Brigid Delaney on Living Like a Stoic for a Year

Executive overview

Brigid Delaney, Australian author and journalist, started out skeptical of Stoicism, wrote a dismissive column about it, then gave it a genuine year-long trial during the pandemic and found it transformative. The result was her book Reasons Not to Worry. Ryan Holiday and Delaney explore Stoicism as a living practice — not a credential to earn — anchored in journaling, anger management, social justice, and what it means to be a good person.

Stoicism is not something you studied; it is something you are doing.

From skeptic to practitioner

• Delaney first tried Stoic Week hungover and wrote a dismissive column; the backlash prompted a serious second attempt.
• She and an economist friend formed a WhatsApp group and began applying Stoic principles to real problems each week.
• A publisher overheard them at a pub and suggested a book; the pandemic lockdowns in Australia gave her the material and urgency to write it.
• Reasons Not to Worry sold in more than 20 countries; the follow-up is a Socratic fable between a seeker and a sage.

Stoicism as practice, not knowledge

• You don't become a Stoic by reading once — it seeps in through repetition, like going to mass or going to the gym.
• Marcus Aurelius repeated himself in Meditations because he was wrestling with the same problems, not writing for an audience.
• Journaling is Stoicism: it lets you track your patterns across years and recognize when the same core problem keeps returning.
• Holiday writes a public Stoic meditation every day for eight years as his explicit practice; his private journal handles the personal specifics.

Marcus Aurelius and the nature of meditations

• Meditations was written in Greek — not Marcus's native tongue — and never intended for publication; it is an accidental masterpiece.
• It is a spiritual exercise: Marcus practising appreciation, acceptance, and virtue, not describing his inner life.
• The survival of the manuscript is a complete mystery; its structure and what was cut is unknown.
• Marcus quotes Euripides; to him, Euripides was as distant as Chaucer is to us — the scope of historical time is routinely missed.

Seneca: the Shakespearean stoic

• Seneca was simultaneously the greatest writer, most celebrated philosopher, and most powerful political figure of his era — an combination no one believed possible for 2,000 years.
• He wrote for himself first; his letters and essays are him working things out, not lecturing from a position of perfection.
• The moral complexity of advising Nero — enabling vs. constraining, complicity vs. indispensability — maps directly onto modern political dilemmas.
• His materialism (500 marble tables, vineyards, summer houses) and his philosophy were in constant tension; he had appetites he couldn't fully govern.

Anger and how stoicism addresses it

• Society has an anger problem: domestic violence, road rage, and casual abuse of service workers have all increased.
• The Stoic position: anger is the most irrational and hardest-to-contain emotion, and it weakens you against both redeemable and genuinely bad opponents.
• Marcus's morning passage — expect annoying people; they can't implicate you in their ugliness — works on both the frustrated and the philosophical level.
• Seneca's line: "We are bad men living amongst bad men — only one thing will calm us, and that is we must go easy on each other."
• Anger can be performed (coaches rally players, teachers correct children) while ataraxia — inner equilibrium — is preserved.

Stoicism and social justice

• The tension: if you can't control the outcome, is activism futile? The Stoic answer is no — almost every major Stoic was involved in politics.
• What you control: who you vote for, how you treat people in your sphere, whether you enable or constrain bad systems.
• Anger can provide energy for change but also burns activists out and makes them less effective; cold clarity is the more powerful tool.
• Marcus: "You can commit an injustice by doing nothing." Indifference dressed up as equanimity is not Stoicism.
• The concentric circles of concern (Hierocles): the goal of philosophy is to pull the outer circles inward — caring about strangers is described as a "beautiful madness."

Compassion, justice, and what stoicism leaves out

• Compassion is not formally listed as a Stoic virtue, but Delaney argues it is present inside justice — the golden rule implies caring what others deserve.
• The Stoics had no concept of trauma, hormones, or unconscious drives; modern readers need to bring that science in rather than discard the philosophy.
• What kept Marcus from becoming a tyrant was some felt sense of other people's inherent worth — the guardrails were internal, not institutional.
• Being a selfish, vindictive person is its own punishment; Stoics observed this close-up in figures like the dying general Marius.

Stoicism, success, and ego

• The joy is in the doing: the process is what you control; reception, sales, and acclaim are not.
• Holiday finished The Obstacle Is the Way on a flight and had no idea it would succeed; retroactively claiming prescience is where ego enters.
• When Stillness Is the Key hit number one on the New York Times list, he chose to go for a swim rather than check his phone — the swim is the memory he values.
• Delaney: Netflix cancelled Well Mania season two mid-pre-production; the first season existing at all would have seemed impossible when writing the book.
• Success inflates your confidence in your next idea, makes you stop listening to editors, and leads to coasting — humility is a more resilient operating position.

Accessibility and modern relevance

• Stoicism has a PR problem, not a content problem; nothing in the ancient texts is inherently exclusionary to women.
• The philosophy predates the modern gender binary and is explicitly universal; Musonius Rufus argued women should be taught philosophy on equal terms.
• Younger readers who grew up without religion or trusted institutions are drawn to Stoicism precisely because it is not selling anything — it is about character.
• Stoicism is a fraction as popular as it once was and could be; in a secular consumer culture, it offers something the market cannot: a guide to the good life.