Welcome to let it be easy with Susie Moore.

I would like to read to you today an email from the Daily Stoic from Ryan Holiday

that I received when I was on vacation and I thought it was so good I shared it with my husband

and I thought I'm going to read this out on the pod. The Daily Stoic

releases a daily email I absolutely recommend subscribing. It's awesome and this one just really hit home for me. And I'm going to read it for you right now.

The email was titled or the subject was,

they don't want you to know this.

Those shoes you're wearing were likely made in a sweatshop by a child in horrendous labor

conditions. That a luxury handbag is a few dollars worth of leather and a fortune in deceptive advertising and

rounding. Those two politicians with radically different agendas are ladder

climbing friends behind the scenes with the same corporate donors.

Those big tough rappers whose beef you've been following are two poets laughing all the

way to the bank.

That fancy car will not only lose half its value when he drive it off the lot, but many of the cars on that same lot share the same chassis, were made in the same factories and cost a lot less. Those songs were the That a ripped actor is on steroids, that beautiful actress had plastic surgery and images of

photoshopped. And by the way, both of them are thrice married for a reason. This list, not a conclusive one by a long shot, is not a morning dose of

nihilism. It is, however, an exercise that Marcus Aurelius tried to practice in his own way.

This expensive wine he noted was just rotten grapes.

This sumptuous dish was actually a dead pig.

The brilliant purple of the Emperor's cloak was dyed with

shellfish blood, made by miserable slaves. What Marcus was doing, what we can do do is stripping things of the legend that encrusts them.

He was using the power of his mind to rip the polish off, to remove the branding, to take things down to their studs.

So he could see what was really happening, but he was deceived, puffed up, tempted. Materialism, injustice, our lower urges, these things depend on

...