Welcome to the final day of Resist and Persist.

Today’s practical focus is returning to the practice. We will not always want rightly, judge clearly, or act well. The work is learning to recognize when we have wandered and return, again and again, to the person we are trying to become.

If you missed any of the previous days, catch up here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4.

I hope today’s final essay helps bring the week together—and gives you something worth carrying beyond the course.

J.W.

Resist and Persist

Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.

The Disciplined Life

Resist and Persist (Day 5 of 5)

We have spent this course separating three disciplines that, in ordinary life, rarely arrive separately.

• Desire asks, What is worth wanting?

• Action asks, What is mine to do?

• Assent asks, What am I agreeing to believe?

We separated them because each required attention of its own. But the point was never to leave you carrying three philosophical techniques through the day, trying to remember which one belongs to which moment.

The disciplines belong together.

Consider something ordinary. A colleague receives the promotion you had quietly hoped would be yours, and almost immediately an impression arrives: “I’ve been passed over.” “I’m falling behind.” “This says something about what they think of me.”

You notice it and ask what actually happened. Someone else received a promotion; everything beyond that requires interpretation. That is assent.

Then you notice the desire beneath the reaction. Did you want the work itself? The responsibility? The money? Or had the title begun to serve as evidence that you were succeeding—especially now that someone beside you possesses it? That is desire.

And then comes action. You still have to decide what to do.

Perhaps the disappointment is real. There is no need to pretend otherwise. But disappointment does not determine the conduct that follows from it. You can congratulate your colleague. You can ask what you might learn. You can continue doing your work well. Later, with a clearer mind, you can decide whether something in your circumstances genuinely needs to change.

Assent, desire, action: not three separate exercises, but one movement.

In life, the order will vary. The disciplines are not stages so much as different ways of attending to the same moment.

The Stoics separated the parts because it is difficult to train what we cannot distinguish. Eventually, though, the parts have to disappear back into life.

That is where we are now.

The disciplines also correct one another.

Desire without judgment can attach itself to almost anything. Action without examined desire can make us very efficient at pursuing the wrong things. Assent without action can become another form of intellectualism: endlessly examining thoughts while never doing what the examination requires.

Taken together, they form something more complete. We learn to want with greater care, to think with greater accuracy, and to act with greater fidelity.

Not perfectly, but more deliberately.

Read more

Resist and Persist

Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.

The Discipline of Assent: Training the Mind

Resist and Persist (Day 4 of 5)

At the end of Day 3, I asked you to notice something.

You chose one action worth doing, and when the moment came, you watched for the thought that appeared to free you from it: “Not today.” “You’re too tired.” “Ten minutes won’t matter.”

I asked you not to argue with the thought.

Only to notice that it appeared.

Now we turn toward it, because that thought is not yet a command. It is not necessarily a fact. It is what the Stoics called an impression: something presented to the mind that asks to be taken as true.

In the distinction between what appears and what we agree to believe about it, the Stoics located one of the most important forms of human freedom.

This is the discipline of assent.

We have already worked with the first two disciplines. Desire asks, “What is worth wanting?” Action asks, “What is mine to do?”

Assent turns toward the judgments beneath both: “What am I agreeing to believe?”

The question matters because desire and action do not arise in a vacuum. Beneath them are judgments.

• “I want the promotion because I have judged it desirable.”

• “I avoid the conversation because I have judged it threatening.”

• “I abandon the work because some part of me has decided that the discomfort is unnecessary, intolerable, or no longer worth enduring.”

These judgments often happen so quickly that we don’t experience them as judgments at all. They arrive already dressed as descriptions of reality: “This is terrible.” “She disrespected me.” “I can’t handle this.” “Everyone can see that I’m failing.”

The thought and the world seem to arrive together.

The Stoics ask us to separate them.

Epictetus states the principle in one of the most famous lines of the Enchiridion:

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”

This sentence is easy to misunderstand. Epictetus is not saying that events don’t matter. Lose someone you love, and something real has happened. Receive a frightening diagnosis, and something real has happened. Be betrayed, assaulted, dismissed, humiliated, or treated unjustly, and something real has happened.

Stoicism does not require us to pretend otherwise.

Nor does it claim that we deliberately choose every bodily or emotional response.

Seneca, writing about anger, distinguishes between an initial, involuntary reaction and the judgment that may follow. A sudden noise can make us flinch. Bad news can tighten the stomach before we have formed a sentence about it. The face can flush. The heart can accelerate. Fear can arrive before philosophy has found its shoes.

