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.
A student of ancient philosophy, not a master of it.
Ricardo Pereira
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.