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Hey there, welcome to the first episode of practical stoicism.

I thought that for our first episode, it would be appropriate to start with, perhaps the most broadly known of the Stoics.

Not Epictetus, not Zeno, not Seneca, but Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius, a notable Stoic and Rome's emperor from 161 to 180 AD.

Marcus is the author of a collection of thoughts that we know today collectively as the Meditations.

Almost everyone has heard of him and of the Meditations ascribed to him.

He is, for whatever reason, perhaps because of his status as a Roman emperor,

the best known of the, let's say, brand ambassadors of Stoicism. When you first stumble across

Stoicism in the wild, it is very likely that it is Marcus's work that you've happened upon.

The best known concept from Meditations is usually paraphrased as some sort of analogy featuring a coffee mug, and it goes something like this.

Imagine that you have a favorite coffee mug. Perhaps it was a gift from a very dear friend or from a family member who's no longer with you.

You adore this mug, and you drink coffee from it every morning. But one morning, due to some

careless fumbling, the mug falls on the floor and shatters into bits. You are absolutely devastated by

this. You feel that you've lost something precious, and that loss makes you sad. Stoicism suggests,

much like Buddhism, that you feel this sadness because of your attachment to the coffee mug, and that if instead you had formed a relationship with the mug with the understanding that you did not truly own it, but that it was instead, in a way, on loan to you, and accepting from the start that it would not be around forever, the sudden loss of the mug would

have not felt sad to you, but instead, expected, and a reasonable thing. Here's a quote from one of

the fathers of stoicism. His name was Epictetus, and this quote is from a book called the Encoridion.

This is from chapter 11 of that book, and it says, quote, Never say of anything, I have lost it, but I have returned it.

Is your child dead?

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