Building Resilience

Around two millennia ago, a Roman emperor sat in a tent on a freezing frontier, writing away to himself. During his reign, the Antonine plague surrounded him, which may have killed up to ten million people across the empire, possibly extending to his co-emperor. Fighting a war he hadn’t wanted against Germanic tribes along the Danube. His trusted general, Avidius Cassius, had declared himself emperor in a betrayal that must have cut deep. On top of this, he buried at least eight kids from the thirteen his wife bore.

His writing came from lived experience, backed by philosophically minded mentors, and all those personal notes were never meant to be published. Within them, we see repetition, almost contradictory and banal remarks. Because this wasn’t philosophy designed for an audience, it was a man talking himself down off a ledge night after night. We call them - Meditations now, and they are selling by the truckload. Usually to people needing guidance, building a business, or going through something difficult.

I’m sure Marcus would be in absolute bewilderment at the gym bros he’s inspired to get their PB on their bench press, and at the number of sayings he’s got credit for, but never actually wrote being shared online. A certain younger Irish Stoic is guilty of these misquotes at least once or twice in his time.

All this should tell us something, not that Marcus had all the answers, far from it. But the core problems for humans in this time period haven’t changed as much as we think.

Right now - as of August 2026, the anxiety about the future of AI is bubbling underneath the surface of almost every industry. The same anxiety a Luddite weaver felt in 1811 watching stocking frames arrive. And to add to this the fear of illness, redundancy — of a future you can’t see and control. What is a fundamental problem, and is new, is the little screens in your pocket, around the clock - seeking your attention - with actuarial precision. A frightened person scrolls much longer than a calm one.

This is a long essay about resilience. How you can build it, using ideas that have survived twenty centuries of fires, raids, climate changes, empires and now 21st century technology and unhinged productivity gurus. Modern psychology has since confirmed, refined and expanded why these teachings and techniques work. The ancients weren’t just poetically right. In many cases they were mechanistically right.

Let’s dive in.

To my favourite Philosopher, Epictetus. A slave born in what’s now Türkiye, around 50AD. His name epiktetos means “acquired one”. He was lame as a result of a beating from an early master; one account has him calmly warning his master mid-torture that his leg was about to break, and when it did happen; he simply replied: “I told you.” Even though the story is probably embellished, the message remains poignant.

If there was anyone who had a right to conclude that life was unfair, and surrender to a certain attitude or mental capacity — it was him. Instead, his teachings later in life start with one brutal, liberating sentence in the opening line of his Enchiridion: some things are up to us, and some things are not. Epictetus was so nonchalant about the whole living well thing, that he didn’t even bother writing anything down, and we are able to gain his wisdom thanks to his student Arrian. I wonder if he ever called Arrian out in seminar for having his head in the books?

Back to the above; what is up to us: our judgements, our decisions, our responses, our values, our effort. Not up to us: our health, our reputation, our body, the economy, the weather, other people’s opinions, the past, and let’s be honest — most of what happens in daily life.

This sounds alarmingly simple, to the point of even being useless. I’d consider this principle a form of discipline, and one you’ll often fail at. The best approach is to run a daily audit - thinking about where your worry went today, or yesterday. If you’re anxious about current circumstances.

“What will my job look like in five years, or will my industry even exist?”, is one I hear the most.

The move here is not to stop caring about such questions, but instead to relocate the effort. You won’t control whether your industry gets automated, however something you can control is having the openness to spend an hour or two working on learning the new tools or automations. You can increase your skillset, keep your network warm, and cut costs where appropriate to increase financial security.

Julian Rotter in the 1950s coined this as a locus of control. With an internal locus of control, you can focus on what influences you. In theory, this can lower bouts of anxiety, provide faster recovery from setbacks, and promote better health behaviours, as well as more persistence. If you focus your attention on the uncontrollable, you get the worst of both worlds. All the fear without a single drop of leverage.

