Orlando Stoics

IN-PERSON: Reason Not to Worry (Stoic Saturdays)

Sat, Jul 4 · 12:00 PM EDT

Panera Bread, 2415 N Orange Ave, Orlando, FL, US

This is our IN-PERSON Stoic discussion and reading (no Zoom link available). We meet every 2 weeks on Saturdays.

READING

# Reasons Not to Worry: How to Be Stoic in Chaotic Times

In this thoughtful and approachable book, journalist Brigid Delaney spends a year exploring how Stoic philosophy can be applied to modern life. Blending personal experience with humor and reflection, she turns to ancient thinkers like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius to help answer some of life’s most persistent questions—how to find peace, handle uncertainty, and focus on what truly matters.
Rather than presenting Stoicism as abstract theory, Delaney tests its ideas in real time. She compares her own tendencies—impatience, anxiety, and a fast-paced modern lifestyle—with the Stoic emphasis on reason, acceptance, and control. Through this process, she examines how ancient wisdom can be used to navigate everyday challenges, from stress and insecurity to grief and decision-making.
The result is a practical and often humorous exploration of how to live more deliberately. By learning to let go of what cannot be controlled, reflect on what is important, and approach life with greater awareness, Delaney shows how Stoicism can help restore a sense of balance and perspective—even in uncertain or chaotic times.

Book Club Format

1. Link to purchase the book: Amazon.com
2. Read the current chapter of the book before the next meeting
3. Write down your thoughts, questions, and concerns, or highlight certain sections of the book you would like to read aloud.
4. We will go around the room, and everyone will have a chance to discuss the chapter and ask questions.
5. Meaningful application and final discussion.

Outlines will be provided. We recommend that you read the chapter before showing up. We will read the chapters, at least summaries of each, and go over the core ideas together.

SCHEDULE
04-25-2026: Chapter 1 - How to Be Mortal
05-09-2026: Chapter 2 - How to Work Out What Matters
05-23-2026: Chapter 3 - How to Cope with Disaster
06-06-2026: Chapter 4 - How to Be Relaxed
06-20-2026: Chapter 5 - How to Be Good
07-04-2026: Chapter 6 - How to Be Untroubled
07-18-2026: Chapter 7 - How to Be Calm
08-01-2026: Chapter 8 - How to Be Moderate
08-15-2026: Chapter 9 - How to Be on Social Media
08-29-2026: Chapter 10 - How to Be Happy with What You’ve Got
09-12-2026: Chapter 11 - How to Beat FOMO and Comparisons
09-26-2026: Chapter 12 - How to Beat Anxiety
10-10-2026: Chapter 13 - How to Grieve
10-24-2026: Chapter 14 - How to Die + Epilogue

VENUE

The location is Panera Bread, 2415 N Orange Ave, Orlando, FL 32804. It's on the FIRST FLOOR of the AdventHealth medical building.

Parking is free. As you drive north on Orange Avenue, you will see the AdventHealth building on the right. Turn right, go 2 blocks, and then turn right again into the parking garage (free parking). Most parking spaces are open; avoid the reserved spaces.

You can park on the first floor and walk outside, or park on the third floor of the garage and use the air-conditioned bridge to walk to the building.

TIME

The meeting is from Noon to 2 PM. No worries if you're late... It's better to be late than not show up. Also, we take a break halfway in the meeting for refreshment and a bathroom break.

ZOOM LINK

Since the meeting is in-person only, no Zoom link is available.

GUESTS

If you want to invite a guest, please ask them to RSVP separately. We have a limited number of seats in the room.

COURTESY

This group enjoys open-minded, respectful conversations. We don't talk over each other. If we differ in our opinions, then "we agree to disagree". The long-term goal is to improve our minds via group discussions. Our group does NOT discuss religion or politics.

