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 think you want autonomy. Here's why you don't. We tend to think of freedom as freedom from, right?

Freedom from rules, from limits, from obligations.

We want total flexibility, total autonomy.

We want not just the ability, but the power to do whatever we want,

whenever we want, to not be constrained or controlled. We want this sort of abstractly,

but also practically, like we sort of shudder when people are telling us what to do or

how we have to do it. But in today's episode, I want to talk about how that kind of freedom

can actually become a trap.

Because without these constraints, without structure, without anything to push against, without anything channeling us, gets a lot harder to know what matters.

It gets harder to make the writer even the interesting choice.

It's harder to prioritize, harder to create, harder even to feel fulfilled.

One of my favorite writers is David Epstein.

I've raved for many years about his book range.

I read his new book back in January.

It comes out this week, but I read in January, and I will say, I did feel frustrated at the

constraint of not being able to talk about it until now. He came out and did the podcast a couple

weeks ago. I had to sit on this episode, but I'm really excited to bring this sort of segment to you

because we're talking about an idea that's at the center of his new book, which is called

Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. We're going to explore this little paradox that I think

the Stoics understood super well, that limits are not only not the enemy, but they are, in fact,

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