The Daily Stoic - So It’s Weird, Now Deal With It | Time-Tested Stoic Truths For Life

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

It’s weird. It’s unnatural. It’s not how you’d like things to be. But so what? Welcome to 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 podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening. And I hope you enjoy.

So, it's weird. Now deal with it. It must have been quite a shock for him, the introverted boy, the lover of books, the philosopher, suddenly finding himself the emperor of Rome. He's famous, he's powerful, he's loved, he's hated, he's besieged with requests. How did Marcus Aurelius handle it? Living on a lighted stage approaches the unreal. The band Rush sings in their classic song, Limelight, for those who think and feel. Some are attracted to that limelight, crave the attention, feel at home in it.

That was not who Marcus was. It would have been surreal, unnatural, like a cage for him. But you know what he did? He did what a Stoic does, what we all have to do in life. He adjusted. He figured it out. He found solace and strength in his own soul. He found practices that helped him. Clearly, journaling was one of those. He got advice. As it happens, you can read all about what Antoninus, his predecessor, told him at the he got advice. As it happens, you can read all about what Antoninus, his predecessor, told him at the beginning of meditation. As it happens, you can read in meditations

everything that his predecessor, Antoninus, told him about this crazy job. He got on with doing the job that was assigned to him. That's what Rush figured out too, as they wrestled with their own fame. As they say in the song, those who wish to be must put aside the alienation. Get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme. It's weird, it's unnatural, it's not how things you would like to be, but so what?

Welcome to life. Welcome to all different types of things in life, not just fame. You gotta figure out what you like about it. You gotta figure out what's interesting about it, what's possible with it, and then you gotta get to work. That's the job. The internet is flooded with advice.

You don't know who these people are. You don't know if they know what they're talking about. What proof do they have that this advice is true, has staying power, that it's worked out well for the person giving it to you? The thing about Stoicism is that it's about as tried and tested as advice could be. Stoicism was ancient to many of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher king, when he is drawing on Stoic philosophy to base his life around, it's already a philosophy that's hundreds of years old.

Thousands of people over thousands of years have tested this advice, these ideas over and over and over again. So these aren't hacks, these aren't shortcuts, these aren't piddly little things. These are things that have been through the crucible that have been tested in some of the hardest and most difficult situations human beings have ever been through. And that's what we're going to go after in today's episode. Some short but essential lessons from the ancient Stoics that have been put to the test, that have been refined down. We have the essence of the wisdom of some of the

smartest people who ever lived, tried, and tested through the centuries. Here are some of the best pieces of Stoic wisdom you can apply to your actual life. Does this actually matter? Right, so many of the things we're upset about that we hold onto, that we focus on, they don't matter. Not to you, to anyone at all. They just don't matter. Marcus Aurelius says, ask yourself in every moment, is this essential?

This is because most of what we do and say is not essential. He says, when you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Stephen Colbert loses his father and several siblings in a plane crash as a young man. And he said what he took out of this was a question from his mother. She said, can you look at this in the light of eternity?

Does this matter in the big picture, right? Because so many of the things we trivially get upset about that we focus on in moments of crisis, we get real clarity about and realize they didn't matter at all. People matter. Your loved ones matter. Doing your best matters. Everything else is irrelevant. And yet that's where we focus so much of our time and energy. Well begun is half done, as they say. So own the morning. If you want to have a good day, have a good morning.

If you want to have a good life, have a good day. So it all comes back to how you start the day, own the morning. It's a great passage in Marcus Relius where he's arguing with himself about getting up out of bed in the morning and he says, look, were you meant to huddle under the covers and stay warm? He says, no, get to work, do what you gotta do, do what you were put here on this earth to do and do it early.

The thing is not the problem, it's your opinion about that thing. The Stokes say the event is objective, it's indifferent to us. It's our opinions about it that are the problem. By the way, the thing is not asking for your opinion, it doesn't give a shit about your opinion. You have to say no a lot.

This goes back to Mark Cirillis. Is this essential? If it's not essential, what do you do? This is the rule. You say no. You have to say no. When I talk to NFL teams, this is something we talk about. I say, look, everything you say yes to

means you're saying no to something else. And whatever you say no to gives you more room, more time to say yes to what matters, in their case, being great at what they do. So what are you going to say no to this year? So you can say yes to the things that matter to the people that matter in your life as well. You don't get rich acquiring things, acquiring money. Epictetus says it's not about having many things, it's about having few wants. If you have everything you need, if you have enough, if you feel sufficient, then you are very rich.

