TagStoicism

Maximize the Gift

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I lost my father in 2021 and his death provoked a lot of reflection on mortality, including my own. The fact that we’re all going to die someday is sobering and frightening on one level, and yet it also infuses our life with meaning. In his book Four Thousand Weeks, author Oliver Burkeman writes: “It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows in the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present in our lives.” The “four thousand...

Life is a Single-Player Game

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The Silicon Valley investor and free-thinker Naval Ravinkant has a saying: “Life is a single player game.”   It’s a good reminder because so much of what we’re exposed to by our culture reinforces the view that life is a multi-player game.  We feel strong social pressure to constantly compare ourselves to others.  We’re programmed, at an early age, to check the score – what college we attend, how much money we make, the size of our house, the car we drive, the vacations we take – and when...

5 Lessons from Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning”

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In 1945, within months of his liberation from a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, Viktor Frankl sat down to write a book. He was forty years old. Before the war he worked as a successful psychologist in Vienna. He wrote the manuscript in nine successive days. Although the book tells the story of the unfathomable horrors and suffering he endured as a prisoner at Auschwitz, Dachau and other camps, the primary purpose of the text is to explore the source of his will to survive. The book...

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