The Many Forms of Energy

Sun, Jul 5 · 9:00 AM EDT

·

Online

Online

***

Last week we followed energy down to Einstein's line between matter and energy, every solid thing a passing arrangement, and asked what endures if even matter is only energy in temporary form. This week we come at it from the other side: not what resists decay, but what feeds on it.

We begin with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012). The fragile is harmed by shocks; the resilient merely withstands them and returns to where it began; but a third kind of thing actually improves under stress, within limits. Muscle, immune systems, and evolution belong to it: they need volatility and wither without it. The Stoics prized the citadel that cannot be breached; Taleb points past it, to what grows stronger for having been attacked. Contribution: some systems require disorder, converting shocks into strength.

We then turn to Richard Feynman. In The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963), teaching the conservation of energy, he gives an unsettling warning: physics offers no account of what energy actually is. We know only that some quantity, however the world rearranges itself, always totals the same number. His image is a child's fixed set of blocks that keep vanishing, hidden, dropped in the bath, thrown out a window, yet always accounted for if we look cleverly enough. Nothing is created, nothing destroyed; the books simply balance. Contribution: energy is not a thing but a strict conserved quantity, a ledger that stays exactly even.

Finally Kingsmill Bond, the energy strategist at RMI and now Ember, who reframes solar not as a fuel but as a manufactured technology, and so describes Taleb's antifragility at the scale of a nation. Fossil fuels are commodities dug from the ground, priced by depletion and lurching with every shock. Solar panels are made in factories, and manufactured things ride learning curves: each doubling of deployment cuts cost by roughly 20%, so the more you install, the cheaper the next unit. China is where this turned concrete. Its solar capacity crossed one terawatt in May 2025, and in that single month it added around 93 gigawatts, close to a hundred panels a second. In the first half of 2025 it installed more solar than the rest of the world combined, and across the year a record 315 GW, pushing non-fossil sources past thermal power for the first time even as its CO2 fell. Bond calls China the first "electrostate." Contribution: treated as a technology rather than a commodity, solar cheapens and strengthens as it scales.

The three sit in tension. Feynman says no energy is ever created; Taleb says some systems still gain from disorder; Bond shows a technology getting cheaper the more we build. Put together: the "gain" in China's terawatt of silicon is not energy at all, but arrangement, the falling cost and widening reach of an apparatus that catches a flow, the sun's, we did not make and cannot enlarge. What endures, if anything, is not a hoard of energy but a way of organizing the catch that improves by being used. And if so, is that firmer ground to build on than stone, or more precarious?

use someone instead of Vaclav Smil –
Deliberated between Feynman and Odum as Smil's replacement
Deliberated between Feynman and Odum as Smil's replacement
Swapped in Richard Feynman as the "idea of energy" figure — he takes the concept to its root: energy as a quantity we can track perfectly but cannot actually picture. That also lets the closing turn on a sharper paradox with Taleb and Bond. Here's the full revised session.

