Stoicism

Raise ‘Em Right Raising Kids with Agency, Resilience, and Purpose Executive Summary Raise ‘Em Right draws on sixteen years of step-parenting to argue that the central task of raising children is not protection or instruction but the cultivation of independent judgment. It treats critical thinking and healthy skepticism as learnable skills (not innate gifts or rebellious postures) and examines how adults can model these capacities without performing them. The core message: skepticism, taught well, is a form of care. ...

There is a moment before violence. It is invisible to everyone except the person holding it. I have stood in that threshold. Not as a soldier, not as a protester, but as a man who discovered, without warning, that the life he thought he was living had been hollowed out from behind. The betrayal was specific: a wife, a friend of a friend, a blunt truth delivered without mercy. But the violence that followed was not directed at either of them. It filled the room. It became the air. I remember my hands shaking, my vision narrowing to a tunnel, and something ancient rising in my chest that wanted not justice but annihilation. ...

I was ready to do something drastic. My machine had been running hot for weeks. Disk usage climbing, performance lagging, the kind of quiet degradation that starts as inconvenience and ends as crisis. I had installed AnythingLLM to test it, decided it wasn’t ready, uninstalled it, and yet the space never came back. The numbers didn’t lie. Something was eating my disk, and I couldn’t see it. The easy answer was staring at me: clean install. Wipe the whole system, start fresh, rebuild from zero. It’s the digital equivalent of the scorched-earth impulse, the one that says, if I can’t understand the problem, I’ll eliminate the conditions that produced it. I’ve done it before. Most of us have. It feels like control. It feels like decisiveness. It is almost always a confession that we have failed to understand what we are actually dealing with. ...

Subject: The Pause “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (paraphrase — no translation contains this wording; the genuine 4.18 in Long’s rendering is “How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only to what he does himself”) (Long, 1862) There’s a moment between stimulus and response where everything lives. ...

I did not set out to use artificial intelligence as part of my writing process. Like most things in my work, it began as a practical response to a problem. I was trying to clarify an idea: tighten an argument that felt structurally sound but poorly expressed. The tool I was using responded with something unexpected: not just a rephrasing, but a reframing. It wasn’t always correct. Often it wasn’t. But it forced a different question: ...

Stoic Backgammon A Profitable Pastime Executive Summary Stoic Backgammon treats the ancient game as a practice of philosophy: not metaphorically, but literally. Each chapter pairs a phase of play with a Stoic principle, demonstrating that the board enforces what the Enchiridion describes: some things are up to us, others are not. The dice are not; the move is. The core message: the right response to uncertainty is not prediction but character. ...

Letters Truth Without Outcome Executive Summary Letters collects correspondence on the difficult topics that most public discourse avoids: what it means to speak the truth when outcomes are uncertain, how conscience functions under pressure, and whether interior strength has any public value. The essays are written as letters (direct, addressed, unguarded) because the subject matter demands intimacy rather than performance. The core message: honest speech is not a strategy for winning. It is a practice of remaining present. ...

Misaligned Right Subject, Wrong Adjective, Disastrous Result Executive Summary Misaligned begins with a late-life diagnosis and follows its implications outward: through a first marriage that ended in miscommunication rather than malice, through a career built on containment, and through the slow recognition that many strengths become liabilities when the context changes. It treats the gap between internal experience and external expectation as a structural problem, not a personal failure. The core message: alignment is not a state to achieve. It is a map to question. ...

The Stoic CGM A Data-Driven Guide to Reinventing Yourself Executive Summary The Stoic CGM treats continuous glucose monitoring as a practice of self-knowledge: not merely a medical intervention, but a discipline of attention applied to the body’s own politics. It examines what happens when Stoic principles meet metabolic data: how to respond to information without being ruled by it, and how to govern the self when the self is constantly in motion. The core message: the body is not an enemy to defeat, but a system to comprehend. ...

🪞 A Reflection “Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.” — Ingersoll, said of Lincoln (“Abraham Lincoln: A Lecture,” 1895) Attribution note: this line is routinely credited to Lincoln, but it does not appear anywhere in his writings or speeches. It is a compression of Robert G. Ingersoll’s tribute to him: “Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.” “Abraham Lincoln: A Lecture” (1895). ...