The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.—Neel Burton, psychiatrist and philosopher, University of Oxford
There is more to being human than the absence of disorder.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of your life trying to make sense of things—happiness and suffering, love and loss, reason and emotion, the strange business of being human.
We live in an era of rapid change. Many of the structures that once gave us identity, meaning, and direction have weakened. More than ever, we must answer life’s deepest questions for ourselves. How should we live, love, work, suffer, and die?
My search for answers has taken me through philosophy, psychology, literature, history, and ancient wisdom—because the deepest truths often emerge where disciplines meet.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
Home is not merely where we return, but where we are recognised.
The Odyssey is usually described as the story of a man trying to get home. But this is only half the story. The real journey is not geographical but psychological and moral. Odysseus is trying not merely to return to Ithaca, but to become the kind of man who can return.
This is why, after almost three thousand years, the Odyssey continues to speak to us. We are all trying to find our way home—not simply to a place, but to a life that feels genuinely like our own.
Every encounter presents Odysseus with a different temptation. The Lotus-Eaters invite him to forget who he is. Circe seeks to trap him into surrendering his humanity. The Sirens tempt him with endless fascination. Even after escaping the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus succumbs to the temptation of pride. By revealing his true name, he forgets his true purpose and risks undoing all that he has achieved. Again and again, Homer asks the same question in different forms: what must we refuse if we are to remain true to ourselves?
The greatest temptation of all comes from Calypso. She offers Odysseus what human beings have always desired: immortality, together with eternal youth and freedom from suffering. Yet he refuses. He chooses instead to return to his ageing wife, his uncertain kingdom, and his mortal life. In doing so, Homer suggests that to become fully human is not to escape our condition, but to embrace it. Only by accepting the limits of human existence can Odysseus finally become himself.
From one perspective, it is a baffling decision. Why exchange paradise for hardship? Like the modern philosopher Bernard Williams, Homer intuits that a life derives its meaning not from its length but from being truly our own. We would rather live a finite life that belongs to us than an endless life that does not.
At last, Odysseus reaches Ithaca. But instead of returning as a conquering hero, he enters his own home disguised as a beggar. His wife does not recognise him. His servants do not recognise him. His kingdom does not recognise him. But one creature does.
Outside the palace gates lies Argos, the hunting dog that Odysseus had raised before leaving for Troy. Once magnificent, Argos has been left to grow old on a dung heap. Yet the moment Odysseus approaches, the dog recognises him. Disguised though he is, stripped of every outward sign of rank and identity, his faithful companion sees through it all. Argos wags his tail, lays back his ears, and, having seen his master one last time, quietly dies. In Homer, true recognition has nothing to do with appearances. We are recognised not for what we possess or the roles we play, but for who we truly are.
It is one of the most moving scenes in all of literature because it speaks to one of our deepest longings. We want our lives to amount to something. But we also want to be known and loved for who we are, beneath all our roles, titles, and disguises. Home is not merely where we return. It is where someone knows who we are—and remembers.
Before Odysseus can reclaim his kingdom, he must first reclaim his story. At the court of the Phaeacians, he recounts everything that has happened to him since leaving Troy. By weaving his adventures into a coherent narrative, he recovers not only his past but himself. We make sense of our own lives in much the same way: not merely by living them, but by telling them. There’s a lovely irony here. At the very heart of the Odyssey, Homer hands the poem over to Odysseus himself. Odysseus quite literally rises into the narrator of his own life, before finally heading home.
Perhaps that is why the Odyssey still feels so modern. We, too, leave home, lose our bearings, and become distracted by ambitions, comforts, fears, and false identities. We, too, sometimes wonder how we ended up living the lives we are living.
The Odyssey endures because Homer understood that the longest journey any of us will ever undertake is not outward across the seas, but inward into our hearts.
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If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy my book, The Meaning of Myth.
If Not Physical Fitness, What Was Yoga Originally For?
