The Unexamined Life

Sweet Bites for March 28, 2025

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of adversity.

Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.

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🍰 Mini Bite

Standing before the Court, Socrates was presented with a choice: he could beg for mercy and renounce his ways or be subject to death

He chose death.

Charged for corrupting the youth of Athens and impiety, Socrates chose to die rather than give up his pursuit of wisdom,

“No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death,” he would say.

So much of our lives are dictated by the perspective we bring to them. Socrates believed truth was central to living a flourishing life. His tactic was picking through arguments and finding gaps in logic.

The unexamined life is not worth living because one never truly comes to know themselves and what they do. And yet, we ourselves are the only person in this world who is with us always.

“Sooner or later,” Maurice Riseling said, “life makes philosophers of us all.”

When we choose not to examine our lives, when we just get swept along by life, our emotions, or the actions we automatically take, we prevent ourselves from better understanding ourselves. Our blind spots remain covered, our true self never revealed.

Then, when adversity strikes, we never truly know how to overcome it. We make the same mistakes, we ignore guidance, we make wrong moves.

When we choose not to examine ourselves, life remains a mystery, and in turn, our true potential remains a mirage.

We must accept that we will encounter hard times. Some of them we’ll be able to overcome with ease, others will make us want to quit and give up.

We get through these events by learning from them, overcoming them and examining how we did so.

We can look at the event as an opportunity to learn and grow or as a an annoyance.

“It doesn't hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me,” Marcus Aurelius would remind himself. “I can choose not to.”

When we try to learn, when we realize there is juice in every bite of life, we learn to not just embrace it but savor it.

🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation

🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom

📰 Article Worthy of a Read

Philosophy’s first steps by J L Schellenberg

Favorite passage:

“Excellent progress is occurring right under our noses. It’s only our frame of reference that needs to change.”

📚 Three Thought-Provoking Ideas from Seneca

“Aren't you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end!”

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“It is the mark of a great mind to disregard injuries; it's the most insulting way to take if the man from whom one seeks vengeance doesn't even seem worth the trouble.”

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“There is no proof of greatness so sure as when nothing that can occur can provoke you... the lofty mind, ever calm, situated in a tranquil resting place, keeping down below itseff all things that anger it, is moderate and reverend and well ordered.”

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Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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