July 19, 2026

The Nightly Audit

What bad habit have you cured today? What fault have you resisted? In what respect are you better?

Seneca wrote this in On Anger, a treatise addressed to his brother Novatus on mastering rage, where he describes a nightly habit borrowed from the philosopher Quintus Sextius. Sextius, he reports, closed each day by asking his own soul three plain questions: what bad habit he had cured, what fault he had resisted, and in what way he had grown better. This is the heart of Daily Self-Examination: reviewing one's actions the way a fair-minded friend would, naming both progress and failure without flattery or excessive shame. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and other Stoics practiced their own versions of this evening reckoning, treating it as the tool by which character gets shaped on purpose instead of left to drift.

A principle of Stoicism: Daily Self-Examination →