The Daily Stoic - Do You Make Time For this? | Ask DS

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Even when he was president, Jimmy Carter tried to carve out space for reflection and study. Just a few days after being sworn in, he was already asking his aides to push his meetings back. ��I need more time alone early each morning,” he wrote to his team. He wanted an hour of reading and thinking and prayer.The Stoics protected this time too.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions from the audience at the conclusion of a Stoicism 101 seminar, covering topics including how we can use anger as a tool, how and why to read points of view that we don't agree with, how to balance appreciating what you have with striving to achieve something else, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are.

Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with daily Stoic life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happen to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you.

["Piano Music"] Do you make time for this? Even when he was president, Jimmy Carter tried to carve out space for reflection and study. Just a few days after being sworn in, he was already asking his aides to push his meetings back. I need more alone time in the morning," he wrote to his team.

He wanted an hour of reading and thinking and prayer. The Stokes protected this time too. Marcus Aurelius writes, even though it was a struggle about greeting the dawn. And this was likely when he penned his meditations. We talked about Hugh Jackman a while back. We talked about getting up in the mornings and reading stillness is the key allowed to his wife. But what about us? We're sucked into the phone first thing or we're waking up well into mid-morning and we're already behind. When Carter was pushing back those meetings, it

wasn't a gossip or get distracted. It was that having spent his whole boyhood getting up an hour before daylight, he was still getting to his morning meetings at around 8.30. We asked recently, what do you give the most important part of your day to? Well, the mornings are such a time. How are you spending them? How are you protecting them? It's funny, I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time They've just gotten back into it and I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading

They're reading more than ever and I go let me guess you listen audio books, don't you? And it's true and almost invariably they listen to them on Audible that's because audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memories And of course ancient philosophy all my books are available on audio, read by me for the most part. Audible lets you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app. You'll always find the best of what you love, or something new to discover, and as an Audible member you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including

the latest bestsellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, exciting new voices in audio. You can check out Stillness' The Key, The Daily Dad. I just recorded so that's up on Audible now. Coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the obstacle is the way audiobooks, so all those are available. And new members can try Audible for free for 30 days.

Visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500-500, that's audible.com slash daily stoke. A text daily stoke to 500-500. My question for today is when we are accepting this new information, do you, when you learn a new school of thought, these revelations that you get from what you're reading, does that become your new belief without like read it? Because I heard you I heard you mention that one of your podcasts, you're like, I wish when I was younger, I would have thought about what I said instead of doing what I just read. Sure. No, to go back to your point about anger,

I've got to imagine that as an actor, you have some experience getting inside an angry person. And you can see, not that anger is a choice, but you can see that it's sort of like a habit or a character that one inhabits. I'm fascinated in sports, like when a coach gets angry on purpose to send a message either to like the team or to the refs.

Obviously a coach who's not in control of themselves is not good, but a coach who can get angry to send a message is good. So I would think that being an actor would be really good practice for sort of understanding your emotions and being able to use them when they're of use to you and say, no, I'm not gonna do that when they're not

to use of you. So I think that's interesting. But yeah, look, there's even a quote from Epictetus where he says, you know, when you start to make progress, when you learn something, he says, don't put on errors about it. Like don't go on bragging about all the things that you've learned, all the progress you've made,

don't just regurgitate the things that you just learned. He says, that's when you get in trouble. And when I think about maybe things that I've, when I look back at things that I read and maybe I, sorry, that I've written that maybe make me cringe a little bit, what I can feel is maybe some artifice, right? Like I can feel that like I, I, I didn't really know this. I just heard it and it sounded good. You know what I mean? It wasn't, I hadn't really know this. I just heard it and it sounded good. You know what I mean? Or it wasn't, I hadn't really done the work, right? I might, I

might still be correct, but I think back and I go, I was correct, but for the wrong reasons, or I was correct, and I was presenting it in the wrong way. And so that, that's sort of what I think about. Mackenzie. Hi. I was truly not expecting that. I was like, there's so many people with their hands raised. So my question actually has to do with this idea of reading books and kind of, and I love the line you had on the podcast about meeting information, kind of like in the middle of the field that you might not agree with. And I think one of the biggest challenges I have, and maybe it might just be kind of my own little bubble. But when you're reading those challenging things, removing your ego long enough to say,

all right, I'm going to read a Jordan Peterson. I'm going to read a challenging book and not sit here the whole time going, you idiot, instead of like being really open, actually open, not that line you say in ego in the end is the enemy where you're like, I'm so humble, but you don't actually mean it. No, no, it's true. I mean, I think because we have so little time to read and we love reading that generally, we wanna spend time reading things that make

