You Will Need This to Push Through | Is AI Making Us Stupid?

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Look, if you hated the taste, if it didn't feel good, if you weren't getting good results, if it didn't guarantee a dopamine hit, it wouldn't exactly require much discipline to steer clear. That's the whole point. point of the virtue though, isn't it? That it's requiring you to resist an impulse or forgo a pleasure.

As we said recently, discipline is about doing what's hard. Just as courage is the triumph over fear, discipline is the triumph over another lower part of our nature. A lot of times discipline is pushing yourself to do something you don't want to do, but it the other part of it, which we might call the temperance part, is not doing the stuff you want to do. And in some ways this takes the most strength. Seneca said that we're all slaves to one thing or another, sex or ambition or attention or chaos, and by indulging in these passions often enough, eventually we lose the freedom to abstain from them.

We just can't not. We need discipline to push through that, to resist the urge to keep going when it's not serving us. To step back when our ambition tempts us to overreach, to recognize that rest and recovery and restraint are not signs of weakness, but also of strength and wisdom. True discipline means knowing when to stop. It's having the courage to say no to the extra hour, the extra project, the unsustainable pace, so that we can sustain ourselves for the long haul.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (21 minutes, 4,463 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.