Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

For more, visitdailystoic.com. It's mostly froth and bubble.

Awards and advertisements, celebrity scandals and local gossip, silly worries and petty rivalries,

people arguing for no reason, people trying to accumulate more than they could ever need. This is what we

do, isn't it? What we've always done? And one of the more cynical passages of meditations,

Marksurelius describes life in Rome as a pointless bustling of processions. Opras, herds of sheep and

cattle, military exercises, a bone flung to pet poodles, a little food in the fish tank.

The miserable servitude of ants, the scampering of frightened mice, puppets jerked on strings.

We fight over things.

We entertain ourselves with trivialities.

We miss the point. We waste this thing called existence, led by our perceptions, our insecurities, our fears.

Stoicism is supposed to be a dash of clarity. It's a hard dose of perspective. It's what Marcus was doing in that passage, contemptuously dismissing so much of what people take for granted, trying, as he said later in meditations, to strip things

of the legend that encrussed them. Too much of life is froth and bubble. Too much of it is

servitude and stupidity being jerked around like a puppet.

You are better than that. Time is too short for that. Wake up. Stop it. Show up. Be the person

philosophy tried to make you. See what it tried to show you.

Human. Your body has a performance superhighway.

60,000 miles of blood vessels that deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell.

...