It’s Always Been Like This (But Worse)

The point is: It’s always been rough. The point is: It always will be rough. 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  It's always been like this, but worse. It's so easy to idealize the past, as if people haven't always been deranged, as if things haven't always been falling apart, as if fate hasn't always been indifferent to everyone and everything. Socrates lived through a 27-year-long war, a great power conflict between Athens and Sparta, and then in a country ruled by what was known as the Thirty Tyrants. Xeno lived in a world torn apart by the wars of Alexander the Great's successors and his own personal shipwreck. Cato saw the Republic fall. Seneca lived through Nero and watched Rome literally burn. So unstable were things that shortly after his death,

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  people enjoyed the spectacle of the Year of the Four Emperors. Epictetus spent three decades in slavery. Marcus Aurelius, as we've detailed, saw floods and famines and wars. And indeed, this whole period is known as the beginning of the decline and fall. One could go on and on. The point is, it has always been rough. The point is, it will always be rough. The Stoics were tough. They had to be to get through what they lived through. And you will need to be tough if you're going to make it through what the present and the future holds. None of us control where we were born, only how we live. None of us control what our leaders do, not really anyway, only how we live, how

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  we act, how we lead in our own lives. We don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. We don't control the awfulness of our times, only whether we will rise above them, only whether we will do good for and inside them.