Stoic Coffee Break

Courage, one of the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism, is what I consider the fuel for virtue, and really for living a good life. But what does courage actually look like? Are we born courageous or it it something we can develop? In today’s episode we’re going to dive into what Stoics taught about courage and how it’s backed up by modern science.

What Does It Actually Take to Be Courageous?

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."

—C.S. Lewis

The Problem

When I started this podcast, I was scared. Not just nervous. Scared. I was convinced that at any moment, someone was going to figure out that I didn't belong — that I wasn't qualified enough, smart enough, or interesting enough to be talking about Stoic philosophy to strangers on the internet. Imposter syndrome was ever present. Every episode I recorded in those early days, I'd finish it and think, "That’s probably the one where people are going quit listening."

But here's what I've come to understand after years of doing this work — that feeling wasn't a warning. It was an invitation. An invitation to do something that takes real courage: to show up honestly, even when you don't feel ready.

Today I want to talk about courage. Not the Hollywood version — the battlefield moment, the heroic leap. Real courage. The everyday, grinding, unsexy kind that determines the actual quality of your life.

Researcher Brené Brown has spent twenty years studying this. The other day I was listening to a podcast where she was a guest, and they were talking about what it takes to be courageous. What she found in her research cuts against everything we think we know. Courage, she says, isn't a personality trait. It's not something you have or don't have. It's a collection of four learnable skills. And when I dug into her framework for the first time, I kept stopping because the Stoics had already mapped the same territory two thousand years earlier.

So that's what we're doing today. Brown's four skill sets of courage, paired with the Stoic philosophy that's been teaching the same lessons since before Rome fell. And I'll tell you where each one showed up in my own life, because if it's worth talking about, it's worth being honest about.

Let's get into it.

PHILOSOPHY & PRACTICE

SKILL SET ONE: Rumbling with Vulnerability

Brown's first skill set is what she calls "rumbling with vulnerability." She defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. And the rumble part matters — it means staying in the discomfort instead of tapping out. Not performing openness. Actually sitting with the hard thing.

Most of us don't do this. We armor up. We get busy, get sarcastic, get certain — anything to avoid the exposed feeling of not knowing, of being seen, of possibly being wrong or hurt or rejected.

Brown's research shows that without this foundational skill, the other three are impossible. You cannot be courageous while armored. The armor has to come off first, because vulnerability is a prerequisite for courage. You can’t be courageous if something doesn’t scare you.

The Stoics called this prosoche — self-examination. The practice of looking honestly at yourself, not to punish yourself, but to see clearly.

Socrates felt this was so important that he said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

He would often practice self-questioning, cross-examining his own thinking about something. Once, while on campaign with the Athenian army, he stood still on a beach for 24 hours, lost in deep thought. The other soldiers, curious about what was going on, gathered around keeping vigil. Then as the sun rose, be woke from his trance-like state, said a prayer to the day, then went on as if nothing had happened.

Epictetus pushed his students toward self-examination constantly. And Seneca in his treatise On Anger describes his own nightly practice in first person. He wrote:

“When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that’s now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”

And then, crucially, he doesn't spiral into self-condemnation. He says:

“For why should I be afraid of any of my mistakes, when I can say: ‘Beware of doing that again, and this time I pardon you.’”

That's the practice. See it clearly. Don't hide from it. Just let it go and do better.

When I started this podcast, the vulnerability wasn't optional. I was putting my voice, my face, my actual beliefs out into the world with no idea if anyone would care. That exposure, was scary. But the harder vulnerability, the one that took more courage, was admitting to myself that I was afraid. That I felt like a fraud. Because as long as I kept that hidden, even from myself, I couldn't do anything about it.

The Stoic practice of self-examination gave me a framework for that. Not "beat yourself up at the end of the day." Look honestly. What did you avoid? What did you do from fear instead of from your values? See it. Correct it. Move on.

Doing so allowed me to see myself not as some sage that knew everything, but a fellow traveler along the road, sharing what I’ve learned. That my experiences, both my successes and my failures, could be of use to others.

Practice: Tonight, before you sleep, spend five minutes doing this. Not a gratitude list. An honest review. Where did you avoid something you knew you should face? Not to shame yourself — to see clearly. That's the beginning of courage.

SKILL SET TWO: Living into Our Values

Brené’s second skill set is living into our values, and to be precise about what those values are. She says most people have vague, aspirational values. Integrity. Honesty. Courage. But vague values don't guide behavior under pressure. She pushes people to get specific: what does integrity actually look like in a hard conversation? What does honesty cost you when it's inconvenient?

