The Daily Stoic - Don’t Make This Lesson More Painful | Ask DS

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

We get so used to having our way. We live in a time when the skies have been conquered. When so many diseases have been vanquished. When technology allows us to do and have things that were inconceivable even just a generation ago.Consequently the eternal battle for our attention, between the things we control and the things we don’t, becomes even harder for us to wage. The lessons and warnings the Stoics have issued to us across the centuries about this perpetual internal fight, begin to feel like they belong to a different age, like they are meant for people who are fundamentally different from us.This is how skewed our collective sense of self has become.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions about how Marcus Aurelius dealt with Commodus's derangement, why the Stoics could be so socially "advanced" in some areas and so "behind" in others, how we can best line up the time when we are the most effective with the work that most needs to be done, 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 they're happened to be someone they're recording. But thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you.

Don't make this lesson more painful. We get so used to having our way. This is, after all the time when the skies have been conquered, when so many diseases have been vanquished, when technology allows us to do and have things that were inconceivable even just a generation ago. The result is that the eternal battle for our attention that we have talked about often here, between the things we control and the things we don't control becomes even harder for us to wage.

The lessons and warnings that the stills have issued to us across the centuries about this perpetual internal fight, they begin to feel that they belong to a different age meant for people who are fundamentally different from us, who occupy the world alien to the one we occupy. This is how skewed our collective sense of self has become thanks to the conquest of physical and digital worlds. We have unrealistic beliefs about what's in our control and what isn't. And it has made the art of acquiescence, as Mark has called it, even more difficult to practice, let alone perfect. One of the many things one learns in prison, Oscar Wilde writes in his haunting essay, Day Profundus, is that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Born into a life of privilege and pleasure, complemented by staggering brilliance, wild had grown quite accustomed to getting his way, to doing what he wanted, to having things the way that he wanted them. And they're in prison, sentenced to two years' hard labor for the crime of being gay, of being himself, of being himself essentially, wild was faced with the unavoidable reality as we discussed in a recent daily dad email, that he had to learn how to practice acceptance. He had to figure out how to come to terms with his fate and with circumstances. This lesson was as painful for him then as it is for us now,

and it gets all the more painful, the more entitled and spoiled we get. We must remember that for all the privileges and advancements of our time, for all our brilliance and resilience, things still are what they are and will be what they will be. There will always be an entire universe of things that remain out of our control, and the more comfortable we get with that fact now, the more pain and surprise we will save ourselves later. All right, there's one from Maureen about markets

overlooking communistodus' arrangement. Yeah. And sort of the complexity of that question. It is very complex, right? Because on the one hand, almost all the emperors before Marcus, like five in a row, do not have a male heir. So they're able to choose their hair.

They're able to choose their hair. They're able to choose who succeeds them. And that was something that Marcus didn't have the luxury of doing. That's one way to think about it and to make some sort of excuse for it. It doesn't fully excuse him though because, you know, confidence is clearly unfit, right? For at least from what we know historically, and the way he's

portrayed in Gladiator probably understates how awful he actually was. If you can read some of the pages in Gibbons to climb and follow the Roman Emperor Empire. And you just see that communist is just unimaginably bad. To Marcus's defense, I'd offer a couple things. So number one, he doesn't choose communist. Marcus loses something like six children before adulthood. So imagine you're in this difficult position where you have to give a job, you have to give a job to your son

and it's the most difficult job in the world. So, and millions of lives are dependent on it. So you try to pick which son is right for it. And so you pick a son and you're grooming him for it and then he dies. And then you have twin boys and you think, oh, maybe you'll have two emperors take my place, just as Hadrian set up for me in Lucius Varis.

And then both of them die. And then you think, well, maybe my son and Lucius Varis's son can rule together. And then again, one of them dies. So imagine just all this horrendous death and what that would do to your own judgment and what that would do to your own judgment and what that would do to your own family. I think that part of it is never fully been explored.

