Showing results by author "William Ferraiolo" in All Categories

Stoicism offers rationally grounded, proven psychological techniques for the gradual development of consistent self-mastery, and emotional detachment from those elements of the human condition that tend to cause the most pervasive and unsettling forms of fear, anxiety, and avoidable disquiet. In the essays in A Life Worth Living, William Ferraiolo examines what it means to incorporate Stoicism into 21st century life, adapting classical Stoic philosophy for the modern day.

This book is a collection of several months of written meditations concerning the conditions over which the author has no control, the few phenomena that author can control, and sporadic rumination about the author’s bouts of confusion, alienation, and a gradual, meandering progress toward something vaguely like equanimity (or at least something vaguely less like despair).

This is your guide to personal secession. You are a free, autonomous human being, an adult, and you are neither legally nor morally obligated to be part of any nation-state at all. You can stay right where you are, but you can also radically alter your conception of your life, your status, and your style of living in the world. Why not declare your independence? It is up to you. This manifesto offers one hundred suggestions for conceptualizing, planning, and carving out a new way of life. You have nothing to lose but your discontent.

160 Meditations about Western Culture, God, Stoicism, Cynicism, the recent lockdowns, riots, etc. Each meditation is approximately 300-370 words. The book is approximately 54,000 words.

Being a citizen of modernity is not what it used to be. The contemporary world is a deeply frivolous place, and it is filled with far too many ludicrous people who have far too much time on their hands and altogether too much bullshit to spew. It may be true that, “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” but it is a near certainty that idle minds will turn to self-destruction and to the project of wrecking everything in their general vicinity. It seems that we inhabit a wreckage masquerading as a culture. What we used to think of as our society has deteriorated and become a sprawling ...