Three ancient mind exercises for processing and subliming bad news.
Imagine: Your house has been burgled. You’ve been fired. Your partner cheated or walked out on you. You’ve been diagnosed with a life-changing condition…
Bad news can leave us in a state of dread and despair. It seems like our whole world is falling apart, almost as if we’re being driven into the ground. We fear the very worst and cannot get it out of our mind, or gut. Often, there are other emotions mangled in, like anger, guilt, despair, betrayal, and love.
Bad news: we’ve all had it, and the worst is yet to come.
So, how best to cope?
I’m going to give you three cognitive strategies, or mind exercises, that I picked up from the Stoic philosophers—who, in the second century, could count the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, among their followers.
All three strategies aim, in one way or another, at generating perspective. While reading, hold a recent piece of bad news in the front of your mind, and consider how the strategies might or might not apply to your bad news.
Contextualization
Try to frame the bad news, to put it into its proper context. Think about all the good things in your life, including those that have been and those that are yet to come. Remind yourself of all the strengths and resources—the friends, facilities, and faculties—that you can draw upon in your time of need. Imagine how things could be much, much worse—and how for some people they actually are. Your house may have been burgled. Yes, you lost some valuables and it’s all such a huge hassle. But you still have your health, your job, your partner… Bad things are bound to hit us now and then, and it can only be a matter of time before they hit us again. In many cases, they are just the flip side of the good things that we enjoy. You got burgled, because you had a house and valuables. You lost a great relationship, because you had one in the first place. In that much, many a bad thing is no more than the removal or reversal of a good one.
Negative visualization
Now focus on the bad news itself. What’s the worst that could happen, and is that really all that bad? Now that you’ve got the worst out of the way, what’s the best possible outcome? And what’s the most likely outcome? Imagine that someone is threatening to sue you. The worst possible outcome is that you lose the case and suffer all the entailing cost, stress, and emotional and reputational hurt. Though it’s unlikely, you might even do time in prison (it has happened to some, and a few, like Bertrand Russell, did rather well out of it). But the most likely outcome is that you reach some sort of out-of-court settlement. And the best possible outcome is that you win the case, or better still, it gets dropped.
Transformation
Finally, try to transform your bad news into something positive, or into something that has positive aspects. Your bad news may represent a learning or strengthening experience, or act as a wake-up call, or force you to reassess your priorities. At the very least, it offers a window into the human condition and an opportunity to exercise dignity and self-control. Maybe you lost your job: time for a holiday and a promotion, or a career change, or the freedom and fulfilment of self-employment. Maybe your partner cheated on you. Even so, you feel sure that he or she still loves you, that there is still something there. Perhaps you can even bring yourself to look at it from his or her perspective. Yes, of course it’s painful, but it may also be an opportunity to forgive, to build a closer intimacy, to re-launch your relationship—or to go out and find a more fulfilling one. You’ve been diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Though it’s terrible news, it’s also the chance to get the support and treatment that you need, to take control, to fight back, to look at life and your relationships from another, richer perspective.
A Taoist story for the road
There’s a Taoist story about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. “Such terrible news!” said a neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The next day, the horse returned with six wild horses. “Such wonderful news!” exclaimed the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The day after that, the farmer’s son tried to tame one of the wild horses but got thrown off and broke a leg. “Such terrible news!” cried the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, biting into a peach. A week later, war broke out: thanks to his broken leg, the farmer’s son managed to escape military conscription. “It all worked out really well in the end,” said the neighbour, “such great luck!”
“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, rolling his eyes.
Neel Burton is author of Growing from Depression, which is currently free to download from his website bookstore.
The Angel Standing in the Sun, by JMW Turner (cropped)
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.
The Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) is the master of the ‘consolation’, a letter written for the express purpose of comforting someone who has been bereaved. Seneca wrote at least three consolations, to Marcia, to Polybius, and to Helvia. In the Consolation to Helvia, he comforts his own mother Helvia on ‘losing’ him to exile—an unusual case, and literary innovation, of the lamented consoling the lamenter.
The emperor Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE) had at least 14 children with his wife Faustina, but only four daughters and one unfortunate son, Commodus, outlived their parents. In the Meditations, Marcus likens his children to leaves, and paraphrases Homer in the Iliad:
Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines.
The image is deliberately impersonal. To a parent, the death of a child is a profound loss; but to nature, it is no more extraordinary than the falling of a leaf. The Stoic challenge is, somehow, to hold both perspectives at once.
