What Did You Think You Would See?

The reason it makes you upset is because you expect it to be otherwise. Because you let it surprise you. Because you take it personally.🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: 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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  What did you think you would see? Annoying people, toxic politics, litter, traffic, construction noise, spam calls, long lines, noisy or nosey neighbors, phone calls that should have been emails, and meetings that should have been phone calls? The things we encounter in the course of a day. Everyone that Marcus Aurelius calls out in the opening sentences of meditations, the meddling, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the dishonest, the jealous, the surly, it's all there, it's always been there. The question is, why does it surprise you? Cato's problem, Cicero once remarked, was that he sometimes thought he was living in Plato's Republic. In fact, he was living in the dregs of Romulus.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  You are living in the 21st century. It is wonderful and advanced. It is also decrepit and dysfunctional. It is plagued by the same problem society has always been plagued with, that humanity never has and never will shake. The reason it makes you upset is that you expect it to be otherwise, because you let it surprise you, because you take it personally, because you allow yourself, as Marcus writes, "to be implicated in the ugliness." Don't let nastiness make you nasty, as we've been saying. Don't be surprised. Don't be dragged down.