Foreword | October 07, 2026

Searching for Life

The writers in this issues find authenticity in ways that remind me of Stoic or existential thought. They speak of acting on one’s own, finding meaning in life by engaging struggle and desire, and making the best of personal challenges, no matter how demanding. they quest for something as small as a spark of theatrical tension and as large as a new life in the universe.

Existential thinkers admit the apparent meaninglessness of the Given. For them, it is up to us to choose identity and purpose. This idea of connecting the will to our self-definition is related to a surprising number of religious and philosophical approaches. Who are we, and what we should we do? Socrates started by admitting that same ignorance: “I know that I know nothing.” Evil comes from failing to do anything about it, from not asking questions, discovering contradictions, and moving toward intellectual and practical independence in our lives. This conception of meaning was not a vague, harmless idea to the anxious and politically fearful people of Athens, who had just lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta. An Athenian court sentenced Socrates to death for encouraging such skepticism and independent thought, and he accepted his sentence rather than escape into exile.

Toward the end of the second century A.D., Roman emperor and general Marcus Aurelius kept a meditative diary through ten years of warfare. He wrote to maintain his sanity during nights in tents in grimy, smallpox-infested military camps.  His Meditations are compelling as Stoic philosophy not because he invented the ideas but because he enacted them under profoundly convincing circumstances.

Stoic teachers and writers had been around for almost four centuries by Aurelius’s time. They were so popular during his schooling that his principal teacher had insisted he give them up because he needed to lead men, not pursue wisdom. Aurelius continued to read the Stoics in Greek, just as he later wrote his diary in Greek while moving across eight hundred miles of Roman frontier. His private diary shows vulnerability, isolation, and hunger to find meaning, despite his disgust with both himself and the condition of his troops, who were dying at a rate of as many as three thousand a day from infections, illness, and injuries. Aurelius wrote about the plain, almost commonplace-sounding choices—accepting one’s imminent mortality, duty, resilience, controlling one’s mind, the determination to care about and love others, and focusing on impediments to action so clearly that it becomes a means to action.