The Daily Stoic - Surprise People Like This | Powerful Life Lessons From Epictetus

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

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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.

Try to surprise people this way. Cato was a rich and powerful man. He came from a family that for generations had been rich and powerful and a caste society with all the privileges and norms that that entailed. And yet Cato dispensed with most of this, at least in how he went about his day. He didn't dress in fancy clothes, he didn't support a large entourage, he liked to walk the streets of Rome meeting his fellow citizens, being of use, and helping them. As a politician, Cato traveled across the empire, again without a large baggage train or advanced party to make sure he was

treated with the respect accorded to his official position. Sometimes arriving before the rest of his group, he would arrive in a small town and sit and wait, often without being recognized, sometimes quietly enduring snubs or indignities from people who had no idea who he was. When his identity became known and that treatment suddenly changed, Cato would smile and remind them that not all future visitors would be Cato's. Not every Roman would be so understanding or low maintenance. Needless to say, this was all very surprising. One of Rome's greatest men walking barefoot and bareheaded without fear or favor. A representative of Rome's great imperial might, being kindly and patient and respectful

and prudent. This just didn't happen. Cato could have gotten away with so much worse. Indeed, he was entitled legally and culturally to all sorts of pretentiousness and deference. Perhaps your job affords you similar privileges. Perhaps you are used to being treated a certain way. The measure of who you are is how lightly you wear

these honors, how approachable you are. Be the kind of person that surprises people. They were so nice, I was so surprised at how easy they were to deal with. Be the kind of person that surprises other people with how interested you are in them, how much respect you treat them with, how little use you have for formalities or status symbols. You'll be amazed at the kind of respect this affords you in the long run and how surprising this really is. It's one of the most remarkable pairings in all of human history.

The only analog I can think of is the time that Abraham Lincoln invited Frederick Douglass to a dinner at the White House. But the idea that Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in Rome, the emperor, his favorite philosopher, would be a slave named Epictetus. And how does Marcus Aurelius get introduced to Epictetus? The same way that many of us in the thousands of years since have been introduced to him. Marcus Aurelius credits his beloved philosophy teacher, Rusticus. He thanks him for everything that he gave him. He says, for teaching me to read attentively, to not be satisfied with just getting the gist of things.

And then he says, and for introducing me to Epictetus's lectures and loaning me his own copy. Almost 2000 years ago, Rusticus says, hey, you got to check out this guy, Epictetus. And Rusticus may have in fact studied under himself. Epictetus had been banished from Rome along with all the philosophers a generation or so before. And he sets up shop as this influential teacher and thinker. And that's how it comes to Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher king.

Epictetus lives in the time of Seneca. He was in the same court. He would have seen Nero's administration from a very different angle. And this is something very powerful that we get from Epictetus. Epictetus doesn't have control of his body, doesn't have control of his wages or his freedom.

And yet he looks around in Nero's service and he sees these very rich people who are ambitious, who are afraid, who are sycophants, who are addicted to pleasure, and he realizes that he might be freer than them. He sees a man sucking up to Nero's cobbler, trying to curry favor with the emperor by being overly complimentary to the man who makes his sandals. And Epictetus realizes that this guy is the real slave, both of them are. He says, you make yourself a slave to slaves.

And so Epictetus has this very interesting understanding of what freedom is. For him, freedom is not a legal status. For him, freedom is how much control you have over your urges, over your decisions, over your actions within the confines of your reality, right? That the emperor may be less free than Epictetus. Epictetus understands

that people who are whipsawed by their emotions, by their anxieties, by their fears, by their desires, by their ambitions are not free. And so he has this definition then of freedom. He says, look, there's some things that are up to us, some things that are not up to us. This is the essence of Stoic philosophy, this dichotomy of control. And that comes to us from Epictetus. The serenity prayer, if you've ever heard it, ultimately traces its way back to this Greek slave. Epictetus eventually did become free and became a wonderful teacher of philosophy. He himself was instructed by a great Stoic named Musonius Rufus, and Musonius Rufus didn't have a cushy life either. He'd been exiled four times. So it's from Epictetus we really get the idea of Thoism as a philosophy of resilience, of being able to look at whatever life throws at you,

Epictetus says, and go, this is what I trained for. And in fact, to see the obstacles and difficulties of life as something that life is throwing at you to train with. He says that when you face something difficult, when something doesn't go the way that you want it to go, you say to yourself, life has spared me with a strong sparring partner. He says, this is how I become Olympic class material. And Epictetus becomes Olympic class as a result of what he goes through, which is not just slavery, but torture. He walks with a limp for the rest of his life because he'd been tortured by his master. So Epictetus knew difficulty, he knew pain, he knew loss, he knew injustice, and yet what you hear in his lectures, what you see in his thinking is a guy who's not fazed by it,

a guy who's certainly bowed and disabled by it, but not broken by it. No one could touch the spirit inside of him, the strength inside of him. And this is why Admiral Stockdale, who would spend seven years in the Hanaway Hilton as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, so resonates with Epictetus's writings and how it guided him and those fellow prisoners through that immense gauntlet that is this human experience.

