💀 Dying Every Day
The Dying Every Day series delivers guided Stoic meditations on the art of living. Each meditation provides a quote, a selected passage, and a journaling prompt to consider. These meditations are designed to help you (and me) reflect on what it means to live a ‘good’ life.
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A Stoic Guide to Conquering Oneself
“You must persevere and develop new strength by continuous study until only a good inclination becomes a good settled purpose. … Examine yourself; scrutinize and observe yourself in diverse ways; but mark, before all else, whether in philosophy or merely in life itself, that you have made progress.”
— Seneca, Moral Letters, XVI
Selected Passage
In this week’s Dying Every Day meditation, we’re exploring the art of conquering oneself — through a selected passage from Epictetus.
If you have received the impression of any pleasure, guard yourself against being carried away by it; but let the thing wait for you, and allow yourself a certain delay on your own part. Then think of both times, of the time when you will enjoy the pleasure and the time after the enjoyment of the pleasure when you will repent and reproach yourself.
And set against these things how you will rejoice if you have abstained from the pleasure, and how you will commend yourself. But if it seems to you seasonable to undertake the thing, take care that the charm of it, and the pleasure, and the attraction of it shall not conquer you; but set on the other side the consideration, how much better it is to be conscious that you have gained this victory. […]
+ Adapted from The Enchiridion
Reflection Exercise
One of the common themes in Stoic writings is the emphasis on freedom from unhealthy (or disordered) desires. For the Stoics, freedom is an orientation to life achieved through conquering oneself.
“You can be externally free and internally a slave,” as the modern-day philosopher A.A. Long put it, “controlled by… disabling desires, passions, and cravings.” On the other hand, you could find yourself in literal bondage but internally free from frustration and disharmony, so free that you found yourself in charge of your own well-being.
We see an example of this in Man’s Search for Meaning, a classic by the psychologist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905—1997),
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. …
Conquering oneself is a lifelong endeavor. There are always choices to make—opportunities to choose. Every day, every hour, every moment offers a chance to live (and lead) an intentional life.
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Journaling Prompt
Consider reflecting on what it means to be free “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” to quote Frankl. You might ask yourself, “How might my life change if I focused greater attention on conquering myself?”
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
P.S. New here? Catch up on previous volumes in the archive!
A Stoic Guide to Conquering Oneself