Marcus was a Stoic, and would have known, at least in principle, how to cope with grief, loss, and bereavement. But if Seneca could have consoled Marcus on the loss of his children, and could only have told him three things, what would he have told him?
A Life Can Be Sufficient
First, Marcus, remember that life is given to us with death as a precondition. Some people die sooner than others, but life, on a cosmic scale, is so short that, really, it makes no difference. Even children are known to die—indeed, they often do—and these, Marcus, simply happened to be your own. A human life, however long or short, or great or small, is of little historical and no cosmic consequence. Since a life can never be long or great enough, the most that it can be is sufficient, and we would do better to concentrate on what that might mean. A short life may be complete, just as a long life may be squandered, or drag on for far too long. It is not how many years we have, but what we make of those years, or the shape of those years.
Is Death Really Such an Evil?
Second, it may be that death is in fact preferable to life. Life is full of suffering, and grieving only adds to it, whereas death is the permanent release from every possible pain. Indeed, many people who have died—think only of our friend Cicero—would have died happier if they had died sooner. If we do not pity the unborn, why should we pity the dead, who at least had the benefit, if benefit it is, of having existed? The unborn cry out as soon as they are delivered into the world, but to the dead we never have to block our ears. If weep we must, it is not over death, but the whole of life, that we should weep. Marcus, you may find this bleak, or me brutal. But if death is a loss to those who remain, it does not follow that it is a misfortune to the departed—and we should not deepen our grief by assuming it is so. When King Midas compelled the wise Silenus to reveal what was best for human beings, he replied: ‘Not to be born; and, failing that, to die soon.’
The People We Love Are Only on Loan
Third, we should treat the people we love not as permanent possessions but as temporary loans from fortune. When, in the evening, you kiss your wife and children goodnight, reflect on the possibility that they, and you, might never wake up. In the morning when you kiss them goodbye, reflect on the possibility that they, or you, might never come home. That way you’ll be better prepared for their eventual loss, and, what’s more, savour and sublime whatever time you spend with them—and, in that way, lead them to love you more.
If you do lose a loved one, do not grieve, or no more than is appropriate, or no more than they would have wanted you to, but be grateful for the moments that you shared, and consider how much poorer your life would have been if they had never entered into it.
Sometimes, like now, Marcus, our grieving is recent or prominent, but in truth we are permanently grieving. We accumulate losses—people, places, possibilities, former selves. Much of that grief simply recedes, only to resurface more softly in our quieter moments.
Everything leaves us, and if they do not, we leave them.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
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 26 July 2026.
We spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves marginally more comfortable. The Stoics, Cynics, and Spartans believed that this pursuit of comfort could pose a trap. Their remedy was occasional voluntary hardship.
In the deep winter, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BCE) 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?’
Like their predecessors the Cynics, and like the Spartans, the Stoics greatly valued hardship, albeit on a more modest or moderate scale. They believed that we should occasionally practise poverty or put ourselves through mild hardship, and this for several reasons:
First, to discover what we can do without, and reduce our fear of losing those things. In his Letters, Seneca advises Lucilius: ‘Set yourself a period of some days in which you will be content with very small amounts of food, and the cheapest kinds, and with coarse clothing, and say to yourself, ‘Is this what I was afraid of?’’
Second, to be reminded that simple things, such as bread and olive oil, or a good night’s sleep, can be just as enjoyable and profitable as any great banquet (if not more so), and thus that pleasure is both readily available and highly transferable.
Third, to better reflect upon our true goals, or to work towards them. ‘If you want to have time for your mind,’ says Seneca, ‘you must either be poor or resemble the poor… One cannot study without frugality, and frugality is just voluntary poverty.’
Here are six more advantages of self-imposed hardship, according to the Stoics:
To increase our appreciation and enjoyment of the things that we normally enjoy.
To break from our normal routine, and reinvigorate our minds while exercising our freedom.
To be prepared for future hardship, which, unless we are suddenly struck dead, is all but a certainty.
To be convinced that the greater part of our suffering lies not in fact but in our attitude towards it.
To practise self-discipline, or test our fortitude.
To empathise with less fortunate people, and people from the past.
In addition, self-imposed poverty and hardship can also have more mundane benefits, such as losing weight, saving time or money, and making yourself popular by seeming like one of the people.
