The Daily Stoic - It’s All A Gift | Ask Ds

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

It doesn’t seem that way of course. The economy is a mess, the government is dysfunctional, the virus is still there, screwing up plans and making us sick. People are annoying. People are frustrating. Your co-worker is a jerk. Your kid just broke his arm. Everything is expensive, so expensive.This isn’t how things are supposed to be is it? Well, it’s pretty much how things have always been. Look at Marcus Aurelius, in his reign and life, he knew all those things intimately, plus many other tragedies. A few years ago, a Daily Stoic reader wrote in to make an interesting observation. In Meditations, Marcus is vague about some things and very specific about others. As a general rule, Marcus does not talk much about the plague he lived through or the grief he felt. Nowhere does he bemoan the disasters which happened with such frequency that one ancient historian described Marcus Aurelius’ reign as an unending series of troubles. Marcus skips over all this, but you know what he spends a full 10% of Meditations talking about in very clear detail? The gratitude he felt to the people who had helped him, who had inspired him, who had taught him. ✉️ 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.

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$20 or more using the code DailyStoic20. Again, sign up for your free trial by downloading the Coho app and receive 20 bucks off when you make your first purchase of $20 or more using the code DailyStoic20. Welcome to the DailyStoic 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 happened to be someone there recording, but thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you.

It's all a gift. It doesn't seem that way, of course. The economy is a mess. The government is dysfunctional. The virus is still here, screwing up plans and making us sick. People are knowing, people are frustrating. Your coworker is a jerk, your cage is broke, his arm. Everything is expensive. So expensive. And this isn't how things are supposed to be, is it? Well, it's pretty much how things have always been. Look at Marcus Reales in

his reign and his life. He knew all those things intimately, plus many other tragedies. A few years ago, a daily stoke reader wrote in to make an interesting observation. In meditations, Marcus's vague about some things and very specific about others. As a general rule, Marcus does not talk much about the plague he lived through or the grief he felt. Nowhere does he moan the disasters, which happened with such frequency that one ancient historian described Marcus really his reign as an unending series of troubles.

Marcus skips over all of this, but you know what he spends a full 10% of meditations talking about it in very clear detail? The gratitude he felt towards the people who had helped him, who had inspired him, who had taught him. It's a lesson. Marcus was shrugging off the negative and embracing the positive. He was actively defining what he was grateful for. He was passively accepting what he could not control. And this is a great example for us to follow. Convince yourself that everything is a gift of the gods,

was how we put it, that things are good and always will be. When Epictetus talks about how every situation has two handles, this is what he means. You can decide to grab onto anger or appreciation, fear or fellowship. You can pick up the handle of resentment or gratitude. You can look for the obstacle or get a little closer and see the opportunity. It's so easy to miss the fact that Marcus Aurelius would not have been Marcus Aurelius without this unending series of troubles. The difficulties they

shaped him refined him called greatness out of them. It's also easy to miss when we focus on all the bad breaks the guy got all the tragedies that he experienced, that he was also incredibly lucky. After all, this dude was chosen to be emperor. For next to no reason at all, Hadrian selected a young boy and gifted him unlimited power and wealth and fame. Marcus had a wonderful wife, a stepfather. He adored amazing teachers and he discovered stosism, which guided him when he most needed it. For everything that went wrong in his life, or everything that was taken from him, the gods actually gave him an equal number of gifts.

So as you gather around your family and friends, this Christmas or Thanksgiving or any other celebration you may partake in this year, of course appreciate and give thanks for all the obvious and bountiful gifts the moment presents. Just make sure that when the moment passes, as you go back to your everyday ordinary life that you make gratitude a regular part of it. Again, not for simply what is easy and immediately pleasing, but for all of it, for every day.

I'm down at the beach celebrating Thanksgiving with my immediate family. Took a walk this morning, saw the sunrise. We took a walk this evening, saw the sunrise, took a walk this evening, saw the sunset. It was amazing. It was beautiful. Things are crazy. Things are busy, behavior, it rained pretty hard in between. My kids weren't the best behaved. I've got a lot of work stuff going on, dealing a couple crises, but I just tried to sit in that feeling of gratitude and wonder and appreciation. The biggest of which is for all of you. Thank you for being a part of the Daily Stoke community. It's the largest group of Stokes in history. Thank you for letting me do what I do

for being such a great audience. I hope you can carry some of this lesson out today in whatever it is that you are doing. Thanks. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast, whereas you know we jump into a Q&A. As I've said before, one of the honors of my life, one of the really cool experiences I've had as a writer and as a practitioner of stochism has been getting to do this series of lectures at the U.S. Naval Academy as part

of the Stockdale Center's leadership program. And so back in April of this year, I gave a talk. I gave the first two talks. I've given now on the idea of discipline, the second of the Cardinal Virtues. I suppose to 1200 sophomores there at the Naval Academy. It's an incredible experience, a really cool opportunity. And then they got to ask me some questions at the end. I'll bring you the talk in a different episode. I think actually we're working on the YouTube video of it right now.

But these are the questions that some sophomores at the US Naval Academy, some of the best and brightest young men and women in the United States who have already been introduced to stoicism so they're thinking about it at a high level. They're already thinking about vaccine leadership questions, ethical questions, personal development questions. So I was really excited to get to talk to them and to bring you their questions. My question to you is what would you say is the fine line between the difference of putting

all others before yourself, but not putting others before yourself so much so that it's in an unhealthy manner? Yeah, there's a great quote from Thilell. He says, if I am not for me, who is? And then he says, if I am only for me, who am I? And so when we think of the virtue of temperance, Aristotle renders it as a spectrum. He says there's a golden mean.

