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Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic. My book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Heart of Livin,

which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and a literary agent, Stephen Hanselman.

So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me,

and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

It's interesting how infrequently money comes up in meditations. Here was a guy who had incredible wealth,

whose predecessors obsessed over it, found it to be the source of both pleasure and conflict,

yet in his private meditations, it hardly comes up at all. In his actions, we see Marcus was conscious of money, though,

but primarily as a means to an end, not as an end to itself. He was more interested in what it could do for other people.

He declined gifts and inheritances. He gave liberally to the poor. He sold off palace furnishings at Rome's lowest point.

But perhaps these attitudes are related, because Marcus did not think particularly highly of money,

he was comfortable in his ability to be generous. At one point, he told the Senate that he did not regard himself in possession of any of his wealth,

belongs to the people, he said, even the house I live in is not mine. There can be virtue in frugality.

Client these seem to be an incredibly hard worker, a manual laborer, no less, who spent little of what he earned.

But frugality and diligence with money can also be a vice. It makes finances loom too large in our lives.

It makes us throw good time after bed. After all, it's not just enough to earn money, but we have to manage it and make it grow.

We can come to identify with the fruits of our labor and our success, which makes it hard to spend, even unnecessary things, hard to be generous, hard to share.

Money isn't rare. There's nothing precious about precious stones. It's all incredibly common.

Most of the people who have it are not impressive. Most of the great fortunes are, in fact, the opposite of great.

The way to think about money is as a tool. And what did the Stoics use their tools for to do good, to get better, to make the world better?

And we can all do the same.

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