The Daily Stoic

Overview

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, published by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman in 2016, is the book that brought Stoicism to a mass audience. It is organized as a year of daily readings: for every day of the year, a passage from one of the ancient Stoic sources — Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Seneca's Letters, Epictetus's Discourses, the fragments of the Greek Stoics — followed by a short commentary that applies the passage to modern life. The book is the flagship of the modern Stoic revival, and it has sold millions of copies worldwide, making Stoicism one of the most widely practiced philosophies of the twenty-first century.

Author

Ryan Holiday is an American author and media strategist whose books — The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, and others — have made him the most prominent popularizer of Stoicism in the English-speaking world. Stephen Hanselman is a publishing executive and a scholar of the ancient sources who translated and selected the passages. Their collaboration combines Holiday's gift for practical application with Hanselman's fidelity to the texts, and the result is a book that is at once accessible and grounded.

Historical Background

The Daily Stoic belongs to the revival of Stoicism that has transformed the philosophy's place in modern culture. After two millennia of obscurity, Stoicism re-entered the mainstream in the late twentieth century through the work of scholars (A.A. Long's Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life, 2002), therapists (the cognitive behavioral tradition, which draws on Stoic ideas about judgment and emotion), and popularizers (the "Stoic week" of 2012, the blogs and newsletters of the new Stoic movement). The Daily Stoic appeared at the crest of this wave, and it turned a scholarly revival into a mass practice: a year of daily readings that makes the Stoic discipline available to anyone, without requiring any philosophical background.

Key Ideas

The book is organized around the three disciplines of the Stoic life, which divide the year into themed months: the discipline of perception (how we see the world), the discipline of action (how we act in it), and the discipline of will (how we accept what we cannot control). Each daily reading combines three elements: the ancient passage, a lesson drawn from it, and a practical application. The famous headings of the daily entries — "The First Rule: Keep Calm and Carry On," "Everything Is Change," "You're Better Off Seeing the Glass as Half-Full" — give the ancient wisdom its modern form.

The book's underlying thesis is the modern Stoic conviction that the ancient philosophy is a practical discipline for the conduct of life, not a historical curiosity: that the distinction between what is up to us and what is not, the discipline of the impressions, and the acceptance of fate are skills that can be trained, and that the training is the path to resilience, focus, and peace. The daily format embodies this thesis: philosophy is not something one reads once but something one practices daily, one passage at a time, in the rhythm of a life.

Important Passages

The book opens with the daily reading for January 1st, which sets the tone for the whole: "Control and Choice" — the distinction between what is up to us and what is not, drawn from Epictetus's Enchiridion. Its most quoted passages are the applications of the ancient texts to modern situations: the use of Marcus Aurelius's meditation on the morning ("When you arise in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant...") as a preparation for the day's difficulties, and the use of Seneca's account of time ("It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it") as a corrective to busyness.

Influence

The Daily Stoic has been the most influential book of the modern Stoic revival. It has sold millions of copies, spawned a daily email list and a website, and created the practice of "daily Stoicism" followed by readers around the world — athletes, executives, soldiers, and students who begin each day with the Stoic reading. It has also provoked debate within the movement: scholars have questioned the selection and application of the passages, and traditionalists have wondered whether the mass-market form dilutes the philosophy. Whatever the verdict, the book's achievement is secure: it made the ancient philosophy of Zeno of Citium, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius a living practice for the modern world.

Sources

• Holiday, Ryan, and Stephen Hanselman. The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. New York: Portfolio, 2016.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Stoicism" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism)
• Long, A.A. Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.