It is Not a Fact | 6 Stoic Lessons for Living a Great Life

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's not a fact. It's bad, it's dangerous, it's awful, it's mean. But is it? How quickly we, as the Noah Khan lyric, puts it state of feeling like a fact.

We take our initial impression of something, our partial view of an entire event, past, present, future, and decide we know what this is. We no longer get curious about why someone acted the way they did or why something happened the way that it did. We know because we can feel it. We take a strong stance on an issue without taking time to understand what it means, what caused it, who it affects or its impacts. We immediately jump to a negative conclusion instead of asking ourselves what we might be missing.

This is madness, the Stoics remind us, it's misery. Our feelings are not only not facts, most of the time they are wrong. When we decide our emotional reaction is the truth, curiosity disappears, humility disappears, patience disappears, we stop trying to understand, we stop listening, we stop seeing things as they truly are. So instead of mistaking feelings for facts, let's pause, let's get curious, let's be humble, let's be patient, because the way we feel about something in the moment is rarely, if ever. A fact.

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