Ryan Holiday

Right.

And so I think that's kind of the pleasure that that the Stoics are reacting against.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

It's the most empowering thing.

We all have those days when we'd rather just not.

Days when we'd rather not deal with an annoying coworker or a petty family member.

Days when we'd rather not bother with all the work we have to do, all the responsibilities we have to manage.

Days where the awfulness and corruption of the world gets to us and we'd rather just not get out of bed that day.

And Marcus Aurelius and all the Stoics, of course, knew days like this.

Life was one thing after another for them, too.

Think of Marcus Aurelius' life.

We have a plague.

We have famine.

We have backstabbing.

We have wars.

He does not meet with the good fortune he deserved, one ancient historian noted, as his whole reign was a series of troubles.

It would have been easy for him to give up trying to retreat into luxury or pleasure.

It would have been easy for him to allow the indelible stain of power to ruin him, as it had for so many emperors before him.

Yet within the pages of meditations, we witness Marcus Aurelius doing something very different.

We see him fighting to be the person philosophy tried to make him.