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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 the 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, we must avoid. When he was young, Seneca experimented with vegetarianism. It was a fad at that time considered a transgressive but trendy idea

from the philosopher Pythagoras. Then soon enough, he abandoned it. For getting quite quickly the thing,

he'd been so passionate about that he was willing to risk his life for it. That's how transgressive Rome viewed Pythagoras' teachings.

The point here isn't a comment on vegetarianism, but on fads. We can imagine in a different generation,

maybe Seneca would have been wearing those silly glove shoes that were popular for a while,

loudly telling everyone how superior they were to regular shoes. Before quietly returning to regular shoes without comment,

maybe he'd have been on the standing best trend before reverting back to a chair like most everyone else seems to have done,

or less humorously, how easily might he, like many young people, have gotten caught up in extremist politics on the right and left,

falling prey to that corrupt and force of radicalization that is destroying so many of us today?

It can be easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing, or what a small group of people we want to impress or doing.

The opinions of the mob can be like rip currents, they grab us and take us far away from where we thought we'd ever go,

and then when tossed aside they have remarkably little power, and we are embarrassingly swim back to shore,

if we are still alive to do so. We have to be careful, we have to think for ourselves.

That is what was so impressive about Cato, because he practiced not caring about what other people thought,

because he stuck with his most morium when the rip tide of Caesarism tore through Rome he was not affected.

This is what was impressive about Musoneus Rufus, he was able to think independently and see that of course women should be allowed to learn philosophy,

even if every other school was sexist and discriminatory. You must avoid the mob, you must reject trends and fads, you must stick with what is timeless and true.

Hey, it's Ryan, just a few days left to sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year New Year Challenge.

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