Dying Daily: Two Paradoxes, One Truth | Dying Every Day
Dying Every Day (Stoic Meditations) · May 23, 2026 · 11:02
Dying Every Day (Stoic Meditations)
Dying Every Day (Stoic Meditations) · May 23, 2026 · 11:02
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Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.
One Stoic text that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes—six ideas that seem like contradictions until you understand what the Stoics actually mean. In this Dying Daily, we sit with one of them: the claim that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness.
To test it, we go to September 9th, 1965—the moment Navy pilot James Stockdale ejected from his burning plane over North Vietnam. He had thirty seconds of freefall. His last thought in freedom: “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”
He endured seven and a half years at the Hanoi Hilton, sustained by a philosophy his captors could not break. This is the essence of the Stockdale Paradox and Cicero’s Paradox—two thousand years apart, yet conveying the same insight. [...]
#stoicism, #philsophy, #meditation, #selfimprovement
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