The Daily Stoic - Who The True Stoics Were

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Who the true stoics were. If you were to run down the list of the great stoics of history, who would come to mind? Santa-ka, Marcus, really, Epictetus, maybe if you really knew your stuff, you'd mention Xeno or Clientes or Cricypus. What do all these people have in common?

They're all men. In fact, you really have to look and stretch to come up with even one or two accepted female stoics. Does this mean that stoicism is just for men or that it's been entirely composed of men for the last 2,500 years? Do you think that Seneca and Marcus Aurelius in the male stoics had a monopoly on suffering,

on courage, on mastering emotion, on being disappointed of having to make do with an imperfect world? No, not at all. It's an omission that needs to be addressed. When the biographer Robert Caro was researching what life in Texas was like in early 20th century, he and his wife were appalled by what they found. Just how primitive and tough things were. Most of all how much backbreaking work was

expected of women, doing loads of laundry by hand, carrying endless amounts of water, cooking so much food in such incredible heat, fear of Native Americans, the terrible loneliness and isolation. After speaking to one woman, his wife, Ena, finally said, I don't ever wanna see another John Wayne movie again. She was disgusted at how much of the picture

had been left out by historians and writers. Robert Caro would write later about how much this experienced opened his eyes. You hear a lot about gunfights in westerns. You don't hear so much about hauling water after a perennial tear. Women have had to deal with trials like these as much as if not more than the famous Stoics we read and talked about so much here, certainly they have had to put up with being underappreciated, misunderstood, taken for granted,

and being deprived of many critical rights. They did all that on top of having to give birth and know that they might well die going into it. The fact that they did this, along with other countless sacrifices and daily obligations, and did so bravely and patiently for so long is proof that they are true stoics.

Not only do they deserve our respect for it, but they have a thin or two to teach everyone else about focusing on only what you can control really looks like. In exciting news, we now have an obstacle is the way pendant. If you want to carry this idea with you everywhere you go, it's a necklace you can wear, it says the obstacle is the way in the front, it has a mountain path carved through the steep mountain up to the top. And on the back, it has that quote from Marcus really is the impediment to action, advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way.

You can check it out at dailystoic.com slash store. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.