This Is Our Duty

"That nice, warm feeling you have right now? That fullness? From the food you stuffed yourself with, from the wonderful meal you had with your family? It’s important that you realize not everyone is feeling that right now."Ryan explains what we can do to help others who don't have enough to eat this holiday season on today's Daily Stoic Podcast. Donate to the Daily Stoic Feeding America fundraiser: http://dailystoic.com/feed***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.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  This is our duty. That feeling you feel right now, that fullness from the food you stuffed yourself with yesterday, from the wonderful meal you had with your family, it's important that you realize not everyone is feeling that right now. In fact, they may well be feeling the exact opposite. While you sit here with a Thanksgiving hangover, they're feeling pangs of hunger, you're wondering if you'll ever eat again, and they are, in a very different way, thinking the exact same thing. The pandemic has not just taken hundreds of thousands of lives, it's also wreaked enormous devastation on families,

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  on businesses, on people who were already struggling. And now, now they're broken. Nearly one in eight households in the United States is experiencing food insecurity, and almost 20% of children aren't getting enough food to eat. You might be thinking, so what? Stoicism is focusing on what's in my control. Why should I let a slow-moving humanitarian crisis kill my vibe? Because, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Those suffering humans are us, and we are them. To allow harm to come to them through indifference, through callousness, is to allow harm to come to ourselves." It's why the most magnificent moment of Marcus's reign was the day he decided to sell off the palace furnishings to keep

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  Rome going, to help those in need. Another famous Stoic spoke of our circles of concern. Our first control, our first concern, the Stoics said, was our mind. But beyond this was our concern for our bodies. For our immediate family, then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world. The work of philosophy, the Stoics said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible. Oh, chaos, this was the Stoics affinity for our fellow human beings.

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  It was our obligation, our duty, they said, to help other people, to serve them, to illustrate those virtues of courage and justice toward and for and through them. So today, on a day when in ordinary circumstances, people would be lining up to get a deal on a flat screen television or gorging on leftovers while they post photos on social media, let us instead put our energy towards helping the less fortunate. The pandemic is not in our control. Government policy is at best only something we barely influence, but we can help people from being hungry. We can alleviate someone's worry and fear. We can put food on their table. Better yet, we can do this together.

• 3:24Ryan Holiday?

  Daily Stoic is raising money for Feeding America. You can go to dailystoic.com/Feed. We've donated the first $10,000 in what we hope is at least a $20,000 raise, which would provide more than 200,000 meals for families across the United States. Together, we can make a small dent in a big problem. We can't alleviate all the suffering and struggle in the world. No one can. But for the people we can help, the difference is huge. So let's do it. Let's be a good Stoic today. Go to dailystoic.com/Feed. I just put in the first $10,000. You can see it there. We're encouraging you to make whatever donation you can. If it's a dollar, if it's $10, it's $100.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  If it's more amazing, there is, to me, nothing as nonpartisan and effective as these food banks. The Feeding America provides food for all the different food banks across the world. Across the United States, so we're not just picking one geographic area. You know, we've donated a bunch of money from Daily Stoic to the food banks here in central Texas. That's where we're based. But this one is a national donation. We're trying to feed as many people as possible. Together, we can provide up to 200,000 meals. If we can double this donation, just go to dailystoic.com/feed. I hope everyone is feeling good. As we've quoted before, the great Bill Campbell, "If you've been blessed, be a blessing. Let's see what we can do for other people." dailystoic.com/feed.