I’ve been largely offline since late 2022. Substack, and emails would be my exceptions to this statement. And it was simply a decision I made to step back from the noise of modern life and see how it would change my perspective on things. What I found didn’t actually surprise me, because the first thing that goes when you leave the internet behind is the act of performance. That would be the constant, low-level performance of yourself. And once that falls away, you’re left with a much more honest question, “what am I actually doing with my time, and why?”

That question is at the heart of what I’m calling the Dual Newspaper Test, often cited as the Front Page Test, or Buffet Newspaper Test. I borrow this from the corporate ethics tool, which is where it originated, and lightly from another psychology model, the Dual Process Theory. But I solely use it as a practical method for auditing your life.

And before you scroll on thinking this is another journaling prompt dressed up in philosophy, bear with me. This is not about self-improvement theatre, but instead focuses on necessary self-imposed honesty.

The test was originally a business ethics thought experiment. The idea was simple: before making a decision, ask yourself two questions. First, would this appear on the front page of a newspaper as something wrong, harmful or dishonest? Second, and this is the part that gets ignored; would this appear on the front page as needlessly cautious, cowardly or small? It’s more about avoiding the opposite failure in my eyes, the failure of doing nothing, of playing it too safe, of letting fear of judgement shrink your actions down to almost nothing.

The Stoics would have recognized both failures immediately. Marcus Aurelius wrote constantly about vice, but he also wrote about cowardice, about the man who avoids difficulty not out of wisdom, but out of weakness. Epictetus, who had every reason in the world to collapse inward and protect himself, consistently pushed outward toward Virtue, action and what he called the proper function of a human being. And Seneca, for all his contradictions, understood that a life unlived is its own kind of failure.

What I want to do here is bring those two traditions together. The modern approach to the Stoic self-examination and positive psychology’s focus on flourishing, turning this into something you can actually use.

Most of us, if we’re honest, only ever ask the first question. Are we doing anything wrong? Are we hurting anyone? Are we behaving badly? And if the answer is no, we tend to give ourselves a pass and move on. In positive psychology, Martin Seligman spent decades arguing the same thing. Removing what’s wrong with a person does not automatically produce what’s right with a person. So the absence of suffering is not the same as presence of flourishing.

In 2026, I think this has become even more acute. The world looks like it rewards passivity now. You can spend an entire day, even an entire week just consuming, scrolling, reacting, and at the end of it feel like you’ve been busy. You’ve been present in the world’s goings on, but present to what, exactly? Whose life were you paying attention to? What did you actually build, or say, or do? The first question, did I do anything wrong today, is almost always answered with a clean conscience by the person who did nothing at all. Which is precisely the problem.

Here is how I’m framing the test for a philosophical life in 2026:

Question One: am I doing anything I’d be genuinely ashamed of in action, word, or character?

This is the Stoic mirror at first glance. It’s not about what others would think, but instead about what you know. The Ancient Greeks, and Romans had a practice called the evening review. Where you sit quietly at the end of the day and you ask yourself honestly: where did I fall short? Was I unkind? Did I act against my values? Did I behave in a way that the version of myself I’m trying to become would not recognize? That’s the first question.

Question Two: am I living in a way that I’d be proud of in terms of growth, contribution, and genuine effort?

This is the positive psychology question. Seligman’s PERMA model (Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Achievement) is essentially a map of what flourishing looks like. The second question checks your ceiling above. Not whether you’re keeping out of trouble, but whether you’re actually living. Are you engaged in work that stretches you? Are your relationships getting real attention? Are you moving toward something, or just drifting through days that feel vaguely fine? This is the question most people never get around to asking because the first one takes up all the available guilt.

The Stoics as you may know were big on practice over theory. Epictetus wasn’t interested in students who could quote philosophy at dinner parties. He wanted students who could use it when something went wrong at three in the morning. So here is the practical version of this:

Pick one time a week. I do it on a Sunday (just finished it before I wrote this), and sit with both questions. About fifteen minutes is enough. Write a few lines on each if that helps, or just sit with them in your head. The act of giving both questions equal weight is the practice. Most people tilt heavily toward question one. Force the balance.

One of the most useful things I’ve found in going offline is the disappearance of what I’d call reputation management. When you’re not broadcasting your life, you stop optimizing for how things look and start caring more about how they actually are. The test works best when you’re asking it in private, without imagining an audience there.

The ‘newspaper’ in this metaphor is not the public, it’s the clear-eyed version of yourself. The one who knows exactly what you did and why.

The second question is harder for most people because it requires you to hold yourself accountable not just for what you did wrong, but for what you failed to do. The conversation you avoided. The project you kept putting off, or the relationship you are letting drift. Modern Stoics might see this a failure of duty, whereas positive psychology might call it a failure of engagement. Whatever you call it, it’s the harder confession, not I behaved badly, but I didn’t show up fully. That one stings more, and it should, because it’s the one most people are carrying around, myself included.

I want to say something here about the offline decision, because I think it’s relevant to how this test works. When I stepped back from social media and most of the internet in 2022, the first thing I noticed was how much of my self-assessment had been outsourced. I wasn’t asking myself whether I was living well. I was reading signals. Likes, follows, reach, engagement. These are not the same as character. They’re not even close. But they masquerade as feedback on your life.

Without those signals, the questions become much cleaner. Am I doing anything I’m ashamed of? Am I living fully? You can’t outsource either answer to an algorithm, well I suppose you can try with AI.

Nobody is going to like-react your way to clarity on either of those. And that’s uncomfortable, at first. Then it becomes one of the more grounding things you can do.

I’m not suggesting everyone goes offline. No need for it. That’s a personal decision and the circumstances that make it possible are not universal. But I would suggest this, whatever medium you’re using to audit your life right now, consider whether it’s actually giving you accurate information. A lot of what passes for self-reflection in 2026 is really just reputation management in a quieter room.

To make this concrete for usage, here is what a real audit might look like:

Question One: was there anything this week I’d be genuinely ashamed of? You might land on a conversation where you were short with someone and it wasn’t warranted. Or a moment where you were dishonest, or where you acted from ego rather than values. You note it down, but don’t catastrophize it. Acknowledge it and you ask whether you need to do anything about it. This could be an apology, a change of behavior, a conversation, but then you move on.

Question Two: was there anything this week that I’m honestly proud of? Did I do the thing I said I was going to do? Did I give real attention to the people who matter to me? Did I do work that actually stretched me, or did I coast? Did I move toward something, however incrementally? The answer here is often more complicated than question one, because we’re not trained to hold ourselves accountable for flourishing the way we’re trained to hold ourselves accountable for failure. But that’s exactly what this test is trying to correct.

Overall the goal is not to find yourself guilty or innocent on either count. The goal is to see clearly where you are, so you can point yourself in the right direction for the week ahead. That’s all philosophy has ever really been to me, not a set of strict verdicts, but a set of tools for seeing more clearly.

As you all know, you have a finite number of weeks left, and a finite number of Sunday mornings. The question isn’t just whether you’re avoiding doing harm in them. It’s whether you’re doing anything with them worth having lived.