It’s a complicated issue. 

Maybe it doesn’t affect you directly. 

Maybe you’ve got a lot going on in your own life or your own community. 

Maybe you’d rather not think about it. 

Maybe you’d rather not hear from me about it. 

I get it. 

These are difficult, divisive times. 

There are plenty of reasons to turn off your brain or your heart. 

About six years ago, I wrote a piece about our obligation to care about what happens to other people. I wrote it in part because I was frustrated by the news that the sheriff in the rural county I live in was engaging in targeted traffic stops at night so they could detain and deport Latino immigrants (I was myself pulled over driving back from the airport one night but of course immediately let go as soon as the officer approached my car). I wrote it in part because of the videos I’d seen of the killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.

I thought about it again the last few weeks as I watched the same horrifying videos that you may have watched.

One of the things I said in that piece was that I didn’t like the idea of “privilege” being the focus of the conversation in the discussions about the police or race. The fact that my publisher sends me early copies of books before they are released, I said, that’s a privilege. Something I didn’t earn, something that can disappear, something that I enjoy but am not entitled to.

But not being harassed on the street by the police or by vigilantes? Not being strangled to death on suspicion of some minor crime? Not being tear gassed or thrown to the ground for protesting government policies?

That’s not a privilege.

That’s a constitutional right. Actually, it’s more than a constitutional right. According to the Founding Fathers and many philosophers before and since, the rights to life and liberty and property are beyond constitutional: They are inalienable.

The right to not be murdered, to not be harassed by people with guns, to not be targeted, exploited or incarcerated unfairly, to speak your mind, to pursue your religion, for your home to be a safe haven, these are not things that governments give to their people. These are things that God—or generations of evolution and progress—endowed us with at birth, and that we in turn give governments the power to protect. 

All of us.

Black. White. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. Republican. Democrat. Socialist. Even annoying, obnoxious idiots. If these basic rights are threatened for one person, for one community, it’s threatened for all people.

Oh but these people came here illegally… But previous administrations deported a lot of people. But some of these people are criminals…Due process. Due process. Due process. That’s the answer to every one of those objections. It doesn’t matter if you’re a serial killer, everyone is entitled to their day in court.

Look, the punishment for filming I.C.E is not summary execution. The punishment for fleeing in your vehicle is not extrajudicial murder, even if a federal agent thinks you’re “a fucking bitch.” (Being shot in the face three times is not the punishment for hitting a federal officer with your car either, it’s worth saying!) The punishment for coming to the United States illegally—the punishment for overstaying your visa or indeed any kind of violation of immigration laws—is and never will be a trip to an El Salvadorian torture prison.

Immigration is a complicated issue. Crime is complicated. My dad was a cop for twenty years, I understand it’s a hard job. But this is not complicated.

Heavily armed masked agents should not be storming American streets demanding to see people’s papers. They should not be harassing citizens, making arrests and sorting things out later. They should not be harassing people because they don’t look or sound like citizens. They should not be entering schools or hospitals or courthouses or churches to try to take people away.

OK? 

It should not be controversial to say that. 

In fact, it is our job as human beings (and Stoics) to say it. 

Callous indifference to suffering by the authorities towards minorities or the poor or the voiceless is not just a lamentable fact of modern life, it’s an active crime. One we are complicit in, if we ignore it or rationalize it or tolerate it. 

Marcus Aurelius wrote two thousand years ago that “you can also commit an injustice by doing nothing.” The Stoics believed that harm to one was to harm all. Martin Luther King explained this idea of sympatheia beautifully. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I understand that this might not be what you want to hear from me. I write about self-improvement. I write about philosophy. I write about history. That’s true.

But what do you think the point of the study of those three things is? It’s not so you can make a little more money. It’s not so you can live in your own bubble or have interesting dinner conversations. It’s so you can be better. So you can do the right thing when it counts.

You have to realize that if the state can find ways to deprive someone of their rights, then they can find ways to deprive you of yours. If they can get away with brutalizing one group, eventually they’ll brutalize you. In fact, this is an inexorable law of power, whether it’s held by segregationists or Stalin, bureaucrats following orders or malevolent dictators. When you give power an inch, it takes another. When you allow evil to happen because you are not its victim, it will inevitably find its way to you—or if not you, to someone you love, or to your great-great-grandchildren.

