You see it on the news every day. You see it in traffic. You see it on social media. People being awful. Things falling apart. Virtue not just in decline but in an all out rout.

We don’t control this, but as always we control how we respond. Will it make us better or worse? Will we be implicated in the ugliness? The real harm, Marcus Aurelius reminded himself in his own dark and ugly times, was whether he allowed it to affect his character.

Bad times can make things hard on us. Bad people can hurt us. But resentment? Despair? Revenge? These are choices that still belong in us. So too is the decision to remain decent, to do the right thing, to be a small light in a dark room, as Miep Gies put it, to carry the fire, as Cormac McCarthy writes in ​The Road​.

The election is not up to us. A pandemic is not up to us. A collapse in public trust, public kindness, public responsibility—these things are not up to us, not as individuals, that is (of course, we all share the blame collectively). As individuals what is up to us is whether these bad times make us a bad person, whether hard events harden our hearts, whether the wrongs of the world make us do wrong.

This is the idea in ​Right Thing, Right Now​—it doesn’t matter what other people do or say or think, our job is to do what’s right. In fact, that’s what Marcus Aurelius was talking about when he said ​the obstacle was the way​: every obstacle, every evil, every problem is at the very least a chance for us to practice virtue.

Grab copies of ​Obstacle​ and ​Right Thing, Right Now​ over at the Daily Stoic Store!