This is the Main Thing | Ask Daily Stoic

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 main thing. There's nothing wrong with success, there's nothing wrong with power, there's nothing wrong with living a nice life with achievement or admiration. Certainly many Stoics did precisely that. Seneca, Cato, Marcus Aurelis, they were important and well known.

They were admired, they were influential. But you know what? They would have shrugged all that off. They appreciated the success, but it wasn't something they coveted. It may have impressed others, but it wasn't how they defined themselves.

The main thing, Walter Wade says in Walker Percy's stoicism inspired novel, The Movie Goer, the main thing, Binks, is to be humble, to make Golden Fleece and be humble about it. It might have meant a lot to others, he was saying, but it didn't mean anything to him. That's how we might assume that Marcus Aurelius felt about a lot of what was thrown at him. In fact, one of the lines in Meditations suggests as much, where he says that he measures himself not by how many honors he's received, but how many he's turned down. He didn't make golden fleece, but he did remind himself that the purple cloak of the emperor was nothing more than an ordinary one died by shellfish blood.

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