The Stoic Handbook by Jon Brooks Newsletter

Last week, on the school run, I stumbled getting out of the car and knocked into someone’s wing mirror. I hadn’t damaged it. I waved and said sorry. But the woman in the car looked at me, then immediately looked at the mirror, and something in me flared. It felt like she wasn’t seeing a person who’d made a small mistake. She was seeing a problem. A threat to her car. My stomach rose into my neck and the heat ran down into my hands. The line in my head wasn’t wise or polished.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.6, in Gregory Hays' translation. The man who has done a good thing, Marcus writes, "does not call out for others to come and see, but goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season." The vine image gets read as modesty advice, but Marcus is after something more structural: the good act is supposed to be complete in itself. The moment it needs witnesses, it has started working for a different employer. Grapes don't check who's watching.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -8:10 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. During the 170s of the common era, while ruling an empire and often away from Rome, Marcus Aurelius wrote notes to himself in Greek. What survived is not a public book. It is a private notebook, the Meditations, sentences a man wrote to remind himself how to live. This is a short morning practice built from eight lines drawn from the Meditations.

For Christmas, I bought my partner tickets to go see a show in Liverpool. A weekend trip with no kids. The plan was to drive there, 3.5 hours, park near the hotel, and stay in a hotel. The day after the trip was Father’s Day, and my son usually sees me then. Then in the evening, a longtime friend travelled down from London to visit for 2 nights. It felt like a lot, a lot of disruption to the routine.

Are Stoics really emotionless? It is the most common thing people believe about Stoicism, and it puts a lot of people off the one idea that might actually help them. In this conversation I sit down with Erick Cloward, host of the Stoic Coffee Break podcast and author of Stoicism 101, to take the myth apart. We get into why the word "stoic" came to mean cold and shut down, and why the Stoics actually felt their emotions fully. They just learned to be masters of them rather than ruled by them.

This newsletter has a new name. It used to be The Stoic Handbook, like everything else I make. From now on the weekly email is called The Practice, because that is what it actually is. Not a digest. Not my best thoughts. One idea, pulled out of Epictetus or Marcus or Seneca, and put to work on your week. Same person writing it. Same inbox. I am just being clearer about what it is for.

Marcus Aurelius is the most quoted philosopher on the internet, and his private journal shows a man who kept failing at the thing he's famous for. He struggled to get out of bed. He needed ten separate strategies to manage his temper. Near the end of his life he wrote, to himself, that he was "far from philosophy." In this episode I read the passages most Stoicism channels skip. The two getting-out-of-bed debates, four books apart. The brutal self-talk about caring what people think.

You haven't done anything yet, and the voice is already running its commentary. Too slow, too weak, not enough. The day hasn't started and you're already failing in advance. This guided Stoic practice works with the inner critic directly — not to silence it, but to strip it of the authority it doesn't deserve. You'll practise the Stoic technique of examining your impressions: separating the bare facts from the judgements your mind adds automatically.

Most people hear focus on what you can control and assume Stoicism means stop caring about everything else. That is not what it means, and it might be one of the most misunderstood ideas in the whole philosophy. It starts with a line from Marcus Aurelius that most people skip: you can commit injustice by doing nothing. That is not an invitation to detach. It is a call to show up.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -6:46 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Some mornings the dread arrives before the alarm. A tightness in the chest, a list already forming, a quiet resistance to the day ahead. This guided Stoic practice meets you there, not with forced optimism, but with honest preparation. You will practise the ancient Stoic technique of premeditatio malorum: facing what you are afraid of before it has power over you.