That gap between stated values and actual behavior is where courage lives or dies.

The Stoics made this the center of their entire philosophy. Virtue, excellence of character, wasn't an abstract idea or an aspiration. It was how you acted, specifically, when it was hard. Marcus writes in Meditations:

"No random actions, none not based on underlying principles."

Every action either expresses your values or betrays them. There's no neutral ground.

And Marcus knew how easy it is to betray them. He was the most powerful man on Earth. He had every excuse to let himself off the hook. He wrote the Meditations as a daily practice of bringing himself back to his values because he knew that without that discipline, the gap widens without you noticing.

One of the things I committed to early on with this podcast was honesty. Not just talking about Stoic philosophy in the abstract, but being real about where I struggle with it. That meant talking about my failures on air. Not as a performance of humility — that's its own kind of armor. But because the show is built on the premise that this work is hard and real, and pretending otherwise would be a lie. It would go against the actual virtue I’m trying to teach.

That was harder than it sounds. There's a version of a podcast host that looks like they have everything figured out. I knew my audience might be more comfortable if I projected that image. But it would have been a betrayal of what I actually believe, which is that the messy, uncertain, still-figuring-it-out life is the only honest one.

Living into your values means it costs you something. If it doesn't cost you anything, you're not really being tested.

Practice: Name two values that are genuinely yours. Not what sounds good, but what actually guides you at your best. Then find one moment from the past week where you acted against them. That's not dwelling on failure. That's useful information. That's where the work is.

SKILL SET THREE: Braving Trust

Brown's third skill set is braving trust. She breaks trust down into specific, observable behaviors — she has an acronym, BRAVING, that maps it out.

B — Boundaries: Say no when you need to; respect others' no

R — Reliability: Do what you say, consistently, without overpromising

A — Accountability: Own your mistakes, apologize, make amends

V — Vault: Keep confidences — don't share what isn't yours to share

I — Integrity: Choose courage over comfort; what's right over what's easy

N — Non-judgment: Ask for what you need without judgment; others can do the same

G — Generosity: Extend the most generous interpretation of others' intentions

But the core insight is this: trust is not a feeling. It's not something that just happens between people. It's built through consistent, specific actions over time. And it requires courage because trusting someone means accepting that you can be hurt.

Most of us either over-trust, where we hand ourselves over and get burned, or we under-trust, we armor up, and we end up isolated. Neither is courage. Courage is the willingness to be in genuine relationship, with your eyes open, knowing the risk.

The Stoics were deeply committed to this idea, even though we don't always talk about it. They believed that humans are fundamentally social, that we are made for community, for relationship, for mutual care. Marcus returns to this again and again. We are not isolated units managing our own inner states. We are connected to each other, and our obligations to that connection are part of what it means to live well. Justice (dikaiosyne) one of the four cardinal virtues, is entirely about relationships with others. You cannot be fully virtuous alone.

I took two breaks from this podcast. Both times, it was because I needed to deal with personal challenges in my life. And both times, the hardest part wasn't the break itself. It was trusting my audience to still be there when I came back.

That's a hard thing. When you build something with people over years, you feel an obligation to them. And stepping away feels like a breach of that. But here's what I had to learn: sticking around just to please others wasn’t serving them. It was serving my fear of being abandoned. Showing up when I wasn't actually present wasn't trust. It was a transaction. Real trust meant being honest about where I was and trusting that the relationship was strong enough to hold it.

It was. Both times.

Practice: Think of one relationship where trust has eroded — maybe slowly, maybe all at once. Don't start with what the other person did. Start with your own behavior. What specific thing did you do or not do that contributed to that erosion? That's your work.

SKILL SET FOUR: Learning to Rise

Brown's fourth skill set is learning to rise, and she's clear that this doesn't mean bouncing back quickly or pretending the fall didn't hurt. It means owning the full story of what happened. Not the sanitized version, not the victim version, not the "everything happens for a reason" version. The real version. What happened. How it felt. What you contributed to it. And what you're going to do differently.

That's hard. Most of us either grab onto the failure and let it define us, or we rush past it and pretend it didn't happen. Rising means doing neither. It means going through it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote what is probably the most quoted line in all of Stoic philosophy:

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

People print it on posters and put it on coffee mugs. But what it's actually describing is something brutal and honest — that the obstacle doesn't get removed. You go through it. The going through is the point. The going through is what builds you.

