The Daily Stoic - BONUS: Celebrate Earth Day The Stoic Way | Living In Accordance With Nature

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

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Get an instant price today at ZenSurance.com. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-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, visit DailyStelic.com. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

It is Earth Day here. I'm not saying I live in Austin for Barton Springs, but it's certainly one of the reasons I have stayed in Austin. I swim there a couple times a week now that I take my son to school in Austin most days. And it's just one of my absolute favorite places. Actually, when I was in Australia last summer, I guess, their winter to give my talks, I sort of riffed on why I love Barton Springs so much. I love to swim. It's one of my hobbies.

It's one of my favorite things to do. I swim pretty often where I live in Austin, Texas, in this place called Barton Springs, which is one of the wonders of the earth, in my opinion. It's this natural spring, something like 30 million gallons of water comes up from deep under the earth every single day. It's exactly 71 degrees Fahrenheit. Doesn't matter if it's snowing outside, doesn't matter if it's 110 degrees out, which it probably is now, it's always 71 degrees. And I like to swim in there's fish and turtles and plants, it's endangered

species, it's this incredible oasis that people have been coming to for literally thousands of years. And I was thinking of the beauty of Barton Springs and then I was swimming in icebergs yesterday and watching the waves crash over into the pool. And I remember thinking the whole world is a temple of the gods. I couldn't swim in icebergs today.

The waves were too high. So I had to just settle for sitting on the third story and just watching these enormous waves crash over some of the biggest waves I've ever seen in my life. The whole world is a temple of the gods, and I would say Australia is a temple of temples. You're all very lucky to live here, and I'm excited to be here talking with all of you.

And one of the other things I love about it, though, is I love that it exists. Like, not the natural wonder of it, but I love that at some point, the people in this state got together and preserved it. Right? And then continue to preserve it. See, Barton Springs is home to this endangered species called the Barton Springs salamander.

So the whole thing is, is this like federally protected habitat. There's another amazing one out in the middle of Texas called Balmore that's got this species of of Comanche pupfish that's the only place that it exists in the world. Like so by preserving it not only does everyone get to enjoy it but it's also by definition preserving a species that wouldn't be able to exist anywhere else. And I just love that. I love that human beings came together and solved the collective action problem,

preserved something for future generations. It just, anytime there's a national park or a national monument, or just thinking in Australia, we went out to the Blue Mountains, we went to their parks, you just go, a group of people got together, solved the political problem, and made a thing that now, generations later, we're enjoying.

People from all over the world are here. I love that. That's, to me, what Earth Day is about. A reminder that this doesn't just happen. We have to do work. And that if we don't do that work, if we leave it to someone else, it might not happen. And then we are robbing our children and grandchildren and their children, we are robbing other people of that. That clip from my Australia talk, I was saying that the whole world is a temple of the gods. We pay our respects to that temple by protecting and preserving. And that's what Earth Day is about.

And so for this bonus episode, I wanted to riff on that idea. Here are some stoic secrets to living in accordance with nature, or rather, some stoic ideas on protecting, preserving, enjoying, and philosophically relating to this natural world that we are lucky enough to live in and obligated to protect and preserve. One phrase you hear pop up in the stoic writings quite a bit is this idea of living in accordance with nature.

All the stoics talk about it. You know, one thing they didn't do is define that particularly well. Did they mean human nature? Did they mean outside nature? Did they mean outside nature? Did they mean some sort of metaphysical nature? Probably some combination of all of the above. But I want to talk about one of those which is most interesting and I think most accessible to us. The idea of living in and with nature. That's one thing you see abounding in the stoic writings.

