Skip The Shortcut. Take The Long Way Instead.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Skip the shortcut, take the long way instead. There's a great exchange between Epictetus and a student that encapsulates how the Stoics likely would have felt about artificial intelligence. Tell me what to do, the student says. It would be better to say, Epictetus corrects him, make my mind adaptable to any circumstances.

In our fast paced world we are constantly bombarded with promises of shortcuts to success, happiness, fulfillment. We advertise get rich quick schemes and productivity hacks on social media, which is itself kind of a shortcut to human connection. And now artificial intelligence presents itself as perhaps the ultimate shortcut, offering to write our emails, draft our essays, create our art, even think and plan for us. AI promises to do the intellectual heavy lifting while we reap the rewards, suggesting we can bypass the learning process altogether. Marcus Aurelius, despite being emperor of Rome, still made time every day to write in his journal.

examining his thoughts and actions, he understood that wisdom required ongoing effort, not once, but continually throughout his life. There was no app, no hack, no shortcut that could replace the necessary inner work. In our modern context, the Stoics would likely view AI and other shortcuts with caution, not because technology itself is the problem, but because the siren song that we can bypass hard work, is fundamentally misleading. The Stoics would remind us that the struggle itself, the very difficulty we try to avoid, is often where the most learning and value is created.

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