Finally, all these motives are in themselves a source of pride and pleasure of a different kind. ‘Do not,’ says Marcus Aurelius, ‘lament misfortune. Instead, rejoice that you are the sort of man who can undergo misfortune without letting it upset you.’
Seneca does us the favour of putting self-imposed hardship into radical perspective when he says: ‘Armies have endured being deprived of everything for another person’s domination, so who will hesitate to put up with poverty when the aim is to liberate the mind from fits of madness?’
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
Alexander the Great before Diogenes the Cynic: power to truth.
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 12 August 2026.
Free speech is not merely a political right, but a condition of freedom of thought—and of becoming fully human. Read what happens to the mind when it is denied.
Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Greek means something like ‘free speech’ or ‘full expression’. In his ethical treatise, the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) presents parrhesia as a trait of the ‘great-souled’ man, or megalopsychos.
The Greeks did not conceive of parrhesia as a right or privilege, but as a virtue or perfection, as well as a moral and social obligation. When Alexander the Great approached Diogenes in Athens and asked whether there was anything he might do for him, Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my sunlight.’
Living in a much more oral society, and having but one word, logos, for both speech and reason, the Greeks understood the close connexion between freedom of speech and freedom of thought.
The connexion runs deeper than might first appear. Speech is not merely the expression of existing thoughts. It is also one of the principal means by which thoughts are formed in the first place. By putting an idea into words, we give it shape and solidity; by submitting it to public scrutiny, we expose it to verification and contradiction; and by defending, modifying, or abandoning it, we teach ourselves what we think. Rhetoric, at its best, is not merely the art of persuading other people, but part of the process by which we reason with them, and with ourselves—hence the tradition of sometimes writing two speeches, one in favour of a position, and the other against.
In Athens, parrhesia underpinned the democracy. For a democracy to flourish, or even merit the name, citizens must be free, able, and willing to speak their mind. Free speech not only enables democracy, but also legitimises its laws and protects it from aspiring tyrants. Undermine free speech, and you undermine democracy—which is why free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Undermine free speech, and you undermine human dignity, which is why free speech is enshrined in Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
‘Free speech’ is something of a misnomer. It includes not only speech but also forms of expression, such as writing a book, drawing a cartoon, or burning a flag. Taking inspiration from the French libre expression, we might more accurately and comprehensively refer to ‘free speech’ as ‘freedom of expression’.
Today, many people, especially younger people, believe that freedom of expression can conflict with minority rights, and ought to be curbed to promote a more inclusive society. Is this argument worth entertaining?
The Freedom to Think
Let’s begin by looking more closely at the benefits of free speech. Often, it is by articulating it to others that we work out our position on a particular issue. And in arriving at our opinion, it helps if we are being encouraged, assisted, and challenged—which is why tutorials and a common table are (or ought to be) an important part of university life.
The same principle operates on the scale of entire societies. Intellectual cultures become sophisticated not simply by accumulating information, but by permitting disagreement. An argument produces a counterargument, the counterargument exposes a weakness, and the original argument either collapses or becomes stronger and more subtle. Socrates made a method of this dialectical process, asking awkward questions in gymnasia and marketplaces until received but misguided ideas about courage, justice, and virtue began to unravel.
Even if an opinion is untrue, it may still serve to clarify or reinforce the truth. Moreover, many misguided opinions contain aspects of the truth. Plato himself doubted his Theory of Forms, which nonetheless remains of immense value. Rousseau, who pushed back against the Enlightenment, may have been wrong to idealise the state of nature, but was right to point out that progress also has downsides. Even when securely established, a living truth risks stultifying into a dead dogma if it is not regularly challenged.
This is one reason censorship can have consequences far beyond the particular opinions it suppresses. When certain things cannot safely be said, people learn to avoid not only certain statements, but also certain questions, associations, and lines of enquiry, corrupting the processes that make complex, sophisticated thought possible. That would be why Nazi ideology could take off without ever being grounded, and why Soviet art criticism under Stalin was seldom very enlightening.
Censorship, in other words, does not merely prevent us from saying what we think. In time, it can prevent us from thinking what we might otherwise have thought. We become, as it were, lame human beings, something less than fully human.
Censorship, No-Platforming, and Cancel Culture
So far, we have been talking about the kind of constructive, co-operative discourse that graces academia. But are resentful bigots also entitled to freedom of expression? Or to put it more neutrally, do the intolerant also warrant tolerance?
