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Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic,

366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator Steve Enhancelman.

And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the stoics from Epititus Markis Relius,

Seneca, and some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

Don't just settle for a shortcut. Do the work.

When things are scary, when we're overwhelmed, when we're struggling, it's tempting to find yourself looking for a shortcut for a pill that makes you feel better for a TV show that helps you turn off your mind.

Nothing makes that clear than the last couple years of destabilizing and alarming global events, to which people have turned all sorts of magical solutions

from meditation to self-help gurus, descending countless tweets and petitions off into cyberspace. These things help us cope with the overwhelming world around us, but of course only temporarily.

Tim Ferris and Tyler Cowan recently talked about this on Tim Ferris' podcast.

Tim asked what Tyler might recommend besides the wisdom of the stoics, and what would help people find equanimity and peace amidst the craziness.

Tyler's answer was counterintuitive, as always.

He said, I feel a bit of the people in that position, it's like they want a kind of talisman, like a voodoo object.

I don't know if they really want to be more detached and dispassionate or if they just want the talisman, and maybe my advice to think through would be, do you just want the talisman?

That's a great question to ask ourselves when we're reading the stoics, watching the news or considering an experiment with plant medicines.

Are we after a talisman or the real thing? Are we actually trying to improve or do we just want to make ourselves feel better for a second?

Do we just want to do something or really anything will do?

There's a time and place for both strategies, but of course the stoics would favor focusing on the real work, on deeds, not just words.

They wouldn't want you to settle for letting yourself off the hook for some symbolic gesture or tidying consolation.

They'd want you to do the real uncomfortable work on yourself or on the world around you.

The training we're doing as stoics is not easy, it's not a matter of reading one book, it's not signing up for an email or buying a coin, it's a process, it's an ongoing thing, it's committed to a hard path, it's committing to a way of life, it's about doing the work.

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