Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

It can be easy to forget it in the depths of winter or the doldrums of summer or in the middle of an interminable divorce

or the brutal bear market. You know, when it feels like forever, when it feels like things

will never change, you just lose track, you get confused, you start to give up.

January ain't the whole world, Bonnie Vair sings in the song Short Story. He's saying

that winter doesn't last forever. No season does. And it's also worth pointing out that January

isn't winter for the whole world either. But again, this is easy to forget when the news is

dark or everything is going poorly at work.

You can start to think it will always be this way, or that it is this way for everyone, or that it's going to get worse.

Your child is sick, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself in meditations.

Leave it there, he says. You don't have to tell yourself that they might die from it.

Extrapolation, we have to understand, is the enemy.

January is January. A slump is a slump. They're not fun, but neither are they the whole world or forever.

Remember that this moment is not your life, goes one of the most quoted lines in the

obstacles the way.

It is just a moment in your life.

When people hear the word stoicism, they often think cold and emotionless, suppressed, repressed. But in all my years of writing and thinking about stoicism and also practicing it in my life, I can tell you that's not true.

It's not supported by the scholarship. It's not supported by the practice. So much of what people think about stoicism and the stereotypes about it

are totally wrong.

I think one of the things that people don't like about stoicism is this idea that it's

about suppressing your emotions because we know that's not healthy. You know, just stuff it down, don't feel it. Sometimes people call this talk that it's about suppressing your emotions. Because we know that's not healthy.

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