Welcome 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 2000-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, the little dose of courage and discipline and justice in wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com Advance for Lauren Hope. Markets are really as tried to arrest the decline of the Roman Empire, but he did not succeed.
Before him, Cato tried to stop the fall of the republic and similarly failed. Thrasia and Helvidius and Rutilius Rufus fought valiantly against Nero, but he triumphed over them. In the end, it was Nero who stood over each of their corpses. Was it all pointless then?
Should they have adapted instead of opposing? Should they have accepted the inevitable? That's what the stoics seem to say sometimes, right? In his ponting poem, Delphold Dreams, Adam Lindsey Gordon wrestles with this very idea.
Failure, disillusionment, the impossibility of it all. Vane dreams for our fathers cherished, high hopes in the days that were. All these men wondered and perished. No better than these, we fair.
And our do, at least, is their do. They fought against the odds and fell. He's alluding to the old military idea of soldiers being sent on a tragic, dangerous mission. Yet they proceed anyway because that's the job, because that's the nature of being a soldier.
It's the nature of being a stoic too. We may not win. Our mission might be impossible. The bad guys might get away with it.
But that's not going to stop us from doing what we're supposed to do from being who we are supposed to be. The odds do not deter us. And neither do the difficulties. Life itself is a doomed mission.
We are all going to die. We are all going to be forgotten. Should we do nothing and write it all off as meaningless then? No.
We advance. Because in the end, the end is the same. So in the meantime, we might as well do our duty. We might as well do.
What's right?