Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You can't join them. It's a dark world filled, sadly, with dark people, people who lie, people who cheat, people who steal, people who do all the things that Mark Sreelius opens that passage in meditations with. The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly, he says.
And he was right, as we all know. But it's important to understand that Mark Sreelius didn't use this as an excuse, and more importantly, he didn't join them. As he says just a few lines later, no one can implicate me in ugliness. Elsewhere in meditations, Mark Sreelius talks about not becoming like our enemies, and it's the same idea.
People are the way they are. They will always be this way. We don't control them. We do control who we are.
We control whether we let them drag us down. We control whether we become like them. It's ugly out there, but we don't have to be ugly. We can be beautiful.
We can be kind. We can be honest. We can be decent. We can be good.
We have to be.