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Welcome to the Daily Stoke Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more you can visit us at DailyStoke.com.

Avoid this sickness. Nobody wants to get sick. We don't want food poisoning, we don't want the flu, we don't want COVID-19.

And this is why we protect our immune system, wash our hands, take care of ourselves. Good. Health is important. But what about as the great Phoebe Bridgers put it emotional motion sickness?

It's not quite the same as a virus, but it overwhelms our lives just the same. One day we're angry, the next we're elated. We're frustrated, excited, worried, relieved, paranoid, entitled swooning, and then depressed.

We're obsessed and then annoyed, fascinated, then bored, mad as hell, and then overcome with gratitude. We love hate, love hate, love hate, love hate, love, love hate.

Sometimes we're all these things in the course of a single day, even a single hour. It makes us crazy. It can kill us if we're not careful. So we need to take precautions.

Remember, stoicism is not about not having emotions. It's about protecting yourself against the extreme ones. It's about not letting them rule your life.

There are going to be times when we catch something, of course. But if we build up an immune system, we'll be able to prevent ourselves from being overrun by them.

Grief, anger, fear, frustration, these things happen. What matters is that we don't whipsaw between them, that we use our reason and our training to process them. And this is how we avoid emotional motion sickness.

Role models. Adoption was a widespread practice in Roman society, especially the senatorial class, and as a provision for imperial succession. Marcus Aurelius was himself, the adopted son of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who himself was adopted by the Emperor Hadrian, so that Marcus could one day succeed them both to the purple.

While Senna was never adopted, his brother Novatus was, becoming Gio, who in the New Testament refuses to press charges against Saint Paul.

But Senna liked to look at the phenomenon of adoption the other way around, saying that we can always choose whose children we want to be.

For him, Cato, the towering resolute stoic who railed against Julius Caesar in defense of the Republic, was always standing by in his mind.

The first book of Marcus Aurelius' meditations, in fact, is a catalog of all the people that Marcus had learned from, and the lessons he had taken from their lives.

So this week take a minute to think of the models that you can follow, wise and admirable people that you can measure yourself against.

And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoke Journal, which I forgot to record yesterday, my apologies, but you can check out the Daily Stoke Journal 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by me, Ryan Holiday.

Anywhere Books are sold, including the Pandid Porch, my bookstore, at thepandiporch.com.

We like to say that we don't get to choose our parents, Senna said, that they were given to us by chance.

Yet truly, we can choose whose children we'd like to be, that's in on the brevity of life.

But then, in moral letters, Senna said, we can remove most sins if we have a witness standing by as we are about to go wrong.

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