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 can't think about you. It does so much damage. It sets us back so much. It's something we desperately don't want to happen. So yeah, we think about you. It does so much damage. It sets us back so much. It's something we desperately don't

want to happen. So yeah, we think about it a lot. We fret about it a lot. We dread it a lot.

But it's worth remembering, as we said recently, about toxic people that these things aren't

thinking about you at all. Just as a Nero is not thinking about Seneca, the economy is not thinking about you.

This drought is not scheming to disrupt your plans. The airport isn't trying to make you miss your

flight, and thus your meeting and Air Force screw up your career. The highway doesn't care.

Neither does gravity or cancer. These are impersonal forces. They are inanimate objects.

This is fortune and fate. It's not targeting you. It's not favoring or picking on you.

We have to figure out how to deal with them without turning our minds over to them. We can't let them

steal our focus or our happiness. We can't let them consume our every waking second.

And most importantly, as Marks realist writes in meditations,

I love the Hayes translation.

You may have heard me mention that.

I don't know, once or twice.

The point is we can't let these inhuman forces steal our humanity.

These things are indifferent to you, and your goal is to be a little more indifferent to them.

Hey, it's Ryan.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. You know, there's this stereotype of the Stoics as unfeeling and withdrawn, unfun. But friendship is a theme that runs throughout the Stoic writings. And in fact, one of the most powerful images we get from the Stoics is rooted in

friendship. Seneca says, you know you're making progress in this philosophy when you become a

better friend to yourself. But you think about Seneca's letters. Who's he writing to? He's writing to

...