How Much Is Left? | The Stoic Protocol for Your Next Zoom Call

Most of what once existed is gone. The historian Jill Lepore puts it plainly: flesh decays, wood rots, walls fall in, books burn. Nature takes one toll, malice another. History is the study of what remains — letters, diaries, gravestones, coins, the ruins of buildings, abandoned Facebook pages. Some things survive by accident, like the one house still standing after a hurricane. But most survive because someone purposely kept them in a box, carried them to an attic, shelved them in a library, downloaded them to a server. This archive is maddeningly uneven and unfair, but we are lucky that Marcus Aurelius's Meditations survived. Someone kept that in a box. Seneca's writings survived. Stories about Cato, fragments from Zeno. The tradition of Stoicism continued almost without interruption, even as the buildings crumbled and wars destroyed. And in a way, what is left of Stoicism today is more robust than it was in the ancient world. More people are participating in it now than perhaps ever existed in human history combined.

The Stoic Protocol for a Zoom Call