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 part to love, the terrible diagnosis, the economic calamity, the trauma you experienced as a young person,

the betrayal, the broken heart. Are the Stoics really saying that you should love that? Is that what

it means, this idea of amorphati, to love your fate? You have to love that cancer is ravaging your body. You have to love

your painful childhood. You have to love that thousands of people just lost their job and you

alongside them. No, that's not quite it. Perhaps a true sage could. Perhaps Epictetus could

shrug his shoulders and smile through those 30 years of slavery, as Marcus Aurelius apparently did through plagues and floods and funerals. That's a lot to ask of us mere mortals. The part to love is not the tragedy. The part to love is yourself, yourself in and after the tragedy. Not only are you

going to square up and meet this, because what choice do you have, but you're going to become

better for it. That's the choice you have, one that not everyone makes. What you were loving is what Admiral James Stockdale said he came to love

about his seven and a half years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton,

the part that he would not, in retrospect, have traded away.

His time in bondage offered a chance at greatness, a chance at courage, a chance at justice, a chance at strength, a chance at wisdom.

This thing, whatever you are dealing with, is that chance.

It's not fair, it's not fun, but it is that chance. And that's what you love. That's what's on the

back of the Amor Fati coin that we made now almost 10 years ago, if I'm remembering correctly. And a lot

has happened in those 10 years. Not as much as what happened in Marcus Aurelius's reign,

and more stuff happened for some of us than others. But the idea was we had to not just bear it,

as Nietzsche said, not hide from it, but love it, embrace it. Amorfati is a reminder that

those events shaped who we were. They shaped what we've been

able to become now. That's what we don't want to trade away. That's what we want to embrace.

And that's the reminder we want to give ourselves now as we're going through stuff here in the

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