It’s incredible to think of what has occurred in the last twenty years. The tech bubble. 9/11. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Great Recession. The Syrian Civil War. The Arab Spring. And now the COVID-19 Pandemic, and unprecedented protests and clashes between authorities and civilians

Even the last few months, as people have come to joke, feel like years all by themselves. Impeachment. The primaries. Pandemic. Police. 

It’s too much. Overwhelming, yeah? Or is it just… life?

Remember in a span of less than two years, Seneca lost his father, got married (AD 40), then lost his firstborn son, and then twenty days after burying his son, he would be banished from Rome by the Emperor Claudius. Think about Marcus’s reign, which lasted just 19 years. This turned out to be enough time for a plague, a coup by one of his closest friends, to lose 5 of his children, a plague, the loss of his stepbrother (and co-ruler), an economic crisis, and more. Think about that three year period for Theodore Roosevelt where he got married, wrote a book, graduated from law school, won his first public office, and then had his first daughter. Then 48 hours later, on the same day in the same house, he lost his beloved mother and his wife. 

To say this was “a lot” for these men would be a preposterous understatement. But guess what? They got through it. As you will get through it, as you have already gotten through so much. Because that’s what life is. It’s tackling problems day to day, or step by step as Marcus said. We can’t let the whole of it overwhelm us.

No, we have to concentrate like Romans. We have to say amor fati. We have to keep calm and carry on. Because that’s all we can do.

P.S. This was originally sent on June 22, 2020. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.