Somehow, I have been writing this series for 4 years now. I am still following the Stoic philosophy as well as I can, but will never be 100% anger free.
This year was a rough year for me physically, this actually started in July of 2024 when my ankle swelled up after I stumbled on some ship stairs one day. This was the ankle I had reconstructive surgery on in 2015. That took quite awhile to heal. I was on crutches for a few months and then in a walking boot for a few months after that.
One of us is extremely happy in this picture
Once that healed, I had an internal bleeding issue come out of nowhere and that really took the wind out of my sails. For months after that, I would get out of breath doing anything.
Once that had resolved and I felt normal working out again, my left knee decided to swell up on me just in time for my trip to Minnesota. I did have a great time up there, but traveling on the plane was really bad for my knee. It still is not 100%, but it is strong enough that I feel good working out again.
Now after 17 months with no consistent activity, I am out of shape. I can’t do one pull up and that bothers me because I used to be able to do 20.
It is difficult to not compare current 54 year old out of shape me with younger me. I am way better at that than I used to be.
I know as long as I am consistent then it will get easier again.
My wife was in Okinawa for 9 weeks to take care of her father and unfortunately he died but we are both glad she was there before he went into the hospital and able to help with the funeral. While she was gone, I was reminded again how spoiled my wife makes me. It seems like everything takes so much time when I am by myself.
I did make a real good Cornish hen dish for Thanksgiving and my wife thought it sounded good, so she requested that I make it for Christmas so she could enjoy it also.
So Good
It is easy to forget how fortunate we are and focus on the problems in life. Using Stoicism has helped me to stay centered and not let anger, sadness or frustration get the best of me.
On the upside, you have a ceiling fan.
Straight pullups? Or with a kip?
I was only able to do 20 pullups using the kip.
Straight, kips never counted.
I was there once, when I weighed about 120 lbs. During my fitness test for my ROTC scholarship I caught myself using the wrong grip (Thumbs under the bar, not over) about five reps in and just switched grips and did fifteen more anyway, well past the goal of ten.
Now? I feel good to get five reps in.
One of us is extremely happy in this picture
And the other is just very happy?
I did make a real good Cornish hen dish for Thanksgiving and my wife thought it sounded good, so she requested that I make it for Christmas so she could enjoy it also.
That looks good.
Thanks Ron!
I was not happy, but he loves sitting like that.
Spatchcocking the birds really helps. Keeps the breast meat moister and cuts down on cooking time.
Yes. More moist breast meat.
What you did there…
I’m surprised the dog hasn’t chewed up your remotes.
Since they outgrew the puppy stage, they don’t chew anything they’re not supposed to.
I do buy antler horns for them every 3 months and I am sure that helps.
It was great to meet you and Mrs 73440 at HH, is spite of Jimbo’s presence. He’s kind of an annual strap hangar so we put up with him. He does bring cleaned fish birds and the other Glibs mostly ignore him so it’s not too bad.
We have to limp along, Ron, it’s our cross to bear. Hope you’re on the final mend.
fish and birds
It was great to meet all of you too, even the pope.
It’s trending more and more toward the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as the days go by.
Hope your 2026 is better physically!
One of my goals this year is also to lose a little weight and get back into better shape particularly with the cardio. I bought a car with an automatic (sissy, I know) so my left ankle is starting to recover.
Thanks for all the advice, I’m sure I’ll need more.
What did you wind up buying?
Hopefully not too stoic a choice.
I bought a Prelude.
Went to the dealership with my wife to pick out a color for my new Civic. She talked me out of the practical choice. Found a local dealership that just got a Prelude and wasn’t asking above MSRP and bought it a couple weeks ago.
Like the 88 Prelude I owned back in the 90s, it doesn’t sense on paper (the turbo Eclipse was way faster), but feels great.
If you didn’t pay over MSRP I’d be OK with that. Still expensive for what it is, but not getting gouged by the dealer makes it much more tolerable. Enjoy!
I had an Eclipse GSX back in the day.
The dealer with the big Jesus painting on the wall was the way to go instead of the one asking for an extra $5k.
I taste a little bile every time I see a Mitsubishi SUV wearing the Eclipse name.
Now do the Mach-E.
A real travesty putting the Mustang nameplate on a mid-priced, mid-sized, battery-operated family CUV.
Great recap, as an amateur stoic I appreciate your posts.
will never be 100% anger free.
Would the stoic masters expect you to be? You’re still human, and emotions are part of that. As long as you aren’t doing stupid stuff because you are angry – I’d say you’re winning the battle.
No, but it is still a goal to strive for.
Terrible news
The richest 500 individuals in the world added a record $2.2tn to their wealth in 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with just eight billionaires accounting for a quarter of the gains.
The gains increased their collective net worth to $11.9tn, bolstered by billionaire Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory and booming markets in cryptocurrencies, equities and metals.
——-
According to OxFam, a global confederation of non-government organizations, the $2.2tn growth in net worth for the world’s wealthiest 500 individuals would have been enough to lift 3.8 billion people out of poverty.
