Stoic

Stoicism

• What Is Stoicism? A Definition & 9 Stoic Exercises To Get You Started
• "Memento Mori": The Reminder We All Desperately Need
• The Stoic Reading List: 3 Must-Read Books To Get You Started

Stoics and Politics

Stoic philosophy has many lessons for a heated political culture that simply point back to only dealing with the things that are in your control. The government of the United States of America is not something that's within your control. It's in nobody's control, since even at the core we have a system of government immediately branched into three parts. The same is true for what we can actually control in the political process.

During the final months of the 2024 election as a husband and a father with a full time job I took an honest look at my schedule and the time and resources I had available to me and without sacrificing the well-being of anything else could put an hour here and an hour there to do a few key things:

1. Be that personal touch in phone calls and door-to-door canvassing for the candidate of my choice in one or two hour chunks.
2. Contribute money where I could to the races where it would make a difference, sometimes the smaller the better.
3. Reach out to the local campaign organizations to offer my help and maybe take two or three small things off someone's plate or pitch in when staffing was light.
4. Learn who the local, county, state, and federal offices were and who was running for them so if anyone asked me a question I would be ready with a useful answer to point them in the right direction.
5. Make sure that I removed all my impediments to voting by checking my registration, requesting a mail ballot, and following through on that final vote.

One of the keys to this was focusing on the cardinal virtue of temperance and not letting my passion for anything in particular get in the way of a solid plan in which I was absolutely making an incremental difference. Something where I could look back at the end of the process and think to myself: I did what I could without taking away from other important parts of my life. Most importantly, that I was in quiet control of where my time and energies were applied and could do so rationally and with an eye to the biggest return on my time and energy.

Exceptionalism

• In Defense of Being Average - Mark argues that striving for exceptionalism in every aspect of life is unrealistic and unhealthy.