About Citewise

Nothing new under the sun

The book of Ecclesiastes was written somewhere between 450 and 200 BC. Its opening argument is blunt: there is nothing new under the sun. What has been is what will be. What has been done is what will be done.

That claim is not pessimism. It is a diagnosis — and a useful one. The problems haven’t changed. The solutions are already written. Anxiety about the future, the pull of distraction, the gap between who we want to be and how we actually behave — these are not modern inventions. They are conditions of being human. People have been working out how to manage them for as long as there have been people. Most of that work is still sitting in books nobody reads.

What this site is not

The content that fills the space between those books and ordinary life tends toward one of two failures. It is either academic — rigorous, inaccessible, written for scholars who already know the vocabulary — or it is inspirational, which is a polite word for shallow. Quotes without the mechanism. Motivation without the explanation. Nothing that actually tells you what is happening inside you, or why the ancient advice works when it does. Stoicism is part of the answer. Not all of it. Marcus Aurelius matters. So does Seneca, Epictetus, Epicurus, and a long line of thinkers from traditions that rarely appear in the same sentence. The starting question here is not “what did the Stoics say?” It is “what have human beings already figured out about this problem, wherever and whenever they figured it out?”

The standard

Ancient wisdom as a toolkit, not a comfort blanket. The ideas here are tested against the standard that matters: does understanding this actually change anything? Not every ancient text passes that test. The ones that do tend to be precise where self-help is vague, specific where motivation is general, and honest about the difficulty where most content promises ease. That is the standard this site holds itself to. If you have tried self-help and found it hollow, this is written for you.

If this resonates, the Evening Review is a good place to start. Five minutes, three questions, no blank page. Get it free →

About the author

Dave Felton holds a first-class BSc in Psychology from The Open University (UK) and has studied at postgraduate level in both psychology and business. He holds counselling qualifications and has worked in counselling practice.

His interest in ancient philosophy is not academic in the distant sense. He came to Stoicism and the broader tradition of ancient thought as a practitioner — someone who first reached for these ideas to manage his own mind, then spent years reading the primary texts closely and testing them against both the clinical literature and ordinary daily life. What kept him there was not inspiration but precision: the old texts were often more exact about what was actually happening inside a person than the modern self-help built on top of them. Everything written here has been worked through that way before it is published — read in the original sources, checked against the psychology, and held to the test of whether understanding it changes anything.

The pattern kept repeating. CBT — the most evidence-based psychological therapy of the twentieth century — turns out to have been built on Epictetus. Albert Ellis said so explicitly. Cognitive defusion, the core technique of ACT therapy, is what Marcus Aurelius was doing in his private journal. The Stoic evening review predates modern journaling practice by two thousand years. The problems haven’t changed. The solutions were already written. That is not a coincidence — it is the point.

Citewise exists to close the gap between rigorous ancient thought and accessible modern writing. Not to dress philosophy up as self-help, but to show the mechanism — why these ideas work when they do, what they are actually doing inside you, and where the ancient account is more precise than the modern one.

A note on what this site is for

Citewise is written to inform and to support reflection. It draws on psychology and philosophy, but it is educational content — not therapy, diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. Where a topic touches mental health, the aim is to explain the mechanism clearly, not to advise on your individual situation. If you are struggling, a qualified professional is better placed to help than any website. See the Disclaimer for the full position.

Questions, corrections, or want to get in touch? The contact page is the place — genuine feedback on the ideas here is always welcome. Citewise is also on X and YouTube.