Marcus Aurelius is writing beautifully about the way that stalks of grain bend over low under their own weight. He talks about animals, the way there's flecks of foam on the boar's mouth. Seneca writes a whole series of books on natural questions on sort of what we would today call biology and anthropology. So the Stoics were definitely fascinated with this and they weren't your sort of classroom bound bookish philosophers They were people who got outside in the world and that's what I try to do. I'm Ryan Holliday I've written a number of books about Stoke philosophy. Of course, this is my life This is what I get excited about but I also live on a little ranch outside Austin, Texas

Where I try to spend a good chunk of my time. I try to do things outside every day I try to be out in nature because it makes me happy and that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode some stoic strategies to live in nature to appreciate nature and get happiness and joy from nature. Nothing makes me happier for instance than going to see my two donkeys at Buddy and Sugar. That's them right there. So Buddy I bought on Craigslist for $100, maybe the single best purchase and investment I've ever made.

And then Sugar we got her for, I think $300 on Craigslist. And they're just the sweetest. Hey! Sugar is much moodier than Buddy. I'd say Buddy's a bit of a sex pest, if I'm being perfectly honest. But he's a nice boy. I think one thing I realized one time I walked over

and I was just sort of watching Buddy. He's just standing there for like hours and hours. I realized he's not comparing himself to anyone, right? He's not wondering if he's adequate or not. He's just alive right he's just still right you know that expression human being not human doing but he doesn't wrestle with that at all he's just present look at him oh when i go out and i see the animals when i spend time with them calms me down makes me happier makes me more grateful makes me more present then i can bring

that energy back towards my regular life, toward my job, towards the world that is not calm and chill like they are. And there's something about animal energy. This is why they do equine therapy, for instance, just being around the animals, feeling them, having to adjust your mood, having to read their mood. There's something very special and powerful about that.

And so, yeah, he was $100 and he's kind of a lot of work sometimes. Not really, he's pretty low maintenance, but he pays us back in many, many ways. Mostly just being alive and being a good example. And one time you fought off a mountain lion, didn't you buddy? Remember? You still have some scars. Buddy, where's your scar? Somewhere around here. His neck was all bit up. That's what they do. They're livestock guarding animals.

Their job is just to sort of be around. They keep the cows company and they keep bad stuff away. That's what Buddy does. And then Sugar gets us a baby every once in a while. Buddy and Sugar have a baby every year or so, about 13 months, and we name it Booger, and then we spread the love and we share it with friends. Let's see if Sugar will let me pet her today. She's kind of grouchy. Sugar, you got that on you.

Sugar's a little smaller than Buddy. And then we've got this little lake here, which sometimes we go fishing in. Hunting and fishing, as far as hobbies go, teach us all sorts of amazing philosophical lessons. Patience, of course. Ingenuity, of course. Silence, of course. And then, you know, some certain resiliency, a certain gratitude for the gifts of nature, and then you know you got to learn these skills, right? Fishing is a skill, hunting

is a skill, cleaning a fish or a deer or a hog is it's gross but it's a skill and then from that skill you get certain benefits, right? And that's what life is. I think one of the things I've had to learn when I go hunting, especially, I talked to Peter T about this on the podcast, I'll show you a chunk of that. One of the experiences I find when I'm hunting is, so first off, you have this sort of awareness. And then when you see the thing that you are looking for, you get that rush, that flood of emotion, the recognition, the practice of

having to calm down the adrenaline dump because you know it's not going to be productive. To me, I get the most out of hunting just in the unusual practice or the building of that muscle, which I feel like you don't get to so consciously do in the rest of your life. Yeah, I think that's an amazing experience that you're right. There's no comparison to that in regular life. All of the best laid plans can go right out the window in the fog of war. And in archery especially, this is a much bigger issue. So I only hunt with a bow and arrow. In archery, the goal is obviously for the most rapid and humane exploration of the animal.

