About Stoic Wisdoms

Stoic Wisdoms is the largest Stoicism publication on Substack, which means the posts have been stress-tested against the questions real readers actually bring to philosophy, not the ones that make for tidy answers.

The Greeks had a name for the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it: akrasia. Weakness of will despite knowledge. The Stoics rejected the concept entirely. They believed that if you truly understood what was right, you would act on it. Bad action was always a failure of judgment, never of will. That distinction is central to how they approached change: you don’t strengthen your resolve, you correct your thinking.

Marcus Aurelius asked what clear thinking looks like while running an empire through plague and war. Epictetus built a philosophy of complete inner freedom while enslaved. Seneca wrote his most important work while waiting to find out if the emperor would have him killed. Their answers have survived two thousand years because human nature hasn’t changed, the pressure has just taken different shapes.

Each post builds a real argument grounded in the original texts, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and ends with a concrete set of tools you can put to work the same day. No quotes without context. No wisdom without application.

Free subscribers get one post per week.

Paid subscribers get two to three, plus the full archive, including a complete 5-part series on building genuine confidence from the ground up, and a collection of deeper meditations on applying Stoic principles to the situations that actually test you.

The Stoics believed that eudaimonia, human flourishing, came from virtue alone. Not happiness as a feeling, not success as an outcome, but the quality of your reasoning and your actions. That's what this is about.