That’s what Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” is about. You know it:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemöller’s words were not theoretical. He tolerated, even complied with, policies he didn’t agree with. He rationalized them, assuming his Christian church would be protected. For a while, it was. But in the end, Niemöller found himself in Dachau, where he nearly died. Someone later asked how he could have been so self-absorbed, so silent when it mattered. “I am paying for that mistake now,” he said, “and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”

It is essential that you see it this way. Because when you do, you realize that this affects you, it affects everyone. 

Directly. 

Urgently.

There is no such thing as an issue that doesn’t affect you. We are all bees of the same hive, Marcus writes in Meditations. There is no injustice far enough away, no victim different enough, no rationalization clever enough to make you exempt from the single hive we all share.

It may be complicated.

But your obligation isn’t.

You have to care.

It’s weird how much you don’t remember, even of your own life. 

Even things that happened not that long ago can come back to you as total surprises. 

I opened an old worn copy of my One Line a Day journal this morning and was flipping through dates. 

On June 14th, 2017, I had lunch in Oklahoma City with a guy named Mark Daigneault, an up and coming coach in the G-League of the NBA…and now he’s the head coach and defending NBA champion of the Oklahoma City Thunder. On Dec 7th, 2017, we woke up to four inches of snow on our ranch. On October 19th, 2019 I had to kill a rattlesnake near the garage. A couple months later, I was walking my boys down our road when two loose pit bulls attacked us. I frantically searched around for anything to fight them off with before miraculously, mysteriously they ran back in the direction they had come from. 

July 2nd, 2018 was the day I wrote the first words of Stillness is the Key. July 2nd, 2017 is the day my oldest son crawled for the first time. In the fall of 2019, I kept popping in to “look at that building” which would become The Painted Porch over a year later. 

On a very disappointing day in February 2023, I discovered that an employee I had just promoted was actually stealing from us—and the next day, had a very emotionally difficult confrontation with them about it.

March 30th, 2025: I took my son to see Hamilton, and then we got sushi after. March 17th, 2022: We drove six hours to Balmorhea to swim in one of the most amazing spring-fed pools in the world. March 12th, 2020: My wife and I called and woke up her parents who were in Europe and told them we really, really thought they needed to come home because this pandemic thing was real. The next day, my son was home and the lockdowns began. 

In late April 2019, I had a call with an accountant we were using and I lost my temper and yelled and fired him in a way I regretted even in the moment. On Christmas evening in both 2024 and 2025, we went to the same Waffle House in Florida near the airport.

To catch a tight morning flight out of JFK in June of 2024, I got to fly in a helicopter to the airport…and then the next day I woke up with COVID. Over a four-day stretch in September 2023, my kids and I got our ATV stuck in the mud on our ranch, then I flew to LA to interview Arnold Schwarzenegger… before driving to Ojai for a talk the next morning…before flying so I could be home with the kids for twenty hours before flying back to LA to do a talk with Robert Greene to a sold out crowd at the historic Wilshire Ebell Theatre. 

I remember some of these things better than others. I know what happened because I wrote it all down. 

I’m sure there’s “better” stuff tucked away in the some 3,300 days I’ve filled out so far, and if I was writing a memoir or something, maybe I would take the time to find those keystone days. That’s not really the point. What strikes me most about what I see when I flip through it is the ordinary wonderful days, the little moments and memories, the rhythms of life on a ranch, as a writer, as a parent. 

I see the person I was. I see the person I am becoming. I see the person I want to be again. I see mistakes I don’t want to make anymore. 

I don’t remember exactly how, when, or where I first heard about the One Line a Day journal, but it’s changed my life. Although I’ve been journaling off and on for longer, I’ve been using one of these One Line a Day Journals for nine years now, going on ten. It’s something I’ve done every single day. Sometimes in the morning, but usually at night before bed. I take a few minutes and I write down something that feels like it defines the day I just had—something I wanted to remember about the day.

