Nearly every day was a terror. People died of easily curable diseases. People starved to death. People were clapped into slavery. Wars broke out–fought literally to the knife–where the losers were executed alongside civilian populations…their cities razed to the ground.

Seneca was exiled. Marcus Aurelius buried his own children. Epictetus was tortured, leaving him disabled for life. Yet somehow they wrote and spoke a philosophy that had within it, cheerfulness and love and lofty words about meaning and purpose. How did they even get out of bed in the morning, let alone smile?

There is a great lyric in the Florence and the Machines song, Free, that expresses this very bafflement:

“Is this how it is?

Is this how it’s always been?

To exist in the face of suffering and death?

And somehow still keep singing?”

The answer to that is basically, “Yeah.” That is how it is…always has been and always will be. People are awful. For some, cruelty is the point. Things are hard. Things go wrong. People get hurt. People die.

We don’t control that. We do control whether we keep going. We control whether we let those bastards get us down. We control whether we let them implicate us in ugliness, as Marcus Aurelius wrote. We control whether we keep singing, keep smiling.

Amor Fati. Live with virtue.