Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

It's the most empowering thing. We all have those days when we'd rather just not. Days when we'd rather not deal with an

annoying co-worker or a petty family member, days when we'd rather not bother with all the work we

have to do, all the responsibilities we have to manage, days where the awfulness and corruption

of the world gets to us, and we'd rather just knock it out of bed that

day. And Marcus Aurelius, and all the Stokes, of course, knew days like this. Life was one thing

after another for them, too. Think of Marcus Aurelius's life. We have a plague. We have famine. We have backstabbing. We have wars. He does not meet with

the good fortune he deserved, one ancient historian noted, as his whole reign was a series of troubles.

It would have been easy for him to give up trying to retreat into luxury or pleasure. It would have been easy

for him to allow the indelible stain of power to ruin him, as it had for so many emperors

before him. Yet within the pages of meditations, we witness Marcus Aurelius doing something

very different. We see him fighting

to be the person philosophy tried to make him. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one

you are in right now, he writes in meditations. He was saying that we don't just talk about

philosophy. We have to apply it to our daily lives, whatever profession and place we happen to occupy.

And that's why if you're interested in Stoic philosophy or philosophy in general, meditations by Mark Spruillus is the first thing to read, according to Arthur Brooks,

when he came on the Daily Stoic podcast. It's the most empowering thing I've ever read, he said,

especially since I read it when I was young. He said it's always been incredibly important to me.

And the reason that he and thousands of other people say this is because in meditations,

Marcus is showing us that it doesn't matter how rich or powerful or famous we are.

That life will still include pain and suffering.

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