If bigots were unable to air their opinions, or simply denied a platform, these and they would go unchallenged. Feeling vindicated and persecuted, the bigots would recast themselves as tellers of uncomfortable truths, and, in time, recruit followers. Feeling unheard and unrepresented, this growing mass may resort to violence and destruction, including sabotage of the political system.
Censoring bigots also risks giving their opinions greater appeal and publicity. Prosecuting David Irving for Holocaust denial put him onto the front pages, and turned him from obscure and discredited historian into a free speech martyr. Banning The Satanic Verses and issuing a fatwa to kill the book’s author and publishers turned the book into a cultural icon.
Conversely, those who engage in ‘cancel culture’ are likely to invite resentment and, in so doing, undermine their cause—to say nothing of the extra-judicial and often disproportionate damage done to the reputations and careers of their targets. In such a climate of fear, self-censorship, even by well-meaning academics and liberals, makes it difficult to calmly and rationally discuss sensitive topics such as immigration and transgender rights.
And here the distinction between free speech and free thought begins to break down. If an academic has an idea but dare not voice it, the idea cannot be tested against the opinions and objections of colleagues. If a student has a doubt but dare not express it, the doubt remains inchoate. If an entire culture learns to avoid certain questions, it may eventually lose not only the answers but even the questions themselves. This is, of course, what some people would like. But to forbid a question is to forbid whatever truths might lie around and beyond it.
Policing Free Speech
Of course, we do already police free speech. In Schenck v. United States (1919), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously argued that free speech does not extend to falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. John Stuart Mill (d. 1873) drew the line at incitement to physical violence.
But beyond this (and a few other cases such as libel, threats, and false advertising), where might we redraw the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable? Socrates, Christ, and Giordano Bruno all lost their lives expressing what came to be regarded as seminal ideas.
Once we had redrawn the line, would the temptation not be to keep redrawing it? The Spanish Inquisition began as one thing and slid into quite another. And it mattered little if some of the inquisitors were well-intentioned.
There is a deeper difficulty. The people empowered to decide which opinions are too dangerous, offensive, or mistaken to be expressed must themselves hold opinions, and their opinions are no more guaranteed to be correct than anybody else’s. To censor an opinion is therefore not to remove judgement from public discourse, but to privilege one judgement over another—and, in many cases, to protect it from the very criticism that might correct it.
Today, the public square has moved online, and it is unaccountable tech giants, rather than the church and state, that are being expected to police free speech—when they might simply begin by ensuring that each individual user is genuine and accountable.
As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The best response to a bad opinion is not censorship, but good argument and rhetoric. And yes, this might sometimes include mockery and derision and causing offence—although we should not go out of our way to cause offence, as with ‘hate speech’. Our focus ought to be on the facts, and not on the characteristics (although maybe the character) of our opponent.
This brings us back to parrhesia. To the Greeks, speaking freely required more than permission. It required courage: the willingness to say what one believed to be true despite the possibility of ridicule, retribution, or mere umbrage. Socrates exercised that freedom in the face of death; Diogenes before a bloodthirsty king.
In a society in which suffering is medicalised, there is a tendency to conflate psychological offence with physical violence, with the implication that retaliatory physical violence might be justified. But ‘free speech’ includes the right not to listen. Taking offence, as the Stoics insisted, is always a choice. Offence exists not in the insult but in our reaction to it, and our reactions are completely within our control. It is unreasonable to expect a boor to be anything but a boor; if we take offence at his bad behaviour, we have only ourself to blame.
Diogenes called parrhesia the most beautiful thing in the world because freedom of speech is more than the freedom to make a noise. It is the freedom to question, to contradict, to make mistakes, to change our minds, and to find out who we are and who we might be. Without it, rhetoric falls into propaganda, truth into dogma, and thought itself is strangled.
The Stoic dog and cart: we can run willingly alongside the wheel of fate, or resist and be dragged along anyway.
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 14 August 2026.
The Stoic revival has picked up pace in recent years, with people looking for something more substantial than the material hedonism that has come to fill the space vacated by the retreat of organised religion.
Although more expressly rational, Stoicism has been compared to Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, for being based on fluid concepts and flexible principles rather than blind faith and rigid dogma.
But the similarities do not end there.
Although Stoicism and Buddhism emerged at different times and a continent apart, they repeatedly arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about desire, attachment, suffering, and the good life.
Desire and Attachment
According to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the cause of all suffering is desire, and the natural way to eliminate this suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. The first division of the Noble Eightfold Path is ‘right view’, or maintaining perspective on reality.
