Stoic Practices: Journaling
When most people hear the word “journaling,” they picture a notebook filled with private thoughts, something closer to a diary than a philosophical treatise. Yet one of the greatest Stoic works, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, began as nothing more than personal notes to himself. Marcus never set out to publish a book. He was writing reminders. Encouragements. Rebukes. Simple observations about the day’s events. Nearly two thousand years later, those scribbles have become one of the most essential foundations of Stoic philosophy.
Marcus was not alone in this. Seneca urged his readers to review each day before bed: What have I learned? Where did I fall short? How did I improve? Epictetus gave the exercise even sharper edges, suggesting three questions: What did I do wrong? What did I do right? What could I do better next time? These were not abstract puzzles. They were the raw material of ordinary life, set down in writing so the writer could see more clearly.
I have been journaling, on and off, for nearly forty-five years. Some seasons, I wrote every day. At other times, I let the habit slip for months or even years. I’ve used spiral notebooks, bound journals, and scraps of paper. Occasionally, I’ll pull an old volume off the shelf, flip through the yellowed pages, and meet a younger version of myself. Sometimes it’s humbling. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s painful. But it is always instructive. I see what I was worried about then, what I thought mattered most, and what I was blind to. In that way, journaling is a mirror that changes with time.
Marcus wrote as though speaking to a friend. He often used the second person: “You will meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, arrogant…” He was reminding himself, but also creating distance. Modern psychology now suggests that this trick is effective. Writing as though you are advising another person creates a little space from your emotions. It keeps you from spinning stories to justify yourself. It sharpens self-examination and sometimes makes it kinder.
My own practice has shifted in recent years. For a while, I kept my notes in Microsoft OneNote. It felt efficient and tidy, but also private enough to speak freely. More recently, I’ve taken up something many people are experimenting with now: writing my daily journal into ChatGPT. I still copy the entries into OneNote, but here I write as though to a conversation partner. I’ve provided the system with enough background information about myself and my values that its responses often surprise me. It highlights patterns I might not notice. It reminds me to close each day with reflection. And it asks for three things: Gratitude, Struggle, and Hope or Resolve. This keeps me on-task with another Stoic practice, “Daily Reflection.” That small structure has proven invaluable. When I keep up the practice, the days have a rhythm, and the evenings have a kind of honesty that I might otherwise dodge.
This is not about being profound. Marcus was an emperor; his reflections had the weight of wars, plagues, and betrayal behind them. My own pages are often filled with the mundane aspects of daily life: chores, frustrations, errands, and conversations. Yet even the mundane matters. Sometimes it is only by writing down what seems unimportant that I realize what I’ve been ignoring. Patterns emerge: too many days when I gloss over a small anger, or when I skip celebrating small joys. The act of putting pen to paper, or words to screen, forces me to see them.
Seneca once wrote, “Each day, we should call ourselves to account.” That is the heart of journaling. Not self-punishment. Not wallowing. Simply a reckoning. What did I do with this one day of my life? How did I meet it? Where did I falter? Where did I show courage or kindness? For the Stoics, this practice was part of philosophy as a way of life. For me, it has been an anchor, especially in times of transition.
There are seasons when journaling feels like a conversation with God, or with my better self, or with Marcus whispering across the centuries. There are other seasons when it feels more like bookkeeping. But even in those plainer stretches, the habit pays off. As Massimo Pigliucci noted in a recent interview, when you keep at it long enough, you can look back ten years and ask: Am I handling this anger better now than I used to? Do the same things trouble me, or have I grown? The journal becomes a record not just of events but of progress.
Of course, there are pitfalls. The Stoics warned about self-deception. We humans are experts at rationalizing. A journal can become a place where you excuse yourself or flatter yourself instead of confronting the truth. That is why Marcus sometimes wrote harshly, as if to shake himself awake. It is also why Epictetus urged students to seek out friends of virtue, companions honest enough to tell you when you’re off track. My own twist on this is letting an AI push back. It is not a friend in the Stoic sense, but it does keep me from falling entirely into my own echo chamber.
What matters most is not the tool but the intent. Marcus had wax tablets. Seneca had letters. I have notebooks, apps, and now, a digital confidant. The common thread is the act of pausing long enough to notice. To say: this is what today was. This is where I stood firm. This is where I slipped. And tomorrow, I will try again.
Other figures beyond the Stoics show how journaling can outgrow its original purpose. Augustine’s Confessions began as a deeply personal reckoning with his past and became a cornerstone of Christian thought. Montaigne, scribbling reflections in his tower, gave birth to the essay as a form. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau filled notebooks that became the soil for their public works; their journals were laboratories of the spirit before they were manifestos. Anne Frank, writing while hiding in an attic, left the world a testament to courage and innocence in the face of evil. Virginia Woolf’s diaries chart both her struggles and her genius. They later helped readers understand the weave between daily life and artistic creation. None of them wrote with posterity in mind. They were writing for clarity, for honesty, for survival. Yet their private pages became public guides. This, too, is part of journaling’s power: it shapes not only the writer but sometimes the world around them.
There is one more gift that journaling offers, one that the Stoics understood well. It reminds us of the passage of time. Each entry is a small memento of mortality. Seneca wrote that “we die every day,” and Marcus told himself to act as if this day were his last. When I leaf through pages written decades ago, I see how quickly those years passed. The hopes of my twenty-year-old self. The worries of my forty-year-old self. The questions of my sixty-year-old self. The record is humbling yet heartening. I have kept going. I have kept learning.
Journaling is not about producing a masterpiece. It is about producing a life examined. Marcus’s notebooks survived because others found them worth keeping. Ours may never be read by anyone else, and that is fine. The real point is the act itself.
To write is to reckon with the day. To reckon is to grow. And to grow is to live more wisely.
So, whether with pen, keyboard, or conversation with a machine, the practice remains the same. Pause. Write. Reflect. Be grateful. Admit struggle. Hold hope. Do it again tomorrow.
