The Daily Stoic - Stoicism and the Art of Resilience

Episode Date: May 8, 2022

How does someone who was born into slavery, whose master broke their leg and crippled them for life, somehow escape all that and become one of the fathers of Stoicism and an amazing thinker? Epictetus had every reason to be unable to transcend his own struggles, but instead he is one of the most important Stoic philosophers. He lived the philosophy and it saved him.Watch the video: https://youtu.be/6-UQYo1YabY Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc/stoic to receive 15% off your purchase.Kion Aminos is backed by over 20 years of clinical research, has the highest quality ingredients, no fillers or junk, undergoes rigorous quality testing, and tastes amazing with all-natural flavors. Go to getkion.com/dailystoic to save 20% on subscriptions and 10% on one-time purchases.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck 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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school. And we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. I want to talk to you today about elements. Element is a maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work the gym or anywhere else.

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share it with a salty friend and they'll give you your money back. Plus, there's free shipping on all orders. Right now, you can receive a free element sample pack for just five bucks. Sample pack includes eight packets of element, 2 citrus, 2 raspberry, 2 orange, 2 unflavored, and the claim this, you just go to drinkelement.com slash daily stup, that's drinkelement.com slash daily stup. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday, welcome to another weekend episode, the Daily Stup podcast. Another way to describe stuposes might be the art of resilience. How do we bounce back from the difficulty that life throws at us? How do we overcome the odds? How do

we overcome fate, fortune as the stokes talk about? How do we, you know, how do we become, as Hemingway said, strong at the broken places? And I really think that's what stosis is about, but really that's what's beautiful about epictetus's life. Here's a man born into slavery as a child. It spends three decades of his life in one of the most brutal, awful sort of forms of imprisonment and forced certitude that, you know, the human species has ever experienced. All slavery is bad, Roman slavery. I mean, you were an animal to be used up, worn out, and then put down.

And Epochetus manages not only to survive this, but to become educated, to become wise, to become optimistic and inspiring. And he goes on to become a philosophy teacher, and is so influential that he even instructs the emperor Hadrian. And then as we know his work makes its way to Marx and Realists. So here we are today looking at stoicism, part of resilience, and by extension, the life of Epictetus. There have been people who have talked about how to be resilient and then there is epic

teedis. The acquired one, as his name translates from Greek, epic teedis was born the son of a slave woman and spent the first 30 years of his life in chains. As a young boy, he was purchased by a man so violent and depraved that at one point he twisted epic teedis' leg with all his might for reasons unknown. All we know from Epic Titus is that he warned his master repeatedly, you're going to break my leg, you're going to break my leg, you're going to break my leg, and finally when it snapped, he looked at his master in the face and said, I told you that would happen.

From this incident, Epic Titus' leg was shattered and he walked with a limp the rest of his life, and yet not long after something good happened, he began to attend the lectures of a Stolic philosopher named Musonius Rufus, and when Epictetus was freed from slavery in his thirties, he decided to become a philosophy teacher. His lectures immediately gained a large following. The poor, the affluent, the powerful, and even the future emperor Hadrian were told passed through Epic Titus' classroom. So what did he teach them? Why were people from all over the Empire gathering at the feet of a one-time slave? It was because he could teach them what we all need.

How to be resilient. It was this skill that Epic Tit what we all need, how to be resilient. It was this skill that Epictetus promised will ensure we lead a mainly untroubled life, the ability to overcome the worst and darkest of circumstances. And Epictetus had mastered it and he taught others how to do it too. How do you cultivate resilience or as Epictetus put it, discover the power of endurance. It starts with, he said, your chief task in life, which is to be able to identify and distinguish between what is up to us and what is not up to us, the things we control and the things we cannot. That's the crucial distinction that every person must make. That's the difference between people who are

resilient and people who aren't. Epictus liked to use the example of being insulted. What other people say is not up to us. How we respond is. So if someone succeeds in provoking you, he said, you must realize your mind is complicit in the provocation. And he called this the faculty of choice. And he said, it is our greatest power, our most effacious gift, our uniquely human capability. It was critical to his own resilience and his survival as a slave. As powerless as we can sometimes feel, as frustrating as it is

when things don't go our way, as unfair it is when fate deals us a bad hand, we always retain the power to choose our response, our attitude, our emotions, our perspective, our creativity, our judgments and opinions. We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Hey everyone, we've talked about this a million times here at Daily Stoke. Life is short, momentum-mory, you will not live forever. None of us will.

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and one by which it can't. If your brother does you wrong, he said, don't grab it by his wronging because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other that he is your brother, that you were raised together and then you all have hold of the handle that carries. When adversity strikes, a recession hits,

a pandemic sweeps across the globe, setbacks, struggles, uncertainties, inconveniences, whatever it is, the critical question is, which handle will we grab the one of resentment, of bitterness, of anger, of unfairness, or the one of forgiveness, of strength, of fortitude, of looking for the good, of looking for what we might do with what has happened. Are we going to grasp the problem or the opportunity, the have to, or the get to, that this is unfair, that you have a right to be angry, or that you have the power to move on. There is almost always some good hiding within or around the bad.

You have to look for it and you have to grab hold of it. This is how we thrive in life. Well, almost always, sometimes as epictetus new well, there just isn't anything we can do. Sometimes when you separate things into the categories of what is up to us and what is not. Sometimes it comes down that something is not up to us. The shot didn't go in. The stock went to zero. The whole industry collapsed and took your job with it. All you can do is let go and move on.

Epictetus called this the art of acquiescence, surrendering to fate, accepting that there is a larger plan. It's not resignation, it's not pessimism, it's bold optimism fused with determination. The recognition that there is more at work behind the scenes that we know that there is a bigger picture that we cannot see something higher than ourselves. This epictetus says does not make us weak, far from us, it makes us powerful and unstoppable in every human way. The Stoics talk about the idea of a more faulty, of embracing your fate. Well, that was easier for Marcus to really, the emperor, the rich, the powerful to wrap

their heads around. But what about epictetus? Even he too was able to see the adversity and the difficulty he went through as something that was shaping him, something that was making him into the man he needed to be, so he could do what he needed to do, which was instruct a generation of Romans on how to rise above even the worst circumstances. Of course this isn't easy to do, separating what is up to us and what isn't choosing to grab the right handle, except accepting pain and suffering in life. None of that feels great. And so, Epic Tita said, we must undergo a hard winter training and not

rush into things for which we haven't prepared. This is where we get the stoic love of challenges of embracing adversity, of taking cold plunges, of sleeping on a hard mattress, on making good of arduous physical exercise. Training for what the world is likely to throw at us. This takes work. And so when we talk about resilience, we are talking about building resilience. We have to work at it, practice, prepare, and of course accept. Every time life throws something that you remember, this is training a chance to get better. You are lifting heavy weights,

and that is making you stronger. Focusing on this, seeing this way is up to you. You can choose the right handle, except that you have some powerless, but that you retain an incredible power. It isn't always easy, but in time, Epochitis promised, you will grow to be confident that there is nothing which you do not have the means to tolerate.

And this was a man who was not simply speaking of overcoming adversity, but lived it through his whole life. And his example stands to us, a more faulty turn, what you have to do into what you get to do, turn what life throws at you into fuel for the fire that is making you great. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference and of course every nice review from a nice person helps

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