The Four Pillars of Stoicism
Acceptance, Awareness, Action, and Antifragility
If you understand acceptance, awareness, action, and antifragility you understand Stoicism.
There are a number of ways to understand the philosophy. From understanding the three Stoic disciplines to building everything on top of the principle of living according to nature to deriving Stoic principles from their view of the fundamentals physics, logics, and ethics.
Thinking about the philosophy from different vantage points has myriad of advantages, both practical and theoretical.
In this post, I’ll suggest a simple mnemonic. The four As: acceptance, awareness, action, and antifragility. I don’t claim that this is the 100% accurate way to understand the writings of the Stoic philosophers. But it is valuable frame to get at the most useful aspects of the a practical philosophy.
Stoic Acceptance
Stoic acceptance is about accepting what is outside of what is under one’s control. Human minds are prone towards agonizing over the future or the past. We can spend hours ruminating over completely fictional events. Seneca reminds us to stay in the present. What is out of our hands we can accept:
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence…
