The Three Authors Who Saved Me During an Existential Crisis “Stench and worms.” To use Leo Tolstoy’s words in A Confession, that’s what will become of us all after death. We toil through life. Our actions will inevitably come to an end. And all memory of us will eventually disappear. So, what’s the point of going on in the first…

Last year, I struck up a conversation with a man sitting next to me at the bar of a TGIF at Miami International Airport. I never learned his name, nor did he learn mine. Still, we enjoyed nearly an hour-long conversation: we discussed his son’s hesitance to pursue a degree…

What the Existentialist Author Can Teach Us About Body Positivity — Most photographs of Simone de Beauvoir show her seated, typically in a café, often writing or enjoying a cigarette. What’s less well known is that the twentieth-century philosopher and novelist, best known for her groundbreaking feminist book The Second Sex, was also an avid hiker. Her…

Why Marcus Aurelius Might Tell You to do a Digital Detox Take a view from above — look at the thousands of flocks and herds, the thousands of human ceremonies, every sort of voyage in storm or calm, the range of creation, combination, and extinction. Consider too the lives once…