🌷 Sunday Snippets: August 23rd, 2026

Hi all,

This week’s Snippets include some resources on listening like a Stoic, including a short experiment you can try today.

I hope you find something useful to take into the week ahead.

Before You Speak
Gossip often feels harmless, but Epictetus saw careless talk about others as a distraction from the work that actually belongs to us.

This reflection explores why blame, comparison, and even praise deserve more restraint when we rarely know another person’s motives or full circumstances. The Stoic alternative is simple: speak less, listen more, and focus your judgment where you have real control—on your own words, intentions, and character.

As a little extension of this week’s practice, try this in one conversation today.

Let the other person finish speaking before you decide what you’re going to say.

Then, instead of immediately offering your own story, opinion, correction, or advice, ask them one more question. It sounds easy, but often it isn’t.

We may discover that quite a lot of what we call listening is actually waiting for our turn to speak.

The psychologist Carl Rogers and the art of active listening
This Aeon essay continues theme of listening and explores what it really means to listen to another person rather than simply wait for our chance to speak. Through the work of psychologist Carl Rogers, it looks at curiosity, attention, and how much better conversations become when understanding matters more than having the next word.

The Road to a Happy Life
This episode uses Seneca’s image of the road to ask whether we are moving with purpose or merely following the crowd.

A clear destination helps us resist distraction, while Epictetus shows where our attention truly belongs: on our judgments, choices, desires, and actions.

The Stoic task is to be cautious with what depends on us and confident toward what does not.

Everyone rushes his life on, and suffers from a yearning for the future and a boredom with the present. But that man who devotes every hour to his own needs, who plans every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears tomorrow.

—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

All the best for the week ahead,
Allan