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What If You Had to Live Your Life Again?

Sisyphus, by Titian.
Sisyphus, by Titian (c. 1548–1549). Like Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return, the myth of Sisyphus challenges us to embrace a life that endlessly repeats itself.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

What if you had to live your life again, exactly as before? Nietzsche’s eternal return is the ultimate test for measuring a life well lived.

Imagine this. Tonight a daemon appears at your bedside.

The daemon tells you that every moment of your life—every joy, every disappointment, every triumph, every humiliation, every love, every regret—must be lived again, exactly as it has been, over and over, for all eternity.

Would you despair?

Or would you rejoice?

Most people associate this thought experiment with Nietzsche. It is, in fact, much older. Long before Nietzsche, the Stoics imagined a universe in which everything returns.

Under the influence of Plato, who was himself influenced by Pythagoras, who was himself influenced by India, the Stoics held that the universe undergoes cycles, being periodically destroyed in a great conflagration (ekpyrosis, ‘blow-out’) and then reborn, ad infinitum.

Because God, being perfectly rational, is bound to make the same choices, each cosmic cycle unfolds as the last. Thus, the world as we know it, with us in it, existed before and will exist again. In around 200 CE, the Peripatetic (Aristotelian) philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote, ‘[Chrysippus and the Stoics] hold that after the conflagration all the same things come to be again in the world numerically, so that even the same qualified individual as before exists and comes to be again in the world…’

Maybe, in ten trillion years, I will once again be sitting at this desk, writing these words, with the same cat asleep on my lap.

The Roman Stoic Seneca hints at the same idea when, in his famous Letters, he writes to Lucilius:

Things that vanish from our sight are merely stored away in the natural world: they cease to be, but they do not perish… the day will come again that will return us to the light. It is a day that many would refuse, except that we forget everything before returning.

Whether the Stoics thought of eternal return as literal cosmology or as a philosophical exercise scarcely matters. Its enduring power lies in the challenge that it poses.

Nietzsche’s Challenge to Us

In July 1881, Nietzsche discovered his arcadia in Sils-Maria, a place of ‘splendid isolation’. For one Swiss franc a day, he took an upstairs room in the house of Gian Durisch, the mayor of the village. The following month, along the shores of Lake Silvaplana, he stopped before a mighty pyramidal block of stone, where he had the ‘abysmal thought’ of eternal return (or eternal recurrence).

In The Gay Science (1882), he adapted this flash of inspiration into one of philosophy’s greatest personal challenges. In Aphorism 341, he asks how you would feel if a demon crept into your loneliest loneliness and informed you that you would have to live your life exactly as it is, has been, and will be, over and over again. ‘Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: “You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!”’

For Nietzsche, how we respond to the demon is the acid test of life-affirmation. 

In Ecce Homo (1888), he says, ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.’

Whereas the Stoics asked us to accept our fate, Nietzsche challenged us to love it.

For it is not enough merely to endure. Instead, we must embrace every joy and every sorrow so completely as to be willing to relive them for evermore.

Even Nietzsche himself struggled to meet the standard he had set himself: ‘I confess that the deepest objection to the Eternal Recurrence… is always my mother and my sister.’ After Nietzsche’s mental collapse, his sister Elisabeth deleted the remark from Ecce Homo.

Sisyphus

Albert Camus, who kept a photograph of Nietzsche in his office, took the idea one step further.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, he compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for daring to defy the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. 

Yet Camus reaches one of the most startling conclusions in all philosophy: 

‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, and embracing it, he at the same time transcends it.

Or, in those wonderful words of Virgil,

Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.

The only hope for the doomed is no hope at all.

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This essay draws on themes explored at greater length in Stoic Stories, my overview of Stoic philosophy, and The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

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The Stoic Seneca on Anger

A study of anger, after Lebrun.
Ira furor brevis est.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.

After his brother Novatus asked him ‘how anger may be soothed’, the Stoic philosopher Seneca penned his famous treatise, On Anger (c. 45 CE).