Martin Seligman’s work on learned helplessness showed the extreme cases. Organisms that learn their actions don’t matter, simply stop acting. Even when circumstances change and the action would work again. Depression, in one influential framing is partially this. The generalised conviction that nothing you do makes a difference.

The Dichotomy of control is the remedy against this very conviction. It is not resignation, or the misreading that people dismiss Stoicism as passive in nature. It’s a form of triage, asking of every single concern. Is there a handle on this I can actually grip? If yes, grip it, today. If no, put it down.

One refinement I’d like to add once again, is to propose a trichotomy: things fully in your control, things fully out of it, and the huge middle category — things you can influence but not determine. These might include your general health, a job application, relationships, and how many pull ups you can eventually do.

I didn’t come up with that on my own, by the way. It’s borrowed from Bill Irvine’s work. But I fully agree with adding this addendum to Epictetus’ original thought for the modern world.

For that middle category then, we borrow an idea any athlete will recognise: internalise the goal. Don’t set your heart on winning the game, which depends on the opponent, the referee, and a little bit of luck. Set it on playing the best match you’re capable of, which depends on you, and you alone. You will notice this is exactly what a good sports psychologist teaches, and exactly what process-over-outcome thinking means in any craft. Epictetus and others got there first by about 1,900 years.

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My guy, Epictetus - cut through the slabs of ancient texts and put this concept into one succinct line, "men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them." Albert Ellis built out Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) on this very notion, and between that and Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy (CBT), we get arguably the most evidence-backed psychotherapies in existence, with hundreds of randomised trials behind them.

A central technique of Beck's being;

1. Catch the automatic thought,

2. Write it down,

3. Interrogate it against the legit evidence,

4. And generate the alternative.

This is Socratic-level (yes, that Socrates) questioning applied to your own internal dialogue. The lineage of these methods isn’t a coincidence or a marketing flourish. It’s the same mechanism: that space between event and your response is where your true agency lives, and the methodology above is widening that space.

Run “I’ll never work again” through the interrogation and watch what happens. Is it true? What’s the evidence then? And to create a bit of cognitive distance - for example, what would you say to a friend who said it?

What usually survives that process when you’re ready to acknowledge it truly is something like; “This is hard, it will probably take months, I will earn less for a while, and I might have to change direction or lean on friends and family.” Which is painful. But notice what kind of statement it is. It’s a problem. Problems have next steps, and are designed to be solved, or at least looked at. On the other hand statements like “I’m a failure” are a verdict, and verdicts have nothing after them but the sentence.

Always make that distinction my friends.

So now back to the Stoics. Of course! You probably wouldn’t be reading this if these guys weren’t included. They used a tool exactly for this purpose, and it does kind of sound depressing and morbid until you drill it. It’s called the premeditation of evils or premeditatio malorum if you like your latin.

Funnily enough, I actually learned just recently from Prof. Greg Sadler that this phrase is borrowed, from another school at the time. The Cyrenaics. They were essentially old school hedonists who believed distress comes from unexpected misfortune, and were practising premeditation of evils generations earlier, with hints.

So the Stoics expanded premeditatio malorum; they didn’t originate it. I think that’s the case with a lot of Stoicism, they refined these ideas from another school, and through fortune and understanding that’s why they’ve been with us for so long.

Seneca the younger, the final piece of our big three Stoic puzzle advised his friend Lucilius to regularly set aside days to imagine poverty, eat the cheapest or no food and wear the roughest clothes and ask, “Is this what I was so afraid of?”

It may sound absolutely unhinged to some of you, but the point was never to remain in this state or embrace pessimism. It’s purely mental reconnaissance. Fear itself does its worst work in the dark, on the unexamined and unknown. But walk through the feared scenario deliberately, and it turns out to have faint edges, steps ahead, and usually leads to the brightness of the next morning. People who actually try this technique (myself included) report the same effects Seneca promised:

1. The imagined catastrophe begins to shrink,

2. Your gratitude and standing of your current situation sharpens.

Modern psychology backs both halves. The exposure to any fear rather than avoiding it, is the single most robust principle in the treatment of anxiety. The gratitude section exploits what researchers call hedonic adaptation; we stop seeing what we have until we simulate absence. Negative visualisation is a hedonic adaptation reset, run manually.