I picked this podcast back up twice. And both times, I had to reckon with the question of whether I was coming back because I had something real to say, or because I felt guilty about quitting. That distinction matters. Rising isn't just resuming. It's understanding what happened, being honest about it, and choosing to move forward from that honesty rather than from fear or ego.

The episodes I've done about my own failures, the relationships I've gotten wrong, the times I've been less than I wanted to be, those are some of the most important things I've made. Not because failure is glorious. It's not. But because the willingness to look at it honestly, to say "this is what I did and this is what it cost me and here's what I learned," that's what makes the philosophy real. That's the difference between reading about Stoicism and actually practicing it.

Practice: Pick one failure you're still carrying. Not a small inconvenience. A real one. The kind that still has weight when you think about it. Write down three things: what happened, what you contributed to it, and one specific thing it taught you. Not a silver lining. An actual lesson you can act on.

Conclusion

Brown's research and Stoicism arrive at the same place through different routes. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is not armor. It is not performing strength while feeling nothing.

It is the willingness to examine yourself honestly. To act from your actual values when it costs you something. To trust, and to be trustworthy, even knowing you can be hurt. And to fall — because you will fall — and to get back up having actually learned something instead of just surviving.

That is what this podcast has been about since the beginning. Not because I figured it all out before I started recording. But because I kept choosing, imperfectly and over and over again, to show up honestly. To rumble with the discomfort. To let the work be real.

That's the invitation this week. Not to be fearless. To be honest. Courage follows honesty. It always does.

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

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Kelly McGinnis has a long and storied career working her way up the corporate ladder to CFO and later President of Thermo Fischer, a Fortune 100 company. In this episode we discuss ideas around what it takes to be good leader, company culture, and stepping out on your own.

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

Watch episodes on YouTube!

Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.

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“What’s the worst that could happen?” We’ve all heard this before. Usually it’s tongue in cheek just before something really bad does happen. But counterintuitively, it’s actually one of the most powerful questions that we can ask ourselves when we’re stuck in anxiety. So let’s talk about how imagining the worst can you you be your best.

“The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable.”

— Seneca

The Problem

In today’s busy world, we all struggle with anxiety. Most people complain about anxiety hampering their daily happiness. And where does this anxiety come from? It’s from worrying about things that we think are going to happen.

This is a natural part of being human. The brain is a prediction machine. Think about when you're walking through a crowd, your brain is constantly reading people's trajectories so you don't collide. It does the same thing with the future — always trying to anticipate what's coming next.

That capacity kept us alive. If we couldn't imagine bad outcomes, we'd never prepare for them. But most of us have taken that survival tool and turned it into a source of constant stress.

What if instead, you could take that same ability and use it to build resilience rather than anxiety? What if considering the worst could help you become your best?

The Philosophy

Paradoxes

In episode 377, I talked about paradoxes — holding competing ideas without rushing to resolve them. It's one of the most powerful skills we can develop, because the moment we choose a side, we close off other possibilities.

Seneca puts it plainly:

“Ignorance is the cause of fear.” — Seneca

The longer we can withhold judgment and hold each idea and try to understand it, the deeper our understanding of it. This is how we gain wisdom, which is not just about knowledge but about being able to see things clearly. Marcus Aurelius captured this idea in his Meditations:

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” — Marcus Aurelius

The more clearly we can define what troubles us, the easier it is to turn it to our benefit.

Premeditatio Malorum

Stoicism is full of paradoxes, but one of the most useful is premeditatio malorum, the “premeditation of evil”. Rather than ignoring what causes our anxiety, we look it in the face. We stop judging it as good or bad and treat it as something that simply is.

This is why the Stoics teach that events are neutral. We're the ones passing verdict on them.

“It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them.” — Epictetus,

When we see things as neutral, some of that anxiety loses its grip.

The Present Moment Problem

Here's the paradox: the Stoics also teach us to be present. To stop worrying about what might happen, and focus on now.

In his Letters to Lucilius, Seneca writes:

“There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

The anxiety we feel is a direct result of the story we're telling ourselves about the future. We catastrophize. We treat the worst possible outcome as the only one. And what makes it worse — we're doing it to ourselves.

The mind has a hard time distinguishing imagination from reality, so the body responds as if the threat is real. Think about a time you were convinced someone was upset with you. You felt the tension. Maybe in your stomach or shoulders. Then you found out you were wrong, and the relief was immediate. Your body was responding to a story, not a fact.

