Don’t Live According to Nature Like the Stoics. Do this Instead.

Douglas C. Bates
6 min readMay 12, 2023

The ancient Stoics took for their motto, “live according to nature.” While this motto sounds appealing, it turns out to be terrible advice.

The problem is that while nature does seem to provide some guidance — we do have to eat, drink, and sleep, for example — nature’s guidance is ambiguous at best about how to make decisions about how to live in complex…

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Douglas C. Bates

Ancient Greek philosophies of life. http://www.pyrrhonism.org Author of “Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism.”