What's The Alternative?

“All around you see things you don’t like. Bad people getting away with stuff. The wrong incentives being offered, sending trends off in an alarming direction. Perhaps you’re worried about cancel culture or the rise of illiberalism. Maybe it’s corruption or systemic injustice. Maybe it’s apathy, indifference or stupidity.”Ryan explains why you can never put off of being a better person. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday 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.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  What's the alternative? All around, you see things you don't like: bad people getting away with stuff, the wrong incentives being offered, sending trends off in alarming directions. Perhaps you're worried about cancel culture or the rise of a liberalism. Maybe it's corruption or systemic injustice. Maybe it's apathy, indifference, or just plain stupidity. We see the guilty get off scot-free. We see the innocent brutalized. We see the media totally miss the point. We see the mob get riled up about silly distractions. We see good people struggle while the worst are not just alive, but thriving with passionate intensity. It's frustrating. It's scary. Is it cause for despair?

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  No. "No matter what other people say or do," Marcus Aurelius repeated to himself, "my job is to be good." And this is our job too, no matter what. The world can be going haywire. It can be falling apart right in front of us at our feet. None of that changes what our responsibility is. None of that has one iota to do with the validity of our principles, of this philosophy, which have been borne out over thousands of years of human experience, much of it far worse than we have faced. Eras come and go. There are moments when things are horribly out of balance. It has been and always been the case that evil can succeed. It can succeed for a long time. And?

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  And you're gonna join them? Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends towards justice." But it doesn't bend that way itself, no. It requires people like you to keep being good, to stick to what's right, to insist on truth just when history feels like it's at its longest, darkest period. Because what's the alternative? There isn't one. This is this idea of some M'bonam, the virtue being the highest good despite everything that's happening in the world. Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. As Marcus really says, you can check that out at the Daily Stoic store. Go to store.dailystoic.com.