Dear Fellow Mortals,
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.
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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.
