Meet Ryan Holiday: the author who says we need more grit
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The American historian Will Durrant once wrote that nations are born stoic and die epicurean: a catchy but misleading aphorism that has led people to conflate stoicism and apathy. A far more accurate explanation for the philosophy of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius was written last month by Melanie McDonagh in this very paper. Stoicism, she wrote, is “the opposite of snowflakery, and the cult of being perpetually offended by other people’s speech and the general embrace of victimhood.” And so it is, as it has always been, that great minds emerge in reaction to the spirit of the day. Enter Ryan Holiday, host of the podcast The Daily Stoic, author of eight books on the matter and a man once asked to be Donald Trump’s director of comms (he turned the job down).
Holiday, 36, is a sprightly
