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Welcome back to practical stoicism. I hope you enjoyed yesterday's discussion with Jason and Maggie from the Wrongful Conviction podcast. We're going to probably dive into the thoughts that followed that episode after I've had a chance to relisten to it a few times. There really is this difference between the

stoic concept of justice, which is about fairness, and modern justice, which centers around the

idea of punishment for wrongdoing, or the absence of punishment for being wrongly accused.

And I think that that will be a worthwhile conversation to have, but I need more time to

marinate on everything that was discussed and really

frame it in a stoic framework. In the meantime, today we'll be covering meditation number 41 from book

four, which reads as follows, thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.

Finally, Epictetus gets a shout out, but we won't spend too much time on him.

That'll be in a future season of practical stoicism.

But what we're being reminded of in the meditation today is what we talked about on Tuesday.

This, and I'm pointing at my chest here and the rest of me,

I guess, is just a body, a worthless nothing, a shell for our consciousness, a container.

It's not the body that matters. It's what we're doing with our consciousness, with our

faculty, with our mind. Are we using our faculty to flee our appropriate duty? For the sake of what?

For the sake of what our body wants? Namely to avoid pain or death? Is this how we want to go on living?

Do we want to live by avoiding death through the doing of unjust things? Do we want to fail to be brave when we need to be?

Fail to be just when we need to be? Fail to be what we know we should be when we need to be,

just so we can go on living? And living what exactly? What are we living after making those

sorts of concessions? Are we living a life? I mean, perhaps in a

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