The original purpose of yoga was not to strengthen the body, but to free the mind.
Millions of people practise yoga for stronger backs, greater flexibility, or relief from stress. These are genuine benefits. But they were never yoga’s original purpose.
The first yogis were not searching for physical fitness. They were searching for freedom.
More than two thousand years ago, Indian philosophers concluded that the root of human suffering lies not in the body but in the mind—or, more precisely, in our mistaken understanding of who we are. Yoga emerged as a practical method for overcoming that mistake.
The First Meaning of Yoga
One of the earliest surviving discussions of yoga appears in the Katha Upanishad, composed around the fourth century BCE. There, the brahmin boy Nachiketa rejects wealth, power, and a long life to ask Yama, the god of death, a single question: What becomes of us after death?
Yama replies that this knowledge cannot be gained through study alone, but only through yoga, which he defines as ‘the firm holding back of the senses’:
When the five organs of perception become still, together with the mind, and the intellect ceases to be active: that is called the highest state.
From the beginning, then, yoga was not a form of exercise but a discipline of inner stillness.
Why We Suffer
Classical yoga rests on Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy. It seeks to explain both the nature of reality and the origins of human suffering.
According to Samkhya, reality consists of two fundamental principles. The first is Purusha, pure consciousness or the witnessing self. The second is Prakriti, which includes not only the physical world but also the body, the senses, the ego, and even the mind itself.
An ancient Indian image captures the idea beautifully. Two birds perch in the same tree. One pecks eagerly at the fruit, tasting now sweetness, now bitterness. The other simply watches. The first bird represents the self absorbed in the changing experiences of life; the second, the silent witness that remains untouched by them.
Yoga teaches that we mistake ourselves for the first bird when our true nature is the second. We identify with our thoughts, emotions, and fears, forgetting that these are passing experiences rather than our deepest identity.
Yoga Beyond Meditation
Composed in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era, the Bhagavad Gita broadened the meaning of yoga. Alongside meditation, it described the yoga of knowledge (Jnana Yoga), selfless action (Karma Yoga), and loving devotion (Bhakti Yoga).
Its central message is that freedom comes not from withdrawing from life but from living without attachment to success or failure. Like Stoicism, the Bhagavad Gita teaches that peace of mind depends less on what happens to us than on how we meet it.
As the god Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna:
Work done for a reward is much lower than work done in the Yoga of wisdom.
Yoga was no longer confined to the forest or meditation hall. Everyday life itself could become a spiritual practice.
Patanjali’s Yoga
The philosopher Patanjali transformed these ideas into a practical discipline in the Yoga Sutra, the foundational text of classical yoga. He famously defined yoga as:
Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.
To achieve this, Patanjali described an eightfold path combining ethics, posture, breath control, concentration, and meditation, culminating in samadhi, complete absorption. Significantly, the physical postures (asanas) formed only one stage of this much larger discipline.
How Yoga Became Exercise
If yoga began as a path to liberation, how did it become associated with stretching and physical fitness?
The answer lies in its long evolution. Later traditions, especially Hatha Yoga, placed increasing emphasis on physical postures, though still in pursuit of spiritual liberation.
The decisive shift came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Indian teachers such as Tirumalai Krishnamacharya presented yoga in dialogue with Western physical culture and modern medicine. Their students—including B. K. S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois—introduced these new forms of postural yoga to Europe and America, where they proved enormously popular.
Modern yoga is therefore not a misunderstanding of the tradition so much as one particular branch of it. While its philosophical roots remain ancient, its familiar image as a form of exercise is surprisingly modern.
The yoga practised by millions today is therefore only one chapter in a much older story.
The Original Purpose of Yoga
Millions of people come to yoga hoping for stronger backs, greater flexibility, or relief from stress. The first yogis hoped for something altogether more ambitious: freedom from suffering through a deeper understanding of the self.