***

Last week we followed energy down to its source, closing with Einstein's collapse of the line between energy and matter — every solid thing a passing arrangement of energy, borrowed and soon repaid — and with a question: if even matter is only energy in temporary form, what endures when we speak of building something that lasts? This week we take that question up from the other side. Instead of asking what best resists decay, we ask what might feed on it.
We begin with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and the idea he named in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012). Taleb splits apart a distinction we usually collapse. The fragile is harmed by shocks and volatility; the robust or resilient merely withstands them and returns to where it began; but a third category actually improves under stress, disorder, and error — it gains from being knocked about, within limits. This is antifragility. Muscle, immune systems, evolution, and certain markets belong to it: they require volatility to function and decay in its absence. The Stoic ideal prized the citadel that cannot be breached; Taleb points past it, to the thing that grows stronger for having been attacked. Contribution: some systems do not merely survive disorder but require it, converting shocks into strength — a property not of stillness but of a particular relationship to change.
We then turn to Richard Feynman, the American physicist and Nobel laureate who took the idea of energy down to its bare root. In The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963), in the chapter on the conservation of energy, he issued a warning that still unsettles: physics gives us no account of what energy actually is. We know only that there exists a quantity which, however the world rearranges itself, always comes out to the same number. His analogy was a child with a fixed set of blocks that keep vanishing — hidden in a box, sunk in the bathwater, thrown out the window — yet can always be accounted for if we are clever enough about where to look. Energy is that count: never a substance we can see or hold, only a total that stubbornly refuses to change. Nothing is ever created; nothing is ever destroyed; the books simply always balance. Contribution: energy is not a thing but a strict conserved quantity — a ledger that stays exactly even no matter how the world is rearranged.
Finally we arrive at Kingsmill Bond, the energy strategist whose work at RMI and now Ember reframes solar not as a fuel but as a manufactured technology — and in doing so describes something very close to Taleb's antifragility unfolding at the scale of a nation. Fossil fuels are commodities dug from the ground; their price is set by depletion and lurches with every shock. Solar panels are made in factories, and manufactured things ride learning curves. Over roughly forty years solar has fallen in cost by about 20% for every doubling of cumulative deployment — the more you install, the cheaper the next unit becomes — while fossil fuels, being extracted commodities rather than mass-produced technologies, capture almost none of that effect. Volatility and scale, which punish an extractive system, feed a manufactured one. China is where this logic has turned concrete: its installed solar capacity crossed one terawatt in May 2025, a threshold no country had reached before, and in that single month it added around 93 gigawatts — close to a hundred panels every second. In the first half of 2025 it installed more solar than the rest of the world combined, roughly two-thirds of all global additions. Across the full year it added a record 315 GW, lifting its cumulative solar to about 1.2 terawatts and pushing non-fossil sources past thermal generation in its installed capacity for the first time. Clean-energy growth even helped China's CO2 emissions fall in 2025. Bond calls China the first "electrostate" — the first great power building its base on manufactured electricity rather than mined fuel. Contribution: treated as a technology rather than a commodity, solar behaves antifragilely, cheapening and strengthening as it scales, and China is deploying that property at civilization-shifting speed.
Here the three sit in productive tension. Feynman insists that energy is conserved absolutely — nothing is ever added to the world's total. Taleb insists that some systems nonetheless gain from disorder. Bond shows a manufactured technology getting cheaper the more of it we build. Put together, they sharpen the paradox: if no energy is ever created, then the "gain" in China's terawatt of silicon is never a gain in energy at all, but in the arrangement — the falling cost and widening reach of an apparatus that catches a flow, the sun's, we did not make and cannot enlarge. The durable thing, if there is one, is not a stock of energy but a pattern of capturing it that grows stronger the more it spreads. Which returns us to last week's question in a new key: perhaps what endures is not the fortress that resists disorder, nor any hoard of energy, but a way of organizing the catch that improves by being used — and if so, is that a firmer thing to build on than stone, or a more precarious one?
Links
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
Richard Feynman
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I, Ch. 4 – Conservation of Energy (Caltech, full text) https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_04.html
Richard Feynman – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
Kingsmill Bond
The Cleantech Revolution (RMI) https://rmi.org/insight/the-cleantech-revolution/
Kingsmill Bond – Ember https://ember-energy.org/people/kingsmill-bond/
Record solar growth keeps China's CO2 falling (Carbon Brief) https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-solar-growth-keeps-chinas-co2-falling-in-first-half-of-2025/
China adds 315 GW of solar in 2025 (pv magazine) https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/01/28/china-adds-315-gw-of-solar-in-2025/
Timezones
6:00 AM, Pacific (USA)
7:00 AM, Mountain (USA)
8:00 AM, Central (USA)
9:00 AM, Eastern (USA)
About Our Group
We welcome open minded, respectful conversation on Stoicism and its relevance to daily life, personal growth, and modern thought. Our discussions connect ancient philosophy with contemporary science, psychology, economics, and culture with the shared aim of cultivating wisdom together. The meeting begins at 9:00 AM Eastern, with dialogue starting promptly at 9:15 AM.