Anger, says Seneca, is a bad habit that people tend to pick up from their parents. When a child who was raised at Plato’s house was returned to his parents and witnessed his father shouting, he said, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’

Anger is like a virus. If we are around angry people, it is hard not to lose our temper, however temperate we may normally be. For this reason alone, we ought to prefer the company of mild, level-headed people. For my urban readers, even wild animals become gentle in the company of the calm (though I wouldn’t rely on it).

Anger Is a Loss of Perspective

We should also resist our egocentric tendency to believe the worst about others. Often, the people at whom we are most liable to get angry are those who are in fact trying to help us—although, of course, not as much as we would like. In their minds, they are only trying to do what they think is best for them, and we, by our anger, are trying to thwart them—which is why they tend to return our anger. If what they are doing is not in their best interests, then we should calmly explain this to them, rather than losing our temper and, with it, their ear.

As for the things that anger us, they are often mere slights or annoyances that do not do us any real harm. Luxury debilitates the mind and undermines our sense of perspective, so that pampered people (like us) are more prone to anger over trivial things.

Events are events. It is we who attach emotion to them. And it is far easier to adjust our expectation of the world than to change the world itself.

Anger Does Us More Harm than Good

Even if someone murders our father or child, anger is not required to honour their memory, obtain justice, and, more generally, do the right and honourable thing. Recognising an injustice and becoming angry about it need not be one and the same thing—and, in fact, superadded anger may impair our ability to address the injustice. Many people think that anger is a show of virtue or, at least, a spur to virtue; at most, it can substitute for virtue in those who are lacking it.

Anger and grief only add to our existing pain, and often do more harm than the things out of which they arise. It is out of anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who had saved his life—that great conqueror of kings, himself brought down by anger. And it is also out of anger that Medea slaughtered her innocent children. Will you suffer a stroke or die from a heart attack because someone said something out of place?

As Horace put it, anger is a short-lived madness (ira furor brevis est). Whereas other vices bend the mind, anger overthrows it. The angry person is like a collapsing building that destroys itself in the very act of bearing down upon others.

Anger Is Contrary to Our Nature

Being social animals, like ants, bees, and wolves, human beings are born to provide and receive assistance. Anger, which, on the contrary, seeks to arrogate and annihilate, is so inimical to our nature that some angry people have benefited simply from looking in a mirror. 

Those who are unwilling to check their anger and work with others for the common good are like wasps in a beehive, gorging on the honey of others without contributing any of their own.

For all these reasons, we should never get angry. We might feel the beginnings of anger, but then reject this passionate impression that threatens to overthrow our reason and the tranquillity and dignity that follows in its train. We may not be able to prevent the first flash of irritation, any more than we can prevent ourselves from flinching at a sudden noise. Our freedom begins with what we do next, as we recognise anger for what it is: irrational and, often, unfair.

Now Here’s Your Answer

To regain perspective when angry, to reclaim our sanity, we might ask ourselves:

  • Am I expecting too much out of the world?
  • How is getting angry going to help me?
  • Who will remember this in a day or in a year, or in a hundred years?

But the surest cure for anger is delay, because it gives us a much better chance of rejecting our passionate impression.

Before rising into the first emperor of Rome, Augustus—then Octavian—was taught by the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus Cananites at Apollonia, in modern-day Albania, where he received the news of Julius Caesar’s demise. Athenodorus followed Octavian back to Rome and remained by his side as he deftly achieved that which his great uncle Caesar could or did not. When, on account of his old age, Athenodorus begged to be dismissed and was at last taking leave of Augustus, he reminded him, ‘Whenever you get angry, Caesar, do not say or do anything before repeating to yourself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.’

At this, the emperor seized Athenodorus by the hand and said, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’

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Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories. Through the lives of Zeno, Cleanthes, Cato, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and many others, Stoic Stories introduces the philosophy not through abstract theory, but through the memorable stories that have kept it alive for more than two thousand years.

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Diogenes the Cynic and the Philosophy of the Dog

Alexander the Great before Diogenes the Cynic
Alexander the Great bows before Diogenes the Cynic.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 18 August 2026.

