The Daily Stoic - Live Like This To Handle Anything | Ask DS

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

By living philosophically, we can learn to handle anything. This isn’t easy. But this is also a foundation for true well-being, happiness, and, as seen in the lives of Marcus, Cato, and many other Stoics.Ask DS:What are the overlaps between Eastern philosophy and Stoicism? Was there a particular obstacle that Ryan experienced that led him to Stoicism?💡 The first course of Ryan's MasterClass Using Ancient Wisdom to Solve Modern Problems is out now! Head to dailystoic.com/masterclass📚 Books Mentioned:Die With Zero by Bill Perkins | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎥 Check out these interviews:Morgan Housel's Formula For Building Wealth and HappinessRamit Sethi on What It Means To Be Rich💡The Wealthy Stoic: A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Happy, and Free explores how stoic ideas can be applied to personal finance, wealth-building, financial mindset, and how it can help you overcome common financial obstacles and challengesGet The Wealthy Stoic: A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich, Happy, and Free & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life✉️ 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcast. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with me when I went to Australia. When I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So, we're not staying in a hotel. We're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location. You can find something awesome. You want to stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels. So I'm excited that they're

a sponsor of the show. And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. 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 who are 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you. Live like this to handle anything.

When you read about Cato or Marcus Aurelius, you're struck by their extraordinary reserve. They were certainly friendly and kind, even playful at times to those close to them, but with strangers, they kept a measured distance. They were self-contained. This quality was rare in Rome and it's even rarer today. We live in a world overflowing with overshares and gossip. People proudly flaunt their chaos, inviting not just a glimpse into their lives,

but full immersion. Everywhere you look, there are busybodies, energy vampires, trolls, and toxic narcissists. Seems that no one pauses to think before speaking, no one practices restraint. Social media has fostered an epidemic of poor boundaries, and with it, a culture marked by insecurity, low self-esteem, and a blurred sense of where one person ends

and another begins. So how can we establish better boundaries in a more confident sense of self like the Stoics had? How can philosophy address our modern day struggles with communication and resilience and relationships? Well, that's actually a question I tried to answer in my new master class, which is built around this idea of using ancient wisdom to solve modern problems.

And the first class is out now and it features some of my conversation with Dr. Jennifer Baker, a philosophy expert who researches virtue ethics and teaches philosophy at the College of Charleston. By living philosophically, she said, we can learn to handle anything. And it was philosophy that created an inner citadel within Marcus and Cato. It was philosophy that protected them all from the pushback and attacks on their character.

If you're willing to engage with the process of philosophy, the same can be true for you. The Stoics taught the importance of knowing one's place and path in life. They advised tuning out gossip, keeping a healthy distance from flawed influences, avoiding the trap of adopting others' bad habits. They champion reserve and dignity and poise a steady detachment from the opinions of others. And this isn't easy, it demands real self-discipline,

but it's also the foundation for true well-being and happiness, and as we've seen in the lives of Marcus and Cato and many other stoics, it is a path to greatness. It was so cool to do this masterclass. I believe we have some other episodes we're gonna run from it, but I got to sit down. They had this awesome set that the production quality was incredible.

And we got to talk about not just stoicism, but a bunch of different schools of ancient philosophy and how what they teach can be applied to your everyday life. I bring in a bunch of experts, not just Dr. Jennifer Baker, but an AV Seale, a trained psychologist, and we're trying to take their teachings,

merge it with the teachings of the ancients, and again, use this ancient wisdom to solve modern problems. The rest of the masterclass is gonna drop in four courses over the next couple of weeks. You can head dailystoic.com slash masterclass to find those and learn more about the course.

I love being a student of things. It's always great to find ways to continue your education as the stoics themselves did. And this masterclass is a great way to do that. Dailystoic.com slash masterclass. Check it out. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode

of the Daily Stoke podcast. Two of the things that are most controversial when I talk about them with the Stoics, if you actually look at the history of the Stoke, should be the least controversial. The Stoics were in politics and many of them were wealthy. And yet, when you talk about Stoicism and money, Stoicism and finance, people go,

oh, you're turning this into a prosperity gospel. You talk about politics and say, why'd you have to drag politics in there? Both of those criticisms would have sounded absolutely absurd to Seneca, who was born wealthy, an incredibly savvy and successful investor, and then a career politician who held elected office. Right? Objections noted. It's something we do have to talk about. And we're not going to talk about politics here. What we're going to talk about is some stoic lessons and ideas when it comes to our finances, when it comes to money. I flew to New York

City back in June. I spoke at this Money Is Mastermind. I was at the Grand American Hotel, which is a cool hotel, and it's basically a group of entrepreneurs who get together. They want wanna learn how they deal with the success they have, how they manage their money, how they make sure that they manage with all this money to be happy, to actually get the value out of it, which, you know, Stokes talked about, so few of us do, right?

