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, visit dailystoic.com. What the wise know and fools ignore.

It could be said that he was the most prolific writer of his time.

He wrote hundreds of letters, dozens of essays and plays, volumes of natural history, and more.

He shared his thoughts on the Roman entitled elite,

the doctrines of stoicism, the conquests of Alexander the Great. But you know what Seneca

didn't write much about? What he thought about himself and his job at Nero's right hand.

It's like that line from Taylor Swift, who I believe has a new album out today,

Seneca would apparently rather stare directly at the sun than look into the mirror.

We should contrast that with Marcus Aurelius, who we see force himself to examine himself across meditations.

What am I doing with my soul? he asks in book five. And then he says that he and that

you need to interrogate yourself to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of

soul do you have. A child's soul, an adolescence, a tyrant soul, the soul of a predator, or its prey.

What he was doing in this journal is self-awareness. Journaling is how we

understand who we are and who we've been. It's how we discover who we hope to become,

why we make the choices we make. It's how we stop being strangers to ourselves and get to what's

underneath, to make sense of the complications and multitudes

we contain. Yet so much of this wisdom is lost to us because we ourselves are lost, not to the

...