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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living good life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

So it's been a bad year. This is probably not been the year you expected. Few of us went into 2020 expecting an impeachment, a pandemic, murder hornets, earthquakes, fires, record setting, unemployment, and God knows what else has hit you individually.

Did you blow out your knee? Lose a big client? Did you have a falling out? It's easy to sit here and say that this has been a bad year, but is it really so bad? Is it 1865 bad? Winter of 1777 bad?

Was it as bad as many of the years of Marcus Aurelius' reign? The years at the end of Nero's reign for Sennaka? How about 1919 when there was a World War and a pandemic?

Of course, this is not to make light of any of our troubles. Things have gotten real. No one would deny that. The Stoics would have simply pointed out those other examples to help you see. You still have options left. There is still room to maneuver. All is not lost.

They'd want you to have some perspective and to grasp this simple black and white truth, humanity will either survive this or we won't. You will or you won't. Things looked dark in 1777 and 1865 and 1919 and in 2009. But guess what? We made it through. We survived. And the people who didn't, they got their own form of relief too, as hard as that is to wrap our heads around in this moment.

This hasn't been a bad year. It's been a year. A year more like some and less like others, but it is what it is. You don't control what it has been, but you still have some influence over where it's going. There's still a couple quarters left to play. So focus on that. Stay objective and don't despair. It'll get better. Or at well.

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