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

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

This is the most valuable thing. There are all the things that wealthy people buy with their

money. They buy nice cars and

enormous homes. They stay in luxury hotels and fly on private aircraft. They accessorize

with jewels in high fashion. They pay for access. They hire help. But there is one thing they cannot buy

that indeed no one can buy. Contentment.

It is interesting that for all the conspicuous consumption and competition between rich people,

one thing that is rare amongst them is equanimity, what the Stoics would have referred to as a good

and well-ordered life, or as the song we've been riffing on lately puts it, a satisfied mind.

Epictetus, an enslaved man, had it. Nero, the emperor, did not. Seneca, both a philosopher and

an incredibly ambitious man, struggled after it, ultimately finding that his power and money were hindrances in achieving

it, much like the proverbial camel through the eye of the needle. If the rich cannot seem to

possess this, does that not give us a sense of the value of this elusive state, this equanimity?

It is literally priceless. Cannot buy it. You can only earn it.

And you can only earn it by doing very difficult work. You do it by your daily reading and

reflection. You do it by having hard conversations. You do it by pushing yourself physically,

by questioning desires and passions. You do it by zooming out. You do it by questioning assumptions.

You do it through the training and practice of virtue.

You cannot inherit it.

You cannot have a personal shopper pick it out for you.

You cannot get it through your Ivy League tuition.

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