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The Daily Stoic

There Is Hope Within Despair | Ask Daily Stoic

The Daily Stoic

Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures

Education, 694393, Daily Stoic, Society & Culture, Stoic, Stoicism, Self-improvement, Business, Stoic Philosophy, Philosophy, Ryan Holiday

4.64.7K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Despair is so easy, even reasonable in moments like this. The Stoics knew that feeling well.


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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

0:11.7

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

0:18.8

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

0:24.2

history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

0:33.0

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

0:40.3

For more, visit Dailystoic.com. There is hope within despair.

0:58.3

It can be hard, especially right now, to feel good about anything.

1:02.2

There is dysfunction. There is conflict. There is outright lawlessness. There is corruption.

1:07.5

There is cruelty. What is working well? Not the economy, not the government, perhaps not

1:13.4

even your own business or your own day-to-day life. Despair is so easy, even reasonable in

1:20.7

moments like this. And the Stoics knew that feeling well. Seneca in the time of Nero, Epictetus chained

1:27.3

to slavery, Cato watching the

1:29.5

Republic fall. Marcus Aurelius at the beginning of the end of the empire. But they did not despair.

1:35.6

They did not give up. They knew that there was hope within despair. Where? Marcus Rialis notes that

1:42.8

it was within us. It did not matter how much dung you threw on top of an

1:48.4

underground spring, he noted. Fresh water was still there. He said we needed to dig for it. If we

1:54.2

want to live in good times, he said the solution is easy. Do good things. Hope is there. It is within you. It is up to you.

2:10.4

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

3:08.3

I was out for a walk last night. I was taking the dog for a walk. The sun was setting. The weather had cooled off. And I was eating a plum cot. Do you know what that is? It's like a combination between a plum and an apricot. And it was so good. Me, it is a little epicure to me. It just occurred to me. I was like like, I don't think Marx really knew anything better than this. I mean, he might have been incredibly rich. He might have been incredibly powerful. He might have believed he was, you know, had the divine right of kings. I don't know. But it was pretty amazing. And it's those simple pleasures, too. When I said, you know, Epicureanism that we sort of gave Epicurus a bad rap. He wasn't a hedonist. He took delight in these small pleasures. And then the thing I thought about as I'm enjoying this is I said, when I get home, am I going to have another one of these? And I thought, you know what? No, I'm not going to feel good if I have another one of these. So I didn't.

3:12.6

Anyways, that has nothing to do with the Q&A today.

3:21.0

I was down in Palm Springs back in June right before we left for Greece for a trip.

3:23.7

And I gave a talk at this conference.

...

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