Philosophical Dictionary

“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” The line comes from Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, written for the official who ran Rome’s grain supply. It sounds like carpe diem or YOLO, yet its author was one of the richest men in Rome and later died on Nero’s orders. So what did he mean by living now?

Thomas Szasz called mental illness a myth in 1961, R.D. Laing read madness as a divided self, and a former DSM editor later warned of diagnostic inflation. A 1979 study even asked whether depressed people are sadder but wiser. Which of these claims survived their critics, and which quietly fell apart?

Marble Marcus Aurelius heads, three quotes and a lot of confidence: Stoicism memes are everywhere, and the trend has a newsletter, a free online course and a Reddit army behind it. Critics call it neoliberal self-help. A prisoner of war leaned on it and modern therapy borrowed from it. Who reads the Stoics right?