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

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

The wealthiest person is a pauper.

We think they have it all, and in a way they do.

They have money. They have power.

They have a private jet and an enormous amount of access. Look at Marcus Reus. Look at what he commanded.

Look at Seneca or Cicero or Cato, their estates, their natural talents, their influence.

Look at plenty of other wealthy Romans or ancients who had even more.

And yet what we miss is that they, for all of this, were still fundamentally constrained.

They were limited in all the ways that human beings are limited.

No control of the weather, fundamentally mortal, etc.

They were also impoverished, as all humans are.

Not enough time. They were fully satisfied. And we as all humans are. Not enough time, never fully satisfied.

And we've been talking about that great song, a satisfied mind recently, and it's haunting line.

The wealthiest person is a pauper.

And how especially poor many rich people are when it comes to relationships, to contentment,

to peace. And we are not exceptions to this, whatever our net worth happens to be. And worse,

we all make ourselves poorer than we need to be, and our craving for more, and our ignoring

of what actually matters in life, in the way we waste our time or in the delusions we hold.

We seem to think that

there is some kind of escape velocity when it comes to money that if we can just get to a certain

amount we will be beyond this. But how much more evidence do you need that this is simply not true?

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