Trapped inside our home last week, my family was in search of a “snowy” movie we could watch together. After rejecting Alive, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Shining, we settled on Groundhog Day, which famously features a blizzard trapping Bill Murray’s Phil Connors in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

Essays have been written treating Groundhog Day as a cinematic primer on Stoicism or Buddhism, and they are not entirely wrong. Phil, trapped in an endless loop, learns to master his impulses, detach from selfish desires, and find meaning in service to others. There are overlapping themes. But these interpretations miss the true driving force of the movie.

Stoicism treats romantic attachment as a possible threat to inner equilibrium. Buddhism goes further, seeing desire itself as the root of suffering (the Buddha himself famously abandoned his wife and children). In both traditions, spiritual progress is tied to a........

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