That physical distress creates a spiral: thoughts create story, story creates sensation, sensation triggers the fight-or-flight response, which narrows your thinking to the very thing you're afraid of. That's why getting someone to breathe slows the spiral. Calm the body first, then the mind follows.

Avoidance Makes It Worse

When we try not to think of something, we give it more power. It’s the pink elephant problem. Try not to think about about a pink elephant and you will think about one. The brain has to imagine a concept before it can dismiss it. It can’t operate in a void, and suppression takes energy.

So the fear stalks you. You scroll your phone. You have a drink. You eat things you shouldn't. Anything to avoid sitting with it.

But Seneca reminds us:

“Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings.” — Seneca

The courage to face it head-on is the path through.

Outcomes

One more thing worth naming: when we fixate on outcomes, we lose agency. Outcomes aren't under our control. Actions are. That's why the focus has to shift to what you can actually do — not what might happen.

But here’s another part of the paradox. We do have to consider what might happen, consider other possible outcomes. Even ones that we’re not focused on at the moment. As Seneca writes:

“What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. The fact that it was unforeseen has never failed to intensify a person's grief. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.” —Seneca

This isn’t about running a catastrophizing session. It’s considering as many possible bad outcomes as you can so that you aren’t caught by surprise. You don’t have to do them all at one time, but by taking on the things that scare you, you’re following Seneca’s advice:

“So I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.” —Seneca

The Practice

So how do you actually do this — and what makes it different from just ruminating?

Two things. First, you do this in a safe space — not in the heat of the moment, but sitting quietly with time to think. Second, you approach the problem with objectivity. And objectivity isn't cold. Think about the friends you trust most — they're the ones who tell you the truth, not what you want to hear. This practice is you doing that for yourself.

Seneca explains this clearly:

“This is why we need to envisage every possibility and to strengthen the spirit to deal with the things which may conceivably come about. Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck. Misfortune may snatch you away from your country… If we do not want to be overwhelmed and struck numb by rare events as if they were unprecedented ones; fortune needs envisaging in a thoroughly comprehensive way.” — Seneca

Now, it’s important that you write it down. Don't do this in your head. Getting it on paper creates distance. You see it more clearly. You have to actually articulate the thing.

This practice that I’m going to share with you is one from my course, Build an Unbreakable Mind. If you find this useful and want to learn more useful practices, make sure to check it out on my website at stoic.coffee/unbreakable

Step 1 — Write down the the story you're telling yourself. It can be freeform, or you can ask yourself:

What outcome am I afraid of?

What do I think happens if that outcome occurs?

What doubts do I have about myself?

What assumptions am I making?

Step 2 — The facts.

These are things that could be proven in a court of law:

What are the actual roadblocks?

What's outside my control?

What skills do I have? What am I lacking?

No opinions. Only what could be proven.

Step 3 — The emotions:

Write down everything you're feeling. Angry, sad, scared, nervous. All of it. Get it out.

Then take a break. Step away. Come back later with fresh eyes.

Step 4 — What you can actually do:

How will you handle the roadblocks?

What could you learn to close the gaps?

If the worst actually happened — what would you do?

What's under your control right now?

Where can you take action today?

This is how you rewrite the story. You use your rationality to see more clearly, and shift your perspective toward something useful.

Conclusion

Anxiety about the future is part of being human. You're not going to think your way out of having it. But you can stop fighting it and start using it.

Premeditatio malorum is leaning into the fear. It's having the courage to ask: what am I actually afraid of? It's sitting with the hard thing — clearly, not catastrophically — and dismantling the doom loop before it dismantles you.

So the next time you catch yourself trying not to worry about something — stop resisting. Welcome it in. Look it in the face.

And ask: “What's the worst that could happen?”

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

Watch episodes on YouTube!

Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.

Thanks again for listening!

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Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man on Earth. He had every external condition for a meaningful life — wealth, status, purpose handed to him by birth. And yet, his private journals are full of reminders he had to write to himself just to keep going. Which tells you something important: meaning isn't a thing you find. It's a thing you build.

The Problem

Do you live a meaningful life?

Not "are you successful" or "are you productive" or "are you optimizing your mornings”, but does your life actually feel like it means something?

Here's what I've come to believe: Don't try to find the meaning of your life. Do things that bring meaning into your life.

It’s a subtle shift, but it leads to a completely different life.

