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. The world is full of mysteries.
There's so much to learn, so much to discover. There are libraries of things to read about. Every day brings countless news stories to follow. Do UFOs exist?
What's going on with this scandal? Or that one? Who do you think is to blame for this or that? And while the stoics were certainly curious and intellectual people, they tried to ignore a lot of that.
Why? Because they had plenty of other questions they needed answers to first, questions that pertain more to self-awareness and self-actualization than being informed. In fact, I am dealing with those more important issues, Seneca wrote, the ones that sued the mind and I investigate myself first and then, he said, the cosmos. Look, the man was a plugged in power broker who also published a multi-volume series on natural history and biology.
So he was hardly ignorant. He just tried to remind himself that his first job was to understand himself, was to solve the problems of living before he then distracted himself with the issues of the universe. In our very busy, very noisy, and very confusing modern world, this is a great model to follow. We ought to investigate ourselves first.
Get to the bottom of what's happening in here first, rather than obsess about and despair over what's happening out there.