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.

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That's the thing with anger.

Sometimes it's righteous, sometimes it's understandable.

Sometimes it's motivating.

Sometimes it's a long time coming.

But you know what it always is?

It's always ugly. Indeed, it is the ugliest of all the emotions, Seneca writes. It distorts. It sullies. It degrades. And unlike the other passions, it comes at the expense not just of ourselves, but of others. There's a great lyric in a Sam Fender song that feels like it could appear in Seneca's famous essay on anger.

Seneca advises to stick around. So if you fleece you off your beauty and leave your spent when out to over, make you hurt the ones who love you. Seneca advises us to look in the mirror when we're transformed. And what we've transformed. And what we find is often shocking, a face distorted by rage, barely resembling our true selves. Actually, when I reach into my pocket,

I pull out the pause and reflect medallion we made for Daily Stoic. You sort of get this, right?

There's a reason it's shiny on the front. It says pause and reflect, but it literally gives you

your reflection. It's supposed to give you, oh, I don't like this look, right? Because you

don't look any different than other people when they get upset, which is to say ugly and dangerous.

We can look at the receipts to understand the cost of our temper, right? The stuff we broke,

the relationships we exhausted, the people we hurt,

the opportunities we blew. The toll is often greater than we realize. Think about what you could have

done, how your relationships could improve if you didn't so often fall victim to angers, destructive

ways. If you could wake up each day, if you could respond to the aggravating things in life with peace and clarity.

...