Whether or not we accept their answers, the first yogis were asking one of humanity’s oldest and most profound questions:
Who am I?
For them, the search for that answer was the true purpose of yoga.
Be prepared to laugh. Musonius could be severe and hilarious in the same breath—a combination that made him one of antiquity’s most admired teachers.
If Stoicism has a forgotten hero, it is Musonius Rufus.
Today, the names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are familiar to millions. But in antiquity, many regarded Musonius as the greatest Stoic teacher of them all. His lectures attracted students from across the Roman world, foremost among them Epictetus.
Unlike Seneca, Musonius wrote no polished essays. His philosophy was not intended for libraries but for life. He taught in public, argued fearlessly, endured repeated exile, and demonstrated by his example that philosophy is not something merely to discuss, but something to live.
For Musonius, philosophy was not an escape from ordinary life but a preparation for it. It taught people how to eat, work, marry, raise children, endure hardship, and come to terms with death. His school, he liked to say, was not some concert hall, where people came to be amused and entertained, but a hospital, where they came, in trepidation, to be treated.
Yet there was nothing gloomy about him. Though uncompromising in his principles, he possessed a wonderfully dry wit. When a man with a long beard claimed to be a philosopher, Musonius replied that he could see the beard—but not the philosopher.
Beginnings
Gaius Musonius Rufus (c. 25–c. 100 CE) was born in Etruria into a family of Roman equestrians.
As a young man, he went about inquiring into the health of people’s souls, suggesting that his sympathies then lay more with the Cynics than with the Stoics.
He later established himself in Rome as one of the most celebrated Stoic teachers of the age.
When, in 60 CE, the paranoid Nero banished Rubellius Plautus, a Stoic and distant cousin of Nero, Musonius followed his friend to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and only returned to Rome after Plautus’ death in 62.
Second and Third Exiles
When, in 65, Nero learnt of the Pisonian conspiracy, led by the senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso, to have him overthrown, he condemned nineteen people to death, including Seneca. Though not involved in the plot, Musonius was banished to the barren island of Gyaros, the Alcatraz of the Mediterranean.
Exile, however, seemed to weigh lightly upon him, even on Gyaros, and one of his surviving lectures is entitled, Why Exile Is Not an Evil.
Exile, he says, does not deprive us of water, earth, air, or the sun and stars. Nor does it deprive us of human companionship. But by removing us from luxurious living, it can cure our bodies and souls of many ills.
More significantly, exile does not prevent us from caring for our real needs and acquiring virtue. On the contrary, it provides us with more leisure in which to study and do good deeds.
Resourceful people are resourceful wherever they find themselves. Those who lack resourcefulness have vice, and not exile, to blame for their miseries. Ergo, it is vice, and not exile, that we should fear.
Musonius returned to Rome in 68, in the reign of Galba. In 70, in the reign of Vespasian, he accused and obtained the conviction of Egnatius Celer, who, despite calling himself a Stoic, had colluded with Nero in condemning the Stoic Barea Soranius and his daughter Servilia to death.
When, in 71, Vespasian banished all philosophers from Rome, his reputation rode so high that he was tolerated to remain—before being banished all the same into his third and longest exile, this time in Syria.
He returned to Rome in 79, in the reign of Titus, and died around 100 CE.
The Teacher of Philosophy
Musonius exerted an important influence on his two most famous pupils, Epictetus and the polymath Dio Chrysostom (‘Dio the Golden-Mouthed’).
To separate the wheat from the chaff, he would often turn would-be students away, explaining to the young Epictetus that ‘the more one pushes the intelligent person away from the life he was born for, the more he inclines towards it.’
His school, he insisted, was no place for clever performances. People came not to be entertained but to be cured. Because treatment can sometimes be painful, students might expect to suffer a bit. He measured the success of his lectures not by the applause that they received but by the shock and silence that they provoked.
