When people face extreme situations, there is a body of evidence to show that Stoicism helps. Seneca faced his death with calm. Marcus Aurelius faced war with equanimity. Musonius Rufus faced his multiple exiles without complaining.

If we fast forward to modern times, we have the example of James Stockdale facing long years as a prisoner of war with the help of Stoicism. We have Dr. Rhonda Cornum’s account of how she used Stoic principles to survive and move beyond a sexual assault.

Clearly, Stoicism has helped many people to face extreme conditions like death, imprisonment, exile, and assault. But can Stoicism affect our daily life?

We believe it can. One of the aims of THE STOIC magazine and TheStoicGym.com is to help keep awareness of Stoic principles top of mind. We try to do this by constantly publishing articles that discuss how Stoic prinicples may be applied in our daily life. Our hope is that constantly reminding ourselves of the principles will make them available when we need them.

There is not one single Stoic solution to each and every problem we face. The same problem may have many Stoic solutions. Neither can we think of solutions to all problem we might possibly face. However, we can think of some common problems we face and see how they can be approached from a Stoic perspective.

So we asked our panel of writers to tell us how exactly they would use Stoic principles in their daily life. We left it for them to think of an everyday situation and then say how they would see it from a Stoic perspective. As I said, these are not canned Stoic solutions for our everyday problems. Their purpose is to train our minds from a Stoic perspective so, when we face a everyday problem the next itme, we are less likely to be overwhelmed by it and more likely to look for a Stoic solution, keeping our peace and equanimity.

The problems we face can either be “trivial” (for example, how to deal with traffic jams) or “profound” (such as, what should we do when bad things happen to others).

What do you do...

• When you have bodily pain?
• When your health is challenged?
• When thingss don’t go according to plan? • When you are stuck in traffic?
• When your perceptions are coloured by your past and you fail to see what is happening now?
• When bad things happen to others?
• When we fail to be present?

These are some of the problems we come across in our daily lives and we don’t always know how to deal with them. We present our contributors’ thoughts on these issues. We hope you find them useful.

---