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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life.

On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

You need to calm down.

We live in a time of social upheaval.

What work looks like has changed, what marriages look like has changed, how kids dress has changed,

how we understand or view our history has changed, our discussion about race is different,

even gender is fluid and up for debate in the modern world.

And guess what?

It was like that in the ancient world too.

That isn't just to say that one can find precedents for some of today's debates about gender and sex in ancient Rome,

but more generally that the only constant in history was change.

People have always felt like they were reeling that life was moving too fast,

right down to the first appearance of stoicism in Rome, which Cato the Elder thought would be such a dangerous import from Greece that he tried to ban it.

Taylor Swift's advice to all of you are freaking out about this is fitting.

You need to calm down.

You're not going to succeed at banning things.

It never works.

It only heaps shame and embarrassment on the people who ignorantly stood a thwart history and tried to shout stop.

And it certainly doesn't make a great case for the old values, which do have values when you present them as being so fragile that they need protection by any means necessary,

...