How Will You Respond?

0:00Ryan Holiday: So we live on Halloween Street and we go crazy over Halloween decorations. And we're having to do it twice this year because someone stole a bunch of our Halloween decorations. I don't blame them. We have awesome Halloween decorations. We actually got a bunch of them from Wayfair. Wayfair delivers high quality customer trusted products for your home so you can host and celebrate without the stress. So if you're in an arms race with your neighbor about who can have the scariest, biggest Halloween stuff, coolest, prettiest, most awesome Christmas lights, well, Wayfair is the place for you. Wayfair has thousands of products across every style and budget, whether simply replacing an appliance or transforming your home from top to bottom for the holiday season.

0:45Ryan Holiday: My favorite thing about shopping about Wayfair is the reviews. You know, you buy stuff online sometimes and then you get it and it's way smaller than it looked or it's garbage. You know, you want to see real photos from real people so you know what you're actually buying. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to Wayfair.com to shop all things home. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:24Ryan Holiday: You see it on the news every day. You see it in traffic. You see it on social media, people being awful, things falling apart, virtue not just in decline, but in an all-out route. We don't control this, but as always, we control how we respond. Will it make us better or worse? Will we be implicated in the ugliness? The real harm Marcus Aurelius reminded himself in his own dark and ugly times was whether he allowed it to affect his character. Bad times can make things hard on us. Bad people can hurt us. But resentment, despair, revenge? These are choices that still belong to us. So too is the decision to remain decent, to do the right thing, to be a small light in a dark room, as it's been said, or to carry the fire, as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road.

2:14Ryan Holiday: The election is not up to us. A collapse in public trust, public kindness, public responsibility, these things are not up to us. Not as individuals, that is, although, of course, we all share blame collectively. As individuals, what is up to us is whether these bad times make us a bad person, whether hard events harden our hearts, whether the wrongs of the world make us do wrong. Every obstacle is a chance for us to do right, to be the person we are meant to be, that we're supposed to be, that the world needs us to be. So let's focus on that today.

3:21We'll be right back. We'll be right back.