So therefore you want to be as close as possible so that the risk of a subpar shot is gone. Well, anybody who's hunted elk knows that when you're 50 yards or less from an elk during the rut, I mean, you can smell it, you can feel its spit hitting you at times. By the way, if it gets really angry, it'll charge you and it will destroy you. It could impale you. You now have to be able to calm yourself down to do something that is very technically hard, which is shoot a bow and arrow. I work with this guy named Joel Turner, who's I think one of the masters of teaching the process of the perfect shot and You've probably heard of like target panic right target panic is a real issue in anything, but boy, especially in archery

How do you get out of target panic? Well, it turns out you have to shift your focus from the aim to the process of the shot and you have to turn it into from the aim to the process of the shot. And you have to turn it into something called a closed loop process as opposed to an open loop. So an open loop process is something that you do without thinking that can't be stopped mid process. Whereas something that is closed loop, everything you're doing is being done slowly enough that you can stop at any moment. And your only capacity is to focus on that thing. You can't be thinking about anything else. Now that's not an easy thing to do. That in and of itself is a remarkable skill.

But once you have that skill, all of a sudden, even when an elk is screaming and, you know, it's just total chaos in the midst of wherever you are. You can sort of focus on the process and not the aiming, which is the thing that you would net. By the process, I mean the shot process. Having to calm yourself down, having to understand that your racing heart rate here is not your friend, that your emotions here are not necessarily your friend. And to calm

yourself down and to be in command of oneself to do this thing that you have to do. Obviously people who fight in wars or respond to real crises or you know experience this in a real way but hobbies that challenge us in that way right are really good. Plus they they get us outside. There's this great passage from Theodore Roosevelt where he goes out, he goes out, he spends all days in the rain, whatever. He ends up getting what he wanted, which he says is a reward. He says, but if one actually needed a reward,

because the reward was doing all the stuff, right? I think that's one of the things you learn when you go hunting is you have to detach from the results a little bit. You have to actually experience the process. Hey buddy. You have to experience the process. You have to be present for it. You just have to understand that you know you can do everything you want to do right, but then you also just have to turn yourself over to the gods so to speak.

Right? How's the weather that day? What are the animals doing that day? Right? There's a certain acceptance, the art of acquiescence as Epictetus calls it, so you practice that too. So I think hobbies that get you out and challenge you, there's a reason Marcus Aurelius goes hunting, there's a reason hunting metaphors abound in the ancient world because they obviously had a different food system than us. They didn't have the luxury of just magically getting everything from the supermarket. They had to learn how to do things. They had to have the luxury of just magically getting everything from the supermarket. They had to learn how to do things. They had to understand where their food came from and so do we. Moussonius Rufus has a whole essay on how farming is the profession best suited to philosophy.

I don't know exactly what he means. I think he's saying that, you know, cultivation, right, I think he's saying that patience, I think he's talking about hard work and dedication. I think he's talking about being outside. You know, it's a profession unlike, I don't know, something more exploitative, something more manipulative, right, it's something that forces one to play by certain rules.

Isn't quite as virtuous a profession. I don't exactly farm stuff, but I would say that getting this place, what it's forced us to do is learn a bunch of skills we wouldn't have otherwise learned, understand the world in ways that we probably otherwise wouldn't have had to do. There's so many moments when we wanted to give up,

when we wanted to go back towards an easier life, when we wanted to live like everyone else. You know, it makes you responsible, right? We're responsible for these guys. We're responsible for the chickens. We're responsible for keeping everyone safe, for taking care of them, for making sure that they're fed. These are all, I think, great traits that challenge you, that force you to grow up, force you to be responsible, but you get a lot out of it in exchange, which of course is the essence of what the Stoics are talking about. Maybe that's what Musonius Rufus meant when he said that farming is the only profession that a philosopher should embark on.

One of the things about being outside, being in nature, especially being out in the country, is it's quieter. And it forces you to be present, to observe, it calms you down. Like I'm just noticing the different prints that I'm seeing here. I saw some raccoon prints a few minutes ago. You got to be on the lookout for snakes. The donkeys were walking behind me earlier. I don't want them to sneak up on me. You're just always noticing, right?

