The Daily Stoic - It’s A Brilliant Flash | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

We come into existence—by some impossible, unbelievable set of circumstances—and then come out of it. Why? How? No one can say for certain.🎙️ Listen to Ryan's episode on the Soul Boom Podcast on Apple Podcast & Spotify 🎥 Watch Ryan’s episode on the Soul Boom Podcast with Rainn Wilson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stnG5IGZc4k🎙️ Listen to Rainn Wilson's episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast | Apple Podcast, Spotify, & YouTube 📚 Grab a copy of Soul Boom: Why We Need A Spiritual Revolution by Rainn Wilson at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/You can follow Rainn on Instagram @rainnwilson and Twitter @rainnwilson, and on soulboom.com.Subscribe to Rainn's Substack: https://newsletter.soulboom.com/👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content coming soon: dailystoic.com/premium📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 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, visitdailystileck.com. was born, and just a few decades later, he was gone. Cato, Rome's great defender, went down in defeat.

Seneca, for all his power and fame, could not escape Nero's nihilism. For generations, his important plays, which he so labored over, had their authorship attributed to someone else. How many schoolchildren today know who Cicero was, or care that Musonius Rufus once had a reputation that rivaled Socrates? And these are the boldface names, the who's who of who's that, as we've said. But what about all the forgotten Stoics, who out-out brief candle had ordinary basic lives that barely registered?

This is sad and tragic. It's also beautiful. We come into existence by some impossible, unbelievable set of circumstances, and then come out of it. Why? How? No one can say for some. certain, but certainly we are here for a period. Isn't that quite wonderful? In Adam Lindsay Gordon's haunting poem doubtful dreams, he captures something close to the Stoics

bittersweet sense of the human condition. For the great things of earth are small things, the longest life is a span, and there is an end to all things, a season to every man, whose glory is dust and ashes, whose spirit is but a spark, that out from the darkness flashes and flickers out in the dark. Here we are. Let's do something with it. Let's not let it go to waste. Let's make a brilliant spark in the dark.

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Introducing your new Dell PC with the Intel Core Ultra processor. It helps you handle a lot, even when your holiday to do list gets to be a lot. Like organizing your holiday shopping and searching great holiday deals and customer questions and customers requesting custom things, plus planning the perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet. Luckily, you can get a PC with all day battery life to help you get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside. Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours today at Dell.com slash deals. Terms and conditions apply. See Dell.com for details. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic

podcast. Back in June, I was in L.A. I was doing a talk and then my wife had a little family reunion. And towards the end of the trip, we drove out to Malibu area and I did Rain Wilson's podcast, Soul Boom. And the reality, the real thing. I interrupted the trip. It was not because I'm always working, but because my oldest son has become obsessed with the office. We don't let him watch whole episodes, just little clips. In fact, it started because he was in an improv class at school, and I showed him the Michael Scott scene where Michael Scott is taking improv classes, and he just turns everything into like, freeze, FBI, I've got a gun. My son thought it was the funniest thing. So we started watching clips, and then he found

out about Dwight, and he thought Dwight was hilarious. And then when Rain Wilson, who I've known for a while, He came on the daily show podcast a couple of years ago, and then he came on again when he had this new book out, Soul Boom. When he asked, I said, oh, this is a great chance. I'll introduce you to Dwight. And both my youngest who also got to watch some of the clips, thought this was the absolute coolest thing in the world. And then afterwards, Rain sent them a very nice video,

you know, like a cameo thing. Like he's like, I'll record a video for your kids. Let me send this to them. So he's an absolutely sweet person and a really deep philosophical person. And I think he's building something awesome. at Soul Boom. He actually has said that Daily Stoak is sort of his model for that. So what I asked, after we did the episode, we ran an

excerpt of the book on the podcast. And then I'm going to run a chunk of him asking questions from me for today's Q&A, because I thought he asked some really good questions. It was a great chat. If you don't know who Rain Wilson is, I don't know what's wrong with you. If you don't know what the office is, I really

