, knew he was the wrong man to give the lecture.
Burnout, hustle culture, and the suspicion that opting out is a luxury. The Stoics argued about this too, and they did not agree.
Epictetus devoted a whole chapter to being alone, and his first move is to pull apart two things we habitually run together.
Diet, fitness and ageing have quietly become moral categories, as though a smoothie were a virtue. The Stoics would recognise the instinct, because they had it badly.
One Stoic ran the Roman Empire and disliked it. Another tutored Nero. Neither of them thought your side was the point.
Marcus Aurelius kept setting himself the same either/or. It is the question a lot of readers now bring to Stoicism without noticing they are asking it.