Stoic Wisdom Amended for Life During the Current Administration
Plus all about my experience at St. Nell's (finally)!
Stoic Wisdom Amended for Life During the Current Administration
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. There is no need for a second rule since this one’s impossible already.
Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. But you can’t blame God if you didn’t vote!
Never let the future disturb you. If you’re not entirely focused on how disturbing things are now, you aren’t paying attention.
If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person. However, Portugal is very beautiful and pretty easy to move to, just saying…
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Except for that sentence you just read, which is an actual fact and why you feel like you’re losing your freaking mind.
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond our power or our will. And the only way to do this is bottomless margaritas.
To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign of want of education. Or maybe, I don’t know… a Department of Education?!
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. Psych, this is a goddamn lie.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it. But sometimes your estimate is really fucking accurate.
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – and then think, holy shit, when will it end, I can’t take it much longer.
All cruelty springs from weakness. (No caveat required.)
Hello Substack friends,
When I started this Substack a year and a half ago, I was determined to make it a place to escape from politics. However, it is not possible to escape from politics, and sometimes the only way I know how to make it through the week is by writing about how hard it is to live in this time where the news headlines too often read like satire and keeping up with the news feels harmful to your mental health.
I thought the Stoics might offer some advice, but I discovered that their wise words needed an update for 2026. And that’s how this piece came about. (In case you couldn’t tell, this administration is taking a toll on my mental health.)
If you want to see when else I could not resist writing about politics, you can find those pieces here, here, and here.
Besides writing humor and satire, what has also helped me in the last year is getting together with other humor and satire writers! I wrote previously about my experience at Erma Bombeck, but never shared about my (two!) amazing experiences at St. Nell’s. If you are a woman+, non-binary, and of a marginalized gender and working in any humor-related field, you should definitely know about St. Nell’s!
At the beginning of 2025, right before I started Humor in the Middle, I wrote a list of writing goals for the year, and besides starting this Substack, one of them was “Apply to St. Nell’s.” I’m no goal-attaining expert, but I’m pretty sure writing goals down makes it 3,500% more likely you will achieve them. One thing that also helps is only to write down goals you can control. This is why I wrote “apply” to St. Nell’s and not “get accepted.” That was up to the humor gods and the amazing Emily Flake, founder and proprietor of St. Nell’s.
I monitored the site until they opened up applications for satire writers and then applied. It is no exaggeration to say that when I got my acceptance email, I was excited. I ran downstairs to tell my husband, who was confused because he thought it meant I’d been admitted to a convent.
So in October I spent a week at my very first writing residency, lounging in bed and at the desk in my room all day writing and reading, taking long walks around Williamsport, PA, and then hitting the town for dinner with the other members of my cohort (shout out to Kelley Greene, Emily Bressler, and Tessia Sue Phillips!) for wild nights of good food, conversation, and so many seltzers with cranberry juice.
To spend an entire week just in thought and writing, without makeup and minimal hair brushing, was such a luxury, but also a bit intimidating. Was I supposed to be able to write the best stuff of my life while there?? I overcame this worry by focusing on writing rough drafts and rereading the approximately 45 parenting humor pieces I’ve done to figure out how I might put them into a cohesive book. (More on that another week).
Some of the art and decor in the house was, naturally, funny. And every resident is invited to sign the wall in one of the bathrooms!
What I didn’t know when I left St. Nell’s was that I’d return this spring for a reunion with not just my cohort, but dozens of other funny writers, comedians, and artists. We enjoyed awesome sessions, a panel discussion on the state of humor in today’s world, a very funny stand-up show, and lots of interesting conversations with new friends and writers whose names I knew from online
Check out some photos from the reunion weekend and more about it here.
It was a magical and energizing weekend that gave me hope and a profound appreciation for all that my decision to start writing humor two and a half years ago has brought into my life.
Humor forever!
Thanks for reading,
Jen
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Love the sign in the bathroom.
Also, you made me realize that me and everyone I knew as a kid spelled Psych wrong when used in that context. We used to write sike. You know, back In prehistoric times when kids still passed notes in class.
Margaritas are popular and still underrated.
I've never been to Portugal, but my parents say it's nice and now I am actually researching their immigration policies.