Plato is said to have called Diogenes the Cynic ‘a Socrates gone mad’. It is easy to see why. Diogenes lived in a storage jar, begged for his food, masturbated in public, mocked Plato to his face, and told Alexander the Great to get out of his sunshine.

But there was a philosophy behind the madness. Diogenes did not merely question the conventions by which people lived. He attempted to strip them away altogether—and to live out the consequences.

Exiled to Athens

Diogenes (c. 412–323 BCE) was born in Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of modern-day Turkey. After being exiled for having defaced the city’s coinage, he moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention—which, he maintained, was the false currency of morality.

The story about defacing coinage may have been no more than a play on words, since, in Greek, the word for ‘money’, nomisma, sounds like, and is derived from, the word for ‘custom’, nomos. However, archaeologists have unearthed defaced mid-fourth-century coins from Sinope, making the literal story harder to dismiss.

In Athens, Diogenes attached himself to Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who taught that virtue, rather than wealth or pleasure, is sufficient for happiness. According to tradition, Antisthenes initially tried to drive him away, even threatening him with his staff. Like all the best students, Diogenes simply refused to leave.

If Socrates had shown that a good life required examining our assumptions, Diogenes went further. He asked what might happen if, having examined our assumptions, we outright discarded them.

The Philosophy of the Dog

Diogenes disdained the need for conventional shelter and other corrupting ‘dainties’ and chose instead to sleep in a large storage jar and get by on a diet of chickpeas, lupins, and assorted vegetables. He used to beg for the bare necessities, including from statues—explaining to passers-by that he was thereby practising for rejection.

According to another famous story, he possessed a wooden cup until he saw a boy drinking water from his cupped hands. ‘A child has bested me in simplicity,’ he exclaimed, throwing away his cup.

Diogenes held that human beings had much to learn from the artlessness of dogs, which, unlike us, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. The term ‘Cynic’ derives from the Greek for ‘dog-like’, kynikos—or perhaps from Antisthenes’ association with the Cynosarges, a gymnasium near the Temple of Herakles for the use of Athenians born of foreign mothers.

He placed nature and reason firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. It is natural for human beings to act in accordance with reason, and reason dictates that human beings ought to live in accordance with nature. Instead of wasting our substance in the pursuit of wealth or renown, we ought to have the sense and courage to live like animals or gods, revelling in life’s simplest pleasures, which are also its greatest, without bond or fear.

When people called him a dog, he took this as a badge of pride—for the less he needed from the world, the less the world could take from him.

The Philosophy of Shamelessness

His freedom extended even to shame. Diogenes taught that, if an act is not shameful in private, it should not become shameful merely because it is performed in public. Convention had taught people to be ashamed of things that were natural while remaining remarkably unashamed of vices such as greed and vanity.

Thus, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, in full view of everyone, he replied, ‘If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.’

This was not simple exhibitionism, but an extreme form of philosophical training, or askesis. Like later Cynics, Diogenes deliberately exposed himself to discomfort, rejection, ridicule, heat, cold, and hunger to strengthen himself against them. 

In the deep winter, he would strip naked and embrace bronze statues. One day, upon seeing this, a Spartan asked him whether he was cold. When he said that he was not, the Spartan replied, ‘Well, then, what’s so impressive about what you’re doing?’ A contempt for comfort is one of the many things that the Spartans and the Cynics held in common.

Diogenes vs Plato

Although he privileged reason, Diogenes despised abstract philosophy of the kind practised at Plato’s Academy.

When, to great acclaim, Plato defined a human being as ‘an animal, biped, and featherless’, Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it to the Academy with the words, ‘Behold! I have brought you Plato’s man.’ Plato consequently refined his definition, adding ‘with broad nails’—even though he would probably have known of monkeys, and perhaps even seen one.

One day, Diogenes asked Plato for a handful of figs from his garden. When Plato had a whole bushel sent out, he muttered, ‘Typical Plato.’

Like Socrates, Diogenes favoured living dialogue over the dead word. When a certain Hegesias asked to borrow one of his writing tablets, he replied, ‘You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.’