I think that's a beautiful part of meditations. You see that Marcus Rias had cultivated kind of the poet or the artist's eye. He's noticing these little things. He says, you know, the flecks of foam on the boar's mouth. He says, the furrowed brow of the lion. He's cultivated a kind of presence. Winston Churchill, who falls in love

with painting at middle age, right? One of the things it does is it gets him outside into nature in a way that as a very ambitious, busy sort of a worldly guy, he wasn't doing, right? You look at Winston Churchill and you go, yeah, this isn't a guy who was going for long runs or bike rides, but getting out in a field and painting, watching a sunset, you know, observing a flower,

it forces him to slow down, to and be present like right now where I am It's not the most beautiful right all the leaves have fallen We're still dealing with a bit of a drought in Texas Although we finally got some serious rain last week the more I live here the more I spent time I find beauty in all the different seasons if I look for it, right if I try to be Observant and notice and find oh, that's cool. I didn't see that before I've lived here now for going on ten years and you know Right? If I try to be observant and notice and find, oh, that's cool. I didn't see that before. I've lived here now for going on 10 years and you know,

even though I've walked every inch of this, I find things that I missed the whole time. Or I find something that washed up, or I find something new that's happened. Right? And that's one of the things you're doing. You're walking around, you're checking the fences, you're just monitoring what's going on. You're present. It's not work,

but being responsible for all this, you have to be aware. As you cultivate land, a piece of property, or a place on earth, it's also cultivating you a kind of presence and awareness. And I've found that to be immensely beneficial. If you want some semblance of the cycle of life and death on the farm, these are some bones of a cow I had to put down.

I think this is a deer or boar or something. But like, look, just walking as I'm walking back to the fence, I'll show you. This is, you know, I think a leg bone from one of the cows and then the dogs were grabbing it and playing with it. That's just how it goes. So anyways, there's a certain stillness to being around it, but there's also this kind of sobering reminder of memento mori. Same thing will happen to us eventually, right?

You know, we're not that different than even a cow. Hopefully nobody will eat us, but what do we care? We'll be dead. Let me show you the goats too. That's Turtle. That's Bucket. That's Watermelon. Turtle is from Brent from Cerro Gordo.

He had her here in Austin. He was actually kidnapped and then he came back and then Brent couldn't drive her all the way out to California. So he lives with us now. This is watermelon. We rescued him. Bucket is our first goat.

We had another goat that we really love named Biscuit. And we'd been here maybe two years. Biscuit got out, went over to our neighbors, escaped and got impregnated, came back, had babies, you know, a while later, and we called the neighbor and he had more experience with goats. He said, could you help us?

Unfortunately, she died in childbirth. They were huge calves. So I think one of them was stillborn, this whole thing. And, you know, we were really sad. We'd go to the point about there being life and death. We were really sad about it. And then as our neighbor was helping us clean up, he was consoling us, and then he said,

hey, can I have the babies and the goat? And then it all died, and we said, why? And he was like, I'm gonna barbecue them and feed them to my dog. And we were just like, whoa, this is a different life, man. But it's that point of, you think you're just like, whoa, this is a different life, man. But it's that point of like, you know, you think you're special, but you know, someone will eat you when you die if you're not careful.

I think the idea is that you can see stoicism anywhere and everywhere. And that's in fact, in life that we should look for these lessons. That's what I do. That's why I love living out here. You can see the philosophical lessons, not just in the pages of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius

But in in a cow in a goat in a painful experience in a goose going missing And these are the ways that the words sort of you read about them and then you have to experience them in some way Living out here in the country has been a constant reminder of that some very happy fun days like today when we get a new calf of that. Some very happy fun days like today when we get a new calf. Some sad days when we have to bury something or put something down or lose it or sell it. But such is life, such is stoicism. See you soon. When I wrote the Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 Meditations but I write one more every single day and I give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up.

Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three-quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

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