It's not like Marcus really has had one kid and that kid turned out to be a real shithead. It's more complicated than that, right? And I think, as I was writing lives of the still because I just really tried to wrap my head around how devastatingly difficult that would be. And there's this, let me see if I can find this really fast. There's a really crazy passage in,

okay, so this is no book 1133. He says, it's crazy to look for figs and winter. And it's no less crazy for someone to look for his child when it's no longer possible. And then notebook 1134, he says, Epititas used to say that when you kiss your child, you should silently tell it, tomorrow you will die. But that's an inauspicious thing to say.

No, he says it's not at all inauspicious, but it expresses a natural process. Otherwise, it would be inauspicious to talk of wheat being harvested. So the point is here, Marcus is meditating on the unimaginable reality of losing children. Like he's probably writing that fresh off of a funeral, you can imagine. The idea being that Marcus is devastated by this loss and I would suspect that this both clouds his judgment and puts him in an utterly impossible situation

as a parent and leader. So yeah, I just, to me, that's one of the few sort of where all Marcus's sort of defenses are dropped and you really see the real human being struggling with something and I think that's where Marcus probably was when it came to calm it is. What was it? Yeah, Kyle. Kyle had one about how the stills were sort of ahead of their time in some aspects, like they're thinking about winning studying philosophy, but other issues like slavery, they're assumed to be behind. Yeah, to me, the lesson here that the stills believe that, you know, both men and women should be taught philosophy is an indication of how progressive and ahead of their time they were. At the same time, almost none of the stokes, including epictetus,

say anything about whether a human should be able to own another human being. So they were very much a product of their times or you know barbaric, even according to their times. To me, the lesson there is not, oh, we're the stoic supercritical, how, where does this invalidate what they have to say? I think it's, I think it's different. I think it's that we are exactly the same. There are some things that our children and grandchildren will look at us and go, wow, they really got that right. They really helped move the ball forward. And then they'll look at other things

that we accepted or declined to question and wonder how we could have possibly gotten it so wrong and how we could ever possibly defend such an indefensible status quo, whether that's income inequality, whether that's sweatshops, perhaps that's our relationship with meat, in fact, reforming. There's gonna be so many things that the future is gonna find that we were just totally off about, that I think we wanna be careful at how high we get on our horses about judging the past.

To me, we should look at these figures as tragic figures who fell short in a lot of ways that we can then learn from. All right, what else have we got here? Tanya? Hi. I'm really new to all this, but I'm a long time Yogi teaching Yogi here in Austin. Oh, I'm...

Yeah, yeah. I was reading about creative output and they had it quantified into 20 to 70, 2010. So 70% of what you do is going to be okay. 20% is going to be really good. And then the 10% is going to be really great, which of course corresponds with Coach Pop in San Antonio talking about passing the ball to get a good, better, and then the best shot to really be successful. So I was wondering if the Stolics have some kind of guideline like that for quantifying our efforts,

quantifying our output as we write in our journals and have our self-conversation well how good was my day or did I miss the mark? No, that's great and I think I'm going to try to make it to the Spurs game tonight. But I think one of the things I think about is it is sort of pivoting from your question a little bit. But I think like when am I most effective? And do I line up that time with the work that most needs to be done?

Right? So for me, I'm clearest in the morning and I'm most locked in in the morning and I've been least sort of distracted or jarred by interruptions in the morning. So that's when I try to spend time with my kids and when I try to do my writing. Then everything else, if I like, I want to focus on the stuff that I don't like doing, the stuff that doesn't really matter, where quality control is less important. I want to do that later in the day when fatigue has set in or the stakes are lower, or I've already completed my important tasks.

So when I think about, I don't think it's just about outsourcing or delegating. It's also about how do you prioritize and organize stuff in your own life. I think there's a reason that a lot of CEOs, for instance, work out early in the morning. It's because that's when they have time to do it, and they have the most control over their time and schedule, and they don't want to miss that opportunity. But this is a great question I appreciate this. How do you rectify the 70% that's just average?

I think that's probably just the reality of life. I mean, I guess you could spend some time focusing on, you know, if you can get it to from 10% to 12%, you have a huge advantage over other people. If you can, you you can get the 20% from 20 to 25%, maybe that's a place to think about is just sort of chipping away at the margins, but I might just sort of take the ratio for granted

and then focus on how I assign tasks to those different buckets. I assign tasks to those different buckets. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's

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