You Come From This

0:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14You come from this.

0:17Ryan Holiday: You have it pretty good. We all do. We have modern conveniences. You live in a time of relative peace. Your basic living standards are the greatest in human history and expected lifespan is among the longest. So it is easy to get spoiled. It's also easy to assume that you're spoiled and soft, especially compared to the ancient Greeks and Romans or even our own ancestors. Think of how tough our predecessors were. The great David McCullough writes in his short book, History Matters, which you should definitely read. We carry it in the painted porch. I loved it. He said, think of what they had been through.

0:54Ryan Holiday: There's no one who hasn't an ancestry who went through some kind of hell. They all did. But you know what? Your ancestors also lived in what was then a relatively advanced time. It was the most advanced time in human history up until that point. Marcus Aurelius had conveniences that Zeno didn't, just as your ancestors 80 years ago had things that even an ancient king did not. And when things went sideways, you know what they did, they handled it as we would handle it. Churchill, in his great speech in the darkest hours of the Second World War, McCullough pointed out, reminded us that we haven't journeyed this far because we are made of sugar candy.

1:35Ryan Holiday: You come from that tradition. You are made of the same stock as the Stoics. You are literally from the stock of people who live through wars and depressions and famines and floods. You yourself, it should be pointed out, have been through some stuff, pandemics and panics, political unrest and personal issues. You are not made of sugar candy. You can handle this.