What Commands Your Attention?

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. What commands your attention? We'd like to think we're masters of our fate, that we're in charge of our own lives. But are we? Aren't you constantly checking your phone every few minutes?

Don't you crave the approval of other people? What about that pull for a drink, the lure of various temptations, those things you know you should stop doing, but just can't seem to quit? Epictetus, who was born into slavery, told his students that the critical question of life was who is my master? Because many free, even powerful people are actually slaves, slaves to their ambition, slaves to their urges, to their procrastination, to their emotions. Today we could add to this list the news cycle, social media, caffeine, nicotine, pot keeping up with the Joneses.

Whatever controls what we desire or dislike, Epictetus warned, becomes our master. Whatever we obey, we serve. Look, i if someone kidnapped you and threw you into slavery, that would be one thing. Self imposed slavery, though, the Stoics believed, was something else, something shameful. It's a surrendering of the little amount of control we have in this life.

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