Find a way to use what life hands you

Executive overview

Change is constant, and resistance to it is a choice. The stoics taught that disruption — whether personal, technological, or circumstantial — is an opportunity, not a threat. Adaptability is the core stoic response to an uncontrollable world.

You don't control what happens; you control whether you use it.

Embracing change as a stoic practice

• Marcus Aurelius: "The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it."
• Fearing change is a failure of perspective, not a rational response to circumstances.
• Letting go of attachment to old ways is a prerequisite for growth.
• New tools and disruptions (e.g. AI writing assistants) are to be integrated, not resisted.
• Tyler Cowen's Average is Over (2013) predicted this: talented humans pair with new tools to do better work.

Stoicism and parenting

• The stoics were parents, not just philosophers — Marcus Aurelius lost six of twelve children.
• Meditations is also the work of a grieving parent writing through a pandemic (the Antonine Plague).
• Plato's lasting impact on a student was not his theories — it was that he never lost his temper.
• What we do matters more than what we say; children absorb behaviour, not instruction.
• Ryan Holiday's Daily Dad applies the same one-insight-per-day format to parenting wisdom from history.
• Parenting books front-load advice for stages parents aren't at yet; daily incremental reflection works better.

Writing the Cardinal Virtues series

• The four Cardinal Virtues — courage, discipline, justice, wisdom — are shared by Stoicism and Christianity.
• "Cardinal" comes from the Latin cardos (hinge/pivotal), not from religion.
• Holiday is writing the series sequentially: courage, discipline, justice (delayed to 2024), then wisdom.
• Wisdom feels the most intimidating and potentially the most pretentious to write about.
• Drawing artificial boundaries between the virtues is the hardest challenge — in practice they're inseparable.
• Courage in pursuit of injustice misses the point; wisdom determines what to be courageous about.
• Inspired by Joyce Carol Oates: finished a draft, then deliberately let it sit untouched for months.