For Diogenes, philosophy was not something you read or wrote about. It wasn’t even something you believed in. It was something that you courageously enacted and lived out.

Diogenes’ greatest argument was not a tome like Plato’s Republic, but himself, the life that he led. The jar, the begging, the public masturbation were demonstrations designed to expose the absurdity of blind convention. Whereas Socrates had questioned people, Diogenes interrogated life itself.

Looking for a Human Being

Diogenes was not easily impressed by his fellow men and women.

He used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply, ‘I am looking for a human being.’ It was a case of a dog searching for a supposedly rational being—and finding one only in himself.

On other occasions, Diogenes would walk backwards through the streets or enter the theatre against the flow of people leaving. When a large enough crowd had gathered to laugh at him, he would turn on them: ‘Why do you mock, when you’ve spent your whole life walking backwards? I, at least, am able to turn around.’

Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in The Gay Science is almost certainly inspired by Diogenes. In both cases, the madman carries a lamp in broad daylight and is laughed at by the crowd—but it is, of course, the madman who has the last laugh.

Diogenes and Alexander

The most famous encounter in the history of Cynicism, though it may be apocryphal, perfectly captures Diogenes. Alexander the Great came to visit him one morning while he was basking in the sun. The most powerful man in the Greek world, and soon the entire known world (oikoumenē, ‘the inhabited earth’), stood before the bedraggled philosopher and asked whether there was anything he might do for him.

‘Yes,’ replied Diogenes. ‘Stand out of my sunshine.’

According to the story, Alexander was so impressed that he declared, ‘If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.’

Diogenes, for his part, would never have wished to be Alexander.

Citizen of the World

Diogenes’ rejection of convention extended beyond wealth, status, and respectability to political identity itself.

Asked where he came from, he reportedly answered, kosmopolitēs—‘a citizen of the world’—thereby coining the Greek word that became our ‘cosmopolitan’.

This would sound radical in some parts of modern-day Britain or America, let alone in a Greek world organised around city-states, in which citizenship determined a person’s identity, loyalties, rights, and obligations. Diogenes had been driven out of his own city, and sublimed his exile into universal citizenship.

Diogenes influenced Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to become a Cynic. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideal of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world. The inheritance of the man who inhabited a jar lived on in the emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations remain, today more than ever, a bestseller.

A Socrates Gone Mad?

Diogenes eventually settled in Corinth, where he died in 323 BCE—the same year as Alexander the Great in Babylon.

Asked how he wished to be buried, he replied that his body should simply be thrown outside the city wall. When his friends protested that wild animals would devour it, he told them to leave him a stick to drive them away. ‘But you will be dead,’ they objected. ‘Then what harm can the animals do me?’

After his death, the Corinthians honoured him with a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.

Plato’s alleged description of Diogenes as ‘a Socrates gone mad’ captured something real. Like Socrates, Diogenes challenged received opinion, cared little for wealth or status, practised philosophy in public, and believed that the state of one’s soul mattered more than conventional success. But Diogenes removed almost every restraint that remained in Socrates. He turned philosophical independence into homelessness, Socratic questioning into public theatre, simplicity into radical poverty, and indifference to opinion into shamelessness.

Did he take philosophy too far? I often think that, had I lived in a warmer climate, I too might have had the courage of a Diogenes.

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What the Stoic Seneca Knew About Ambition, Success, and Happiness

Kind Midas turning a rose into gold
King Midas turning a rose to gold.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 19 August 2026.

When Dionysus, god of wine, was in Phrygia, his teacher Silenus wandered off drunk and was carried to King Midas. When Dionysus came to collect Silenus, he offered Midas any wish. Midas asked for the power to turn whatever he touched into gold. Before dinner, he had turned every bush in his famed rose garden to gold. But he was horrified when his food and wine also turned to gold. His daughter tried to comfort him, but she too suffered the same fate. When Midas begged to be rescued, Dionysus told him to bathe in the River Pactolus, the golden sands of which later became the source of Croesus’ fabulous wealth.