don't know what's wrong with you. But you can follow Rain on Instagram at Rain Wilson. That's Rain with two ends. On Twitter at Rain Wilson, two ends. And you can grab a copy of Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution at the Painted Porch, and you can check out my interview on the Soul Boom podcast and Post of Raines episodes on the Davis Toad podcast. So one of the things we talk about on Soul Boom a lot is mental health and tools for mental health, especially spiritual ones. And we talk to comedians about their mental health journeys

and doctors and theologians and authors and experts. And your work with Stoicism has just brought so much invigoration and excitement, inspiration to young people in all of this work. And I don't want to boil down like all of your best sellers down into, well, actually I do. I want to boil all of your bestsellers down into some easy to save everyone the trouble. Easy to digest kind of nuggets having to do specifically with what you see as young people struggling with mental health today and where the Stoics might provide some solutions, some just where the rubber meets the road, meat and potatoes, solutions to gaining resilience,

gaining courage, finding stillness, overcoming obstacles, gaining wisdom, all of these things that the Stoics put front and center. I think at the most basic level, Stoicism, is this idea we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens, which to me is, is resilience. Resilience is not like, oh, I prevent all bad things from happening or I simply endure all bad things happening and I absorb them and they don't affect me in any way. No, it's this ability to bounce back from the things that happen, to use them in some way. And it's this idea that we have a choice whether this thing makes us better or worse. Not does this thing make us more or less money, does this thing, you know,

improve our physical health or not, right? Because, you know, you could have cancer, you could get in an accident. There's all these things can happen to you and be taken from you. And I think the ancients felt this very acutely in a world where, you know, medicine was what it was, where there were tyrannical emperors.

Well, child mortality rates. Totally. Marks Rulisbury's half of his children, right? And he was a king. Yes, so no amount of, of wealth or power, especially then protected you from the mercilessness of nature and fate and time. But we decide what it's gonna mean in our lives.

And when the Stoics are saying the obstacle is the way, that's what they mean. How are you gonna use this as an opportunity to do something or to be someone? Even if the majority of the benefits reaped by this experience are not you right like you go through something terrible and then you write a book about it or you make a piece of art about it and then that helps other people down the road that is a way that the

obstacle is the way it's not necessarily the way for you like you you wouldn't have chosen like to you it's not necessarily fully redemptive but it is uh you know beneficial as a whole i think that's what the stoics are saying so i think resilience is not this like like toughness that allows you to endure and absorb everything, but it is this ability to be flexible and adapt and adjust. And the Stoics are saying, you wanna be able to go, okay, I can work with that. Because that's the, we don't really have a choice, right?

If you need everything to go a certain way, you're gotta be real lucky and we're not all real lucky, right? And in fact, when you look at a lot of these people we admire, I can think about Socrates, right? When a kid learns about Socrates, they think of Socrates, this clever guy, this guy that lives in this quaint time of togas and walking around the olive grows

and having these discussions, even if they know the end of the story that he's put to death, there's still kind of an idyllicness to it. It totally belies when he actually lived. Socrates lives through the great power conflict of Athens and Sparta, which would be like a world war,

between America and China. And he has to fight in this war. And most of the battles he fights in, his country loses. Eventually, they're taken over by the Spartans, which was this, despite what the movie 300 wants you to think, like this deranged military cult. And then that ushers in a time in Athens known as the time of the 30 tyrants.

30 tyrants. That's a high number, you know. That doesn't sound fun. And then, you know, he's largely thought of as, like, a loser. He's largely disliked. He's brought up on these trumped up charges. And then he's executed. Like, Socrates does not live in fun times.

And yet it was fun to be Socrates. Socrates has a great time. Socrates is the best that he can be. Epictetus, the Stoke Phosphorus, he would say that he thinks Socrates is the great athlete of his time. And someone says, what do you mean? And he says, an athlete doesn't spend a lot of time saying whether, or something is a good throw or a bad throw. He says a ball player catches the ball and throws it back,

catches the ball and throws it back. That's, to me, what resilience is, is catching the ball and throwing it back, not going like, this is unfair, this, it sucks, why did this happen to me, why didn't people listen to me, it could have gone otherwise, you know, what if it was like this? It is like this.

