Day 27 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Marcus Aurelius didn’t write down other people’s principles.
He wrote down his own, principles informed by Stoicism, tested against his actual experience, expressed in his own language.
That’s the model for today.
Twenty-six days of engagement with a philosophical tradition produces something.
Not expertise, you’d need years for that.
It produces a set of ideas that have been examined, tested against your own life, accepted where they hold and challenged where they don’t.
That set of ideas, expressed in your own words, is the thing the tradition was always trying to produce: people who think clearly about how to live, not Stoics.
The exercise today is to write your principles.
Yours, not Stoic principles, informed by Stoicism, shaped by the twenty-six days, expressed in language that is genuinely yours rather than borrowed from the tradition.
Marcus wrote in Greek partly because the distance from his native Latin helped him be less glib.
Whatever it takes to get to honest, use that.
The principles should be first-person and present-tense: “I,” not “one should” or “it is important to.”
They should be specific enough to be tested against an actual situation, not aspirational vagueness.
A list of commitments, not a list of virtues.
What do you actually hold, with your own life, your own choices, your own consistency as the evidence, rather than what you admire in theory?
A few prompts to consider before you write:
What do you know to be true about how you want to live that you’ve known for a long time, even before this series, and what has this series given you a clearer way of articulating?
What practice from this series has changed something specific about how you moved through a day?
Where do you fall short of your own values most consistently, and what principle would, if genuinely held, address that shortfall?
What is the thing you most want to remember in a difficult moment, the thing that, if you could access it under pressure, would change how you responded?
For vegans, this exercise has a specific texture.
The vegan commitment is already a principle, a deep one, held for real reasons, tested over time.
The question is how Stoicism has refined or extended that commitment.
Has it given you language for why the commitment doesn’t depend on external validation?
Has it helped with the grief or the anger?
Has it clarified what is yours to do in the broader movement and what isn’t?
Has it changed how you hold the relationships where your values aren’t shared?
The principles you write today are not final.
Marcus revised his, implicitly, over decades, the earlier books of the Meditations wrestle with things he seems to have resolved by the later books, and vice versa.
Principles are living documents.
They grow as you do.
Writing them down now doesn’t fix them.
It gives you something to return to, to test, to revise as your experience accumulates.
Aim for five to ten.
Short enough to remember.
Specific enough to be useful.
Honest enough to be worth keeping.
This is, in the end, what the tradition was for.
Not the accumulation of knowledge about what Marcus or Epictetus or Seneca believed.
Your own articulation of what you believe, shaped by the encounter with people who thought about these things carefully.
That document, yours, in your words, from your life, is the output.
Practice for today
Write five to ten principles, your own, informed by Stoicism, expressed in your own language.
First-person, present-tense, specific enough to test against an actual situation.
Don’t edit for elegance.
Write for honesty.
This becomes your personal philosophy document.
Keep it somewhere you’ll actually read it.
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.