Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoke,

365 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Steve Enhancelman.

And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the stoics from Epititus Markis Relius, Seneca,

and some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

You just keep going. It has been a series of body blows, hasn't it? The economy, politics, or health, maybe you lost your job, maybe you've lost your hope.

All of us are concerned. Each of us is unsure what lays in the future and what kind of shape will be in when it comes.

The stoics who endured some 15 years of the plague in Markis's reign cannot offer us much guidance there.

They can't tell us how to solve this. They can't tell us when this will end.

So what do we do? We keep going. The stoics were at least pretty sure about that. You keep going step by step, action by action.

You don't need hope. You don't need fear either. Seneca said you just keep going, taking it day by day.

In Cormick McCarthy's haunting novel, The Road, the man believed that everything depended on reaching the coast, yet waking in the night, he knew that all of this was empty and had no substance to it.

The coast was just an idea, a distant point on the horizon that served as something to measure progress against. No more, no less.

So the man kept going. He pushed his car, he protected his son, he carried the fire. He tried to do what was right, tried not to be broken down by all that was happening, tried not to be corrupted by it.

All we can do is keep going, we keep buggering on as Churchill did, we fight on, we stick to it, we endure, we survive. Maybe things will get better soon, maybe they won't, but we'll definitely keep moving.

We'll carry the fire, we'll do what's right, we won't be broken down, we'll make it where we need to go.

Hero or Nero. Our soul is sometimes a king and sometimes a tyrant, a king by attending to what is honorable protects the good health of the body and its care and gives it no base or sort of command, but an uncontrolled desire, fuel, and over-indulged soul is turned from a king into the most feared and detested thing, a tyrant.

That's Seneca's moral letters, letter 114. There is that saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and at first glance that's true. Seneca's pupil Nero and his litany of crimes and murders is a perfect example.

Another emperor, a domician, arbitrarily banished all philosophers from Rome, and Epictetus was forced to flee as a result. Many of Rome's emperors were tyrants.

Yet, not many years later, Epictetus would become a close friend of another emperor, Hadrian, who would help Marcus Aurelius to the throne, one of the truest examples of a wise philosopher king.

So it's not clear that power always corrupts. In fact, it looks like it comes down to, in many ways, the inner strength and self-awareness of the individuals, what they value, the desires that keep in check, whether they're understanding of fairness and justice can counteract the temptations of unlimited wealth and deference.

...