You Don’t Have to Be a Victim

"There’s no questioning that the Stoics were victims of severe injustices. Marcus Aurelius was betrayed by his most trusted general in what amounted to an attempted coup that threatened him and his family. Epictetus had thirty years of his life stolen by slavery. Musonius Rufus was exiled on bogus offenses, not once, but possibly four separate times... As unfair as all these situations were, what was impressive is how these Stoics never chose to see themselves as victims."Learn more about how you can reflect this quintessential Stoic attitude on today's episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  You don't have to be a victim. There's no questioning that the Stoics were victims of severe injustices. Marcus Aurelius was betrayed by his most trusted general in what amounted to an attempted coup that threatened him and his family. Epictetus had 30 years of his life stolen by slavery. Musonius was exiled on bogus offenses, not once, but possibly four, separate times. As unfair as all these situations were, what was impressive is how these Stoics never chose to see themselves as victims. Marcus Aurelius chose to use the betrayal as a chance to show future emperors how to deal with civil strife. Epictetus

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  found freedom inside his captivity and then taught thousands the same after he was freed. Musonius Rufus spent his exiles productively writing and helping the locals who had become his new neighbors. This is one way to face the things that life throws at us. If you've watched the new Taylor Swift documentary on Netflix, you get a glimpse of another. Here, a beautiful, talented, enormously successful singer-songwriter spends north of an hour cataloging all the ways she has been a victim in her career. From the expectations of the audiences, to cruel journalists, to Kanye West, Swift looks back at 15 years in the music business and sees, almost invariably, all the things that were done to her and

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  how helpless she was in the face of them. The inspiring exception is a groping incident that she fought back against getting justice, not only for herself, but for other women. The Stoics believed that there are two ways to respond to life and misfortune. We can be a victim or not. We could Focus on our power and our powerlessness. This is a distinction Marcus Aurelius wrote between being harmed and feeling harmed. The events that happen to us are objective. We can't help being victimized, but how we feel about them is up to us. We choose to identify as a victim or not. We choose how we're going to respond. We choose what good is going to come from this.

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.