One objection before we move on, since I’ll be arguing later that imagining futures is where most suffering gets manufactured. The difference is the way you walk into it. You enter the above on purpose, walk through once, and come out with a next step. Whereas worry arrives uninvited at 1 a.m., and runs the same scenario for the thirtieth time, resolving nothing.

Want to know more about this? Allow me to shamelessly plug one of my articles on the very concept, which is garnering a fair bit of attention on Substack since March:

https://endaharte.substack.com/p/the-hedonic-baseline-reset

The deepest cut of a job loss, isn’t often the financial loss. It’s identity and attachment. Somewhere in the last century or so “what I do” quietly annexed “what I am,” and that merger was never put to a vote. How many times; at a conference, a party, or out trying to find your next love — have you been asked this?

I’ve actually been passed over so many times, because of my observing, quiet, and polite nature — until I’m asked about my job, or what I pursue for a living, then it all of a sudden changes. Funny how that works. I’m sure you have your own scenario or story that stands out to you as well.

Epictetus told his students they were actors in a play whose casting they didn’t control: your part might be a beggar, a magistrate, or a cripple. Playing your part well is your job; choosing the part wasn’t totally in your influence to begin with.

Marcus as above, holding the most powerful role on earth, filled his notebook with reminders that the purple cloak was dyed shellfish blood and the applause was the clapping of hands that would soon be dust. He was doing identity hygiene — deliberately keeping his self-worth in assets no one could confiscate: his judgement, his decency, his duty done or not done.

There’s a practical test hiding in all these writings. Make a list of what you’d have left if the job, or ideal health went tomorrow; how you treat people, what you know, how you learn, who trusts you, what you endure without turning bitter. This list is your actual net worth. And your employer/clients only ever borrowed the rest from you.

Your health is your wealth. You can do everything right; eat, sleep, exercise regularly, get the screenings and still end up sitting in the little room where the consultant closes the door before speaking with you. This territory was covered intimately by the Stoics.

Take Marcus’ weak frame, and chronic health issues centring around what we now know was ulcers; records from Galen, (his physician) suggests he lived on tiny amounts of food. Epictetus’ physical impediments, leading to a lifelong disability or even Seneca talking about what sounded like chronic asthma, describing attacks as, “rehearsing death”. Each of them named their ailment precisely, and each made it a workshop.

Unlike what you might think, the answer from the Stoics is not gritted-teeth endurance. It’s more like re-drawing the boundary. As we know all too well, no matter what age we are, illness comes for the body, a body that you don’t have full control over. How does it even work? Only in the last decade or so did medical research decide the appendix is apparently useful after all, quietly supporting gut bacteria and the immune system, after generations of us being told it was pointless. That's the equipment you're working with: on loan, partially mapped, subject to recall.

Illness, for the most part, cannot touch your character, and fundamental determination: whether you stay kind, honest, and remain someone the people closest to you still recognise. Pain is inevitable, and that extends to emotional damage as well. The Stoics never wanted you to ignore it. What they did recognise, is that suffering usually arrives in two layers;

1. The sensation, or impression itself

2. The story, and imagination wrapped around it.

That second layer is the “why me?”, the catastrophising, the rage at unfairness, and the rehearsal of every future loss the diagnosis might imply — the kind we covered earlier. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t express emotions, and in fairness we all should be allowed a good old initial moan to our newly found afflictions. It’s the sustained attitude that is inherently unhelpful. That first layer may not be up to us, but the second layer is built by us, in-house. The good news? Just like a fixer-upper it can be renovated.

If the above sounds like philosophical hair-splitting, look at what happens when medical practice takes it seriously. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), one of the leading modern approaches to chronic pain and illness; teaches patients to stop the internal war against sensations that cannot be deleted, and to redirect that energy toward living by their values with the condition, rather than suspending life waiting for a cure that may not come.

