Is It Even Possible To Be Happy?
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 July 2026
⏱️ 4 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
A master does not actually master anything. The Stoics understood this.
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Transcript
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| 0:28.7 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, |
| 0:36.3 | courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. |
| 0:43.3 | Is it even possible to be happy? A master does not actually master anything. Ask any great athlete, |
| 0:51.6 | musician, chef, writer, surgeon, teacher, coach, comedian. |
| 0:55.7 | And they'll tell you they're not done and proving because that's what a craft is, |
| 1:00.2 | something you spend your whole life getting a little bit better at. |
| 1:04.6 | And the Stoics understood this, that the highest level one could attain, they said, was the sage. |
| 1:09.5 | A level they said that you don't actually reach, |
| 1:12.9 | you just make progress towards. Aristotle said this about virtue, that you can become |
| 1:18.5 | endlessly more wise, courageous, just, and discipline, just as you can keep getting better at any skill |
| 1:24.4 | or profession. And when we were talking about this on the podcast a little while |
| 1:28.7 | back with Harvard professor and happiness researcher Arthur Brooks, he actually put happiness |
| 1:34.0 | in the same category. I started off doing this work years ago saying, I want to find the secret |
| 1:40.0 | of happiness. And it's wrong because you can't be happy. What you can be is happier, which is an Aristotelian notion as opposed to happiness. And it's wrong because you can't be happy, but you can be as happier, |
| 1:45.9 | which is an Aristotelian notion as opposed to a platonic notion. You can get happier. And the goal |
| 1:52.0 | is putting yourself your life on a jagged, messy path toward happierness. |
| 1:59.4 | Epictetus said something similar that he was riffing on Socrates when he said, |
... |
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