Orlando Stoics

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

This week, we shift from industrial age economics to the structure of money itself: credit, debt, currency design, and financial power. The central question is simple: what is money for? Is it merely a tool of exchange, or does the design of monetary systems shape social priorities, political stability, ecological sustainability, and our understanding of value?
We begin with Milton Friedman, the most influential defender of monetarism. Friedman argued that economic instability often comes from poor monetary management by central banks. Inflation, in his phrase, is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” His work shifted economics away from Keynesian fiscal policy toward rules-based monetary policy focused on controlling the money supply, maintaining price stability, and limiting state intervention. Friedman believed markets coordinate information better than governments and that monetary discipline protects economic and political freedom. Yet modern finance raises difficult questions for his framework. When trillions can be created through quantitative easing, bailouts, and financial engineering, what counts as monetary discipline? And if asset inflation benefits those who already own assets while wages stagnate, can monetary neutrality still exist?

We then turn to Bernard Lietaer, whose critique goes deeper into the structure of money itself. Lietaer argued that modern currencies are monetary monocultures. Just as ecological monocultures become fragile, monetary monocultures built around debt-based national currencies generate instability, competition, and short-term thinking. Because most money enters circulation through interest-bearing loans, the system requires continual growth to remain stable. Lietaer believed this creates pressure toward extraction, concentration, and recurring crises. His alternative was not the abolition of markets but the diversification of monetary systems through complementary currencies, regional currencies, mutual credit systems, and community exchange networks. In this view, resilience comes from plurality rather than dependence on a single dominant currency. The financial crises of the last decades, rising debt burdens, and distrust in institutions make his warnings difficult to dismiss. The question he leaves us with is whether economies can remain socially and ecologically stable while operating on a monetary system that rewards perpetual expansion.

Finally we come to John Fullerton, whose work rethinks economics through the lens of living systems. Fullerton argues that modern economics inherited mechanistic assumptions from the industrial era: endless growth, extraction, efficiency above resilience, and the treatment of nature as external to economic calculation. Drawing from ecology and systems theory, he proposes “Regenerative Economics.” Healthy systems, whether forests or civilizations, balance efficiency with resilience, circulation with storage, innovation with stability. Fullerton’s critique is structural. Financial systems organized around debt expansion and short-term returns often undermine the social and ecological foundations on which economies depend. The question becomes whether monetary policy should merely stabilize growth or help cultivate long-term systemic health. In an era of climate instability, AI-driven concentration of wealth, and declining institutional trust, Fullerton asks whether the industrial model of endless expansion has reached its limits.

The discussion will focus on how monetary systems shape human behavior, political incentives, and the future of civilization. The issue is not simply capitalism versus socialism or left versus right. It is whether modern monetary systems are designed for long-term human flourishing or increasingly optimized for abstraction, speculation, and concentration detached from the real economy.