Most of our media are owned by a handful of tech billionaires, but there's one place that still operates like the internet was never invented.

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podcasts. Good morning to you. Welcome back to practical stoicism. I'm your host, Tanner Campbell.

As always, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. Before we start, if you'd like to get

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Today we'll be diving into Meditation 8 from book 4 of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,

and that meditation reads as follows. Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint. I have been harmed.

Take away the complaint I have been harmed, and the harm is taken away. It's not the external

event that has hurt us. It is our perception or opinion of that event, which has done us harm.

This is hard to come around to for most people because there

are some very terrible things which can happen to us that make it quite difficult to tell the victim of

that the crime or whatever that thing was hasn't actually hurt them, and instead it's how they

look at the thing that happened to them that's doing the real harm. Imagine telling the victim of a

horrendous beating or rape or nightmarish kidnapping that the pain these things cause them are all

in their minds. And, you know, I might lose a few followers on this episode. I might get some bad

reviews, but stoicism, even my brand of it, practical stoicism, does hold this to be true.

But it's not as black and white as you might think. One of the reasons we as Stoics work to develop

resilient minds is that we know full well that at some point in our lives, something terrible

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