Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom

designed to help you in your everyday life.

On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual

lives.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

In spite of everything, we must do this.

Marcus Aurelius must have wondered what he did to deserve all this.

First, he lost his father at age three.

Then he was pulled from his first love, philosophy, and pushed into politics.

When he finally became emperor, roughly decades of peace exploded into 19 years of border

wars and civil strife.

There was a plague, there were floods.

He had crippling health problems.

At some point, as he buried another one of his children, as he wept over the ceaseless

toll from the disease and pestilence, he must have thought, haven't I given enough?

When will this end?

What fresh horrors await?

And yet somehow, some way he never managed to give himself over to this despair.

He kept going.

He pushed away resentment and bitterness, fear, or helplessness.

There are dark moments in his meditations to be sure, but mostly what you see in those

pages are little sentences about how life still has meaning about how he can find goodness

...