Finding the meaning of your life is, honestly, an unanswerable question. Philosophers and thinkers and spiritual teaches have been wrestling with it for millennia. You could spend your whole life searching and never arrive. It's the ultimate question.

But doing things that add meaning to your life? That is under your control. That's where you have agency. That's where you can actually act.

So why is "what is the meaning of my life?" the wrong question?

Because searching for meaning looks outward. You're scanning the horizon for something to reveal itself. A bolt out of the blue, a mountain-top moment, a sudden clarity that finally tells you what you're here for. And while you're waiting for that, you're sitting on the sidelines. Ready to start living once you figure out what your life is for. Which may be never.

Seneca cuts right to it. In his Letters to Lucilius he writes: "If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable."

It sounds like saying figure out the destination before you set sail. But I’d like to broaden the interpretation. I think he's saying: pick a direction. A direction that matters to you. Start sailing.

Because a ship that's moving can be steered. A ship sitting in the harbor waiting for perfect conditions goes nowhere.

You don't need the full map. You just need to start.

Why It Matters

So why does meaning matter so much?

Meaning is what makes the suffering in life worth it.

When our lives feel meaningless, we feel hopeless, like we're going through the motions with no point to any of it. This is why people who are deeply dissatisfied with their lives can spiral so quickly into depression. They feel like a cog in a machine. A robot. Present but not alive.

This is also why money and status are such terrible proxies for a meaningful life. You can hit every external marker — the salary, the promotion, the recognition — and still feel completely empty. We attach meaning to outcomes, when really it lives in the effort. If you're working on something that genuinely matters to you, you do it because it fills your soul, even when it doesn't fill your wallet.

Viktor Frankl understood this at a depth most of us will never have to. A psychologist and Holocaust survivor, he observed in the camps that the prisoners who had a stronger why, a deeper sense of meaning, were more likely to survive. They were less likely to lose hope. More likely to help those around them. They knew the circumstances were devastating. But they didn't let those circumstances determine who they were. They made meaning from what little they had: a sunset, a memory, a connection, a small act of kindness.

Frankl wrote: "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."

That's not naive optimism. That's radical agency. That's Stoicism in practice.

He also quoted Nietzsche directly:

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

The suffering doesn't disappear. But it becomes bearable when it's in service of something that matters to you.

Meaning vs. Purpose

Before we get into what you can actually do, I want to draw a distinction I think is important: the difference between meaning and purpose. We use these words interchangeably, but they're not the same thing.

Purpose is the what of your life. Meaning is the why.

Purpose is concrete and actionable. If you're a teacher, your purpose might be to prepare young people to live well. That’s clear and definable. Meaning is what you derive from that purpose — the quiet satisfaction when a student finally gets something, or when someone reaches out years later to say something you said changed their trajectory. You can't schedule that feeling. It arises from the doing.

Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, wrote:

"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."

He wasn't meditating on the cosmic meaning of his reign. He was building his character, one decision at a time. The meaning came from the practice, from doing the work with integrity, even when nobody was watching. Especially when nobody was watching.

The Practice

So what can you actually do? Two things.

First: actively do things you find meaningful.

I think we spend too much of our lives optimizing for productivity. We stop doing things we love because they're not monetizable, or they don't look good on a resume. The way we evaluate our time has become almost entirely economic.

Flipping that script means asking not "is this productive?" but "does this matter to me?" That might be meditating, hiking, making art, playing music, building something with your hands — things that feed your soul even if they don't feed your bank account.

And creativity doesn't have to mean art. Building a fence is creation. Tending a garden is creation. Volunteering your time, helping people who need it, furthering a cause you believe in — those are acts of meaning because you're participating in something larger than yourself.

One of the most reliable ways to bring meaning into your life is simply to help other people. Service is a core component of a good life — and clinical research actually backs this up. Helping others is one of the most consistent mood elevators we know of.

When I was in college, my family had a Thanksgiving tradition. Instead of cooking a big feast at home, we'd volunteer at the Greek Orthodox church in downtown Salt Lake City — feeding people who were homeless or struggling. We'd spend the day cooking and serving. Honestly? It was one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done. That memory still carries weight decades later.

Second: shift your perspective and find meaning in what you're already doing.

This is about rewriting your own story — not gaslighting yourself, but genuinely looking at what you're doing through a different lens.

Raising kids isn't always fun. At times it's brutal. But ask most parents whether it gave their life meaning, and they'll say yes without hesitating. The hard parts and the meaningful parts aren't separate — they're inseparable.