us feel good or that are down a rabbit hole or a line of thinking that we agree with. The problem is reading should also be challenging us and if you're only, it's like, like what I would think, what I try to think back on and I don't think my own answer is good enough, but it's like, how many books, what was the last book you read that you disagreed with, right? And I think there's two problems with that. It's not just that we aren't reading challenging enough stuff. It's probably also that we're not digging deep enough in a topic that we're even getting more than one point of view, right? So it's not like you should just go read the most incendiary offensive awful things, but it's just like, hey, like in any school, like, like, look, there's some, you know,

classicists who think that the still eggs are brilliant. And there's some classicists who think that they're very overrated. This is a book I read a few months ago called How to Be an Epicurean, which is, you know, obviously, to write a book on Epicureanism, you're sort of diametrically opposed to the Stokes in some way. I didn't really love this book, like there's a bunch I disagreed with it, but that's sort of the point. Like you want to be reading things, at least on a semi-regular basis that you disagree with, right? And so I think that's how I want to think about. So it's not just reading the Jordan Peterson's, but it's also just reading deep enough in a topic that you're getting a diverse set of views.

Even if you're reading in, I don't know, critical race theory, there's obviously disagreements inside critical race theory just as there's disagreements inside libertarianism and conservatism and liberalism, where are the disagreements? Because that's, I think, where you're forced to examine your own assumptions. But as far as the more controversial views, too, it doesn't have to be a book, but one of the things I learned from Peter Tio when I wrote my book about him, he was talking about how often we deal with straw men.

So when we argue against someone, we have only the most superficial understanding of what they say or think, because like we've never actually engaged with their point of view in any way. I think that's like when Jordan Peterson gets on these interviews and any sort of ends up making the person look foolish, I think that often happens because they seriously underestimated him. They saw him as this like moronic caricature instead of a guy who was like a Harvard professor for many years and clearly intelligent and articulate.

So like, let's say he's totally wrong about everything. You would be well served to really go understand where he's coming from and what he's saying so that when you try to argue against it or when you hold a counter, a counter-vailing view that you don't end up looking like an idiot because you know all you've read is like five tweets. That is incredibly helpful. Thank you. Oh, and I just have to say my mother wanted me to, if I ever had the opportunity to thank you. She had, my grandmother was a woman that we used to joke, used to speak and teach about

death and living life every moment. And so when my mom and I learned the concept of momentum, or my mom's like, my very religious mother was a stoic and people didn't even realize that she wasn't weird. She was just teaching a four year old to have a concept of the world. That's beautiful. I love that. Well, thank you. Okay.

Thanks so much. Yeah. So, I guess I'm kind of working through some career stuff right now. But I think this kind of applies to anything. And I like this idea of where you are is where you need to practice your philosophy, right? You can just do that anywhere, right?

So how do you keep that, hold that idea, and then hold the other end of the idea that now I'm looking for something else or I'm either aspiring or striving elsewhere. Yeah, I was actually just writing a daily stoke about this there's this letter between Marcus really sent his his rhetoric teacher Cornelius franto and franto says look. Against your will you must put on the purple cloak of the emperor instead of the the coarse cape of the philosopher meaning Like life chose you to do this and that's where you're gonna have to sort of shine And I like the idea that for all of Marcus is sort of freedom and power. He's constrained by this You know opportunity, but also obligation that is sort of foiced upon him.

Now, in the ancient world, obviously, there was a lot less mobility, sort of socially, economically, culturally. You know, there were literally ranks of classes. And the idea of like, well, just because my dad was a blacksmith, doesn't mean I want to be a blacksmith, right? That didn't exist. So it's not a perfect analog that, you know, because we do exist in a time with sort of mobility and some agency that would have been incomprehensible to a Marcus Aurelius. So I don't know if there's like a clear cut answer of when you should stick, when you should quit, but I think his idea that whatever it is

that you're doing is a chance to be philosophical, is a chance to practice the philosophy. I think I was asking someone about this recently who'd like sort of transitions jobs or careers or something. And I said, you know, how do you know that you're not leaving because you're scared or intimidated? And he said, he said, the test was, is the thing you're going to do harder or riskier than the thing you're, than the thing you're leaving? Right? So it's like, if Marcus are really, Aurelius was turning down being the emperor because he just wanted to study books and philosophy quietly alone in his room, that's kind of a cop out.

You know what I mean? Conversely, if he's studying books alone in his room and he gets this opportunity to be emperor, that know, that's a bigger opportunity, a better opportunity. It's a more challenging thing and I think that's why he accepts it. So that might be a decent witness test to think about. Yeah, I guess just ultimately looking at using your philosophy to understand your own motivations. Sure.

Got it. Cool. Thanks. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon music, download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court.

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