The Johnny Cash song “Guess Things Happen That Way” is about coping with loss in a very Stoic way, recognizing that you don’t have to like it, you just have to live it.

The book “Getting Real” by 37signals founder Jason Fried is a set of short, sharp lessons –not even long enough to be called essays, in most cases– about entrepreneurship; how it speaks to Stoicism is the focus on concentrating effort on doing what you can right now and not worrying about what’s out-of-reach. Second, and I know this sounds a little odd now that we know how much of an asshole Fried is to his employees in the present, but at the time of writing he emphasized avoiding a growth mindset and focusing instead on doing right by those you employ and those using your product.

One more book: “Ignore Everybody” by cartoonist / ad man Hugh MacLeod. Ostensibly writing about creativity and how to practice it, MacLeod has a lot of insights about the psychological traps of the postmodern, globally-conected world. As the title suggests, there’s a strong emphasis on not trying to please others in favor of following your own arrow; while he’s writing about art, most of the advice applies just as well to the pursuit of virtue, to farming, to programming, and what-have-you. Though I doubt he’s familiar with Stoicism, he seems to have independently reinvented the principle of “action rather than reaction” that’s core to Stoic philosophy.