The same can apply to work. If you have a job you don't love, can you find aspects you do? Can you reframe it as service to others? As developing skills that will serve you later? Maybe it's simply the price you pay to support yourself so you can do the things that actually matter outside of work.

Now — I want to be clear: this isn't about talking yourself into tolerating a toxic situation. Some environments are genuinely harmful. Some jobs are soul-crushing. Wisdom knows the difference between genuine reframing and self-deception. But for the ordinary friction of ordinary life, the Stoics would tell you the meaning isn't waiting for you somewhere else. It's available right here, if you're willing to look.

Epictetus, who was born a slave and had nearly nothing in terms of external freedom, put it plainly in the Enchiridion: "Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens."

You don't control everything that happens to you. You do control what you make of it.

Conclusion

I want to get personal for a minute, because this isn't abstract for me right now.

A few years ago, my kids grew up and moved out, a long-term relationship ended, and I got laid off, all around the same time. That's a lot of structure collapsing at once. I felt rudderless. Like I didn't have much meaning in my life anymore.

When I was supporting my kids, even a job I didn't love felt meaningful because I was providing for them. That gave it weight. But with a blank slate and no one depending on me, all the constraints that had organized my life were gone. It turns out, constraints aren't only limitations. They're also anchors.

So for the past few years, I've been making the same mistake over and over: treating meaning like something out there to be discovered. Like if I could just find the right framework, the right direction, the right answer, it would reveal itself.

I was going about it completely backwards.

Meaning isn't something you find. It's something you build from the small, concrete things you choose to do each day. I find meaning in creating this podcast. From the emails and comments that remind me these episodes have actually helped someone. I find it in the creative work, the conversations, the things I choose to put my energy into.

The overarching meaning of my life? I still don't have a neat answer for that. But I'm learning I don't need one. I just need to keep doing things that matter and trust that the meaning takes care of itself.

Maybe that's enough for now. I think it might be enough for all of us.

So I want you to take some time this next week and think about: What's one small thing you do that gives your life meaning — even if it's not productive?

The Build an Unbreakable Mind program for building mental discipline is now open for enrollment!
My book Stoicism 101 is available! Order here!

Find out more at https://stoic.coffee

Watch episodes on YouTube!

Find me on linkedIn, instagram, or threads.

Thanks again for listening!

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Far too often we’re never really in the moment. Maybe we’re stuck ruminating in the past over what we wished would have happened, or projecting out into the future our hope of what will happen. Maybe we distract ourselves with our phones, with entertainment, or alcohol or drugs. Anything that can relieve boredom or the discomfort of our present reality. But what if you leaned into that boredom? What if embracing discomfort is the key to really experiencing your life?

In this episode I want to about the importance of being present in your own life by working with reality, rather than against it.

“Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.” — Epictetus

Sitting With Discomfort

The other day I was listening to a conversation on the Ezra Klein Show. He was interviewing Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun who has spent decades writing and teaching about how to actually live with uncertainty, discomfort, and pain. If you haven't come across her work, I'd encourage you to look her up.

The conversation moved through a lot of territory, but one theme kept surfacing, and it's been sitting with me ever since.

Sitting with discomfort. Both emotion and physical discomfort. Not trying to change them. Not trying to fix them or think your way out of them. Just being aware of them, and letting them be part of your experience.

Now I know that can sound passive, like you're supposed to suffer quietly and call it wisdom. But that's not what they were talking about.

What they were getting at is something more precise: when we resist how we're feeling, we don't reduce the pain. We add to it. We take whatever discomfort is already present and we pile on — the worry, the frustration that we feel this way at all, the disappointment that reality isn't matching what we wanted. We make it worse.

Pema talked about how one of here mentors used a phrase that I think is one of the best framings I've heard: collaborating with reality.

Collaborating with reality. Not fighting it. Not wishing it were different. Not white-knuckling your way through it while secretly hoping it changes.

Collaborating with it.

And the moment I heard that, I thought — that's exactly what the Stoics meant when they said we should live according to nature. Same insight, two and a half thousand years apart, from completely different traditions.

But here's the dimension I want to explore today, because I think it goes deeper than most conversations about presence and acceptance actually go.

We don't just resist painful emotions. We disconnect from them entirely. We go numb to them. And we do the same thing with physical pain. We get so caught up in the noise of our daily lives that we stop receiving the signals our own bodies and our own hearts are sending us, even when those signals are urgent.

