Yes, This Is How It Is | The Obstacle Is The Way
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
Nearly every day was a terror. People died of easily curable diseases. People starved to death. People were clapped into slavery. Wars broke out–fought literally to the knife–where the losers were executed alongside civilian populations…their cities razed to the ground.
Seneca was exiled. Marcus Aurelius buried his own children. Epictetus was tortured, leaving him disabled for life. Yet somehow they wrote and spoke a philosophy that had within it, cheerfulness and love and lofty words about meaning and purpose. How did they even get out of bed in the morning, let alone smile?
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And in today's excerpt from The Daily Stoic, Ryan delves into what the Stoics really mean by "The Obstacle Is The Way."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon |
| 0:04.8 | music. Download the app today. |
| 0:08.2 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. On Friday, we do double-duty not just reading our |
| 0:16.3 | daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic. My book, 366 Meditations |
| 0:23.0 | on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, |
| 0:28.7 | and a literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, I will give you a quick meditation |
| 0:33.9 | from the Stoics with some analysis from me and then we'll send you out into the world to |
| 0:39.1 | turn these words into works. |
| 0:42.9 | Yes, this is how it is. Nearly every day was a tear. People died of easily curable diseases, |
| 1:01.6 | people starve to death, people were clapped into slavery, wars broke out, fought literally |
| 1:06.8 | to the knife where the losers were executed alongside civilian populations. Their cities |
| 1:12.6 | raised to the ground. |
| 1:15.1 | Seneca was exiled. Marcus really buried his own children. Epictetus was tortured, leaving |
| 1:20.3 | him disabled for life. Yet somehow they wrote and spoke a philosophy that had within |
| 1:25.1 | it a cheerfulness and a love and lofty words about meaning and purpose. How did they even |
| 1:30.5 | get out of bed in the morning, let alone smile? There is a great lyric in the Florence |
| 1:35.3 | and the machine song free. It expresses this very bafflement. |
| 1:59.3 | The answer to that is basically, yeah, that is how it is. How it's always been and always |
| 2:04.5 | will be. People are awful. For some cruelty is the point. Things are hard, things go |
| 2:11.1 | wrong, people hurt, people die. We don't control that. We do control whether we keep going. |
| 2:18.5 | We control whether we let those bastards get us down, we control whether we let them |
| 2:22.8 | implicate us in ugliness as Marcus really has wrote. We control whether we keep singing, |
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