I’ve taken it pretty much everywhere in the U.S., and all over the world (Europe, Australia, South America at least). The pages are structured so you write just one line for each day, and the years stack on top of each other. January 14th, 2017 sits above January 14th, 2018, which sits above 2019, 2020, 2021, and so on. So you can see what you wrote on the same date one, two, five years ago. 

In these pages, I can see multiple drives across the country. I can see the patterns of catching colds and overworking. I can see the rhythms of the retail and the speaking businesses. I can see the ups and downs of nearly half my marriage. I can see the entirety of COVID. I can see political trends. I can chart books I conceived, wrote, published and promoted. I can see my kids growing up.

Some of it I vaguely remember. Most of it I had completely forgotten (On August 28th 2019, I apparently had dinner at a table with Condoleezza Rice and Paul Ryan. What?! What did we talk about? I don’t remember.) And without these pages, it would all be gone. 

From these jottings, I can piece things back together. I can travel back in time. I can marvel at the absurdities. I can be grateful. I can try to remember how easy it is to get lost in the day-to-dayness of your own existence while you’re in it. 

One line. One sentence. What did I think about today? Where did I go? What happened? How am I doing?

That’s it.

It sounds like nothing. And in a way, it is nothing—but those words accumulate. And after years of entries, you have something priceless: a record of who you’ve been, what you’ve done, how you’ve gotten to where you are.

When Joan Didion was five years old, her mother gave her a small notebook, to keep her busy, and it did—for the rest of her life. Of course, she used those notebooks as a writer and screenwriter, but Didion was reluctant to reduce her notebooks to just a professional tool. In a famous essay called “On Keeping a Notebook,” she flips through scraps of dialogue she had put down at a train station in Delaware, or recollections of childhood experiences, or facts about pollution in New York City. She wonders why she had bothered to write it all down. Who was this person who had felt the need to record so many seemingly banal things?

Then she realized, that was the point. “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” she writes. “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” Capturing little thoughts and moments—however seemingly mundane or insignificant—in the pages of her notebook was, she wrote, a way of keeping in touch with herself, a way of remembering “what it was to be me.”

A journal is a means of taking a picture, both of what you see in a moment…and the person seeing it.

Perhaps there is no area of life where such a practice is more helpful and important than parenting. Because you’re so busy and so much is happening and you can so easily forget to remember who you and they were day to day. (That’s what I built The Daily Dad Journal around. One question every day for five years.)

When I flip back through my journals, the person who wrote those entries a year ago, five years ago, nine years ago feels like a stranger in some ways. His concerns were different. His kids were smaller. His life was calmer. It was also crazier. But he’s also recognizably me. I can see the threads that connect us, the patterns that persist, the things that mattered then and still matter now. All the selves I have been on the way to becoming who I am today.

The biggest regret that comes through? Besides wishing that I slowed down a little and was present more…is that I wish I had started the journal earlier and could go back even further. 

It’s a gift to be able to check in with all those past versions of me. To stay on nodding terms with them. To remember what it was to be them.

A gift that costs almost nothing.

Just one line a day.

***

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A lot happened in 2025. I don’t just mean in the world, although obviously it did. I mean in my life. 

But I think that, years from now, I probably won’t remember most of it. 

The news stories will recede into the background. I’ll forget exactly if this was the year that I put a book out or where it landed on the bestseller list. 

All those things—the concerns, the anxieties, the thrills, the benchmarks—will blur together the way they do every other year. What do I really remember about 2015 or 2022? 

On the Daily Stoic podcast, Jesse Itzler told me about this concept of the Misogi. Borrowed from an ancient Japanese purification ritual, the modern Misogi is about committing to one epic, year-defining challenge—something so significant, so hard, so memorable, that decades later, when you think back, you’ll instantly remember: that was the year I ___________________.

When I look back on 2025, I’m going to think, that was the year I ran the original marathon in Greece. By myself. In the middle of July. 