The Stoics sometimes described these as first movements. They happen to us. Assent concerns what follows.

Read more

Resist and Persist

Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.

The Discipline of Action

Resist and Persist (Day 3 of 5)

In January 1915, a ship called the Endurance became trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, off the coast of Antarctica.

She carried twenty-eight men under the command of the explorer Ernest Shackleton, who had set out to accomplish something no one had done before: cross the Antarctic continent on foot.

They never reached the continent.

The ice closed around the ship. For months the crew waited, hoping the pack would loosen and release them. Instead, the pressure intensified. The timbers groaned. Water began entering the hull. By November, Endurance had been crushed beyond saving and disappeared beneath the ice.

The expedition, as Shackleton had imagined it, was over.

What remained was survival.

The men camped on the drifting pack, salvaging what they could from the ship. Eventually they took to three small lifeboats and reached Elephant Island, an uninhabited piece of rock in the Southern Ocean. From there, Shackleton and five others set out in a twenty-two-foot boat, attempting an open-ocean journey of roughly eight hundred miles.

They reached the island. Then Shackleton and two companions crossed its mountainous interior to a whaling station and began organizing the rescue of the men they had left behind.

On August 30, 1916, after several failed attempts, Shackleton returned to Elephant Island. All twenty-eight men who had sailed aboard Endurance survived.

It is one of the great survival stories of polar exploration. But one feature of the expedition matters particularly for a course on discipline: throughout the ordeal, Shackleton and his officers tried to preserve structure.

When the ship was trapped, the crew established routines instead of giving in to endless waiting. They kept working, with meals and duties marking the passage of time. Later, on Elephant Island, Frank Wild held onto the hope of rescue and encouraged the men to stay ready for it.

Routine could not release the ship from the ice, calm the Southern Ocean, or guarantee rescue. What it could do was give the men something to do when circumstances offered them almost nothing they could control.

That brings us to the second Stoic discipline: action.

Read more

Resist and Persist

Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.

The Discipline of Desire

Resist and Persist (Day 2 of 5)

We begin with desire.

This may seem like a strange place to begin a course on self-discipline. Surely, discipline is about action: getting out of bed, going to the gym, doing the work, refusing temptations, and keeping the promises.

But action is often downstream from something else.

You want to exercise, but you also want to remain comfortable. You want to save money, but you also want what the advertisement has placed in front of you. You want to write, but you also want relief from the discomfort of not knowing what comes next. You want to live according to your own values, but you also want the approval of people whose values may not align with yours.

The problem is not always that we lack desire. Sometimes we have too many desires pulling in different directions.

Epictetus therefore placed the training of desire near the center of philosophical life. Before asking how to get what you want, Stoicism asks a more unsettling question:

What have you decided is worth wanting?

We tend to experience desire as intensely personal: “I want this.”

The sentence seems to settle the matter. But desire does not arrive with a certificate of authenticity.

What we want is shaped by temperament, experience, advertising, culture, comparison, habit, family, status, and the people around us. We learn what a successful person is supposed to own, what a respectable career is supposed to look like, what kind of body should make us confident, how much money should feel like enough, and which accomplishments should make us proud.

Seneca noticed this problem in ancient Rome. In a letter to Lucilius, he warns about the effect of the crowd. After spending time among other people, he says, he often finds himself returning home greedier, more ambitious, and more indulgent than before.

His point is not that other people are corrupt and solitude is pure. It is that influence is often quiet. Standards enter us without announcing themselves.

Someone else receives a promotion, and a job you liked yesterday suddenly feels insufficient. A friend buys a larger house, and your own begins to look smaller. You see enough images of a certain life and eventually stop asking whether you want that life. You simply begin arranging yourself toward it.

This makes desire worth examining—not because social influence makes every desire false, but because the fact that a desire feels like yours does not tell you where it came from or whether it deserves to govern you.

Epictetus opens the Enchiridion with one of Stoicism's foundational distinctions.

“Some things are in our control and others not.”

Our judgments, purposes, desires, and aversions belong, in an important Stoic sense, to the sphere of our agency. Bodies, possessions, reputations, offices, and the actions of other people do not belong to us in the same way.

The distinction is sometimes reduced to a slogan: Focus only on what you can control. But Epictetus is asking something more demanding than that. He is asking us to reconsider where we locate the good.