He quoted Homer after Odysseus had related the length of his labours:
Thus he spoke, and they all stayed softly in silence, And they were held by a magic spell in the shadowy hall.
Epictetus records Musonius saying:
Am I to sit down and tell you clever slogans and sayings so that you praise me as you leave, even though the shoulder is no better than it was, the head still hurts, and the abscess and fistula remain? Do young men leave home for these reasons and leave behind their parents, friends, kinfolk, and property so that they may yell ‘hooray’ when you utter witticisms? Did Socrates do this, or Zeno, or Cleanthes?
Musonius could be severe. By Epictetus’ own account, he once rebuked him for overlooking the omission in a syllogism (formal logical argument). Epictetus sought to excuse himself, saying, ‘It’s not like I burnt down the Capitol’—to which Musonius replied, ‘Idiot, the omission here isthe Capitol.’
Nothing worthwhile, he insisted, is acquired without pain. But if we think that the path of virtue is too arduous, let us consider the alternatives and how much more trouble people put up with for the sake of gain or how many ills they suffer for the sake of fame, even though these things are worthless.
Practical Philosophy
Insofar as we know, Musonius did not work on anything for publication. However, two of his students wrote down his sayings and opinions. The Discourses, collected by a certain Lucius, form the basis of the 21 short lectures preserved in Stobaeus. But a second work, by one Pollio, has been lost except for fragments.
All in all, there remain 31 fragments (preserved in Stobaeus, Epictetus, and Aulus Gellius), as well as the 21 lectures, which altogether fit comfortably within 80 or so pages.
Musonius’ lectures are full of practical, everyday advice aimed at instilling virtue and include a lecture on home furnishings and even a lecture on hair. Men, he advised, ought to grow a beard on the grounds that the beard is the mark of manhood, on a par with a cock’s comb or a lion’s mane.
Besides facial hair, Musonius advocated a vegetarian diet (preferably raw and unprepared), plain clothing, and shelter of a kind that offers little more than the protection afforded by a cave.
He once gave a thousand sesterces to a man claiming to be a philosopher. When his friends protested that the fellow was a charlatan, he let him keep the not-inconsiderable sum, explaining that money was exactly what he deserved.
To do philosophy, said Musonius, is to reason correctly, and to reason correctly is to act correctly. The person who does philosophy thereby takes care of his country, family, and friends—in a word, everybody.
The person who does not do philosophy, even if he be a doctor, lawyer, or some such, is thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is very near to insanity.
Even if one rules only oneself, no one is more kingly than a philosopher or more fit to rule, because one cannot rule others unless one first rules oneself.
Musonius was not merely a teacher of Stoicism. He showed what a Stoic looked like.
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Delve deeper into the life and times of Musonius in Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
According to Tacitus, Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends.
Few philosophers have lived a life as dramatic or conflicted as Seneca’s. The emperor Nero made him the richest man in the Roman Empire before ordering him to commit suicide.
Today, Seneca is our most important primary source on ancient Stoicism, followed by Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius.
Stoicism has exerted a profound influence on the history of ideas, shaping the thought of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. In mental health, it inspired what has become the world’s most widely practised form of psychotherapy: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
The Teacher’s Pet
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was probably born in 4 BCE, the same year as Jesus, in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba), Hispania.
His father, Seneca the Elder (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Maior), was a Roman equestrian who wrote books on rhetoric and Roman history. His elder brother Novatus, better known as Gallio, became a senator, and his younger brother Mela was the father of the poet Lucan.
Seneca was raised in Rome. His tutors included Attalus the Stoic, Sotion, and Papirius Fabianus. He so admired Attalus that he ‘practically laid siege to his classroom’. He was ‘the first to arrive and the last to leave’ and often left with the desire to be poor.
He suffered from poor health—possibly tuberculosis on a background of asthma—and, from his mid-twenties, spent several years convalescing in Alexandria, where he lived with his mother’s sister and her husband, Gaius Galerius, the governor of Egypt.
