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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 DailyStoic.com.

We aren't rational. We become rational. Most of us don't think of ourselves as irrational. We don't think we're reactive creatures.

We presume that we are in control of our emotions, not the other way around. Other people are irrational, of course. But what we feel is what reality is.

Robert Green's newest book, The Laws of Human Nature, begins from the premise that humans, by the way we're wired, are irrational beings.

The part of our brain that processes reason, cognition, and thought is separate from the part that processes emotion.

He says that while we think we're naturally rational, we are not. No, we become rational. It is an effort. As Robert said in his interview with us about the book, we descended from chimpanzees.

It's the fact that we tend to react to what's immediately in front of our face, like a cow or a dog or anything, we bark and that's who we are.

And we tend to always want things to be easier to take the path of least resistance. We all have that lower part of our nature, and it's a lot stronger.

But at the same time, there's a higher self that we're straining to become. And maybe I'm optimistic, but I'm saying that everyone has that desire to reach the higher self.

Of course, there's a strong element of stoicism in what Robert is saying. Although Marcus and Epictetus and Senica spoke of living in accordance with nature, they knew how unnaturally this came to most people.

They knew how much work it was to get to that higher self, to transcend our baser instincts and emotions.

Epictetus said that we must put every impression to the test and say to it, hold on a moment, let me see who you are and what you represent.

To stop and put it to the test takes effort, Socrates, who the Stokes considered as the rational ideal, said one must always begin from the premise of ignorance because what you presume to know is often wrong.

To presume you know is acting from emotion, not reason. To presume that what you feel like doing in the moment is obviously the right thing is taking the easy way out.

It's taking the path of least resistance. It's leaping over the space between stimulus and response.

The key then is to work towards that higher self to become rational through journaling, through discussion, through challenges and courses and other exercises.

Through reading books like Roberts and other books on psychology and philosophy that help you understand what's really going on inside your brain, through taking the time to put every impression and impulse to the test and to not let that monkey part of the self be in control.

It's hard work, but it's worth it. Check out Robert Green's new book, The Laws of Human Nature. It's on sale everywhere, books are sold.

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