As psychologist Kristin Neff frames it (borrowing from Shinzen Young): pain x resistance = suffering. The amount we suffer in life is the product of the pain itself, multiplied by the amount we resist it.

After the resistance is dropped, the pain remains. But the suffering, (the second layer) will start to collapse. Trials show ACT improving functioning and quality of life in chronic pain patients even when pain intensity itself doesn’t budge.

Now to Buddhism, I’m trying to take you on a wild journey here, across time and space, stay with me. The Buddhists, incidentally, arrived at the same place by a different road, and much, much earlier. Buddha’s parable of the two arrows says that when misfortune strikes, we are hit twice; the first arrow is the event, the second is our reaction to it — and the second arrow is the one we fire at ourselves.

So all these mindfulness-based interventions, which now include their own substantial evidence base in pain and illness treatments, are essentially training people not to fire off that second arrow. When traditions with no contact converge on the same mechanism, and our old chums in the clinical world then validate it, you're probably looking at something true about human beings since the dawn of time — not something that only rang true for the Greco-Roman guys and gals.

And to one of my favourite examples of a human being, and author. Viktor Frankl. A Viennese psychiatrist deported to the camps in 1942, losing his wife, parents, and brother in the process, not to mention the manuscript of his life’s work.

He spent his time in the concentration camps, involuntarily conducting what has to be one of the most brutal field studies in the history of psychology. Watching his fellow comrades, collapsing in despair and destitution, but also noting those who didn’t. His findings, set out in Man’s Search for Meaning, were that survival - real nitty gritty psychological survival tracked neither strength nor optimism, but meaning. A purpose, or why. This could have been something or someone the suffering pointed toward.

His observations on men that died within days of giving up on a private deadline, like the war being over by Christmas, but when the deadline passed, the why went with it. “Those who have a why to live can bear almost any how”. He may have been quoting Nietzsche - but had earned the citation in a way Nietzsche never did.

Frankl went on to build out logotherapy on these very observations. The research that followed — meaning-centred therapy in cancer care, purpose studies in ageing, and more — found the exact same signals. A sense of purpose predicts better recovery behaviour, less psychological distress when it comes to serious illness, and even lower all cause mortality in longitudinal studies.

So that’s the question we want to ask ourselves. Regardless of what’s going on in modern life, or how you physically or mentally feel. What’s your why? Remember, purpose isn’t a lovely little decoration in life oversold by online gurus and business podcasts, structurally it’s load bearing on our wellbeing and need for existence.

Load-bearing doesn't mean grandiose, though. Your purpose usually comes from the people around you, the work you carry out, or the character you choose to exhibit. You don’t need to save the world, or write a newsletter on how to solve all of this. That’s just being a show off.

Let’s take this back to why I wanted to write this piece. The newest fear in the oldest wrapper. Will AI take your job — hollow out your profession, flood the world with synthetic sludge, making the skills you spent twenty years building worth nothing.

Possibly some of that, but in truth nobody fully knows what’s going on, or what they're doing. Not the boosters, the doomers, nor the consultancies selling forty-page reports to both sides. This is precisely the point. I know a good few of you reading this are older than me, or should I say more experienced. You’ve likely seen so many technological advancements, global changes, conflicts and the list is never ending.

The suffering most people experience around AI, is not being caused by the information we’re consuming, even those god awful image templates that seem to be everywhere. It’s being caused by poor, unregulated rehearsal, often narrated by someone who knows nothing about you, nor what you’re capable of. Unregulated in the exact sense from earlier — no schedule, no end, no next step. By running a thousand simulated futures, most of which will never occur - the emotional cost of each one, will take a toll on you as if it were actually happening.

