Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. We are poor compared to them. It seemed like he had nothing. He had no home. He had no job. He dressed in rags. Yet when Diogenes encountered Alexander the Great, it was ultimately the poor philosopher who came out on top. Alexander, who could offer wealth and power and protection, virtually anything in the world, asked Diogenes if there was something he could do for him. Diogenes wanted for nothing and was therefore bold enough to tell Alexander the Great to go away and stop blocking his son. It calls to mind the lyrics in the classic song, A Satisfied Mind.
Epictetus was such a man too. He was born a slave in the household of one of Nero's officials. But looking around at the sycophants and psychopaths, he came to understand that actually he was much freer than them. He had something they could never buy, self-possession. He had equanimity and wisdom. Getting to a place where you know yourself, where you have controlled your needs, where you understand and live by values, is an incredibly wealthy place. How many rich people actually have it? Do you?