This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology,

practical wisdom, and insights from parents just like you all over the world. Thank you for

listening, and we hope this helps. It's fitting that one of the most important things you could do as a parent would require you to think about a thing that's very nearly impossible for a parent to even consider.

It comes to us from Marcus Aurelius by way of Epictetus.

As you kiss your son, good night, says Epictetus, whisper it to yourself, he may be dead in the

morning. Don't tempt fate, you say, by talking about a natural event, is fate tempted when we speak

of grain being reaped? No one wants to think this way. You want to think only good things about your

kids. Damn these philosophers and their silly academic exercises.

Except that's not what this is.

Marcus Aurelius wasn't speaking flippantly.

He lost five children.

Five.

Seneca, we gathered, lost one early as well.

Should never happen, but it does.

It heartbreakingly, world-wreckingly,

nobody deserves it does. The power of thinking about this unthinkable thing is not morbidity.

It has a purpose. A parent who faces the fact that they can lose a child at any moment is a parent who dares not waste a moment.

A wise parent looks at the cruel world and says,

I know what you can do to my family in the future, but for the moment you have spared me,

I will not take that for granted.

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