We’ve seen this all play out before, and no you shouldn’t bury your head in the sand. But take everything with a pinch of salt, or sugar. Depending on your preference. Seneca the younger already diagnosed this in a letter, in one of the most quoted lines he ever wrote: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” And yes I checked that one myself, it’s not a misquote - like I did way back with Marcus. He follows it in later letters with practical advice written for the doomscroller in mind.

“What madness it is to be miserable now because you may be miserable later?”

In the Psych world, this is called anticipatory anxiety. The highlight of this being a 2020 study at Penn State, had worriers log every specific bad thought for a few weeks, then track all the outcomes. 91.4% of these worries never came true, and of the ones that did, most turned out better than originally feared. As Seneca remarked, the imagination is a terrible forecaster, and an even worse landlord for your precious mental capacity.

What do these traditions and studies actually offer for a genuinely uncertain future?

1. Prepare rather than predict

   Obsessing over which jobs AI will change might seem useful, but I’d argue it’s energy that could be directed elsewhere. Judgement, taste, the ability to define a problem, rather than just execute a predefined one and the speed at which you learn are all important. These will compound in every version of the future. This is the dichotomy of control we talked about earlier applied forward in time. The shape of 2031 is out of your hands. Your readiness for several possible shapes of 2031 is not.

2. Treat the obstacle as the way

   Marcus wrote that the obstacle becomes the way, that what impedes action can advance action. Later popularised by Ryan Holiday, this idea is much more demanding to manage than it seems printed on a fridge magnet. We shouldn’t pretend all upheaval is good, it can be unhealthy. A middle ground is to adopt a posture of looking for the use in what you didn’t originally choose. Every technological rupture in history has destroyed livelihoods but also created them, usually bringing with it an air of fear and loss affecting those within that gap. But notice the two types of people facing the same rupture. One is experimenting with the tools, asking what they can make newly possible for someone like them; the other is doomscrolling and complaining about them at 1 a.m. They live in the same objective uncertainty. You cannot un-volatile the world. You can change what volatility does on contact with you.

3. Stay in the present, the only place your resources exist

   The Stoics wrote till the cows come home about this very sentiment. The future arrives one day at a time, and is handled by the person you are on that day, with that same day’s information, network, and skillset. You today, negotiating with an imagined 2031, is a farce of a negotiation. One of you has no information, and the other doesn’t exist. You don't need a brain scan for this one. A future you're dreading extracts the same tax as one that's happening. That's the whole trick of worry: it charges you upfront for an event that mostly never arrives.

4. Keep perspective on the scale of things

   The view from above is a common technique in modern Stoic practice, and encourages the end user to deliberately zoom out to see their city, world era, and current crisis as one frame in an extremely long film. Every generation is certain its disruption is the final one. The people who lived through the printing press, the railways, electrification, the assembly line, the microchip, Y2K — all certain. All wrong about the ending, but right about the pain of the transition. This doesn’t minimise that pain, but it does suggest your era’s story has more chapters than the current one, and that the humans who wrote the previous chapters were running the same nervous system you are, without the benefit of their notes. You have their notes, and now mine. Use them.

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Let’s get uncomfortable for a second. The truth about everything above is that reading it alone, changes nothing. Epictetus in his prime, mocked students who could read, analyse and decipher texts and meaning, but would crumble when the ship inevitably hits ropey waters, or stormy weather (That ship being you, of course).

The lecture hall, he said is a hospital, and you shouldn’t walk out of a hospital feeling entertained. As I’ve mentioned before Philosophy to them was askesis; discipline training — or it was nothing. Behavioural research for the most part agrees with him completely; insight like above without rehearsal doesn’t transfer under stress. Under pressure you don’t rise to your reading list; you fall to your training.

You might be wondering about why I write so passionately and frequently about subjects like this. Well, from an early age I dealt with severe anxiety that a child of seven or eight doesn’t normally have. Whether it was death anxiety, things that were upcoming in school, or worrying about my pets at home. It had nothing to do with my early upbringing, as my parents were a supportive, inspiring constant in my life, and still are at the time of writing.

