The Daily Stoic - Don’t Be This Kind of Friend

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Starting point is 00:01:27 philosophic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visitdailystoic.com. Don't be this kind a friend. They've always been with us. They were there in Nero's court,

Starting point is 00:02:20 telling the king what he wanted to hear. They were there in the slave quarters, too, as Epictetus would have known, notions of solidarity being tossed aside for an extra scrap of food or slightly better treatment. Seneca would have known them in his literary salons, too. It's rare to see Marcus Aurelius get as specific or as judgmental as he does in Meditations 1115, when he talks about despicable phoniness, which he calls a knife in the back. We've all known these people.

Starting point is 00:02:52 They do one thing and say another. They virtue signal but act without virtue. They are, as Taylor Swift sings, vipers dressed in impath's clothing. But it's important that we understand when Marcus Aurelius is saying that false friendship is the worst and that we must avoid it all costs. He's not saying that we can get through life without experience in false friendship. That's unavoidable. What he is saying is that we make sure that we aren't false friends.

Starting point is 00:03:22 Remember, we don't control what other people do, whether they lie to our faces or stab us in the back. We don't control other people's hypocrisies or their vulnerabilities. We do, however, control who we are. We control how we treat others. We control what kind of friend we are. Look, ads are annoying. They are. are to be avoided if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the

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The Daily Stoic - Don’t Be This Kind of Friend

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