On Holiday’s website, you can buy Stoic-themed pendants and prints and coins, along with a “premium display” for the Stoic coins featuring “a metallic mountain range and a silhouette of a man conquering that obstacle.” The tiny man pictured in the display carries an even tinier stick, for conquering purposes.Īnother option is the annual online workshop known as Stoic Week, a course that originated at the University of Exeter. And there was a Covid spike - sales jumped 37% in 2020 compared to 2019. Holiday’s “The Obstacle Is the Way” (2014) has sold more than 283,000 copies, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks most printed books sold in the United States. The most commercially successful of the modern Stoic interpreters might be Ryan Holiday, whose books bear blurbs from former defense secretary James Mattis and Matthew McConaughey. Or, as Seneca put it: “Disaster is virtue’s opportunity.”

The proper way to respond to catastrophe, the Stoics will tell you, is to perceive it as a training exercise. One of the premises of Stoicism is that it will help you assimilate horrible events with equanimity. Stoicism, which originated with the Hellenistic philosopher Zeno of Citium, has experienced a revival over the past decade or so, with another uptick in interest at the start of the pandemic, when books like Seneca’s “Letters From a Stoic” and Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” became more popular. I didn’t come to Stoic philosophy as a result of the construction site, but the site did offer an ideal beginner’s challenge: a persistently annoying but not materially threatening situation that was completely outside the bounds of my control. But the sound of a human scream is - perhaps for evolutionary reasons - difficult to tune out. I’ve long been able to mentally delete the whirring of forklifts and stacking of crates. Directly beneath my apartment, and audible through many holes in the floor (it’s an old building) is a warehouse that does a brisk traffic in cabbages and soybean oil. Specifically, there is a great deal of screaming - not screams of pain (thank God), but screams as a form of communication: about moving an object from one place to another, or telling someone to get out of the way of the moving object, or coordinating the arrival or departure of a vehicle containing more objects to move.īackground noise typically doesn’t bother me. every weekday a torrent of robust and erratic noise is transmitted through the thin walls of my apartment.

A six-story building is going up catty-corner to where I live, and from 7 a.m.

The obstacle is the way review