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. Only the wise are free.

Epictetus was born into slavery.

This would have been a profoundly painful experience that left many scars and many disadvantages.

His 30 years in bondage left him with a limp for the rest of his life,

courtesy of a sadistic owner who tortured him. In Rome at that time, many people believed that only

free people were capable of being educated. But the indisputable truth that Epictetus saw every day in the moral disorder and

dysfunction of Nero's court, where his master served as a high-profile secretary, was that it was,

in fact, the opposite. Only the educated, he said, were free. And this is something that Seneca

points out about the same period in Rome,

how profoundly unfree many of the richest and most powerful people are. And this is true

20 odd centuries later. Most people are enslaved and controlled and directed by their ignorance,

their impulses, their temper, their desires and delusions.

What Epictetus came to understand is that wisdom is freedom

from the things that have enslaved and controlled and directed people for all time,

from ignorance, from stupid opinions, from immature emotions and childish impulses,

from desires and delusions, from bitterness and frustration and resentment.

That's the point of wisdom, he said, to argue less, to rage less, to be upset less,

...