And resilience and I think excellence, Lisa Stoaks was the ability to make this into something. I was listening to this meditation by this guy, Rupert Spira, that Pete Holmes, a comedian, told me about. The best. It was an incredible meditation because it was all kind of like, everything is exactly the way it should be right now. Everything is perfect.

Everything is as it should be. Live in total acceptance of how everything is right now. And in doing this meditation, was more to it than that. But I was realizing like, wow, I always want things to be different from the way that they are. Yeah. I want someone I'm driving behind to be driving faster. Yeah. Or someone driving behind me to be driving slower. Or I want so and so to call me back. Or I want this job offer to be given to me. Or I want my knee to not hurt so much. Or you wanted someone else to win an election. You wanted different policy to be enacted. You wanted the economy to be different.

It can be big. It can be small. It can be from your knee to to the world economy. and how it affects you. I'd like not to die. But there is a profound power in just even just taking some stillness, finding some clarity presence in the inner life in kind of like a rabid acceptance, radical acceptance of how everything just is the way it is.

Well, Epictetus said that the first task of a philosopher is to understand there are things that are in our control and things that are not in our control. And really only the things that are in our control are worth our attention. And that's why I've always, I find the serenity prayer to be so remarkable because I feel like if you wrote it down

and you ask someone when they thought this was written, like when's the earliest they would guess? No one's guessing like 195 or whatever. Like you're not, I think he dashes that, I think Reinhold Nyberg dashes that off like on a transcontinental train. Like that's not the technology that that prayer should be interacting with.

That should be like the renaissance at the earliest, you know? This feels like it could be written above like the Parthenon or something. Totally. Totally. Like this is, these were words uttered by the Oracle at Delphi.

That's when that feels like, my other favorite one is like, this is totally a tangent, but Free Fallen by Tom Petty was not written in 1989. That makes no fucking sense to me. That is not an 80s and 90s song. That is like the first rock and roll. Like that's like a 60s song.

You know, it doesn't make any sense. Like sometimes there's things that clearly tap in to an ethos or an energy that is much, much older than it is. And I think the serenity prayer is obviously a very good example of that. because it is, I think, rooted ultimately in stoic philosophy and sort of Christian wisdom.

But, yeah, you have to go, hey, I don't have a choice that this happened, but I do have a choice in what I tell myself about what's happened and what it means to me. And that most of the time, the reason I'm upset or frustrated or hurt, offended, or insert, whatever word, is because I am choosing to see it the wrong way.

Epitaphys, you know, everything has two handles, which handle you're going to grab it by? And when we're, we tend to grab it by the aggrieved handle, the harmed handle, the, I'll never recover handle. You know, the disempowering handle instead of the handle that says, okay, I'm going to use this, or this is good enough. And it is funny because in a different, context, we might see the same thing totally differently, you know? Like last night I was,

took my whole extended family out to dinner and I, I thought I lost my wallet. Like in, I thought I was, we're driving there. I was like, where's my wallet? I couldn't find my wallet. And I'm like, okay, how much cashed out of my wallet? Cancel my credit cards. Yeah, what a giant pain it's going to be to cancel my credit cards. I got going on the country. I got to get, do I have my driver's license? Just all the stuff, right? And then like right before the dinner, I find the wallet. It just got under the seat, did not care about the check subsequently because it's free. Do you know what I mean? Like, I had already, I just resigned myself to this enormous imposition. And then that imposition is lifted and I suddenly see other impositions differently because you've got the high of the

difference, right? So it is so often that we see things in one context and it's upsetting and frustrating. And then in other contexts, we see it totally differently. And that to the Stoics, I think to any philosopher, you realize, oh, I have an immense amount of discretion over how I choose to process this thing. Like the thing is, Stokes would say it is objective, our opinion about it is not. And so they go, the thing isn't what's upsetting you. It's what you've told yourself about this thing that is upsetting. Which is a basic of Buddhism. Yes. It's your, you are in control of your attitude about something.

You're a thought and your attitude about something. Yes. Is your greatest freedom. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple

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