So from Epictetus, we learn how to deal with adversity and obstacles and difficulty. We learn to focus on what's in our control. We learn to make the best of the situation that we're in. And most of all, we learn that philosophy is not something you talk about, that you read about, it's something you do. He says, don't talk about your philosophy, embody it. He says, a weightlifter doesn't show you their shoulders,

they show you what they can lift. And that's what Stoicism was to him, a thing that helps you lift more, that helps you handle more, that makes you stronger, more adept, more skilled. He said, we're like an athlete. We don't label throws good or bad. We catch it and throw it back. Life is this game and our job is to hit it back, to throw it back, to catch it. That everything's a catchable ball in its own way. And Epictetus didn't just talk this talk. He walked this walk as essentially no one else ever has. And that's why it's so resonated with Marcus Riles because although Epictetus is on the very other end of the sociological spectrum, both he and Marcus are constrained.

Both of them are dealing with something that they didn't choose. Both of them have a heavy burden on their shoulders. For Marcus, it's extreme success. For Epictetus, it's extreme adversity. But they both saw this as a sparring partner. They both saw this as an opportunity to step up and be great. And that's how we have to think of Stoicism, what it should teach us.

Running through Epictetus' philosophy is the idea of intellectual humility. And you can get the sense he was bumping up against, you know, sort of best and the brightest of young Roman life. So a lot of egotistical kids, a lot of kids who'd been coddled, a lot of kids who thought they were geniuses.

But he says, look, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. He says, it doesn't matter that you read, it matters what you read, it matters how you read. He says, don't just tell me that you've read books. He says, show me what you have learned by thinking better. And he says, look, to get better, right, you have to be willing to look not good. He says, if you wish to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid. Not only can you not learn what you think you already know,

if you're not willing to admit that you don't know something, right, if you're not willing to ask questions, if you're not willing to be bad at something, you will never get good at that thing. You will never get better. And I think this pertains to another important thing where Epictetus is saying, look, when you're grounded in life, when you know what's important, when you only focus on what you control, you don't care what other people think. You don't look outside yourself for approval. You don't care what your teacher thinks. You don't care what your

classmates think. You don't care what anyone thinks. You're focused on yourself. Epituse has a great line that I think captures both how we're supposed to think about stoic philosophy, but also what his writings serve best. And I actually have it on the back of the Daily Stoic Journal. He says, every day and night, keep thoughts like these at hand, write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.

So we wanna think of stoic philosophy and particularly the writings of Epictetus, something you return to, you riff on, you're incorporating into your life, into your own thinking. And if you've read meditations, and I have another video about that, Marcus Aurelius is doing this.

In fact, several quotes and exercises If you've read meditations, and I have another video about that, Marcus Aurelius is doing this. In fact, several quotes and exercises that survived to us from Epictetus come to us through Marcus Aurelius, who was so intimately familiar with Epictetus that he's citing and quoting him from memory. And there's an exercise that Marcus learns from Epictetus that he quotes specifically in his meditations. He says, when you tuck your child in at night, say to yourself they will not make it till the morning. This wasn't because both Epictetus and

Marksroas didn't care about their children. They were practicing the stoic art of memento mori, that life is short, that we could go at any moment. And they were reminding themselves of this specifically with their family because we can't take them for granted. He's basically saying, why are you rushing through this? Why are you not being present? And so because of the adversity that he went through, because of how fragile he must have seen life as, Epictetus gives Marcus Rheus, and thus us centuries later, a reminder to not take a minute for granted, to know that we could go at any moment, to live life that we have in whatever form we have it, that memento mori, life is very short,

how much longer are you going to wait, Epictetus says, till you demand the best of yourself. And we're lucky that he had a student named Arian who records these lectures. That survives to us. That's known as the discourses. And then it's shortened into a thing called the incuridion, which just means a handbook. Actually, there's a weapon connotation there that it's something you have for self-defense. That survives to us in these two forms and that's what ultimately made its way from Epictetus to Rusticus to Marcus Aurelius and now hopefully to you. Somebody pressed Epictetus on me when I was 20 years old and now I am pressing Epictetus on you. Tetus on you. love to see you there. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free

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