Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

You can skip this part of the nightmare.

You screwed up. You got screwed. You were fired. You were cheated on. You were

humiliated after years of service. You failed in public. You made an inexcusable mistake.

Somebody else's mistake cost you big. The mob is piling on, gleefully so. This happens,

as it has happened to people for as long as there

has been such a thing as society. And what happens most of the time that this happens? It is a

life-changing event, and it often turns that person into a different kind of person. They get bitter,

they get angry, they get radicalized. The first fate is not something we can prevent, at least not at this point.

The second one, we can spare ourselves that.

Routilius Rufus was brought up on false charges. So was Seneca.

Agrippinus and Epictetus were exiled.

Marcus Aurelius's wife, Faustina, may have been completely unfaithful to him,

or perhaps she was a victim of totally unfair rumors about her virtue. None of this was fair.

It was not their fault. It was not in their control. But who they became for going through that

ordeal, for surviving those

whispers, those falls from grace, that injustice, as they understood it, while that was up to

them. They chose to bear it with dignity. They decided not to shrug it off. They decided not to

compromise their principles. They chose, as Marks Reelius wrote, to not be like their enemies. They did not

shoot themselves with the second arrow, as we discussed. They didn't make their fate worse. You may

well be in the middle of a nightmare, but you can skip part of it, this last part, if you choose. It's spring here in Texas, and that means new kinds of bugs. We are dealing

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