***

If you'd rather keep a skeptical counterweight to Bond instead of the pure-physics angle, Howard T. Odum is the other strong candidate — energy-systems ecology, the "maximum power" principle, and pointed doubts about whether renewables return enough net energy. He'd also tie back to Georgescu-Roegen's entropy thread from last week. Want me to draft that version too, or save this one as a Word or markdown file?
remove: Vaclav Smil,
Ascertained subject already removed from document
Ascertained subject already removed from document
Smil is already out — the current version replaced him with Richard Feynman in the previous draft, so the three figures are now Taleb, Feynman, and Bond. There's no mention of Vaclav Smil anywhere in that session or its Links.
So nothing to remove — you're all set. Want me to save this Taleb/Feynman/Bond version as a Word or markdown file, or make any other swaps?
Last week we followed energy down to its source, closing with Einstein's collapse of the line between energy and matter — every solid thing a passing arrangement of energy, borrowed and soon repaid — and with a question: if even matter is only energy in temporary form, what endures when we speak of
pasted
remove em dash:
Strategized systematic punctuation replacement for enhanced readability
Strategized systematic punctuation replacement for enhanced readability
Here's the session with every em dash removed and the punctuation reworked so it still reads smoothly.

***

Last week we followed energy down to its source, closing with Einstein's collapse of the line between energy and matter, every solid thing a passing arrangement of energy, borrowed and soon repaid, and with a question: if even matter is only energy in temporary form, what endures when we speak of building something that lasts? This week we take that question up from the other side. Instead of asking what best resists decay, we ask what might feed on it.
We begin with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and the idea he named in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012). Taleb splits apart a distinction we usually collapse. The fragile is harmed by shocks and volatility; the robust or resilient merely withstands them and returns to where it began; but a third category actually improves under stress, disorder, and error. It gains from being knocked about, within limits. This is antifragility. Muscle, immune systems, evolution, and certain markets belong to it: they require volatility to function and decay in its absence. The Stoic ideal prized the citadel that cannot be breached; Taleb points past it, to the thing that grows stronger for having been attacked. Contribution: some systems do not merely survive disorder but require it, converting shocks into strength, a property not of stillness but of a particular relationship to change.
We then turn to Richard Feynman, the American physicist and Nobel laureate who took the idea of energy down to its bare root. In The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963), in the chapter on the conservation of energy, he issued a warning that still unsettles: physics gives us no account of what energy actually is. We know only that there exists a quantity which, however the world rearranges itself, always comes out to the same number. His analogy was a child with a fixed set of blocks that keep vanishing, hidden in a box, sunk in the bathwater, thrown out the window, yet can always be accounted for if we are clever enough about where to look. Energy is that count: never a substance we can see or hold, only a total that stubbornly refuses to change. Nothing is ever created; nothing is ever destroyed; the books simply always balance. Contribution: energy is not a thing but a strict conserved quantity, a ledger that stays exactly even no matter how the world is rearranged.
Finally we arrive at Kingsmill Bond, the energy strategist whose work at RMI and now Ember reframes solar not as a fuel but as a manufactured technology, and in doing so describes something very close to Taleb's antifragility unfolding at the scale of a nation. Fossil fuels are commodities dug from the ground; their price is set by depletion and lurches with every shock. Solar panels are made in factories, and manufactured things ride learning curves. Over roughly forty years solar has fallen in cost by about 20% for every doubling of cumulative deployment, so the more you install, the cheaper the next unit becomes, while fossil fuels, being extracted commodities rather than mass-produced technologies, capture almost none of that effect. Volatility and scale, which punish an extractive system, feed a manufactured one. China is where this logic has turned concrete: its installed solar capacity crossed one terawatt in May 2025, a threshold no country had reached before, and in that single month it added around 93 gigawatts, close to a hundred panels every second. In the first half of 2025 it installed more solar than the rest of the world combined, roughly two-thirds of all global additions. Across the full year it added a record 315 GW, lifting its cumulative solar to about 1.2 terawatts and pushing non-fossil sources past thermal generation in its installed capacity for the first time. Clean-energy growth even helped China's CO2 emissions fall in 2025. Bond calls China the first "electrostate," the first great power building its base on manufactured electricity rather than mined fuel. Contribution: treated as a technology rather than a commodity, solar behaves antifragilely, cheapening and strengthening as it scales, and China is deploying that property at civilization-shifting speed.
Here the three sit in productive tension. Feynman insists that energy is conserved absolutely, that nothing is ever added to the world's total. Taleb insists that some systems nonetheless gain from disorder. Bond shows a manufactured technology getting cheaper the more of it we build. Put together, they sharpen the paradox: if no energy is ever created, then the "gain" in China's terawatt of silicon is never a gain in energy at all, but in the arrangement, the falling cost and widening reach of an apparatus that catches a flow, the sun's, we did not make and cannot enlarge. The durable thing, if there is one, is not a stock of energy but a pattern of capturing it that grows stronger the more it spreads. Which returns us to last week's question in a new key: perhaps what endures is not the fortress that resists disorder, nor any hoard of energy, but a way of organizing the catch that improves by being used. And if so, is that a firmer thing to build on than stone, or a more precarious one?