By confusing means and ends, Midas had made one of today’s commonest mistakes.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca was one of the richest men in the Roman Empire. Having risen from provincial origins to become tutor and chief adviser to the emperor Nero, he spent much of his life thinking about Midas’ mistake—and his own.

In his famous letters, this is what he tells his friend Lucilius.

The Dangers of Ambition

To be ambitious is to seek out achievement not for the sake of achievement itself, which is to be high-reaching, but for the sake of distinguishing ourselves from others. Were we the last person on earth, it would make little sense to be ambitious. ‘Ambition, luxury, and caprice need a stage; you will cure them if you keep them from being viewed.’

The dangers of ambition are threefold. First, like Midas, we should be wary of what we wish for. ‘In ordinary speech, we often say that we are overjoyed that one person was elected consul, or that another was married or his wife has given birth, events which, far from being causes of joy, are frequently the beginnings of future sorrow.’ In general, the less we have, the freer, and richer, we are.

Second, ambition is future-focused; to live with ambition is to live in fear and anxiety while discounting the moment that is before us. Because ambition ties us to externals (things that are beyond our control), and, ultimately, to other people, it leaves us subject, and vulnerable, to them. ‘Liberty does not come for free. If you value it highly, you must devalue everything else.’

Third, ambition is often destructive. Great leaders like Caesar, Pompey, and Marius who are driven by ambition are not even in control of themselves, and, as a result, end up doing terrible things: Marius led armies, but ambition led Marius. While these men were whirling down on the entire world, they themselves were in a whirl, just like tornadoes, which spin everything around because they themselves are spinning. No one becomes fortunate at the expense of another’s misfortune.

On Fame and Fortune

The purpose of work is not to further our own interests, even if it is only a house in the middle of the woods that we seek, but to help others and move humanity forward—which is, in any case, the best way of furthering ourselves. The highest wisdom is perhaps that it is not necessary to be ambitious to be high-reaching, or to feel alive. Indeed, it is often our conventional ambitions that are holding us down—even, that are ageing and killing us.

If it is fame that we seek, we will have to adopt the misguided values of the majority. ‘It is by skill in wrongdoing that one cultivates popular acclaim. You must make yourself like them: they will not approve of you unless they recognise you.’

Although we would be foolish to seek out fame, we might nonetheless fall into it by way of our good works, in which case we should utilise it for the greater good.

If it is merely wealth that we seek, we would do well to remember that wealth is not the answer to our problems, since there are many wealthy people who nonetheless feel wretched, and sometimes all the more wretched for being wealthy. Had Cicero had only one house, instead of twenty properties, he would, when exiled, have lost only the one house. And with fewer administrative worries, and less travelling between houses, he might have written more books.

We suppose that wealth increases our pleasures, but the greatest pleasures are in any case simple and easy to obtain if only our mind is open to them: eating, sleeping, bathing, seeing a friend, walking in a beautiful garden. If anything, wealth removes us from our pleasures by habituating us to luxury and shifting our focus onto itself. ‘He enjoys riches most who has least need of riches. While he is thinking about its increase, he is forgetting about its use.’ Midas could possess a golden rose, but he could no longer smell a rose.

On Proper Ends

Even allowing that wealth does increase our pleasures, pleasure is not the be-all and end-all, but, like wealth, distracts from our higher purpose, which is the work of the mind. ‘Maecenas would have provided a fine example of Roman rhetoric, had he not been weakened, even castrated, by his great wealth.’

Just as a horse ought to be judged on its speed rather than its harness, so a man ought to be judged on his mind rather than his property, because it is reason, and not wealth, that is the measure of a man.

Many people have wealth in the same way that people are said to have a fever when it is in fact the fever that has hold of us. If our mind is diseased, what does it matter whether our sickbed is made of wood or gold?

Stoics, by virtue of their virtue, are predisposed to wealth, and, even without seeking it—especially without seeking it—may end up being very wealthy. There is no harm in being wealthy and occasionally enjoying wealth, so long as our money smells good and we are not tied to it.

The real value of money is to buy time for the mind; the real value of fame is to disseminate its fruits. Fame and fortune should never be our masters, but only ever our slaves.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.

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