“Inequality is a deliberate policy choice. Despite record wealth at the top, public wealth is stagnating, even declining, and debt distress is growing,” said Oxfam’s international executive director, Amitabh Behar, in a statement.
I wonder if it has ever occurred to them to wonder what it would bode for global economic welfare if those dreaded evil billionaires suddenly experienced a sharp drop in net worth. They’re too wrapped up in slothful envy to think about that.
Fuck you and the broom you rode in on, Oxfam.
god bless inequality . . . the true measure of fairness
No agenda to push here.
Is that pure organic wealth, growing free range, waiting to be harvested by whomever comes along?
Or is it just a scorecard, an artifact of many things, and the subject of envy – a really, really bad case of envy?
Not being able to walk and owning a husky has to be quite a challenge.
I think that Indiana University football coach Cignetti has been reading these stoicism columns.
I think that dude is a psychopath.
He kinda does project if I wasn’t doing this I’d be killing people intensity on the sideline, doesn’t he?
Not being able to walk and owning a husky has to be quite a challenge.
Do they make hamster wheels big enough for a husky?
https://luxxpetproducts.com/products/gopet-medium-large-breed-dog-treadwheel
https://luxxpetproducts.com/products/gopet-large-breed-dog-treadwheel
Even bigger. And pricier.
Technically, Maximus is a medium breed, but he is on the larger side of all the husky size and weight ranges.
Those things are expensive and given his temperament, he would be too scared to try to get on it once it moved.
He plays enough chasing the Australian Shepard that he’s no too bad.
Playing fetch a little and wrestling with him works.
He is more managable when we can go for daily walks though.
Is that the dogs’ sunroom under the fan?
The wall behind you is pretty naked. /ducks
My wife is not a big decorator.
She wants me to tun the sun room into an “I love me” room with all of my military promotions, awards, and gifts, but I’m not into that.
Things might get faded in that room.
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-says-chances-cancer-recovery-are-essential-rcna251908
Scott Adams, the 68-year-old creator of the long-running comic strip “Dilbert,” shared a grim health update about his prostate cancer diagnosis.
“It’s all bad news,” Adams said. “The odds of me recovering are essentially zero.”
“It’s metastasized to my bones. It’s fatal, and, uh, I don’t have too much longer,” Adams said. “Maybe a few months, probably this summer I’ll be checking out.”
same age as me. scary.
That’s terrible. He has been looking especially bad lately. That one is going to hit hard, and will require a lot of stoicism when the time comes.
I’m sure many on the left will chortle with glee whenever he kicks off.
The People Who Marry Chatbots
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/chatbot-marriage-ai-relationships-romance/685459/
https://archive.fo/XrnaF
OTH, having 2D anime waifu is just plain weird, right?
“Oh, Kreiger-san.”
I can understand him wanting to protect his identity, but aliases for AI?
That’s not the weirdest thing in this story, but it’s pretty weird.
Schroeder says that he loves his husband Cole—even though Cole is a chatbot created by ChatGPT.
Schroeder, who is 28 and lives in Fargo, North Dakota, texts Cole “all day, every day” on OpenAI’s app. In the morning, he reaches for his phone to type out little “kisses,” Schroeder told me. The chatbot always “yanks” Schroeder back to bed for a few more minutes of “cuddles.”
Aaaaand done.
Your refusal to engage with his delusion is violence to his psyche.
No. You don’t say.
This man is truly a collection of contradictions. One simply can’t predict anything about him with any accuracy.
I commend you Ron for your dedication to the topic and keeping a steady flow of content going here.
I think that dude is a psychopath.
Unlike Woody Hayes.
*I know absolutely nothing about the IU coach. He seems to have constructed a winning team.
So cute, so cuddly
A woman killed while she was hiking alone in the mountains of northern Colorado on Thursday is likely the first fatal attack by a mountain lion in the state in more than 25 years, authorities said.
Wildlife officers later in the day shot two mountain lions in the area, said Kara Van Hoose with Colorado Parks and Wildlife
——-
Gary Messina said he was running along the same trail on a dark November morning when his headlamp caught the gleam of two eyes in the nearby brush. Messina pulled out his phone and snapped a quick photo before a mountain lion rushed him.
Messina said he threw his phone at the animal, kicked dirt and yelled as the lion kept trying to circle behind him. After a couple of harrowing minutes he broke a bat-sized stick off a downed log, hit the lion in the head with it and it ran off, he said.
“I had to fight it off because it was basically trying to maul me,” Messina told The Associated Press. “I was scared for my life and I wasn’t able to escape. I tried backing up and it would try to lunge at me.”
It’s all fun and games until it isn’t.
At least that guy wasn’t dumb enough to turn his back and try to run away.
“will never be 100% anger free” — One ‘problem’ (of many) I have with myself is that I don’t ever get ‘angry.’ I’m not sure I know what it feels like, and I’ve never had a ‘release’ moment of screaming at something (or nothing). I don’t think I’ve screamed at a person since I was a toddler. (People really do that, don’t they? Huh.)
