The Daily Stoic - Real People. Real Tests. Real Stoicism.

Episode Date: April 5, 2026

What does Stoicism look like in the moments that matter most? In this episode, Ryan shares listener stories about how this philosophy showed up in their hardest situations and what it changed.👉 Do you have a story of how Stoicism has personally impacted your life? We'd love to share it on the podcast! Send an audio recording of your story to this email: [e-mail] 🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. You know, Daily Stoic is a beast. It is a content machine. There is an insatiable amount that I have to record and write. and produce, whether we're talking about the Daily Stoke email or the YouTube channel or this podcast. It's a lot of me talking. And when people go, I listen to the podcast every day or, you know, I listen to your audio books or I watch the videos when they come out, I go, it sounds like a lot of me talking.

It's also a little exhausting to hear me talk that much. So we're going to flip it a little bit in today's episode and I'm going to share your stories. I'm going to share what stoicism has meant to some of our listeners, what they've learned from it, what they've taken from it, how they apply it. and hopefully they can spur something in you. And then maybe you want to share your story with us as well. You can send an audio of what stoicism has meant to you, how you came to it, what resonates with you, what you're struggling with, how you apply it, all that.

You can send that audio recording to podcast at daily stoic.com. Higher audio quality is better if you got an external mic. That's best. Claire can work a lot of magic. She's our producer, but she can't work unlimited magic. And you'll hear in today's episode some audio differences, but I think these are pretty good. And most of all, the stories are what's powerful. And here's our first.

Here's Marty. Hi, my name is Marty. My journey into Stoicism began in the summer of 2021. As I read the Daily Stoic, the lessons captivated me. I was astonished how this ancient wisdom could be delivered in such a readable, understandable way. And I questioned why I never came across this point. before. What initially resonated with me was a passage from Marcus Aurelius that I first read in the Daily Stoic and then reread in meditations. In the passage, Marcus advises that we do not

procrastinate, do not confuse others in conversation, do not allow our thoughts to wander, do not be passive or aggressive, and do not be all business. I thought to myself, if I can follow these rules, it'll be difficult to steer myself in the wrong direction. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I played back and forth with getting sober. I would go weeks or even months at a time without drinking, but then I'd give up and find myself amid another weekend bender. In July of 2021, around the time I began studying Stoic philosophy, I hit my form of rock bottom. After that, I finally quit drinking. While I can't say for certain that it was stoicism that got me sober,

I can say that stoicism has helped me stay sober. I started to realize that coping with stress and enjoying life will not come from external pleasures and vices, but from my internal values and living through virtue. I came to stoicism with the idea that it would help me improve from a performance aspect. As an educator and basketball referee, my goal with stoicism was to learn how to control my emotions and be self-disciplined while maintaining poise and self-confidence. Stoicism involves so much more. The afterward and Right Thing Right Now is one of the most powerful chapters I've ever read.

Ryan writes, like most people, when I was first drawn to stoicism, I was attracted to what it could do for me. But the thing about stoicism is that it does its work on you. I am lucky that I found stoicism, not just because it kept me calm and collected under pressure, but because as the years went by, the deeper message of the Stoics sunk in. I was initially interested in self-discipline, courage, and the process of acquiring wisdom. But I'm starting to understand the justice side. Doing works right for those closest to you and for the greater good. Keeping your word to yourself and others,

remaining honest and loyal, and showing true empathy. This doesn't mean attempting to save the world, but instead doing your small part each day without excuses. Stoicism has become my guidebook for life, something I did not have before. Trying my best to focus on what I can control and to live through courage, self-discipline, justice and wisdom has helped me control my emotions and be more intentional in my career and relationships.

I read books, I write a newsletter, and I cherish the simpler parts of life. I am more open-minded and eager to learn, and I am more aware of what's truly important because I realize that our time is finite. I have an entirely different view on how to embrace challenges and obstacles, and I care more about other people knowing that we're all in this together. It's amazing, Marty, to hear the role Stoicism is played in your sobriety. It actually reminded me of something I talked about with Jamie Alexander on the podcast. She was saying that Stoicism was a big part of her sobriety journey as well. Here is what she said. I'm almost eight years sober now,

God willing, and I think that was by far the best thing that has ever happened to me. So I learned a lot from that. So this is, this ties into a higher power thing, is like, I really don't know what's good or bad. And I'm holding up air quotes here because I really don't. Yes. You know, something can be, you know, we're not dumb. We can realize when we're like, oh, you know, like I broke my shoulder. That friggin hurts.

