They’re Not Thinking About You At All

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. They're not thinking about you at all. They're awful. They're frustrating. They need to be stopped.

These are the people that take up so much space in our head. We stew about them, we fret about them, we plot against them. There's a memorable scene in Mad Men where a young copywriter Michael Ginsburg, clearly bothered by Don Draper's reputation and presence, tries to get under his skin. In an elevator he says, I feel bad for you. Don Draper doesn't take the bait.

He just looks at him and says, I don't think about you at all. Even though Don Draper is the iconic hero of that show, he is exactly the kind of broken and selfish person that ends up consuming far too much of our mental and emotional energy, as Nero surely did for Seneca or Caesar and Cicero did for Cato. We can't let these people take more from us than they already do. We can't let them take our joy and our focus and our time. We have to remember that in most cases there's nothing personal in what they do, and to take it personally is to add to our suffering.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (2 minutes, 267 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.