Old questions, good company — thinking as a practice of wellbeing.
Start free This art, and all eight — join the SalonPhilosophy joined this course for a modern reason: some of its oldest exercises have quietly become some of psychology's best-evidenced ones. Writing about yourself in the third person. Viewing your life from above. Separating events from your judgements of them.
Write about your day in the third person — and watch what distance does to your judgement.
Preregistered randomized trials show a month of third-person diary-writing increases wise reasoning (Grossmann et al., Psychological Science, 2021).
A guided zoom-out — this room, this city, this lifetime, this cosmos — borrowed from the Stoics, supported by self-distancing research.
Psychological distancing is one of the most replicated emotion-regulation moves in the literature.
Take one troubling thought and ask the oldest question in practical philosophy: what happened, and what did I add to it?
The event-versus-judgement distinction is the single most characteristic Stoic skill — and the engine of modern cognitive approaches.
We tell you honestly which parts are trial-tested (the Wisdom Diary), which are ancient practices with modern mechanisms behind them (the View From Above), and which are simply good company for thinking.