That really sucks. But that could lead to something that, you know, really wonderful. And this has put me stoicism and my sobriety and the way my life has gone over the last few years, which is not like I thought it would. Kind of in, I'm not even going to say in the worst way because I don't believe that now. But it has positioned me in a way. And I'm now in a place where I can be, I think, a lot more useful to a lot more people. Thanks, Marty.

I appreciate the kind words about the afterward to write thing right now. That's actually been my favorite part of writing the series. Didn't want the books to feel real preachy. Like I was an expert on these things. In fact, no, I'm struggling with them as much as you guys are. And I wanted it to be clear where I was coming from in writing them. Next, we're going to hear from Jordan. My story of stoicism doesn't harbor around a single event,

but rather it's the glue that made all of these seemingly disjointed pieces come together in alignment. Who am I to be submitting to a platform like this? I am not a community leader. I haven't written a book. I'm not a titan of industry or an exceptional athlete. I haven't been subjected to decades of slavery and servitude. I'm one ingredient in the soup of humanity. But I think it's in that being that I feel the call to this.

It's in this commonality, this thread that near most can pull, and it will tug somewhere on the fiber of their being. My foundational years were formed by people with severe codependency, chemical imbalances, and intense anger issues. I adopted a learned behavioral pattern. Trigger? Fiery explosion. deep emotional damage, cry, massive guilt trip, hug, sweep it away and pretend everything is better.

Even though I noticed how this destructive behavior pushed people away and affected relationships, I still carry this with me into my early 20s. This behavior played itself out in a toxic long-term relationship, and when it ultimately came to a heinously painful ending, I was struck with an epiphany that was a massive turning point in my life and my behavior. I never want to feel this way ever again, and I never want to be someone who makes someone feel this way ever again. I knew what I had been doing up to that point in my life had to change. I started caring more about how my actions, my words, and my behaviors affected others.

I told myself, no more lies, no more half-truths, no more raging. anger. I learned that anger is typically a secondary emotion and there is usually something behind it. Fear, sadness, guilt, betrayal, or confusion. Very rarely was anger erupting just for the sake of anger itself. It was an indicator that something else was going on behind the scenes. I started to examine places in my life where I felt anger and so much of it sprung from my anger towards my mother. and after many months of not speaking with help for my partner at the time, I realized there would be a world one day where I wouldn't be able to reach out to my mother. No call, no text, no letter, nothing.

And that feeling filled me with grief. She was alive and she was a person, a human, just like me, who was dealt an unfair hand in life. And when I took her off the pedestal of, this is what a mom should be, and just saw her as a person with an entire life and parent, which is one of the roles where she did her best with what she had, it released years of animosity and tension from my mind, my heart, and my body. Few things have spoken clear to me than stoicism, and it has been my grounding rod and my guiding star ever since then.

When my current partner had a cancerous brain tumor recurrence in I was his caretaker, stoicism guided me. All the times my chemically and balanced mother tested my boundaries and my patients, stoicism guided me. When other family members were held in the strong grip of addiction, stoicism guided me. And when the weight of the world feels overwhelming and uncertain, stoicism guides me. I cannot control the world or the people in it. but I can always put in the effort to be the best version of me I can be at the time and give myself grace in my learning and my becoming. I always carry my copy of meditations and I have highlights and notes in the margins.

I have gifted meditations to friends and family. I've shared the podcast and posts for years because I carry within me a lived truth of its potency. It's a buoy within the sea of chaos. And I am eternally grateful for the moments. chapters and seasons through which it has and continues to keep me afloat and shape my character. I think a lot of people can relate to that, right? I think we're all a slave to our emotions here there. That's why Stoicism is attractive. If that's a totally foreign idea to you, you're probably not like, oh, I'd like a philosophy that helps me not do that, right? But anger is there for me.

I've said this before. I don't think I have an anger problem, but anger is a problem for me, as it is for most people, as it was for Marcus Ruelas, right? He talked. It's about how the consequences of anger are more harmful than whatever the thing we are angry about. So, yeah, I appreciate you, Sharon, and I hope you keep spreading the word and the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius. We just got home from a spring break trip, 12 hours of driving. We're pulling into the driveway. And we're like, oh, man, what are we going to have for dinner tonight? What are we going to have dinner for tomorrow?

