How to Be a Stoic
I came to Stoicism through difficulty
Not through a university course. Not through a bestseller. Through the kind of season where the ordinary tools stop working — and you go looking for something older and steadier.
Who I am
A student of ancient philosophy, not a master of it.
My name is Ricardo Pereira, and I am the writer behind How to Be a Stoic. I do not hold a philosophy degree. I have no institutional credentials and no public persona to protect. What I have is several years of reading the Stoics carefully — Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca — and doing my honest best to apply what they taught to a life that is, like most lives, full of ordinary difficulties and occasional real ones.
I write in the first person because this work is personal. Every essay on this site began as a question I was genuinely trying to answer. Every practice I describe is one I have attempted — and often failed at — before writing about it. I have no interest in performing wisdom I do not possess.
I built this site because I could not find the resource I was looking for: somewhere that took the original texts seriously, resisted the urge to turn Stoicism into motivational content, and still made it genuinely useful for a person trying to live well in the present century.
So I made it myself. This is what it turned into.
“First say to yourself what you would be;Epictetus — Discourses III.23
and then do what you have to do.”
How I got here
The path was not planned.
I did not set out to build a website about Stoicism. I set out to understand why some people carry difficulty with grace — and why I, so often, did not.
The difficulty that changed everything
There was a period in my life — a confluence of loss, uncertainty, and the particular exhaustion of feeling like I was reacting to everything rather than choosing anything — that made me start reading differently. Not for entertainment. For survival. That is when I found the Stoics.
What the Stoics gave me
Not comfort. The Stoics are not comfortable. What they gave me was a framework for locating myself inside a hard situation — a way to distinguish what I could and could not control, and to stop pouring energy into the second category. That alone changed the texture of everything.
Why I started writing
I began writing to understand what I was reading more deeply. The discipline of putting an idea into precise language reveals every place you have fooled yourself about understanding it. Over time, those private notes became essays. The essays became this site.
Why I keep writing
Because the practice is ongoing and genuinely difficult, and because I hear from readers who are walking through their own versions of what I walked through. The correspondence I receive reminds me that this work is not solitary — that philosophy, at its best, is a conversation across time and difficulty.
My Vision
To help one person live more freely —
and let that be enough.
I do not write for scale. I write for the reader who finds this site at two in the morning searching for something solid. My vision is simple: that this work reaches the people who need it, when they need it, and offers them not an answer but a steadier way of holding the question.
If this site helps you think more clearly, endure more gracefully, or simply feel less alone in your attempt to live well — then it has done everything I ever hoped it would.
My Mission
To translate ancient wisdom into something you can actually use today.
To read the Stoics with genuine care, to test their ideas against real experience, and to write about both — honestly, without simplifying what is hard.
There is no shortage of content about Stoicism. Much of it is shallow: stripped of its depth, sanded smooth, turned into motivational slogans for social media. That is not the Stoicism Marcus Aurelius practised in his tent before battle. It is not the Stoicism Epictetus developed in slavery. It is not what Seneca wrote in the final months before his death.
My mission is to go back to the source — to read what they actually wrote, to engage with the difficulty of it, and to write about the experience of trying to live by it. Not to make it easier than it is. To make it reachable — which is a different thing entirely.
I want this site to be the place you come to when you are ready to take the philosophy seriously, and ready to do the work it asks of you.
My Values
What I stand for — and what I will not do
These are not aspirations. They are the principles that govern every piece of writing I publish — including the ones where living by them cost me something.
Honesty before comfort
I will not soften a Stoic teaching to make it more appealing. If Epictetus is demanding — and he is — I will say so. If I have tried something and it did not work, I will report that honestly. This site has no interest in making you feel good about ideas that are not earning that feeling.
Depth over frequency
I write slowly and deliberately. I would rather publish one careful piece a month than four careless ones a week. The pressure to produce content constantly is antithetical to the kind of reading and thinking this philosophy demands. I refuse that pressure — here, at least, the Stoics would approve.
Practice tested against theory
I do not write about Stoic exercises I have not attempted. The evening review, the negative visualisation, voluntary discomfort — I have done these, failed at them, returned to them, and written about all of it. Philosophy that has not met real life is philosophy I cannot honestly recommend.
Respect for the reader
I write for adults who are willing to sit with a hard idea. I do not over-explain, condescend, or wrap every piece in reassurance. You are here because you sense there is something serious in this tradition. I trust that instinct, and I write accordingly — as one person working through this, to another.
“He suffers more than necessary who suffersSeneca — Letters to Lucilius
before it is necessary.”
My Philosophy
How I approach this work — and my own life
The question I return to
“Is what is happening to me something I have any control over — and if not, why am I treating it as though I do?”
— My version of the dichotomy of control
The philosophical tradition I am working within is classical Stoicism — not the modern self-help adaptation, but the original systematic philosophy of the Hellenistic world, brought to maturity in Rome and expressed most powerfully in the writings of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca.
I hold this tradition with two commitments in tension: fidelity to what it actually teaches and honesty about what it is like to attempt it as a real person in a real life. The Stoics were not writing for scholars. They were writing for someone trying to get through the day with their character intact.
The following convictions guide everything I write here — and everything I try, with mixed success, to practise:
- i What happens to me is not the point. What I do with it is. This is not a counsel of passivity — it is a radical reorientation of where the work of living actually takes place. The event is not the problem. My response to it is where I either grow or contract.
- ii Virtue is the only thing I can call entirely mine. Health, reputation, financial security, other people’s behaviour — all of this is precarious. Only the quality of my choices is genuinely and fully mine. This shifts everything about what I aim for.
- iii The work is daily, not occasional. Character is not built in extraordinary moments. It is built in the thousand small moments when nobody is watching and nothing heroic is required. The morning reflection, the pause before reacting, the honest evening review — these are the practice, and they compound.
- iv I will fail, and that is expected. The Stoics did not teach that perfect equanimity is achievable — they taught that it is worth aiming for. I fall short constantly. The point is not to achieve the ideal but to keep orienting toward it, and to learn something honest from every failure.
- v I am not the centre of anything. Stoicism insists on our place in a larger whole — that we are not isolated individuals but nodes in a web of obligation, reason, and shared humanity. Holding that perspective does not come naturally to me. That is precisely why I keep returning to it.
Now — begin where you are
The Stoics were not interested in ideal conditions. Neither am I. Neither, I suspect, are you.