The Daily Stoic - The 12 Things You Need To Know About Stoicism

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

 Most of what people know about Stoicism is totally wrong. They might recognize names like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, or they assume the whole philosophy is about being stoic in the modern sense, cold, emotionless, shut down, resigned. But that picture couldn’t be more off.👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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.

Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like The Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show, but not listen to ads. Well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic.

We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, completely ad-free. No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive

bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20% off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show of descriptions to make those ads go away. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic,

and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you. for listening. Most of what people know about stoicism is totally wrong. Maybe they know a couple of the names. They've heard Marcus Aurelius, or they've heard Epictetus, or they think that stoicism is about

being cold and emotionless and apathetic and resigned. This could not be further from the truth. Stoicism is a philosophy that literally changed the world, that made some of the great greatest men and women in history. It's not about acceptance. It's a philosophy about resilience, about self-empowerment, about being in command of yourself, as the Stoics would say. And Stoicism was popular not just with Marcus Rilis, the Emperor of Rome, but also Epictetus who lived through three decades of slavery. So what we're going to talk about in today's episode is what Stoicism actually is and what the Stoics have figured out over 2,500 years of teachings

and what this ancient wisdom can help us with here in modern life. There's a bullshit stereotype that Stoicism is emotionlessness. That's not it at all. The Stoics aren't emotionless, but they did try to be less emotional in high-stakes situations because they were leaders. Because they knew that emotions could be misleading. They knew that emotions could make us do things that we later regret, right? So it's not that they're trying to be emotionless, but they are trying to be less emotional

when it matters. Seneca writes three beautiful essays. on grief. If he was emotionless, he would have just said, don't feel anything. This is nothing. That's not what he does at all. But he is trying to work someone through these overwhelming emotions that are torturing them that they can't seem to get over. He's trying to help them understand what they feel, trying to help them process those emotions so they can move on and live their life and feel good emotions again instead of just despair and anger and grief and hopelessness. So don't believe this stereotype at all. The stoics were people who got married. The stoics were people

who loved their kids. The Stoics are people who made beautiful works of art who loved to enjoy works of art, who experience the beauty of nature and all the richness of the human experience. They just try not to be overwhelmed by destructive emotions, which we all know are a problem for all of us. There's only one rule to life. The great novelist Kurt Vonnegut said, he said, God damn it, you've got to be kind. My favorite quotes from Seneca, one of the Stoics, he says, Every human being you meet is an opportunity for kindness. I've been writing this stoic book about justice.

And I think when we think justice, we think the legal system, we think laws, right? We think social justice. And all of this is incredibly important, of course. But to me, the virtue of justice is embodied there in kindness, like how we treat other people. Do you hold the door open for someone? Do you pay for the groceries of the person in front of you because they can't afford it? Right. How nice are you to a stranger? how do you speak to the people who work for you? The kindness that we treat people with is,

I think, in some ways, a precursor to the justice that we live by or that society is set upon, right? The great injustices of society are to say they're based on in kindness would be a massive understatement, but profoundly they're based on not seeing the other person as a person or someone worthy of being treated well. And I think that's what Kurt Vonnegut was saying. And the only rule there is, it's God damn it, you've got to be kind. This doesn't have to upset you. This doesn't have to get to you. You don't have to turn this into something.

That's what the Stoics want you to know. Now, look, sometimes people share that and they think, oh, I'm just supposed to accept injustices. I'm just supposed to accept all the terrible things that are happening in the world. No, there is a difference between tolerating and injustice and letting it get inside your scree with your equilibrium, distract you, make you bitter, make you hopeless, make you despair. The point is, you take the information, you see what it means, and then you say, hey, I'm not going to let this ruin me. I'm not going to let this make me worse.

I may well have to get to work solving this. I may well have to find out more information about this. I may have to dedicate my life to eradicating this thing. But what I don't have to let it do is make me worse, is ruin my day, is make me a jerk to the people around me. I don't have to let this distract me. And in fact, by letting it make me angry, by letting it get inside my head, what it's actually doing is making me less effective at doing anything about it. You know, the greatest empire is command of oneself. So people always want more and more and more.

And really, wealth, self-control, is understanding, like, what's enough for me? What am I good with? What do I actually need? And so fascinating, on the one hand, you have a stoic like Marcus Aurelius, who's the most powerful man in the world. Then you have this other stoic in Epictetus,

who Marcus Aurelius admires, Epictetus is a slave. And who is actually most in command of themselves? Who's in command of their desires, their emotions, their fears? So it doesn't matter how much you have or how little you have. Stoicism is this sense.

of here's what I need, here's who I am, here's what's important to me. Following the Joneses. Exactly. And social media, a world of social media where you're constantly bombarded with what everyone else is doing, you lose track of what you're trying to do, what's important to you, what's possible for you. In one of his letters, Seneca says that we treat the body rigorously so that it would not be disobedient to the mind. And I think about that when I'm jumping in the shower, jumping in a cold pool, whether I'm pushing myself while I'm running or lifting weights, is like, I'm reminding the body who's in charge. This idea that we treat the body rigorously, that that's what the physical practice is.

It's a reminder of who's in charge. It's the mind asserting itself over the body. We tend to think of philosophers as these sort of soft people, but actually the mental practice, the mental resilience, being in charge of yourself is the ultimate. muscle that you want to cultivate and it's the thing that every great athlete has to have. Acceptance is a word that we struggle with because it seems defeatist. It seemed resigned. But the Stoics, Epictetus, say we have to learn how to practice the art of acquiescence. Accepting the things that happen to us is actually the first step in being able to respond to them, to turn them into something. There's a powerful stoic concept called amorphati, a love of fate, embrace accepting the things that have happened to you, the situations you find yourself in,

not because you resign, not because you're passive, but because it's the first step in turning it into something great. It's the first step in making something. I think one of the reasons we have trouble with motivation is that we know deep down that this thing we're doing, it doesn't really matter, it's not important. That's why Marcus Reelis's question is so imperative. He says, ask yourself, is this essential? He says, because, because most of what we do and say and think is not essential. It's getting us further from where we want to go. It's something that society made up for us.

