How Should I Live?
This is the question that begins everything. Not how to succeed, not how to be happy, not how to optimize a life, but how to live rightly. Every serious moral tradition, from Athens to the Warring States to the Roman forum, has placed this question at the center and refused to let it go.
The answers are not the same across traditions. What the Stoics meant by the good life and what the Taoists meant are genuinely different things. But the question they were both answering is the same question. That is why it is worth asking them together.
The essays collected here approach this question from different angles, through different voices, without arriving at a single answer. The point is not resolution. The point is that the question becomes sharper with each attempt.
The Stranger in the Mirror
Socrates told us to know ourselves. Marcus Aurelius spent a lifetime trying. Between the injunction and the practice lies everything difficult about the examined life.
Why Seneca Still Matters
Two thousand years ago, a man wrote letters about time, distraction, and the life we keep postponing. He was writing about us.
The Unfinished Question
Socrates and Montaigne, separated by two thousand years, both refused to close the question of the examined life. The refusal was the point.
What the Stoics and the Taoists Both Noticed About Stillness
Marcus Aurelius counseled the retreating mind. Lao Tzu wrote that the usefulness of a wheel is its empty center. Separated by five centuries and thousands of miles, they arrived at something very similar. But the paths they took are not the same.
Marcus Aurelius and Chuang Tzu on the Shape of Freedom
Marcus thought freedom was won by detachment from external things. Chuang Tzu thought it came from dissolving the self that needed detachment in the first place. The disagreement changes everything about how each tradition approaches what it means to live well.
For those who want to move from reading to practice, the Examined Journal journaling tool is built for this kind of sustained self-examination.
Explore the tools →