The three sailed back to Rome in 32, but Galerius perished in a shipwreck.
These early experiences of illness and uncertainty may help to explain Seneca’s lifelong preoccupation with adversity, mortality, and the best use of life.
Exile on Corsica
A few years after his return, Seneca was elected quaestor, making him a senator.
According to the historian Cassius Dio (d. c. 235 CE), Seneca, ‘who was superior in wisdom to all the Romans of his day and to many others as well,’ spoke so eloquently in the Senate that the emperor Caligula ordered his execution, only to stay the order after being told that he was in any case terminally ill.
In 41, the throne passed to Caligula’s uncle Claudius, and the new empress Messalina, seeking to eliminate a potential rival, accused Caligula’s sister Julia Livilla of adultery with Seneca. The Senate sentenced Seneca to death, but Claudius commuted the sentence to exile on Corsica.
On Corsica, Seneca wrote the Consolation to Polybius, a letter purporting to comfort Polybius, Claudius’ literary secretary, on the death of his brother, but more likely intended to flatter the emperor in the hope of being recalled from exile.
Tutor and Adviser to Nero
In 49, following the downfall of Messalina, Agrippina the Younger, a sister of Caligula and Julia Livilla, married her uncle Claudius, and had Seneca recalled to tutor her twelve-year-old son, Nero.
When the lad acceded to the throne in 54, Seneca became his adviser and, alongside the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus, provided good government during the first five, relatively benign, years of his reign, the so-called quinquennium Neronis.
In 58, the senator Publius Suilius Rufus, who had been close to Claudius, began attacking Seneca with a series of accusations centred upon his rapid rise to fabulous wealth. ‘By what kind of wisdom or maxims of philosophy,’ he inveighed, ‘has Seneca within four years of royal favour amassed three hundred million sesterces?’ In response, Seneca prosecuted Suilius, who was banished to the Balearic Islands.
The charge has echoed down the centuries. How could a Stoic philosopher preach simplicity while becoming the richest man in Rome?
In 59, Nero had Agrippina murdered, and Seneca wrote the self-exculpatory speech that he delivered to the Senate, a speech so artful that the senators moved to congratulate the emperor upon his own mother’s murder.
Downfall and Suicide
But now the tide would turn against our man.
After the death of Burrus in 62, Seneca lost whatever remained of his restraining influence over Nero. Having read the runes, he twice petitioned to retire, once in 62 and again in 64, but Nero refused to cut him loose. Still, he contrived to spend almost all his time on his country estates, working, among others, on his Letters to Lucilius.
His prolonged absences from court may have stoked Nero’s suspicions. When, in 65, the Pisonian conspiracy to overthrow Nero came to light, the emperor condemned a first wave of nineteen people to death, among them Seneca and his nephew Lucan.
By the end of the year, Seneca, his two brothers, and the twenty-five-year-old Lucan had all four been made to commit suicide.
According to the historian Tacitus (d. 120 CE), Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends and chiding them for their outbursts of emotion.
He slit one vein, and then another, and then a few more, but would not bleed enough to die. Now in considerable pain, he took some hemlock, but this too failed to do the deed. At last, to dilate his veins and ease the pain, he immersed himself in a hot bath and finally suffocated to death.
His wife Pompeia Paulina, whom he had married in later life, attempted to share his fate, but Nero ordered that she be rescued and bandaged up.
Legacy
Seneca had seen the writing on the wall, which is why he worked so assiduously in his final years, seeking, through the Letters, to make himself as immortal as any mortal can be.
Even his carefully staged suicide may have been a part of that immortality project. Tacitus hints as much when, having related Seneca’s last words to his friends, he writes, ‘After these and some similar remarks, which might have been meant for a wider audience…’
Upon his death, Seneca’s works were instantly popular and, according to Quintilian, were ‘in the hands of every young man’. Seneca has been read by most everyone since, including the ‘French Seneca’, Michel de Montaigne, who modelled his Essays upon the Letters.