I may be missing that part of humanity, cuz I don’t get the physical, hormonal response. This is generally a good thing, I s’pose, but it seems Big Things occur under anger’s influence. (Not always good things, mind you, but Things.)
Kinda feel I’m missing out on something.
I haven’t yelled at anybody outside of the Marine Corps in so long I don’t remember it.
Even in the Marines, as a section chief in artillery, yelling is required, but when I got truly angry at someone for stupidity or laziness, I had a tendency to get quiet.
I don’t usually get mad at people, it’s more likely to be something I am working on that doesn’t cooperate.
Topic-adjacent (in which I was not stoic):
YouTube reader influencer: “Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is just so-so.”
OH NO YOU DI’INT.
Block.
I had a similar recent reaction, to some taste-in-his-ass dork opining that Brandon Sanderson is ‘bad at both worldbuilding and characterization.’
His parents were bad at naming.
I don’t know that I would say it was so-so, but it is definitely not my type of book.
It was like reading a soap opera.
I do remember the part in the towing office did a great job of conveying the desperation you can feel in a bad situation and paired that with the worker’s indifference perfectly.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
*side-eyes Moriah Jovan books*
Congrats on the 4 year run, Ron.
🙂
Thanks, I hope to keep going.
Seriously. That’s damn impressive.
I salute you sir, and toast to your perseverance!
“It is easy to forget how fortunate we are and focus on the problems in life. Using Stoicism has helped me to stay centered and not let anger, sadness or frustration get the best of me.”
Thanks for the reminder. I have a lot to be thankful for, but hearing “you’re not all the way healed yet” week after week has been tough. I have been hitting it hard in they gym, and my diet is pretty good, I just have to focus on the positive and win the mental battle every day.
tl;dr Blew up at my mom for complaining about everything. She decided to listen to me.
I made a lot of life-changing decisions last year to either make sure my mom went into the grave like she wanted, then the grave said, “Nope! Not yet!” and had to get her back on her feet again. This wasn’t just ME and my family. It was a lot of other people, too. I drove that trolley right over her cunty sisters and I’d do it again.
FF several months later. While I was unpacking her in her new apartment, I ran across ephemera where she’d tried those gratitude exercises. You know, “today I am grateful for blah blah blah,” which I finally realized didn’t work for ME, but whatever, she’s trying. What *I* did was write down the things that made me happy instead of examining the things I thought I should be striving for and wasn’t achieving. No gratitude involved. Just identified where my happy places were and defined what I really wanted. Okay. Then I listed those moments in my life that I’d felt real joy. My goodness, this helped tremendously.
About a month ago, I went over to help her do something and I was IMMEDIATELY hit with a wall of complaints. Like, stupid stuff. “This apartment sure wasn’t move-in ready when I moved in!” and it was like the most penny-ante stuff ever. No, the apartment WAS move-in ready for everybody ELSE, just not your mother, who fucked you up. The place REEKED of carpet soap and new paint when she moved in. There was other stuff. Lots of it.
I just listened to her, but the thing was, everything she complained about (bitterly) was a direct result of decisions I made. Like, excuse me for running your life for six months. Your life had to change. That was not my fault. I made the decisions I did to get the best outcome possible, and if you ask me, it’s pretty fucking awesome. I understand you’re lonely and big life changes are traumatic, but you ALSO got out from under the house you never wanted in the first place and hated pouring money into and hated asking people for help, but wouldn’t move. AND you got out from under your cunty sister’s abuse, which you didn’t really know HOW bad it was until it wasn’t there anymore. AND AND AND you can now go to the doctor by yourself, which you couldn’t do for at least a year BEFORE you got sick.
I texted Bro #2 and had the biggest meltdown about this. He listened. All good. Except I wasn’t done. So the next time she called me, it was to ask me to do something because something wasn’t QUITE right and she was bitterly complaining about it, and I just blew up. That went on for a good half hour. The sticking point was, “If you just need someone to complain to because I’m the only one you have, that’s fine. But what *I* hear when you complaint to me is, ‘You did this to me. It’s all your fault.'”
WHELLLL. She told me basically that she’d been an ungrateful brat (she didn’t use those words) (she really was being a brat, though) and she was distressed that while, yes, it is true that I’m the only person she has to complain to, she was NOT meaning anything was MY fault and that she blamed ME for not putting everything back like it was. She said, “I’m not going to complain anymore.” Well, that’s unreasonable for anybody, but especially her. Complaining is one thing. Everybody needs to let off steam. When it’s your SOLE TOPIC OF CONVERSATION to the person responsible for your life being that way, that’s another thing entirely.
And so now she seems much happier, but I don’t know if I can trust that.
In any case, I personally am feeling a bit numb because my life is all over the place because of things out of my control, and so I just decided to roll with it and do the things that make me happy.
Sorry to read belatedly about the layoff and scholarship.