I know this firsthand. And I’ll tell you a story about that in a minute.

The Philosophy

The Stoics had a concept called the hegemonikon — the ruling faculty. It's the part of us that perceives, judges, and assigns meaning to everything that happens to us.

In an ideal state, this faculty governs us well. It sees clearly. It distinguishes between what's in our control and what isn't. It responds to reality rather than reacting to it.

But here's what Marcus Aurelius kept noticing about himself and what he wrote about in repeatedly in his Meditations:

“Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer. Then remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present—and even that can be minimized.”

— Marcus Aurelius

The mind wanders and the ruling faculty, left undisciplined, reaches backward into regret and forward into anxiety. It is almost never simply in the present.

What I love about Marcus is that he wasn't writing from a place of mastery. He was writing to himself, often about his own failures. He kept having to drag himself back to the present.

Epictetus put it even more plainly:

“Some things are up to us. Some things are not.”

When we expend energy on the things that are not up to us, including resisting what is simply happening, we suffer. Not because those things are bad, but because we are fighting a battle we cannot win.

This is what collaborating with reality means in Stoic terms. It's not apathy. It's not indifference. It's an active choice to stop expending energy on resistance to what is and redirect that energy toward how you actually respond.

The Stoics weren't saying don't feel. That's the misreading that turns this philosophy into emotional flatness. They were saying: feel what's actually happening. Not what you've constructed around it. Not the story on top of it. The thing itself.

The acceptance of what is leads to a richer, fuller experience. Life isn’t meant to be about comfort. It’s meant to be experienced. All of it. If we ignore or avoid the painful things, we’re ignoring reality and cutting off our lived experience.

Which raises the harder question. If this is clearly the wiser path — and the Stoics knew it, Buddhist teachers know it, most of us sense it intuitively — why is it so hard? Why do we keep disconnecting?

I think the answer has to do with something we don't talk about enough.

The Ego Problem

During the conversation between Ezra and Pema, they mentioned the work of Jon Cabot Zinn who works with people with chronic pain and using meditation to deal with it. And what’s interesting is that the approach is not to ignore the pain, but to become even more aware of it. By become aware of it and not resisting it, they found it actually reduces pain. It changes the relationship with it because they learned to accept it and live with it and no longer resist.

And that part of the discussion reminded me of an experience I had with pain.

When I was around 30, I started having numbness in my feet. I went to a podiatrist to figure out what was going on, and he told me it was most likely a back issue, because it was bilateral, on both feet, which pointed to the spine rather than to the feet themselves.

He referred me to a physical therapist.

In our first session, my physical therapist asked me if I had any pain in my lower back. I thought about it and said, “a little, maybe, but nothing significant”. He asked what I did for work. I told him I was a software engineer. He smiled and said that was one of the worst jobs for back health. Hours of sitting, forward-bent posture, the whole thing. And he said: start paying attention to your lower back at work. Notice what you're actually feeling.

The next day, just before lunch, I remembered what he said. So I stopped and I actually checked in with my body. Really checked in.

I couldn't believe how much pain I was in.

It wasn't mild. It was significant. And it had been there for I don't know how long. Long enough to have stopped registering it. I had been living in real pain, every day, and I had gotten so good at tuning it out that I genuinely didn't know it was there until someone told me to stop and look.

That stopped me. Because if I could be that disconnected from something as concrete and physical as pain, something my own nervous system was actively generating, what else was I not receiving? What other pain was I tuning out?

Here's what I think was happening, and why I think it matters.

A psychologist named Dan McAdams developed what's called narrative identity theory. The idea is that we construct who we are through story. We take the raw material of our lives and we edit it into a coherent autobiography: themes, patterns, a sense of where we've been and where we're going. We create a story about ourselves and out lives.

That's not a flaw. It's actually how human identity works. But the story requires past and future to function. You can't have a narrative about the present moment. The present is just happening. It has no arc yet.

Which means when we're deep in the story of our lives — the job, the responsibilities, the mental to-do list — we stop receiving what's actually occurring. We're so immersed in the narration that the experience itself gets crowded out.

Daniel Kahneman named this distinction precisely. He separated the experiencing self, what's actually happening to you right now, from the narrating self — the one constructing and remembering the story of what happened.

And here's the uncomfortable part: the narrating self is dominant. It's the one we primarily identify with. It's the one that decides how we feel about our lives. Not what we're actually experiencing, but the story we tell ourselves about it.

