Day 16 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Nine days of core doctrine.
Take stock of what that means.
You’ve worked through premeditatio malorum, the deliberate imagination of loss as a tool for gratitude and resilience.
Amor fati, the active embrace of circumstances rather than the exhausting refusal of them.
The view from above, scaling your anxieties against their actual proportion.
Memento mori, using the fact of death as a clarifying tool rather than avoiding it.
The distinction between events and the judgements you layer on them.
The Sage as a compass bearing.
Stoic relationships.
The real Stoic teaching on emotion.
None of this was designed for academics.
Every idea in this phase was developed by people, a slave, an emperor, a senator, who needed it to work in real life, under real pressure.
The philosophy was the practice.
The practice was the philosophy.
The review question isn’t whether you understood it.
The review question is whether any of it changed anything, even slightly, in how you moved through the last nine days.
That’s a harder question to answer honestly.
Think about the moments this week where something outside your control went wrong.
A conversation that didn’t land.
A news story that hit hard.
A plan that didn’t work out.
A person who behaved in a way you found difficult.
In any of those moments, did the distinction between what is yours and what isn’t appear, even briefly?
Did you catch yourself, even once, choosing a response rather than just having one?
Think about a moment this week where you felt the familiar grief of vegan life, the confrontation with harm you can see and can’t immediately stop.
Did amor fati or the view from above offer anything?
Not as a way of dismissing the grief.
As a way of holding it at a size you could work with?
Think about a relationship that challenged you.
Did the Stoic teaching on expectation, on loving people as they are rather than as you need them to be, appear anywhere?
If any of that happened, even once, even faintly, that’s the philosophy working.
Not theory retained in memory.
A small shift in the lived experience of a difficult moment, which is what it was designed for.
The Stoic doctrines in this phase are not comfortable ideas.
Memento mori asks you to hold your own death in view.
Amor fati asks you to embrace circumstances you didn’t choose and may not want.
The teaching on emotion asks you to examine the accuracy of feelings that feel self-evidently justified.
None of this is the path of least resistance.
The Stoics knew this.
Epictetus was particularly clear about it.
The philosophy doesn’t promise comfort.
It promises freedom, a different thing entirely, and in some ways harder to accept.
Comfort removes difficulty.
Freedom is the capacity to remain yourself inside difficulty.
The Stoics were interested in freedom.
For vegans, this distinction is worth sitting with.
The vegan position is not the comfortable one.
You chose it anyway, because something mattered more than comfort to you.
Stoicism asks the same thing, and offers the same return: groundedness, not ease.
A stable place to stand inside difficulty, not the absence of it.
Phase three, starting tomorrow, shifts from doctrine to practice:
the morning ritual,
the evening review,
voluntary discomfort,
journaling,
handling criticism,
the question of time.
The ideas become exercises.
The understanding becomes habit.
The transition point matters.
Understanding an idea is necessary.
It isn’t enough.
The Stoics were clear on this.
You don’t become Stoic by reading about Stoicism.
You become Stoic, to whatever degree any of us do, by practising it daily, imperfectly, over a long time.
That starts tomorrow.
Practice for today
Write a half-page summary of Stoicism in your own words, no notes, no reference to previous posts.
What would you tell someone who had never heard of it?
Then write one honest sentence about whether the last nine days have changed anything in how you actually live.
Not how you think, how you live.
That’s the only measure that matters.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.