Life is filled with difficult, frustrating people. It’s filled with people who will annoy and disappoint us. People who will fall short. Who will fail us.
In the morning, Marcus Aurelius often reminded himself that “the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.”
As parents, we encounter this reality daily—at work, in traffic, even at our children’s afterschool activities. Yet Marcus adds something crucial about these kinds of people: we shouldn’t let ugly behavior make us into ugly people. We must avoid getting upset, getting bitter, getting mean. Not only for our own health and sanity, but because our kids need to see an example of what it looks like to understand and sympathize with others, even when they’re difficult.
Your kids won’t learn empathy from lectures. They learn it by watching how we navigate the world—how we respond to the rude waiter, the annoying neighbor, the unhelpful and overworked customer service rep. It’s easy to connect with people who think like us, look like us, sound like us. But the Stoics would remind us that developing empathy for those we don’t naturally understand—or even like—requires virtue.
And not just one virtue, but each of the Stoic Virtues. True empathy demands courage, whether that means engaging with someone you disagree with or even someone who scares you. It requires discipline to keep your emotions in check when you’d rather lash out. It calls for justice to genuinely care about others’ interests alongside your own. And it needs wisdom to explore different perspectives—then transform that information into understanding.
It’s why, over the past five years, I’ve been exploring (hey, Ryan here) each of these virtues through the Stoic Virtues series and demonstrating how to apply them in our modern lives.
These virtues don’t just help us navigate our own lives—they provide the model our children need. In fact, the greatest gift we can offer them is to embody these virtues consistently in our daily interactions, especially during challenging moments. When our kids see these virtues lived authentically, they internalize them in ways that no lesson or lecture could ever achieve.
And wisdom? Wisdom is the virtue upon which all other virtues depend.
There’s no easy way to wisdom. No app. No shortcut. No secret formula. It can’t be hacked, downloaded, or handed to you. It must be earned—through the same hard work people have done for millennia: reading, thinking, living, reflecting.
That’s what my new book, Wisdom Takes Work, is about.
P.S. Wisdom Takes Work, the fourth and final book in the Stoic Virtues series, will be here on October 21, 2025. If you’re reading this before then, grab your exclusive bonuses while they last—preorder your signed copy!