Counselling didn’t help at that age, as I was able to out-manoeuvre the techniques and suggestions. In fact, to this day I’m still figuring out the origins and it has led to some self-proclaimed personal breakthroughs, I’m incredibly proud of. That’s all because of the hours logged, and the practices followed through with.

You’re the only one in your own head, at all times. So it’s best to get to know yourself, and what makes you tick. It may be past trauma, or other events that led to certain conditions, or it simply could be within your psychological/genetic make up, and how your gooey brain wants to work. That’s why I’m here in the trenches as an adult,
self-studying, learning from all walks of life, and sharing the systems and processes that have worked for me.

So, back to the training, in plain terms.

Write, or think like Marcus; privately, with cut-throat honesty, and frequently. This is a few lines a night: where did I lose the run of myself recently? What was actually in my control in these scenarios? What would the person I’m trying to be have done, or what would my character idols do? Functionally, a CBT thought record with the serial numbers filed off. Patterns you can identify written down are patterns you can take action on changing. If these are left in your head, they will bog you down like a stormy evening. Clarity and awareness are key, even if it doesn’t fully heal you.

Rehearse some loss, on a schedule. This doesn’t need to be done everyday, you could look at it monthly. Pick the things you’re most afraid of losing, as mentioned above. Walking through the day after losing it, cements it. Sounds crazy, but it’s a form of reconnaissance on your own fear. This one can sting, it requires a bit of cognitive distancing. A bit like watching a horror film, it’s not actually in front of you at this time, regardless of what your brain tells you when you’re going to bed and you hear the wind outside. If practiced correctly, you’ll return with dividends eventually.

Do voluntary hard things, regularly. I backed off this a bit for a while in my suggestions, as it became a bit cringey in modern internet society. Especially as I know people in the east that are in literal warzones now. Wearing discomfort like a badge of honour, and bragging about how many cold plunges you do, is not the flex you think it is. You know the people, and what I’m talking about.

Simple things for most of us like embracing cold mornings, long walks in bad weather, a fast from your phone (do it after reading this though), opting for the stairs, and difficult conversations you’ve been formatting in your head are a good place to start. Seneca was a wealthy statesman who liked to practice poverty while rich, in anticipation of perhaps future events. Modern literature references it as stress inoculation: controlled, dosed difficulties expand the range of uncontrolled difficulty you can absorb. Too much comfort is a de-conditioning agent.

Triage every worry with one question: Is this in my control? Fully, partially, or not at all? If it’s fully, get to work. However small you think the act. Partially? Internalise it briefly. Define the performance that’s yours and release the outcome, that isn’t. Not at all? Name it out loud if you have to, put it down somewhere, and then escort your attention back to something with a handle on it. Putting down is a repetition, like a pushup, you’ll do thousands in your time. Some days will be worse than others. Don’t think of it as a failure, it’s exercise and continued training.

Finally, borrow beyond Stoicism without embarrassment of the source. Resilience was never one school’s property. Take the arrows from the Buddhists, stop firing the second one. Find defiant meaning from Frankl. Practice the thought record from Beck and Ellis, who borrowed it from Epictetus anyway. Gather acceptance from the ACT traditions. Take resilience training from military sources, or wherever works. Sometimes these schools can argue at the margins, but one thing is true - they agree with a consistency that should reassure you.

The world will always manufacture new things to fear. It’s exceptionally good at that, and it has for the first time in history an entire economy whose business model is your alarm. The person reading these words now is running on the same architecture as the slave in Nicopolis, the asthmatic in Rome, the fragile emperor in the tent on the Danube, and the psychiatrist in the camp. Every single one of them found, under conditions often worse than ours, the same lasting freedom; the choice of what to make of what happens.

It cannot be automated. It cannot be made redundant. It cannot be diagnosed away.

Which is exactly why it’s worth at least attempting to master.

P.S a big thank you to all my new subscribers in the last few months. I appreciate you.

Until next time,
Memento mori,
Enda (The Irish Stoic)