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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 DailyStoke.com.

This is our duty. That feeling you feel right now, that fullness from the food you stuffed yourself with yesterday, from the wonderful meal you had with your family.

It's important that you realize not everyone is feeling that right now. In fact, they may well be feeling the exact opposite.

While you sit here with a Thanksgiving hangover, they're feeling pangs of hunger. You're wondering if you'll ever eat again and they are in a very different way, thinking the exact same thing.

The pandemic has not just taken hundreds of thousands of lives. It's also wreaked enormous devastation on families, on businesses, on people who are already struggling.

And now they're broken nearly one in eight households in the United States is experiencing food insecurity and almost 20% of children aren't getting enough food to eat.

You might be thinking, so what? Stoicism is focusing on what's in my control. Why should I let a slow-moving humanitarian crisis kill my vibe?

Because as Marcus Aurelius wrote, those suffering humans are us and we are them. To allow harm to come to them through indifference, through callousness, is to allow harm to come to ourselves.

It's why the most magnificent moment of Marcus's reign was the day he decided to sell off the palace furnishings to keep Rome going to help those in need.

Another famous Stoic spoke of our circles of concern. Our first control, our first concern, the Stoic said, was our mind.

But beyond this was our concern for our bodies, for our immediate family, then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world.

The work of philosophy the Stoic said was to draw this outer concern inward to learn how to care as much as possible, for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible.

Okay, this was the Stoic's affinity for our fellow human beings. It was our obligation, our duty, they said, to help other people, to serve them, to illustrate those virtues of courage and justice toward and for and through them.

So today on a day when an ordinary circumstances people would be lining up to get a deal on a flat screen television or gorging on leftovers while they post photos on social media, let us instead put our energy towards helping the less fortunate.

The pandemic is not in our control, government policy is at best only something we barely influence, but we can help people from being hungry. We can alleviate someone's worry and fear, we can put food on their table.

Better yet we can do this together. Daily Stoic is raising money for feeding America, you can go to dailystoic.com slash feed. We've donated the first $10,000 and what we hope is at least a $20,000 raise, which would provide more than 200,000 meals for families across the United States.

Together we can make a small dent and a big problem. We can't alleviate all the suffering and struggle in the world, no one can, but for the people we can help the difference is huge. So let's do it. Let's be a good Stoic today. Go to dailystoic.com slash feed. I just put in the first $10,000. You can see it there. We're encouraging you to make whatever donation you can if it's a dollar, if it's $10, it's $100.

If it's more amazing, there is to me nothing as nonpartisan and effective as these food banks that feeding America provides food for all the different food banks across the United States. So we're not just picking one geographic area.

We donated a bunch of money from dailystoic to the food banks here in central Texas. That's where we're based. But this one is a national donation. We're trying to feed as many people as possible. Together we can provide up to 200,000 meals. If we can double this donation, just go to dailystoic.com slash feed. I hope everyone is feeling good as we've quoted before the Great Bill Campbell. If you've been blessed, be a blessing. Let's see what we can do for other people. Dailystoic.com slash feed.

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