Similarly, the Stoics taught that we ought at every moment to be rational. Unfortunately, we are too readily waylaid from reason by unwise attachments and the destructive emotions to which they give rise. These attachments dangle the promise of pleasure or happiness but really offer only slavery—whereas, if only we could see it, nothing leads to pleasure and happiness as surely as reason and self-control.
In the words of Marcus Aurelius, which are all the more remarkable for coming from a Roman emperor:
Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river… Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.
The language differs, but the insight is much the same. We suffer not only because things change, but because we demand that they remain as they are. For both traditions, the path to freedom is not to exert greater control over the world, but to loosen the world’s hold over us.
God and Fate
Stoic physics is indebted to Plato’s Timaeus, in which the philosopher Timaeus claims that God’s creation is itself a god. Human souls, being fashioned from the inferior residue of the world soul, are aligned with the will of God. But once implanted into a body, they are overwhelmed by sensations and affections, which they can only overcome through appropriate nurture and education.
Like Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, Stoicism rejects a separate divine sphere, arguing instead that God is infused in all things, including in us, who therefore share in His nature. We are, as the Stoic Epictetus often reminds us, a part or extension of God:
In conversation, exercise, discourse—do you remember that it is God you are feeding, God you are exercising? You carry God around with you and don’t know it, poor fool.
The Stoics were essentially pantheists, like Baruch Spinoza, who thought of God and creation as one and the same thing. And like that other great seventeenth-century philosopher, GW Leibniz, they believed that the universe is a rationally ordered whole and that everything that happens within it, if only we could see it, happens for the best of possible reasons.
Hence, our fate has already been determined: Instead of rebelling against it, we should be content to play the role that has been assigned to us. We are, said Zeno (the founder of Stoicism), like a dog tethered to a cart: the wise person runs smoothly alongside, whereas the fool struggles and strains but is dragged along anyway.
This is more subtle than simple fatalism. The dog cannot determine where the cart is going, but it can determine how it makes the journey. Its freedom consists in running willingly alongside the wheel of fate, instead of exhausting and injuring itself in futile resistance.
This echoes the Hindu concept of dharma, which can be translated, loosely, as ‘duty’. When Krishna addresses the reluctant warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he is not persuading him to fight so much as telling him that he is going to have to fight regardless:
Fettered by your own task, which springs from your nature, you will inevitably do what you in your folly do not want to do.
Evil and Liberation
Chrysippus, who succeeded Zeno and Cleanthes at the head of the Stoa, argued that evil is the inevitable consequence of nature’s goodness. For instance, many of the bones in the human skull are light and thin, improving it overall but by the same token leaving it vulnerable to blows. Evil presents us, as it did the hero Hercules, with opportunities to test and hone ourselves—and also a motive, for what would it mean to be good in a world without evil?
In Samkhya-Yoga, the world was created to purify souls and consciousness by providing them with experience and, in time, liberation. To put this more poetically, the world was created to show consciousness to itself. The doctrines of karma and moksha (liberation) could not hold in a world without evil.
Salvation, for the Stoic as for the Hindu, is to embrace life to the point of accepting fate, and so to become as one with the world. In Indian terms, it is to achieve moksha, that is, liberation from maya (illusion), dukkha (suffering), and samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth).
In the Encheiridion, Epictetus compares life to a landfall during a much longer sea voyage back to our homeland, and warns us not to get so caught up by the fruits and flowers as to forget about the ship.
For all their theoretical differences, the traditions keep arriving at the same practical conclusion: do not mistake the stopping place for the final destination.
Cosmopolitanism
Philosophers debate whether karma theory is a firm basis for morality or just an appeal to naked self-interest.
One way around this problem is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions so that the system becomes impossible to game. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome.
For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.
The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others—so that helping others is the same as helping oneself.
The Stoics, too, believed that all human beings form part of a single organism. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we too each have a role to play in society, even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.
‘Remember,’ says Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’
To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.
Both Buddhism and Stoicism conclude that the good life cannot be lived for oneself alone. Buddhism arrives at this conclusion through the dissolution of the boundary between self and other, Stoicism through the oneness of humanity. Although the working out is different, the conclusion is the same.
Time and again, Buddhists and Stoics begin from different assumptions, yet converge on the same human truths: that everything changes, that attachment enslaves us, that resistance compounds suffering, that the good life cannot be lived for oneself alone, and that the boundaries we draw around ourselves are much more porous than they may seem.
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