The Daily Stoic - It's All Normal | The Beauty of Choice

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Ryan talks about how the challenges we face in the modern era are no different than what the ancient Stoics faced, about how everything we do for others comes back to us, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day.🎓 Sign up for Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life - https://dailystoic.com/101For a limited time, UCAN is offering you 30% off on your first order when you use code STOIC at checkout Just go to UCAN.CO/STOICSign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, the daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance in the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epititus Markis, Relius, Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Hi, I'm David Brown,

the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. It's all normal. Certainly the last few years have not felt normal. One cannot turn on the TV or scroll social media and not be struck by the images and the tone of it all. Walking through an airport and seeing people in masks, it doesn't feel normal. But of course, it is.

Walking through an airport and seeing people in masks does not feel normal. The enormity of the death toll, the changes we have had to make as a society, none of it seems normal. But of course it is. Because as the Stoics had normal, is the most normal thing there is, look at Marcus

Arelius' reign, it had floods and invasions in a plague, look at Seneca's life, it had political violence, sickness, deranged leaders, corruption, tragedy, look at Stockdale's life, world wars, civil unrests, impeachments, prison camps, government cover-ups. Michael Dell, who you can listen to on the Daily Stoke podcast recently talked about how we'll never be post-COVID, because so many of the things that COVID brought into the public view were, of course, always there and always will be. Life has always required making trade-offs. Life has always placed certain restrictions on people.

Life has always included people who face the problem and people who run from it. People who prioritize their own well-being and people who look out for the common good. Life, as Senaqa would say, has always been in the habit of shattering as Del writes, a cherished way of life. There is no normal except change and disruption and loss and uncertainty. That is life. Get used to it. Prepare for it. Train for it, as the Stoic said, endure it, thrive in it or thrive despite it. Make the most of it.

That's all we can do. The beauty of choice. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 Meditations on Wisdom Perseverance in the art of living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the daily Stoic store, over a million copies of the daily Stoic and print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it.

It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best cellist. Just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoke.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. You are not your body and hairstyle, but your capacity for choosing well

if your choices are beautiful. So too, will you be? It's that line in the movie Fight Club. You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. Obviously our friend Epititus never saw that movie or read the book. It's quite good. You should enjoy it. I know some people think it's a little weird or overrated, but we sell it in the paint-a-portages. It's a classic for a reason, I think, and not maybe exactly what you think it is. Anyways, but the consumerism of the 1990s existed in ancient Rome, too.

It's always existed. And it's easy to confuse the image we present to the world for who we actually are, especially when media messaging deliberately blurs that distinction. You might look beautiful today, but if that was the result of vain obsession in the mirror this morning, the stokes would ask, are you actually that beautiful? A body built from hard work is admirable. A body built to impress Jim Rantz is not. And that's what the stokes urge us to consider, not how things

appear, but what effort, activity, and choices they are a result of. I don't know, this is just one of my favorite quotes from Epititus. Every time we put it on Instagram, it does really well, because it is so simple. If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices, right? That beauty, of course, also exists in the superficial sense, but how often we find that behind that beauty is real ugliness, selfishness, or greed, or vanity, or vipidity, or focus on trivialities, right? Or worse, that perhaps beneath the beauty is really ugly choices, ugly habits, an ugly foundation, right?

Whether we're talking, I don't know, about plastic surgery or unethical choices or, you know, a prioritization of the things that don't matter. So you can be pretty, you can look rich, but you're not pretty if you made ugly choices to get there and you're not rich if you have a poverty of the things that really matter. And so I like this because to me,

I think it boils back down to what Epictetus talks about so much, that the things that matter are the things that we control. And that if we don't control it, it doesn't really matter. So what other people think you look like is something that you don't control, but you control how you look to yourself. You control your focus on the things that you have sway over. So today when we think about the choices that we're going to make, think maybe a little bit less

about the results or the externals or how they're going to be perceived by others and think instead about what's going into them, think about where it's coming from. Think about what you're doing. Think about why you're doing it. Focus on that. Focus on doing the beautiful thing, doing the work, holding the standards, what you control, what's up to you. Because that's where beauty lies. And it's, you know, we don't control our genes. We don't control whether we're tall or short. We don't control, you know, so many of the features that people use to determine beauty or ugly these days, but we do control what's underneath that, right? You know, they go, oh, that person's beautiful, but they have a

bad personality or they're ugly, but they have a great personality. You control the personality, right? Like, you can't necessarily make yourself that much prettier, but you can change who you are. You can adjust your character. You can work on that. You can make yourself beautiful in that sense. And that's what we're talking about today.

And I just urge you to go out and have a day defined by good choices. That's what I'm working on, not perfect at it. I'm sure I already made some ugly choices today, but I'm going to work on the rest of the day then on making prettier choices. And I hope you do as well. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and ad-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 biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Codopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from

air and sunlight. Together they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet. for Neur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet.