They’re Not Thinking About You At All | The Dangerous Comfort of Half Measures

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. They're not thinking about you at all. Awful people have always been with us. Rome had its Neros and its Caligulas and its Tiberiases and its Commoduses. Cruel people have always been with us. Incompetent leaders have always been with us. People have always been trying to undermine our institutions, trying to turn us against each other, fill the hole in their soul with power or fame or influence. And there's no question that these people do enormous damage in the process. Rome burned under Nero. Catiline sent a mob to overthrow an election he lost. These people kill and destroy and waste. So, yeah, it makes us angry. It worries us. It consumes a lot of our attention and energy. It's worth pointing out that these people who we spend so much time thinking about, they don't spend one second of their lives thinking about us. Do you think Nero even knew that Epictetus existed? Certainly he did not spend his dinner saying, can you believe what this Epictetus guy is doing? Certainly he did not gossip or speculate or complain about him, which is why Epictetus understood that the key to his sanity and his freedom and in the end triumphing over someone like Nero meant focusing less on them and much more about himself. And his critical question resounds to us today, is this something that's up to me or not? That isn't to say that Epictetus or any of the Stoics were apathetic. It's just that they knew the trap that is confusing emoting about a problem with doing something about a problem. They knew how easily bad people could consume every waking second at the expense of both our happiness and our effectiveness. Much of what happens in empires, in the world, in politics is not up to us. Our opportunity to influence it, in the modern world at least, comes during elections, at protests, etcetera. Day to day though, it's only our individual actions that are up to us, how we treat people, how we run our business, what we think about. We must make sure that we are not allowing bad people to make us bad people. Governments can take a tyrannical turn, but we need not cede control of our thoughts and moods. Let them be awful. Let them waste the opportunities they have to do actual good in this world. Just don't let them waste our opportunities too. Our power lays in the agency we have over the only empire we do control, that is ourselves. Today's sponsor is Chime, the fee free banking app changing the way that people bank. You know, Chime isn't just another banking app. They unlock smarter banking for everyday people with products like MyPay, which can give you access to up to $500 of your paycheck anytime and help get you …