Links

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

Richard Feynman
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I, Ch. 4 – Conservation of Energy (Caltech, full text) https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_04.html
Richard Feynman – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

Kingsmill Bond
The Cleantech Revolution (RMI) https://rmi.org/insight/the-cleantech-revolution/
Kingsmill Bond – Ember https://ember-energy.org/people/kingsmill-bond/
Record solar growth keeps China's CO2 falling (Carbon Brief) https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-record-solar-growth-keeps-chinas-co2-falling-in-first-half-of-2025/
China adds 315 GW of solar in 2025 (pv magazine) https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/01/28/china-adds-315-gw-of-solar-in-2025/

Timezones
6:00 AM, Pacific (USA)
7:00 AM, Mountain (USA)
8:00 AM, Central (USA)
9:00 AM, Eastern (USA)

About Our Group
We welcome open minded, respectful conversation on Stoicism and its relevance to daily life, personal growth, and modern thought. Our discussions connect ancient philosophy with contemporary science, psychology, economics, and culture with the shared aim of cultivating wisdom together. The meeting begins at 9:00 AM Eastern, with dialogue starting promptly at 9:15 AM.

ONLINE / SPANISH: EPICTETO DISERTACIONES POR ARRIANO

Wed, Jul 8 · 7:00 PM EDT

·

Online

Online

Esta reunión es cada miércoles a las 7 p.m. EST
CALENDARIO
EPICTETO DISERTACIONES POR ARRIANO

5/27/2026 XXI A LOS QUE QUIEREN SER ADMIRADOS
6/3/2026 XXII SOBRE LAS PRESUNCIONES
6/10/2026 XXIII EN RESPUESTA A EPICURO
6/17/2026 XXIV CÓMO HAY QUE LUCHAR CONTRA LAS CIRCUNSTANCIAS DIFÍCILES
6/24/2026 XXV SOBRE LO MISMO
7/1/2026 XXVI CUÁL HA DE SER LA NORMA DE VIDA
7/8/2026 XXVII DE CUÁNTAS MANERAS SE PRESENTAN LAS REPRESENTACIONES Y QUÉ AYUDAS HAY QUE TENER A MANO FRENTE A ELLAS
7/15/2026 XXVIII QUE NO HAY QUE IRRITARSE CON LOS HOMBRES Y QUÉ COSAS SON PEQUEÑAS Y CUÁLES GRANDES ENTRE LOS HOMBRES
7/22/2026 XXIX SOBRE EL APLOMO
7/29/2026 XXX QUÉ HAY QUE TENER A MANO EN LAS DIFICULTADES