Would it also be nice to pair that with having a lot of money? Sure, but you could also have very little and feel like enough, feel good. Get to a place where you feel like you have enough and you are rich. When you pair your wants down, when you don't need anything from anyone or anything outside your control,

that to the Stokes is true wealth. Is this in my control? Epictetus says this is the key question. This is the chief task of the philosopher in life, which is separating the things that are up to us and the things that are not up to us. And so much of the time and energy we spend in this life are on things that are not up to us, that are not in our control. It just started raining. I don't need to have an opinion on the fact that it's raining because it's not in my control. But what is in my control is what I'm going to

do, right? What's in our control is what I'm going to do, right? What's in our control is our actions, our thoughts, our opinions, right? And so the stoic learns to tune out what's not in our control and it focuses on what is in our control. And so we ask ourselves about everything we experience, everything we're feeling, everything we're working on.

Is this up to me or am I throwing good energy after bad? Am I beating myself against a wall? It's never gonna move. You have to remember you're a product of your habits. Epictetus says, if you wanna be beautiful, make beautiful choices. If you wanna be excellent, make excellent choices. Make them habitually, day in and day out, they add up.

You gotta stop wasting time talking about this stuff, arguing what a good person is like, what the right thing is, these complicated virtue ethics. Mark Struth says, waste no more time arguing what a good person is like, just be one. Seneca says, we're all slaves to something. He points out a powerful Roman who was a slave to his mistress. He talks about a Roman politician who's a slave to his ambition, to the crowd, right? Maybe you're a slave to money or food or wine. He says even slave owners were slaves to

their estates, so we're all slaves to something. else. We should look very suspiciously at any habit or practice or item that has power over us. We cannot go without that controls what we do and say and think and where we go. It's called self-discipline for a reason. It's not something you wield against other people. In meditations, Marcus Aurelii says, remember, tolerant with others, strict with yourself. They're your standards. They're your goals. They're your beliefs. You can hold yourself to them, but not other people.

Another way to spell perfectionism, Churchill said, was paralysis. They are the same thing. You think it's that you have high standards, but it's actually an excuse not to have to do things. Outcomes are not in our control. Process and effort is. So the Stoics say focus on effort, not outcomes.

Ignore the results, focus on what's in front of you. I have to do this with my books. I want to write the best book possible. I want to try as hard as I can on the marketing. I want to do the absolute best I can. Everything after that is extra. It's not up to me. Success is internal.

Did I do what I set out to do? Everything else is irrelevant. ... You're not being harmed. you're not being screwed over, you're not being challenged, you're being, Epictetus said, paired with a strong sparring partner. Life is helping you, life is making you better, life is teaching you, life is making you stronger. You want to wrestle with this. You pick hard sparring partners, pick people who you get better for wrestling with. Are you meditating on your mortality? I carry a coin in my pocket that says,

memento mori. You can leave life right now, Marcus really says. Life is short. Don't waste time. Don't focus on things that don't matter. Going through our life with a clear sense of our mortality is essential. on things that don't matter. Going through our life with a clear sense of our mortality is essential. What am I missing by choosing to worry or be afraid? One of my favorite books is The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker.

And he says, when you worry, ask yourself, what am I choosing not to see right now? Right, we only have so much in the way of cognitive resources or time or emotional energy. How are you gonna spend it? And then often by being anxious, by being worried, by taking things personally, by being afraid, we're taking our eye off the ball.

And so I want you to see those emotions not just as unpleasant, but actively destructive because they are. Stuff's gonna happen in life that makes us emotional, but we have to realize that we're only compounding that by acting on those emotions. You have two choices, Seneca says. You can laugh or cry.

Democritus, one of the philosophers, he cried. He despaired at how awful and evil the world was. Seneca pointed out Heraclitus, he laughed at it. Right, we think of the Stoics as humorless, but they weren't. Instead of despairing, instead of being angry, instead of being depressed, instead of any of those negative emotions,

they decided to laugh at the absurdity of life. They decided to laugh at the pain that life can inflict on us, because it's the one part of it we control. We control our response to it, so we might as well find humor in it instead of pain and suffering and anger. Seneca says, we suffer more in imagination than reality.

And that gives us the next law, which is don't suffer imagined troubles. The stuff that you're worried about, it'll happen or it won't. Worrying doesn't affect it, right? So Seneca says, don't feel more than you have to. Deal with that when it comes. For now, focus on what's in front of you.

Focus on what you need to do. Don't add to your suffering by anticipating it, by suffering in advance. That's only adding cumulatively up to more suffering. If you liked 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.

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