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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 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.

What matters and what doesn't? It's almost surreal to think about the things we were thinking about not long ago.

How could we have been so naive, so entitled? How could we have missed all the signs? Well, no matter, because life has a way of letting you know that you've had your head up your own ass.

And there is no other expression for what Western society, particularly but by no means limited to the most progressive among us, than that we've had our head up our own ass.

Cultural appropriation, microaggressions, the war on Christmas to square dancing have racist origins, are unboxing videos bad for children, how dare that guy not stand for the national anthem.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how some of the smartest minds in my world used to spend their days on laptops trying to cancel baby its cold outside, the writer Barry Weiss recently wrote.

Meanwhile, she said many women in this world still don't have access to credit or tampons. Unfortunately, this is not new. Marcus Aurelius described life in Rome of pointless bustling of processions, opera areas, herds of sheep and cattle, military exercises, a bone flung to pet poodles, a little food in the fish tank, the things that people focus on and what they miss by choosing to prioritize the wrong things.

There's not a lot of good in a pandemic, but one thing it should do for us is remind us about what matters and what doesn't. It should chase us how arrogant and silly the things we've been angry about seem to be it should give us a sense of urgency. There are real issues out there issues of serious injustice that we are obligated to address should give us a sense of purpose.

We can die at any moment is this really what we want to spend our time on. We have been decadent and stupid. We were sleepwalking through life. We were not prepared. Well, now we are experiencing the cost of those decisions. We can't change that, but we can choose to stay awake now and commit not to drifting off again.

We can prioritize what matters starting today and what does matter. Other people illuminating real suffering, fulfilling our potential and making sure that everyone else has the chance to do the same courage, wisdom, temperance, duty.

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