Life Endures. That’s What It Does.

"Right now, this feels like an unprecedented crisis. Nearly a million people have died worldwide from a virus for which there may or may not be a vaccine depending on who you ask... Nobody really knows what’s going on. Nobody trusts anybody. Nobody knows who to believe. And both lives and livelihoods are hanging in the balance. It’s a nightmare. Will we ever survive this?"Ryan puts the world situation in perspective and tells us what we can do to cope on today's 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 Daily Stoic: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. Life endures. That's what it does. Right now, this feels like an unprecedented crisis. The global economy has stopped. Literally, millions of people are unemployed. Scientists are racing to find a cure. Doctors are racing against time to save patients. City governments

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  are racing to find a place to bury the bodies. It's a nightmare. Will we ever survive this? Well, one place to find an answer is to look to the past. Marcus Aurelius endured 15 years of the Antonine Plague. It was worse than anything we are experiencing now. And though he eventually succumbed to it, Rome survived for hundreds of years more. The greatest achievements of humankind still lay in the future. Wendels, the mint who manufactures the challenge coins we sell here at Daily Stoic, opened for business in the late 1800s. There have been difficult moments in its 100-plus years in business, but it has survived

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  two world wars, plus the Cold War and 9/11. It stayed in business through the Spanish influenza and the 1957 flu pandemic. The building where the Daily Stoic HQ is located, where this is being recorded, on Main Street in Bastrop, Texas, dates to roughly the same period, which means it endured through the panic of 1907, the Great Depression, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the crash of 1987, the tech bubble, and more recently, the Great Recession. It has also survived a fire, bankruptcies, divorces, mistakes, and disagreements. That's not to say that any of these crises were easy. Lives were lost, jobs were lost, families were torn apart.

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  There was pain, anxiety, fear, frustration. It's sad to think about that. But there is also something uplifting, even inspiring, in it, too. We kept going, we pushed through, we endured. That's what we humans do. We keep going, we survive. When Marcus looked at the past and catalogued the same things happening over and over and over again, he was making the same observation. He was reminding himself that life is remarkably resilient and persistent, that much of what seems overwhelming in the moment will eventually blend in with ordinary history. And the same will be true of this pandemic. It will recede into the past, will become a footnote in your life, because the best

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  days may still lay ahead, especially if we commit to making them so. And that's one of the reasons we've been working on and talking so much about this Daily Stoic Alive Time Challenge. Who knows how much longer this is going to go on? But what you can guarantee is two weeks of productive, focused work on strategies and habits that will make you better. You can decide to use this time productively. That we didn't control that it happened, we do control how we respond. So I invite you to come do that with us, with me, at dailystoic.com/alive time.