I’ll remember the training, running in as many different environments and conditions as possible to prepare for the heat, hills, and distance I’d face in Greece. The long runs up switchbacks in Palm Springs, along California’s Santa Ana River, on mountain trails in Utah (where I was warned to look out for a very protective mother moose and her two calves), around Lady Bird Lake in Austin, and through the eerie elephant graveyard of the burned-out forest of Bastrop State Park. I’ll remember running in 105-degree heat. Running on steep inclines. Running before dawn, at altitude, on cement, gravel, and sand. I’ll remember training at the Acropolis, in Ithaca, and up Mount Olympus.

And, of course, I’ll remember everything about July 13, 2025. Standing at the starting point of the original Marathon route at 6:51 a.m. Being the only one out there running the course. Running on sidewalks, shoulders of busy roads, past shopping centers and autobody shops, alongside freeways, and through underpasses. 

I’ll remember, three and a half miles in, passing a giant mound surrounded by trees—the burial mound of the 192 Athenians who died at Marathon, to whom we owe basically all of Western civilization. 

Mostly what I’ll remember though is that I set out to do a hard thing and then I did it. I’ll forever remember that when I ran into a complete wall—both my mind and body begging to quit—I held on, I didn’t quit, I gutted it out, I finished. (Videos here and here about the full experience of training for and running the original marathon and what it taught me).

As we’ve said before, doing hard things is good for you. Challenging yourself is good for you. Because life is hard and life is challenging. 

Among other Misogi challenges, Jesse has run 100-mile races, completed Ultramans, biked across America, and hiked 44 miles rim-to-rim-to-rim across the Grand Canyon. I actually don’t think the challenge needs to be physical. Quitting drinking might be what you remember about 2012. Or reading the Robert Caro series on Lyndon Johnson is a pretty good Misogi. Learning a language or repairing a relationship could be a hard thing that defines your year. 

I’ll give a minor one that already stands out to me from 2025: One of the early challenges of the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge was to quit a bad habit. I found that I was checking/using Reddit too much. It wasn’t good for my productivity. It wasn’t good for my mental health. So I decided I would quit for the New Year. It took some habit reformation, but I did it. And it sort of snuck up on me yesterday that I hadn’t used the site in a year! 

Considering that I remember vividly that December 2011 was the year I quit drinking soda, I’m guessing this will be another date that sticks with me. In fact, I was just proudly telling my kids about this the other day, that I had made a decision fifteen years ago to stop something and I had held to it ever since. I was telling them that it taught me that I was in charge of my habits and not the other way around and that even if there weren’t any health benefits to cutting that out of my diet, just learning how to do it would have been valuable enough. 

I love this idea of the Misogi because it’s about taking control of your life and the experiences that will, in the end, define it. It’s about being able to one day look back and remember all that you did, rather than all that was done to you.

This is really the idea with the New Year, New You Challenge. Some of the challenges are physical. Some are mental. Some spur you to investigate and overcome internal adversities, others have you take on external ones. Some of the challenges are completed in a single day and others over the course of the year. But in each and every case, the challenges present an opportunity to prove who is in charge. To do the harder thing. To take on the challenge. To not follow the drift of least resistance. To get in the habit of choosing the more difficult option.

Seneca talked about how the only people he pitied were those who hadn’t been through adversity or experienced difficulty. “You have passed through life without an opponent,” he said. “No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”

It’s important that you do hard things. That you seek out challenges and opponents. That every year—starting with 2026—you do something really, really hard.

Something year-defining.

Something you’ll be proud of.

Something you’ll remember.

Something that will make your life better.

Something that will make YOU better.

That’s what Stoicism is—physical and mental challenges we subject ourselves to so that when life tests us, we can say as Epictetus said we need to be able to say: “This is what I trained for.” 

This is why every year since 2018, I’ve started the year with The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It’s 21 days of Stoic-inspired challenges, weekly live calls with me, and a private community of people—CEOs, writers, artists, parents, professors, students, founders, athletes—from around the world, all doing hard things together.

Today is the LAST DAY to sign up to join us in the 2026 Challenge.

We create a new challenge every year and to meet the unique demands of 2026, this year’s challenge is 21 days of challenges built on the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. It’s over 20,000 words of exclusive content that I don’t post anywhere else. Get all the details here—would love to have you join us.

The 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge starts TOMORROW. Learn more and sign up NOW at dailystoic.com/challenge!