Seneca says, poverty is not just having too little, it's also wanting more. We talk a lot about this actually in this cool challenge we did, the Daily Stoke Wealth Challenge, which is about a deeper definition of wealth, not just the size of your bank account, but it's about how you get freedom,

how you get peace, how you get happiness as a result of financial success, and then also how to be disciplined and smart about money. I'll link to that in today's show notes. I think it's one of the best challenges we did. You can check that out. But again, it was controversial when we did it. People said, oh, you're just trying to turn this

into a way to make money. No, I'm trying to talk about the things that Stokes talk about, and this is one of them, and that's why people had a bunch of questions at the mastermind. I think you're really going to like this. Couple book recommendations, if I may, that I going to like this. A couple book recommendations, if I may, that I'll throw out there. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is great. Die with Zero

by Bill Perkins is great. And I Will Teach You to Be Rich by my friend Ramit Sethi is awesome. All three of these guys have been on the Daily Stoke podcast. I'll link to those episodes as well if you want to go further down this rabbit hole. When you talk about Stoicism and what I heard it seemed very similar to non-attachment which I believe a Eastern philosophy. How do you compare the two and have you ever thought about bringing more of just non-attachment to the discussion of your writing? Yeah, I think there are a bunch of overlaps between Stoicism and Buddhism. Yeah, there's a bunch of overlap. I did a book on stillness, which is where I think

the Eastern and Western traditions have a lot of overlap. To me, what I like about it is the idea that many thousands of miles apart, different sides of the planet, you had these two very different schools coming to a lot of the same conclusions independently to me that lends a lot of credence to them. It's also interesting it was during Marcus Aurelius' reign that the Romans send a diplomatic envoy to the Han Dynasty of China. So on the one hand they were not connected and at the same time this was one of the first moments of that connection, which I think is really interesting and cool. Hi. Thank you so much. Was there a

particular moment where you were cornered that must have, I don't know, broke you that inspired the concept that kind of, I have no choice but to pursue this. Yeah, I think some of us experience adversity in kind of one foul swoop, you know, a tragedy, a diagnosis, how we were born, where we come from, and we tend to think of adversity as that, this sort of singular thing. I went through this, I'm in a wheelchair,

I immigrated from this country. And those are obviously profound bits of adversity and obstacles to overcome. But I also think, and to me this is more what the stoic definition of obstacles is, it's a day-to-day thing. We're all waking up in a world that we don't control. And the more we try to fight against that,

the more we try to exert control. We think if I just get rich and powerful and important enough, then it'll be the way that I want it to be. That, it's really wrestling with and coming to terms with that, having to surrender to the silliness of that. That was more my experience

and where I was coming from in the book. We're just constantly faced with these situations where part of it is up to us and part of it is not up to us. And the energy and the focus and the emotions that we throw at the part that's not up to us, we're just throwing good money after bad. And when we focus on here's what I'm going to do about it, here's what I'm going to make of it, here's how I'm gonna be in response to this, that's where the stoicism is.

And so that's kind of where I came to it. And yeah, there's been big moments in my life where I've been sort of punctured by these things, but in a way I don't see them as that different than the little ones. It's like, look, your plane's delayed, how are you gonna respond to this? It's just a microcosm of this larger thing of, I just went bankrupt, how you going to respond to this? It's just a microcosm of this larger

thing of, you know, I just went bankrupt, how am I going to respond to this? 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 of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Did you know that after World War Two, the US government quietly brought former Nazi scientists to America in a covert operation to advance military technology? Or that in the 1950s, the US Army conducted a secret experiment by releasing bacteria over San Francisco to test how a biological attack might spread without alerting the public? These might sound like conspiracy theories, but they're not. They're well-documented government operations

that have been hidden away in classified files for decades. I'm Luke Lamanna, a Marine Corps recon vent, and I've always had a thing for digging into the unknown. It's what led me to start my new podcast, Redacted, Declassified Mysteries. In it, I explore hidden truths and reveal some eye-opening events, like covert experiments and secret operations that those in power tried to keep buried.

Follow redacted, declassified mysteries with me, Luke Lamanna, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen ad-free, join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app.