He says you have two vices. And the virtue is a midpoint between those vices, right? That caring only about yourself would be one end of the spectrum and caring exclusively about others in such a self sacrificial way that you're incapable of getting things done or functioning in the world. And that the virtue would be somewhere there in the middle. I wish I could tell you, here is the exact formula for the virtue would be somewhere there in the middle. I wish I could tell you, here is the exact formula for knowing how to be one or the other, but if we think about it as a midpoint between these two extremes, it's quite helpful.

And actually, if you think about the interrelationality between the virtues, the way that Aristotle renders the golden means, talking about discipline, is he actually thinks of courage as the perfect embodiment of this. There's cowardice on one end of the spectrum, and then there's reckless disregard on the other end of the spectrum, and courage is there in the middle, just as I think the midpoint that you're talking about

is as well. How would you ask who you'd you model your type of kit after. So this idea of choosing oneself a Kato, I think is the critical test or question of one's life. I think simply choosing one Kato is probably harder to do in the modern world where we have a lot more information about some of these historical figures than say the Stoics would. We have the ability to see them critically, to see them sort of worts and all. So I try to choose a collection as opposed to a singular individual. So the big three in Stoicism are epictetus, Marx, Realist, and Seneca, and there are vices and virtues, heroic and tragic elements of each one of those.

I put General Madison the talk. He's certainly, I think, an embodiment of these ideas in modern stoicism. Then I have certain family members. I put there. So I kind of think about it more as a collection or a board of directors, if you will, than a singular person that I'm modeling myself entirely against, if that makes sense. But it's a great question. I think you've got to know who those people are.

And the Stoics would say, you know who they are, and then you have to put up their example or their image where you live and work and operate. And this is why the bus of the Stoic survive to us is people would get a statue of them and put them up in your house. Or what's the home screen on your phone? Or what's the poster you have on your wall? I think these are ways to do that.

Can I change the baseball player? Yes. So, like, exceptional discipline and like, you know, at the students games that Yes. Yes. It's a great question. The idea of how much discipline is too much discipline. When does one quit? And for Lou Gehrig, you know, he has this streak and there are moments where, you know, he gets lucky, he should have missed the game, but then it gets rained out at the last second. There are maybe moments where he shouldn't have pushed through. What's interesting about Lou Gehrig's streak is that at one point a reporter goes, do you

know how long your streak is? And he says, I don't know, probably over 1,000 games. And it was more like 1,900 games at that point. So it wasn't a thing that he was thinking about per se, like, hey, I will never miss a game. It's that he pushed through games that he could push through without causing serious harm or injury, right?

He got lucky in the way that like Atom Brady has only missed a certain, never had one of those, you know, sort of truly devastating injuries. But ultimately, Garrett has to make that choice, right? As ALS begins to ravage his body, he notices that he's so much more hit or miss. And he tells the coach, like, look, there's, I don't know what's happening,

but I don't have it the way that I used to and I'm gonna have to quit at some point. And nobody really believed it. And you know, he made some mistakes and he messed up and he was really hard on himself, but he would say later that the moment that he knew it was time was when he made he caught like an ordinary ground ball on first base and his team was so happy for him that he realized that they had been carrying him and that you know what he used to be able to do

easily, he could no longer do easily. And we do have to have a sense of not just when we're harming ourselves by continuing, but where by being selfish or stubborn or unwilling to seek help or rest or recovery or treatment, we're actually harming the people around us who depend on us. And taking sick days, I think we, at least in America, so often think of a weakness. We don't think about the fact that we just got everyone else, we know sick, right? We, by being stubborn and selfish, we're actually harming the people that we're

telling ourselves we'd be letting down by ending. But I, I do think for most high achieving ambitious people, which I wouldn't probably venture to say includes almost everyone in this room, too much discipline is more often going to be your issue than not enough discipline. There are going to be things that you're not good at that you don't like, and that you're not trying hard on them, but more often knowing what our limits are, knowing when we're pushing it too far. That's actually going to be the harder choice for us. Because by going for the run, we end up blowing out our knee when if we sought treatment for it, we could have prevented that injury from happening, for example. Yeah.

After having this significant discussion on significance at this point in one's life, my question is this, if an individual were given the choice of a way of life that would produce, say, less volume living for them, but the same time, for either amount of joy, and a way of life that involves a great deal of discipline for a more long term prosperity. Which one should one choose, sir? So this is the choice of Hercules.

He is tempted by the goddess of vice and the goddess of virtue. And the goddess of vice says, come with me, and everything will be fun and wonderful and enjoyable. And you will get everything you want right now. And the goddess of virtue says, this is a harder road. This is a longer road. There will be struggles and difficulty and pain. But in the end, it will make you fit to be a God, she says, right?

The point is that the easy path seems like it's easier, seems like it's more rewarding, seems like it gets you what you want. But I think we all understand that things are wonderful because they are hard, because we struggled to get them. And the things that we are handed or the the things that come easily, or naturally to us, are the things we take for granted and never fully appreciate. And I think that is the nature of struggle and suffering and difficulty, is that it's not fun while we're going through it, but it is what creates the meaning.

Or in business, it's what creates the scarcity and thus the value. And so if you're asking me whether I think we should take the easy road or the hard way, I'm gonna say the hard road, not everyone makes that choice, but I think the people that do make that choice very rarely come to regret it and the people who take the easy road almost invariably come to regret it. All right. 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.

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