WebMDave

Any power you have comes to you from far beyond. Everything is fixed, and you can't change it.           — Jesus to Pilate in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar T here’s something both oddly comforting and deeply unsettling about determinism. On one hand, it means you're not to blame for that embarrassing thing you said in 2014. On the other, it means you might not be steering the ship at all. Determinism, a concept that has echoed through the corridors of history, is the idea that everything — your thoughts, your choices, your Spotify Wrapped — is the inevitable result of prior causes. It's a notion that has been pondered by great minds of the past, and if we could rewind the universe and play it forward again, it would unfold exactly the same way. This idea isn’t new. The Stoics were early champions. They believed the cosmos runs on logos — divine reason, a kind of metaphysical cause-and-effect. Their advice? Since you can’t change fate, stop complaining ...

W hen the Stoic philosophers spoke of “God,” they didn’t mean a bearded man on a cloud. Their theos was not a supernatural personality outside of nature, but the totality of existence itself — the rational, ordered, living whole of which we are a part. In this sense, “God” was simply another word for the universe, infused with reason ( logos ), uncreated, eternal, and self-sustaining. Today, 2,000 years later, modern thinkers — whether they call themselves pantheists, naturalists, or just curious human beings — are finding themselves arriving at a similar place. The idea that the universe itself is divine, not because it’s magical, but because it is the total, interconnected reality that produces life, mind, and meaning, has a strange way of persisting. The Stoic View: God as Nature, Nature as God The Stoics, especially thinkers like Chrysippus and Marcus Aurelius, held that God and Nature were the same. The cosmos was a single, living organism, guided by reason ( logos ), and all...

I am a retired senior citizen. With fewer distractions and obligations, the quiet has grown louder — and with it, a deep, gnawing question:  Does anything really matter? The answer I keep arriving at, disturbingly but persistently, is: No. Not really. Not in the long run. Empires rise and fall. The sun will burn out. Everything I have ever done, thought, or loved will be forgotten. Even the Earth itself will one day cease to exist. What’s the point of trying to live “well” when I’m a temporary blip, a speck of dust floating in a cosmic shrug? That’s where I am. This, I suppose, is what some would call an existential crisis . It feels more like existential clarity—and it’s unsettling. But I’ve been walking the Stoic path for a while now. I'm a Prokopton — a student of Stoicism, someone hopefully progressing toward wisdom, even if imperfectly. The Stoics never promised comfort. They promised coherence. A way to live honestly in a world that doesn’t owe us meaning or anyt...

W hen I was a Christian, I was taught to bring my pain, confusion, and doubt to the foot of the cross. “You can be healed,” I was told. “ If you have faith, God will make a way .” But the promised healing never came. When my faith-filled prayers were answered with silence, the reassuring comments of “It’s all part of God’s plan” started to sound like empty rhetoric. For that reason and many others, I eventually left Christianity, carrying a burden of spiritual scaring. Now what? Seek psychological help? Eliminate my magical thinking by actually studying science? I tried those paths, and they did help. However, somewhere along the way, I quietly, curiously stumbled onto the writings of modern and ancient philosophers. I mostly skipped the dry texts presented by academia, being more drawn to contemporary writers who bring philosophy alive. When I think of medicine, I often picture pills, prescriptions, or white-coated professionals poking at problems with stethoscopes. But lon...

F or the better half of my life, I was a dedicated Christian. My faith shaped how I interpreted the world, how I related to others, and how I understood meaning and morality. In my 40s, I began to question — not out of a desire to sin (the usual Christian dismissal for my current disbelief), but out of a deep and unsettling sense that the religious world I inhabited no longer made sense to me. What followed was a liberating and empowering transition. After many years of identifying as a timidly skeptical ex-Christian, I discovered Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that had eluded me until then. Now, I proudly identify as a Stoic Prokopton — a term that signifies progress, not perfection. I am not a sage, not a master, not a know-it-all, but simply someone walking the path with intention and empowerment. Why I Moved Away from Christianity My faith had been my primary source of community, identity, and purpose. The more I learned about Christianity, the more I noticed the contradictory n...

W e tend to think of laws as things written in books, backed by governments, and enforced by courts. But in our day-to-day lives, some of the most powerful "laws" aren’t laws at all. They’re habits. Or traditions. Or inherited opinions. And yet we follow them as if they were handed down from some sort of higher power. So how does a preference — a personal or cultural choice — evolve into something treated as sacred, untouchable, and binding? Why do certain habits feel as unbreakable as laws? Let’s explore it.  1. The First Step: Path Dependence and Institutional Inertia Sometimes, it starts small. A preference becomes a routine. A routine becomes a rule. This is known as path dependence — the idea that once a certain option is chosen, it becomes easier to stick with it than to change, even if better options exist. Think of the QWERTY keyboard layout . The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the 1878 Remington No. 2 typewriter, and it’...

I t seems like everyone and their emotionally-overwhelmed cousin is realizing they might be autistic these days. The internet is full of lists— Signs You Have Autism and Didn’t Know It , Why You Hate Phone Calls , Are You Socially Exhausted or Just Neurodivergent? —and suddenly, what used to be dismissed as “quirks” are adding up to something more significant. For years, autism was thought of in rigid terms: a childhood condition identified early, mostly in boys, with a set of clear-cut diagnostic criteria. But the understanding of autism has expanded, revealing a spectrum that includes adults who’ve spent decades masking their traits, often at great personal cost. The realization that autism isn’t rare—it’s just been overlooked—explains a lot about why so many people feel like they’ve been navigating life on hard mode without knowing why. Of course, there’s skepticism. Some roll their eyes at the surge in self-diagnoses, dismissing it as a TikTok trend or a product of over-patholog...