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I think I'm getting it right. G-E-R-M-A with an Ascento N from Argentina. I'm a school teacher and I wanted to share how I apply stoic ideas in my job. I first came across stoicism about 10 years ago through a YouTube video in Spanish. It was called something like stoicism, the best. mentality you can have. Out of curiosity I watched it and was introduced to the concept of the dichotomy of control, among other stoic ideas. And eventually I found the daily stoic and that's where I really started to go deeper into stoicism. Now I've been watching Ryan's videos, listening to his

podcasts and reading his daily emails for a couple of years. One of my favorite daily stoic videos is the one about you control how you play. If there's one thing that philosophy can teach any athlete, whether you're an amateur, whether you're a collegiate prospect, whether you're a top-ranked recruiter, whether you're making millions of dollars in the pros is something that I talked about to the Cleveland Browns this year when they had me talk about stoicism. What I said, I started my talk and I said, look, everyone in this room controls one thing. They control how they play. You don't control what teammates do, you control how you play. You don't control what they say about you on Twitter, you control how you play. You don't control the size of your contract, you control how you play.

You don't control what they say about you from the stands, you control how you play. You don't control what the ref says, you control how you play. You don't control whether it's snowing, you don't control whether it's raining, you don't control whether it's a hundred degrees, You control how you play. You don't control whether your teammates get hurt. You don't control if your teammates are fair. You don't control if the guy in the position ahead of you wants to groom you and mentor you or not.

You control how you play. You don't control whether your opponents cheat. You control how you play. You don't control if your coach is a bully and he screams at you. You control how you play. You don't control if people are doubting you, if they don't believe it. in you, you control how you play. You don't control yesterday's game. You control how you play today. You don't control if you've lost to this team a thousand times. You control how you play. You

don't control if your team wins. You control how you play. You don't control if you lose. You control how you play. All you control if it's not clear enough is how you play right now, right the second. Whether there's doubters, whether you're being adored, all you're, you control is how you play, the effort that you bring, the decisions you make, the principles by which you operate. And that's ultimately all you can judge yourself on. You don't control the outcome. You don't control the facts. You don't control anything but how you play. But if we can focus on this, the Stoak said, if we can focus exclusively on what we control, not only be happier, we'll have way more energy and way more to focus on what is in front of us while everyone else

waste time, whining about, complaining about, worrying about, thinking about, bragging about what they don't control. Thinking about my job as a school teacher and all the setbacks that come with it, mainly students' behavior toward their teachers, I borrowed this idea of you control how you play and turned it into you control how you teach. And I came up with this. Life is like a classroom. and you only control one thing.

You control how you teach. You don't control whether your students misbehave or not. You control how you teach. You don't control if your students pay attention to you. You control how you teach. You don't control if your students do their homework, study for their tests, or turn in their assignments on time. You control how you teach.

Instead of focusing on what your students do or don't, do, just make sure you're teaching the best class you can teach because that's basically the only thing you control, the only thing that is really up to you. What your students do say and think, that's not up to you. At the end of the day, you shouldn't ask yourself, did my students do everything they were supposed to do? Instead, you should ask yourself, did I teach the best class I could teach? Did I respond to my students' behavior with courage, temperance, justice and wisdom?

Or did I just lash out at them like a wild beast because they didn't do what I wanted them to do? In other words, did I just get angry at my students for not behaving the way I wanted them to behave? But students are not the only people school teachers have to deal with. We also have to deal with our own colleagues, students' parents. parents, principals. Just a few days ago a principal told me, Hermann, you have to make your students respect you. You have to make them be quiet.

And I was like, I can't make my students respect me or be quiet. I don't control what they do in the classroom, what they say to me or what they think about me. Whether they respect me or not, that is not up to me, but it's up to them. When I started to be become more aware of what was really up to me and what was not, I began to feel a sense of relief because I started saying things to myself like, I don't control whether things go the way I wanted to or not, I did the best I could and I can't do more than that. Because of this and other stoic ideas like, don't suffer imagine troubles, put every impression to the test and don't ask for the third thing, as Mark is a real real,

Alias would say you can't record something for the daily Stuyak podcast without mentioning Marks Aurelius. So there you go, Ryan. You know, I love this mantra of I control how I teach. Mantras like that can be really helpful. And it sounds like you're doing the best you can and you're really thinking about how you apply the virtues, right? Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom to your job, which is a great job and an important job. And we appreciate your service.

And I think you're providing a great example. Thanks to everyone for submitting their stories for today's episode. Let us know if you want to share your story, what you think of this episode. If you like this format, I think it's great. And I'd like to do more of it. As I said, the email there is podcast at daily stoic.com.