Read more

Welcome to Day One of Resist and Persist.

Over the next five days, we’ll work through the Stoic disciplines of desire, judgment, and action—not simply as ideas to understand, but as practices to carry into ordinary life. Each lesson will end with a concrete exercise or question to take with you into the day.

I hope you enjoy the course—and, more importantly, find something in it worth practicing in daily life. If you have questions or comments, feel free to share them in the comments.

—

Remember to live.

J.W.

Resist and Persist

Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.

The Stoic Art of Self-Discipline

Resist and Persist (Day 1 of 5)

Somewhere behind you, there is probably a resolution you abandoned. Maybe several.

The running shoes that once represented a new life now sit beneath a chair. The guitar is still in its case. The gym membership that renews automatically even though your attendance does not.

Most of us know this experience well enough that it has become almost ordinary.

We decide to do something, and for a while we do it. Then the excitement fades. Work becomes difficult. Life gets busy. We become tired, distracted, frightened, overcommitted, or simply unwilling to endure whatever the next step requires.

Eventually, the resolution can become evidence in a case we have begun building against ourselves: “I lack discipline.” “I never follow through.” “I need more willpower.”

Sometimes there is truth in the accusation. There are moments when we simply refuse to do something we know should be done. But the explanation is incomplete.

Much of what we call a failure of discipline begins long before the moment when we finally give in. It begins in what we have learned to want, in the judgments we make about what happens to us, and in the relationship we have developed with discomfort, effort, pleasure, approval, fear, and delay.

The problem is that we often treat discipline as though it were almost entirely a matter of force: push harder, want it more, stop making excuses, and make yourself do it.

There are times when force is useful. A difficult action sometimes requires a firm decision. But force is a poor theory of a human life. If your only understanding of discipline is forcing yourself to move against your own desires and judgments, then every worthwhile action becomes a contest between one part of you and another.

Eventually, somebody gets tired.

Imagine trying to steer a car by standing outside it and pushing against the door. With enough strength, you might move it a little.

But there may be a better way. There may be a way inside.

The Stoics were interested in that interior machinery.

Nearly two thousand years ago, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus organized philosophical training around three broad fields. Epictetus had spent part of his life enslaved before becoming a teacher of philosophy, and his students were not trained merely to understand Stoic arguments.

They were trained to live differently.

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New to The School for Mortals? You can read the introduction here.

—

Most of us know more about self-discipline than our behavior would suggest.

We know we should put down the phone, finish the work, exercise, spend more carefully, speak more patiently, keep the promise, or resist the impulse we will probably regret later. We may even decide, sincerely, that this time we will.

Then the moment arrives, and something changes.

What we intended to do collides with what we feel like doing.

We usually interpret this as a failure of willpower. We tell ourselves to try harder, become more motivated, build better habits, remove temptation, or finally become the sort of person who follows through.

All of those things can help. But the Stoics would have us look further upstream.

Before an action comes a judgment about what is happening. Beneath that judgment is often a desire for something we believe will make things better: approval, pleasure, relief, control, or escape.

Perhaps the problem is not simply that we need more willpower.

Perhaps we have been starting in the wrong place.

The Stoic Approach to Self-Discipline

When we think about discipline, we tend to begin with behavior.

Did I do the workout? Finish the project? Resist the temptation? Follow through?

The Stoics cared deeply about action, but they understood that action does not appear from nowhere. What we do is connected to what we want and to the judgments we make about what is happening around us.

This is why the Stoic teacher Epictetus organized philosophical training around three interconnected disciplines: desire, action, and assent—the judgments we make about our impressions.

Those three disciplines provide the framework for this course.

• We will begin with desire. What are we reaching for, avoiding, or demanding from life? Are the things we want worthy of the power we give them?

• Then we will turn to judgment. What happens between an event and our response to it? Must every impression, fear, craving, or thought be accepted as true simply because it appears?

• Finally, we will turn to action. Once we have considered what deserves our desire and examined the judgments guiding us, how do we actually do what the situation requires—especially when it is inconvenient or difficult?

The sequence can be summarized simply: Want rightly. Judge clearly. Act well.

That is a more demanding vision of self-discipline than simply forcing ourselves to do unpleasant things. It is also a more interesting one.

How the Course Will Work

For five days, we will work through the Stoic disciplines one step at a time.

Each lesson will explore one aspect of self-discipline and end with a practical exercise to carry into the day.

