It Shows Us This | Your Actual Needs Are Small

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It shows us this. On the one hand, history is a catalog of human misdeeds. conquests, cruelty, stupidity, and horrors. It's the same thing happening, as Marx Reele said again and again, no escape from the rhythm of events.

On the other hand, is history not also a catalogue of human greatness? People who push back against conquest, cruelty, stupidity, and horror, periods of innovation and creation, innumerous examples of beauty and art. Isn't Marcus Reelis an example of all that? History shows us how to behave, the great David McCullough writes in his short book, History Matters, which I've raved about, with Carrie at the Painted Porch. He said history teaches, it reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand for.

Both the inspiring and the terrifying events of history do this, both the good and the bad do this. The heroes and the villains do this. They show us what to do and what not to do. The question for today is, who will you be? Who will you learn from?

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