Stoicism

“No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.16 (trans. George Long, 1862) The reflection The week’s public business was almost entirely announcement, and the announcements were unusually good at being announcements. A sanctions statute that Congress passed and the President signed in September, aimed at Russian oil and the banks that move it, was set aside by executive order on a Friday night, two days before it was to take effect. On Wednesday of this week the machinery appeared again, in an order that raised duties on Russian goods by five hundred percent and then waived most of what it had just authorized, leaving the threat standing and the trade flowing. In between, a diesel waiver was announced that would put more than three hundred thousand tonnes of Russian product into world markets, while Ukrainian drones struck the oil terminals that pay for the war next door. None of this is incoherent. Read as a single instrument, it is a government that has learned it can keep the threat and spend nothing, and that a waiver is easier to defend than a policy. ...

On April 14, 2025, Ryan Holiday was in a hotel room in Annapolis, getting ready to walk onstage at the United States Naval Academy. He had spoken there more than half a dozen times since 2019, as part of a series on Stoicism and the pursuit of virtue. The invitation to this one had come the previous November, and the subject was wisdom. He had sent his slides over the night before so they could be loaded onto the projectors. ...

He wrote nothing. Not one line that we can hold in our hands and call his own composition. Everything the world knows about Epictetus comes through a student who sat in his classroom at Nicopolis, on the Adriatic coast of Greece, and took notes fast enough to keep up with an old man talking. That student was Arrian of Nicomedia, later a consul and a historian of Alexander. He says plainly what he was doing: ...

The Stoic Virtues Ryan Holiday, 2021–2025 Executive Summary Four books, published one a year from 2021 to 2025, on the four cardinal virtues of ancient philosophy. Each opens with the same short preface: Hercules at the crossroads, choosing between pleasure and virtue, and then the list: “Four books. Four virtues. One aim: to help you choose . . .” The footnote under that sentence counts the volume you are holding, from book one to book four. ...

A tribune of the praetorian guard arrived at a country house four miles from Rome in the evening, surrounded the building with soldiers, and told the man inside that the emperor required his death. The man was at dinner with his wife and two friends. He did not argue, and he did not run. He asked for tablets so that he could write his will, and when the officer refused him even that, he turned to his friends and told them he had nothing left to leave them except the pattern of his life. (Tacitus, Annals 15.61–62, trans. Church and Brodribb, 1876) ...

On the Danube frontier, sometime in the early 170s, the most powerful man in the world sat down with a wax tablet or a scroll of papyrus and wrote a note to himself in Greek. He was in his fifties. His empire was fighting on two fronts, a plague was killing people in the cities behind him, and several of his children were dead. The note was not a decree and not a letter. It was a reminder to get out of bed. ...

“Have I done something for the general interest? Well then, I have had my reward.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.4 (trans. George Long, 1862) The reflection This week produced a great deal of evidence and almost no verdict, and the gap between those two things is the whole difficulty of living in a moment like this one. The V-Dem institute measured the damage and found the country has fallen to its 1965 level; a political scientist at Harvard named the regime and said it is reversible; an essay I published on Thursday assembled the record and then, because a record is not a plan, listed what a citizen might actually do about it. Every one of those items is an act of description. Not one of them, by itself, changes anything. So the week raises the question the epigraph answers: if the work is not rewarded with the outcome you want, what is the reward? ...

The Obstacle Is the Way Ryan Holiday, 2014 Executive Summary Ryan Holiday’s breakout book is the one that carried Stoicism out of the classics section and into the locker room. It opens on a single passage from Marcus Aurelius, written in a tent on the Danube frontier: the impediment to action advances action, and what stands in the way becomes the way. Holiday takes that line as a formula and spends the rest of the book showing it at work across two millennia of lives that were blocked, and then unblocked. The thesis: the obstacle is not what stands between you and your goal. It is the raw material the goal is made from. ...

“He often acts unjustly who does not do a certain thing; not only he who does a certain thing.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.5 (trans. George Long, 1862) The reflection Corruption in a republic rarely announces itself with an envelope. It arrives instead as a normal process: a routine register entry, a cost that nobody totalled, a duty nobody performed. That ordinariness is what protects it, because betraying the public trust is not a decision anyone has to make. A handful of people only have to decide, one at a time, that this particular thing is not theirs to do. The apology belongs to someone else. The measurement belongs to someone else. The room belongs to someone else. A republic does not fall in a single act. It is maintained, or neglected, one omitted duty at a time. ...

“There is no occasion to give this notice. It will soon show itself by acts.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.15 (trans. George Long, 1862) The answer, and the shells. On Saturday the president rejected Iran’s seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “I’m rejecting their deal,” he said, and called it unacceptable (BBC News, 2026). That looked like an ending. It was not one. Within days Qatar had carried an official American response to Tehran, and the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, brought it into a cabinet meeting and laid it before the president of Iran (ABC News, 2026). Officials briefed on the exchange describe the two sides as agreeing on the components and differing only on their order (CGTN, 2026). All of that was diplomacy. In the same waterway, the Revolutionary Guard confirmed for the first time that it strikes shipping in the strait every twenty-four hours, and a Kuwait-flagged tanker was set alight on Thursday (The New York Times, 2026; Seatrade Maritime, 2026). Washington answered the proposal and sent a third carrier group, with roughly nine thousand sailors and Marines (Fortune, 2026). ...