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Delve deeper into the life and times of Seneca in Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus is never more free, or more himself, than when he declares himself to be ‘Nobody’.
In Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, Julianne Moore plays Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife living in 1950s California. She spends the morning baking a birthday cake for her husband, caring for her young son, and performing all the duties expected of a devoted wife and mother.
But all is not as it seems.
Beneath this picture of domestic contentment, something has begun to shift. Perhaps for the first time, Laura seems to experience her own life as though she were standing outside it. Later that day, she books into a hotel room. Alone at last, she lies on the bed reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. For a few precious hours, she escapes the life waiting for her outside the door.
Some years later, she vanishes without trace, abandoning her husband and young children and inventing a new life for herself in Canada. What she did is difficult to understand, or forgive. But it is not her decision that makes the story so compelling. It is the feeling that precedes it. Long before she acts, she has begun to look upon her own life as though it were not her own.
Many thoughtful people have experienced something similar.
Perhaps you are at a birthday party or sitting in a meeting when, suddenly, everything feels strange. You zoom out of the room and wonder, How did I end up here? Or perhaps it happens on the homeward commute or while changing a nappy in the middle of the night. The feeling lasts only a few seconds before necessity kicks in. But for that brief moment, you are no longer simply living your life. You are looking in on it.
It was precisely this human potential that fascinated the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). For Sartre, human beings are unlike anything else in the natural world. A tree simply exists. A stone simply exists. But human beings are conscious not only of the world but also of themselves within it. We can step back from our own lives and ask questions that no other creature appears capable of asking: Who am I? How did I become this person? Whatnow?
This capacity for self-reflection is both our highest freedom and our heaviest burden—for we are never wholly identical with the life we happen to be living. Had things been only slightly different, we would be living an altogether different life. Indeed, there are countless lives that we could have lived, and could still live.
Most of the time, however, we do our utmost to forget this unsettling truth. Sartre called this mauvaise foi, or ‘bad faith’.
Bad faith is not ordinary lying. We do not consciously deceive ourselves. Rather, we come to identify with the roles we occupy. We begin to see ourselves as nothing more than a teacher, a doctor, a parent, a husband, or a wife, forgetting that these are only the lives we happen to be living. We begin to mistake our lives for ourselves.
One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter ought to be. His every movement is a little too precise; his every smile, a little too practised. He is trying so hard to be a waiter that he forgets that he is first a free human being who happens to be waiting tables.
When I was a junior doctor, I too played at being a doctor—partly because it was what everyone expected, and what many of my patients needed. But because I had read Sartre as a teenager, I could sometimes catch myself doing it.
Like Laura Brown, I would suddenly become aware that my role was only a role. Laura had not ceased to love her husband or her son, nor had she forgotten her responsibilities towards them. But she could no longer identify with the life that she happened to be living. A gap had opened up between herself and her life.
Most people expend a great deal of effort trying to close that gap. They tell themselves that they have no real choice, that it is too late to change, that people depend on them, or that this is simply who they are. Often these rationalisations contain a good deal of truth. We are born into circumstances that we cannot simply wish away, and we acquire obligations that we cannot lightly discard.
Still, there is a world of difference between acknowledging our constraints and denying our freedom altogether. The first is maturity. The second is bad faith.
For Sartre, freedom does not mean doing whatever we feel like doing. Laura Brown is not some heroine of liberation. Her story is tragic because freedom and responsibility so often pull in opposite directions. Sartre’s point is not that we should walk away from our commitments whenever they become alien or burdensome, but that we should not simply endure them as though we had no choice in the matter.
That is why those fleeting moments of estrangement matter. When you suddenly wonder, How did I end up here?, you are not necessarily having a crisis. You are opening a window of choice and freedom.
We are something more than the lives we have cornered ourselves into. We could have been a million different people—and still could.
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