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

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

Heal yourself with this. Sometimes life gets heavy. Relationships dissolve. The job you thought you'd have

forever disappears without warning. Someone you love gets a difficult diagnosis. It stings. Stoicism is designed

as medicine for the soul. It relieves us of the vulnerabilities of modern life and restores us with the vigor

we need to thrive. That's why the Stoics urged us to read, to study, and to journal, not as

abstract philosophy, but to help us recover from the stuff life throws at us. Don't return to philosophy

as a taskmaster, Mark Srealis says in meditations, but as patients seek out the

relief in treatment of sore eyes or addressing for a burn or from an ointment, regarding it this

way, you'll obey reason without putting it on display and rest easy in its care.

Musonius Rufus also believed that we could be like doctors, treating ourselves with reason.

The power to think clearly, to get to the truth of the matter.

That is how we recover from being bashed around by our emotions or from world events.

He was not interested in shortcuts, he said, or smelling salts that revive, but do not

cure the disease. So that's what philosophy does. It cures what ails our souls. So check in with

it today and let it do. It's healing.

So you're stuck, right?

You're not reading as much as you want.

You've got a bunch of books piled up.

Life got busy.

You're a bit of a reading rut.

What do you do?

...