This is the Part To Love | How a Stoic Deals with Obnoxious People

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is the part to love, the terrible diagnosis, the economic calamity, the trauma you experienced as a young person. the betrayal, the broken heart. Are the Stoics really saying that you should love that? Is that what it means, this idea of amorfati, to love your fate?

You have to love that cancer is ravaging your body? You have to love your painful childhood? You have to love that thousands of people just lost their job and you alongside them? No, that's not quite it. Perhaps a true sage could.

Perhaps Epictetus could shrug his shoulders and smile through those thirty years of slavery, as Marcus Aurelius apparently did through plagues and floods and funerals. That's a lot to ask of us mere mortals. The part to love is not the tragedy. The part to love is yourself, yourself in and after the tragedy. Not only are you going to square up and meet this, because what choice do you have, but you're going to become better for it.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (16 minutes, 2,930 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.