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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 DailyStoic.com.

You do the math.

Tens of thousands of people are marked for death. They don't even know it. They are essentially walking dead.

That is the cold harsh reality of statistics, of the numbers.

Numbers don't have feelings. They don't care about individuals, about goals, about unfinished business, about anything. The numbers just are.

And sometimes they sentence us to fates we'd rather not think about. Like a certain number of people will be diagnosed with cancer each year. A certain percentage of people are admitted to Harvard. A certain number of plans will crash from the sky.

Here's another number. Right now, the conservative forecast for deaths from COVID-19 is between 100 and 200,000 worldwide. The cumulative total is much, much higher.

Thus far, approximately 50,000 Americans have lost their lives. We're succeeding at flattening the curve and still thousands of people die every day with tubes down their throats and their family prohibited from their bed sides.

In moments like this, we would be wise not to look away from, but to earnestly engage with this sobering momento more exercise.

That tens of thousands remain marked to die. Those walking dead, those poor folks who might not even be infected yet or know their number has come up. They may well be you.

Or they could be your partner, your spouse, your son or daughter, your mom or dad, your grandmother, your neighbor, your employer, your mentor. They could be some or all of them.

This idea that we are on the prescribed list, which in ancient Rome was the list of citizens marked for execution. It's not just theoretical. It is real.

647,000 Americans die from heart disease each year. 606,000 from cancer, 167,000 from accidents or unintentional injuries, 159,000 from respiratory diseases, 147,000 from stroke. Those are real deaths.

You could be among them. You could be one of those. Eventually it's guaranteed you will be guaranteed. Those are the numbers. We have all been selected to die.

The only hope is that we spend a long time on that list before a number gets pulled. That we spend our time on death row wisely.

Marcus said you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. And you wrote that during the plague. Today let's add you have life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. Let that make you brave also.

As Seneca quoted many times as he then faced himself all that a death sentence from a tyrant or a pandemic can do is take you more quickly somewhere you are already going and he would know.

Life is short. Numbers are harsh. There's nothing we can do about that. But we can be brave and be present and live while we can. And of course hope each day to be spared for a little while longer.

For the last six months daily stoke has been developing the daily stoic habits challenge habits for success habits for happiness.

We're inviting you to spend the next six weeks challenging yourself to change what you repeatedly do. And we are promising that if you can do that you can achieve arite personally and professionally.

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