Rock Bottom, Recovery, and Starting Over at 40 | Jon Gustin
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. A lot of people think, you know, sobriety is about quitting something. I gotta quit smoking, I gotta quit drinking, I gotta quit doing this or that. But anyone that's kicked a serious habit knows that's it's not so much about quitting as it is confronting not just your relationship with that substance, but why you turn to it in the first place, what it's doing in your life, what hole it's filling, what problem it's helping you medicate or run away from.
You know, it's about facing your emotions instead of running from them, how to how to deal with chaos and dysregulation instead of just reaching for relief. And I I think that's that's why stoicism has become so popular in twelve step groups and recovery, but but also just anyone trying to get control of themselves, trying to deal with those things that Seneca says make us a slave. And Seneca isn't even just talking about substances, right? Seneca's talking about ambition, he's talking about power, he's talking about wanting to be liked, wanting to be famous, wanting to be rich.
And for the Stoics, it wasn't about perfect abstinence necessarily, especially for some of these things that that actually are a part of life, unlike, you know, cigarettes which you don't need to smoke, or crack, which you don't need to do. Some of these other things are a more integral part of life, and therefore confronting them and our dependence on them or our unhealthy relationship with them is is even harder. I was talking about this a few years ago with Troy Baker. We did a great episode of the podcast.
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