Stoic Role Ethics: Stop Trying To Be Everything

The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks · Jun 23, 2023 · 5m · transcript

Trying to be everything to everyone is a fast route to feeling stretched and resentful. The Stoics had a cleaner idea, role ethics: at any given moment you are playing a specific role, parent, friend, colleague, citizen, and the work is to play that one well rather than all of them at once.

In this episode I unpack how thinking in terms of roles clarifies your duties and quietly lowers your stress, and how the four cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, give you a standard for playing each role honestly. It also makes it easier to accept the edges of your control, since…