Don’t Deprive Yourself This Fortune

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

0:37Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market.

0:50Welcome 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 to 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.

1:40Don't deprive yourself this fortune. In the first century AD, few would have argued that Epictetus was the most powerful person in Rome. Few would have argued that this lowly slave possessed any power at all. In fact, his name said it all. Epictetus literally translates to acquired one. Yet what philosophy helped Epictetus come to understand was that it was actually Nero and the other powerful men and women of the time who were the slaves. They were the ones who had been acquired by ambition, by desire, by insecurities, by money, by fame. All of us are born free, Epictetus came to see, but many of us relinquish this freedom of choice in favor of much more superficial things.

2:26Or we so wallow in our unfortunate circumstances, our lack of literal freedom, that we fail to see where we do have choices, where we do have agency. If enslavement, the horrible torture that Epictetus experienced, the lifelong disability that followed it, if this didn't touch his power over himself, what excuse do the rest of us have? The world can upend us at any moment, through illness, misfortune, even oppression. But there's one thing we always command, our own minds, our thoughts, our emotions, our beliefs about what happens to us. This is the empire we must rule. As Epictetus put it, even Zeus cannot deprive you of that fortune.

3:11So will you seize it or will you trade it away for superficial or shiny things? Will you free yourself through your freedom of choice or will you hand that freedom over to the mob, to your urges, to your fears? That is the question of your life right there. And you could argue that there's really no better philosopher to help you answer that question than Epictetus, your favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher, as we've been saying. After all, it was Epictetus who shaped the mind of young Marcus Aurelius, who proved the exception to the rule that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it was Epictetus's philosophy that James Stockdale used to survive his time as a Vietnam POW that Frederick the Great carried with him into battle and Teddy Roosevelt brought along in his famed River of Doubt expedition.

3:59And it's also the philosophy we've been exploring for the last month here with thousands of Stoics all over the world. We've been doing Epictetus month, the whole month of July, diving deep into his life and his legacy. We've got this course, How to Read Epictetus. It's a digital guide. You can pair it with a copy of The Discourses, his famous book brought to us by Arian. We carry it at the painted porch. And on July 26th, we're doing a private Q &A session, a deep dive into the life of Epictetus and what he can teach us, what we can learn from him. I'd love to have you join me in there. All you got to do is grab the How to Read Epictetus course.

4:36I'll link to that in today's show notes, dailystoic.com slash epictetus course. As I said, you can pair it with the Penguin Classics edition. We have a special deal. You can get that and the book from The Painted Porch, dailystoic.com slash epictetus course. And remember, if you are a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get the course and all our courses for free. It's going to be awesome. I want to see you in there July 26th. Let's make July Epictetus month. Let's really learn a bunch from him together. I've been learning a bunch as we've done this deep dive. I think you're really going to like it.

5:07DailyStoik.com slash Epictetus course.

5:21Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you an ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free.

6:09No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.