ZONAS HORARIAS

Hora de encuentro (EE. UU.):
19:00 h, hora del este
18:00 h, hora central
17:00 h, hora de las montañas
16:00 h, hora del Pacífico

Para nuestros amigos internacionales:
Conviertan la hora con la herramienta gratuita
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/

ENLACE ZOOM

HAGA CLIC PARA COMENZAR LA REUNIÓN - https://us06web.zoom.us/j/7156108004

Si no tienes una computadora con cámara, también puedes marcar usando un teléfono. Elige uno de estos números y agrega el ID 7156108004#
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 646 558 8656 US (New York)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose)
+1 253 215 8782 US
+1 301 715 8592 US

Nuestro grupo disfruta de conversaciones abiertas y respetuosas sobre el estoicismo y su relación con la ciencia, la cultura, la filosofía, otros sistemas de creencias e incluso la cultura popular (libros y películas). A veces "acordamos estar en desacuerdo", pero el objetivo a largo plazo es mejorar nuestras mentes a través de debates grupales.

En general, el estoicismo nos enseña cómo manejar personas y eventos difíciles, cómo evitar la ira y la preocupación y, sobre todo, a utilizar la moderación en todos los aspectos de nuestra vida.

Esta reunión es gratuita y abierta al público.

ONLINE / SPANISH: EPICTETO DISERTACIONES POR ARRIANO

Wed, Jul 15 · 7:00 PM EDT

·

Online

Online

Esta reunión es cada miércoles a las 7 p.m. EST
CALENDARIO
EPICTETO DISERTACIONES POR ARRIANO

5/27/2026 XXI A LOS QUE QUIEREN SER ADMIRADOS
6/3/2026 XXII SOBRE LAS PRESUNCIONES
6/10/2026 XXIII EN RESPUESTA A EPICURO
6/17/2026 XXIV CÓMO HAY QUE LUCHAR CONTRA LAS CIRCUNSTANCIAS DIFÍCILES
6/24/2026 XXV SOBRE LO MISMO
7/1/2026 XXVI CUÁL HA DE SER LA NORMA DE VIDA
7/8/2026 XXVII DE CUÁNTAS MANERAS SE PRESENTAN LAS REPRESENTACIONES Y QUÉ AYUDAS HAY QUE TENER A MANO FRENTE A ELLAS
7/15/2026 XXVIII QUE NO HAY QUE IRRITARSE CON LOS HOMBRES Y QUÉ COSAS SON PEQUEÑAS Y CUÁLES GRANDES ENTRE LOS HOMBRES
7/22/2026 XXIX SOBRE EL APLOMO
7/29/2026 XXX QUÉ HAY QUE TENER A MANO EN LAS DIFICULTADES

ZONAS HORARIAS

Hora de encuentro (EE. UU.):
19:00 h, hora del este
18:00 h, hora central
17:00 h, hora de las montañas
16:00 h, hora del Pacífico

Para nuestros amigos internacionales:
Conviertan la hora con la herramienta gratuita
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/

ENLACE ZOOM

HAGA CLIC PARA COMENZAR LA REUNIÓN - https://us06web.zoom.us/j/7156108004

Si no tienes una computadora con cámara, también puedes marcar usando un teléfono. Elige uno de estos números y agrega el ID 7156108004#
+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)
+1 646 558 8656 US (New York)
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
+1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose)
+1 253 215 8782 US
+1 301 715 8592 US

Nuestro grupo disfruta de conversaciones abiertas y respetuosas sobre el estoicismo y su relación con la ciencia, la cultura, la filosofía, otros sistemas de creencias e incluso la cultura popular (libros y películas). A veces "acordamos estar en desacuerdo", pero el objetivo a largo plazo es mejorar nuestras mentes a través de debates grupales.

En general, el estoicismo nos enseña cómo manejar personas y eventos difíciles, cómo evitar la ira y la preocupación y, sobre todo, a utilizar la moderación en todos los aspectos de nuestra vida.

Esta reunión es gratuita y abierta al público.