This is The Most Valuable Thing | No One Said It'd Be Easy

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is the most valuable thing. There are all the things that wealthy people buy with their money. They buy nice cars and enormous homes, they stay in luxury hotels and fly on private aircraft, they accessorize with jewels in high fashion, they pay for access, they hire help. But there is one thing they cannot buy, that indeed no one can buy contentment.

It is interesting that for all the conspicuous consumption and competition between rich people, one thing that is rare amongst them is equanimity, what the Stoics would have referred to as a good and well ordered life, or as the song we've been riffing on lately puts it, a satisfied mind. Epictetus, an enslaved man, had it, Nero, the emperor, did not. Seneca, both a philosopher and an incredibly ambitious man, struggled after it, ultimately finding that his power and money were hindrances in achieving it, much like the proverbial camel through the eye of the needle. If the rich cannot seem to possess this, does that not give us a sense of the value of this elusive state, this equanimity? It is literally priceless.

Cannot buy it. You can only earn it, and you can only earn it by doing very difficult work. You do it by your daily reading and reflection. You do it by having hard conversations. You do it by pushing yourself physically, by questioning desires and passions, you do it by zooming out.

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