You Can’t Join Them

People are the way they are. They will always be this way. We don’t control that. 🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.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 Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  You can't join them. It's a dark world, filled sadly with dark people. People who lie, people who cheat, people who steal, people who do all the things that Marcus Rilis opens that passage in Meditations with. "The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly," he says. And he was right, as we all know. But it's important to understand that Marcus Rilis didn't use this as an excuse. And more importantly, he didn't join them. As he says just a few lines later, "No one can implicate me in ugliness." Elsewhere in Meditations, Marcus Rilis talks about not becoming like our enemies. And it's the same idea. People are the way they are.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  They will always be this way. We don't control them. We do control who we are. We control whether we let them drag us down. We control whether we become like them. It's ugly out there, but we don't have to be ugly. We can be beautiful. We can be kind. We can be honest. We can be decent. We can be good. We have to be.