Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more,

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The ancient world was very different from ours, obviously.

They had different technology, they had different customs, different gods, different lifespans.

And yet they were also tantalizingly similar to us, just as the people in the distant

past must have seemed tantalizingly similar to them. In meditations, Marcus Rilus observes that even

in the bygone days of Vespasian or Trajan, people did the exact same things they were doing

in his time. Marrying, raising children, getting sick,

dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting,

plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love,

putting away money, seeking high office and power, he writes.

What's remarkable is how people are doing

the exact same thing in the modern world, too. And this list goes on. Things you did today,

people did a thousand years ago, maybe even five thousand years ago. They decided to take the scenic

rope. They talked baby talk to their dog. They arrived late, anxiously. They stayed up late,

reading or talking. They were short with their children. They gossiped about a mutual friend.

They fretted about their parents. They got caught up in a project and forgot to eat lunch.

They caught a vain look in the mirror. They pinched fat on their belly.

...