You do not need previous knowledge of Stoicism. You also do not need to overhaul your life, wake at five in the morning, eliminate every distraction, or become a different person by Friday.

The work is more modest.

Pay attention to what you want. Notice what you tell yourself when something becomes difficult. Notice the moment an impression turns into a judgment. Notice what happens between deciding to do something and actually doing it.

And pay particular attention to the places where your behavior seems to be governed by something you never consciously chose.

The School for Mortals, along with Resist and Persist, will be available exclusively to Dying Every Day members. If you’re not already a member, you can become a member, join at 50% off, or, if cost is a barrier, accept a complimentary membership.

Membership helps make this newsletter possible. At the same time, I never want cost to be the reason someone cannot take part.

Resist and Persist

The title of this course draws from a maxim long associated with Epictetus, traditionally rendered in various ways as bear and forbear, endure and renounce, or, more memorably for our purposes:

Resist and persist.

Resist what should not govern you.

Persist in what deserves your effort.

The two belong together.

Discipline requires resistance because there will always be desires, impulses, fears, distractions, and judgments that pull us away from what we have decided matters.

But resistance alone is not enough. A person can spend an entire life saying no.

We also need something worth saying yes to—something worth returning to when enthusiasm fades, something worth continuing when the work becomes repetitive, recognition fails to arrive, circumstances become difficult, or another path suddenly appears more attractive.

That is persistence.

Not stubbornness for its own sake, but continued fidelity to what we have judged worth doing.

—

On Monday, we begin where discipline so often begins: with desire.

Until next time, remember to live.

J.W.

P.S. If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to share them!

Dear Fellow Mortals,

We have more access to wisdom than ever. Books. Podcasts. Essays. Courses. Quotes. Notes. Ideas collected and saved for later.

The problem is rarely access.

The harder question is whether any of it changes how we live.

That is the idea behind a new project I’m launching here: The School for Mortals

The School for Mortals is built on a simple conviction:

A finite life is shaped by limits, tensions, and choices. Mortal wisdom is the art of learning to live well within them.

That core conviction will also shape the courses I share with newsletter members. Several times throughout the year, courses will unfold over several consecutive days, with one substantial lesson and practice each day.

The subjects will vary, but the aim stays the same: to take enduring ideas about the art of living and ask what they look like in ordinary life.

• How do we become more disciplined?

• How do we pay attention to a life that is passing?

• How do we know ourselves more honestly?

• How do we give what matters an actual place in our days?

These are philosophical questions. But they are also practical ones.

Remember to Live

The philosopher Pierre Hadot spent much of his work recovering an older understanding of philosophy. For many ancient thinkers, philosophy was not primarily something to study. It was something to practice.

Ideas about desire, attention, judgment, character, mortality, and the good life were meant to shape the person encountering them.

That is the spirit of The School for Mortals.

Not simply: “What did this philosopher believe?” But: “What would it look like to practice this?”

The measure of a course will not be how much you remember from it. It will be whether you remember to practice it in daily life:

• A question you keep asking.

• A habit you begin noticing.

• A conversation you approach differently.

• A practice you return to when you forget.

Because most of us already know quite a lot about how we should live. We know attention matters. We know relationships require care. We know time is limited. We know character is shaped by what we do repeatedly.

Knowing is not always the difficult part.

Remembering—and practicing—is.

Support the Project

The School for Mortals will be available exclusively to Dying Every Day members.

Dying Every Day is, at its core, a one-person labor of love. There is no team behind the scenes—just me, researching, writing, recording, and slowly building the project piece by piece.

If you find value in the work, you can become a member, join at 50% off, or, if cost is a barrier, accept a complimentary membership.

Memberships make projects like The School for Mortals possible. At the same time, I never want cost to be the reason someone cannot take part.

Resist and Persist

We begin next week with Resist and Persist: The Stoic Art of Self-Discipline.

For five days, we will explore a Stoic approach to self-discipline built around desire, action, and judgment.

Not simply how to force ourselves to do difficult things, but how to become less governable by impulse, mood, comfort, fear, and circumstance.

I’ll share more about Resist and Persist this weekend.

The first lesson begins Monday.

Welcome to The School for Mortals.

—

Thank you, as always, for being here—and to everyone who helps make this work possible.

Until next time, remember to live.

J.W.

P.S. If you have any ideas for The School for Mortals, feel free to share them!