So we're almost never fully in our experience. We're in our interpretation of it.

My lower back was sending a clear signal. My narrating self was too busy running its story to receive it. The signal was there the whole time. I just wasn't home.

And I think we do the exact same thing with emotional pain.

When something hurts emotionally, like grief, loneliness, fear, or shame, the narrating self kicks in immediately. It starts explaining. It starts planning. It starts building a story that makes the feeling manageable, or it builds a story that justifies avoiding the feeling altogether. We get busy. We fill the silence. We find reasons not to sit with what's actually there.

We numb out. Just like I numbed out to my back.

There's neuroscience behind this. Researchers have identified what's called the Default Mode Network which is a set of brain regions that activate when you're not focused on a task. When your mind is wandering. And what does it do? It generates self-referential thinking. It replays social situations. It plans. It constructs your sense of self.

It's the neural substrate of the narrating self. And it's most active when you're supposedly doing nothing, which is why doing nothing feels so loud. The moment you stop feeding the network with tasks and distractions, it cranks up the internal noise.

This is what boredom actually is. It's not an absence of stimulation. It's what happens when the ego loses its feed. When there's no story to maintain, no distraction to process — you're just there. And that feels threatening. Not because something bad is happening, but because the part of you that needs to be someone has nothing to work with.

Research on presence and meditation shows that sustained attention on the present moment measurably quiets the Default Mode Network. Presence isn't passive. It's neurologically active. You're actively suppressing the story-making machine.

And that is where emotional courage comes in.

Because sitting with physical pain, really sitting with it, like my PT was asking me to do, requires a kind of courage. You have to be willing to feel what's actually there rather than staying numb. And sitting with emotional pain requires exactly the same thing. You have to be willing to stop narrating around it, stop explaining it away, and just be with it.

That's not suppression. Suppression is forcing the feeling down. This is the opposite. This is opening to what's actually present, without adding a story on top of it.

That is the courageous act.

The Practice

So how do you actually practice this?

I want to offer a metaphor that I've been sitting with, because I think it captures something important.

Think about what happens when you're deep in a video game. A good one. One you're genuinely invested in.

You don't argue with the rules. You don't wish the level were designed differently. You take the game as it is, and you engage with what's in front of you. Each challenge is just the next thing. You're not catastrophizing it or resenting it. You're playing it.

And here's what I really want to point at: when you're fully in it, you forget yourself. You're not monitoring your performance or worrying about what others think. The narrating self goes quiet. There's just the experience. Psychologists call this flow, and it's not accidental that people describe flow states as some of the most satisfying experiences they have. Because in those moments, the gap between the experiencing self and the narrating self collapses. You're just there.

Life isn't a video game. I know the metaphor has limits. The stakes are real. The consequences follow you. You choose your own direction.

But the principle holds: whatever level you're on right now, whatever challenge is in front of you, the question is whether you're going to stand outside it, arguing with the design, or whether you're going to play it, fully and presently.

Collaborating with reality doesn't mean you're happy about everything that happens. It means you stop expending energy on the fight with what is, and start putting that energy into how you actually respond.

Epictetus reminds us of this idea:

“If we try to adapt our mind to the regular sequence of changes and accept the inevitable with good grace, our life will proceed quite smoothly and harmoniously.”

— Epictetus

That's where your power is. Being in the moment. Experiencing your life rather than narrating it.

Sot there’s two things I'd invite you to try this week.

The first: at some point during the day, stop and actually check in with your body. Like my physical therapist asked me to do. Not a quick scan, but a real one. Start at your feet and move upward. Notice what's there. You might be surprised what you've been ignoring.

And then ask yourself: am I doing the same thing emotionally? Is there something I've been numbing out to, narrating around, staying too busy to actually feel?

The second: find one moment today where you’re faced with boredom, frustration, or discomfort you can't immediately fix, and instead of reaching for the phone or filling the space, just stay with it for sixty seconds. Don't analyze it. Don't build a story around it. Let it be what it is.

That's the practice. Small, repeatable, and harder than it sounds.

Marcus Aurelius kept dragging himself back to the present. Not because he arrived. Because returning was the work.

Learning to be present and in the moment is challenging because we don’t like to sit with discomfort and because we have so many ways to avoid it. But by avoiding it, we’re cutting ourselves off from experiencing our lives.

The signal is there.

The question is whether you're home to receive it.

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