Live Like a Stoic Week

Over the next seven days you will be putting some of the Stoics’ views of the good life into practice. The main goal is to adopt the Stoics’ notion of virtue as the only good, understood as a kind of wisdom. On each day of the week you will be assigned a particular activity to complete. Some of these activities will ask you to complete a task, reflect on a few questions, or engage in a thought experiment. Others will involve cultivating habits, changing your behavior with others in a certain way, or going about your everyday routine a little differently.

All of the philosophical exercises for this week are located on this page and you will need to complete them daily. This will consist of two steps:

1. At the start of each day in the morning, you should read the assigned exercises and carry them out—you can keep this assignment open on your phone throughout the day for easy access.
2. At the end of each day in the evening, you should submit in the designated dropbox a short private journal entry (1-2 paragraphs) on what you’ve learned.

Class periods and dialogue sessions that occur during the week will involve discussing and working on your exercises individually or in groups.

Readings for the assigned exercises and evening reflections this week are drawn from:

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Books 1–6, translated by Christopher Gill (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Epictetus, How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life (The Encheiridion and selections from the Discourses), translated by A.A. Long (Princeton University Press, 2018)