It's just what everyone else is doing. It's piddily busy work. He says, are you really afraid of death because you won't be able to do this thing anymore? He's saying that we waste our time with frivolous, unimportant, meaningless things. So he says, when you ask yourself, is this essential, you end up eliminating the inessential.

And then he says, you get this double benefit of doing the essential things better. But I would say that the real benefit is that if we only have a finite amount of motivation, if getting up the motivation, if maintaining motivation is this difficult task, well, then we want to save it for the precious few things that really matter, right? What's the main thing for you? You eliminate the things that are not the main thing, and then that marshals more resources, more energy, more motivation for the things that are the main.

If everything is this battle between the higher self and the lower self, right, And if you're exhausting that resource battling for things that don't matter, that you don't actually care about, that you could say no to, right? You're going to have to have so much more motivation than someone who has winnowed down their frame of reference, their to-do list only to the things that truly matter, that truly are essential. They didn't have to make that comment, they didn't have to be a jerk, they didn't have to point that out, that they could have done nothing, but they didn't. And so now we have a choice. How are we going

to respond? Right? We don't control other people. That's the idea in Stoicism, but we control how we respond. Epic Tita said that when you find yourself offended, when you get upset, realize that you are complicit in taking the offense. Marks really said, remember, you don't have to turn this into something. Life is hard. People aren't perfect. They don't understand how things are going to be felt or perceived by other people, they're going to keep doing this for as long as they exist. But we have to decide, are we going to go around being offended all the time, being hurt all the time, feeling slighted all the time, getting worked up all the time. We have control over that. And we can decide not to waste our time getting offended, getting upset. We can focus on

what we control, which is who we are in response to the things people do and say to us. It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we make it short. By acting as if we have forever, by putting things off until tomorrow, by doing things that we shouldn't do. He says it's insane. We protect our money. We protect our property. And then we are foolish with the one thing that can't be replaced.

The one thing they're not making any more of. He says, don't spend your time on anything that's not giving you a return. And of course, he doesn't mean that financially. He means, how are you going to spend this limited amount of time that you have here on Earth? How are you going to protect that valuable resource? How are you going to make good choices, courageous choices, disciplined choices? Memento Mori. Death isn't this thing that's at the end, Seneca says.

It's happening now. The time that passes belongs to death. So how will you spend your life? A big part of success is positive visualization. If you can't see it happening, it's unlikely that it's going to happen. If you don't see yourself on the metal stand, if you don't see the shot going in, if you don't see yourself connecting with the ball, it's not going to happen. If you don't believe it's possible, it can't happen.

But the Stoics would pair this positive visualization with a kind of negative visualization. The term for this is premeditation of malorma, premeditation of evils. Basically understanding that things are unpredictable, that because things can go wrong, they invariably will go wrong. And how are you going to respond to that? Are you prepared to respond to it? Do you have a backup plan? Are you going to be rattled by the stuff that happened? Seneca says that the unexpected blow lands heaviest. One of the Bill Walsh things I love is he would script the first several plays in a game so that whatever happened, however the game went, right? At the beginning, however, the unexpected, unpredictable parts of a game, he knew what he was going to do. He had

his plan law that couldn't be affected by circumstances. So the idea is stuff is going to go wrong. Life is unpredictable, but you have to imagine for that. You have to prepare for that. Seneca says that the only inexcusable thing for a leader, but I think also for an athlete, to say is, oh, I didn't think that would happen. You have to think it could happen and you have to have a plan for what you're going to do if that happened. The first, the hardest, the most important exercise in all of Stoicism is really, really simple. It's simple, but it's not easy. It's the dichotomy of control.

There are some things that are up to us, Epictetus says, and some things that are not up to us. It's our choices, our decisions, our opinions, our actions that are up to us, other people's actions, other people's opinions about our actions, how those actions are received, or whether or not they succeed, it's not up to us. So if you're thinking about trying to be more stoic, it's not the cold plunges. It's not enduring intense and difficult adversity, although again, that's part of it. It starts with something really simple, which is separating things that are in your control from the things that are outside your control and caring about and acting on the things in the first category. When adversity happens in life, when things are difficult when you run into obstacles,

which is going to happen. There is no escape from it. You have to be able to see it, the Stoics say, as a good thing, that life is pairing you with a strong sparring partner. And the purpose of a sparring partner is to help you level up to get better, to practice and cultivate the very skills that you'll need in the map, in the ring, when shit gets real. So the idea is not to run away from adversity or difficulty or obstacles, but to embrace them. Mark Serrilla says that the impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way. you know what you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire so don't think about the fact that it's hard that it's difficult that it's not going your way that these this thing happened and

you wish it hadn't happened no it's good that it happened because you're going to use it it's going to make you better it's teaching you something and if you have this attitude you are unstoppable because all the things that are happening are making you better making you stronger preparing you teaching you warning you and that's what you want a single book changed my life. I was 19 years old and someone recommended Marcus Aurelius' meditations. And this book, The Private Thoughts of the Emperor of Rome, hit me 19 years old and I was never the same. It put me on the journey that I am still on today. It's something that's made me not just smarter, but more balanced, more able to bounce back from difficulty and failures. It's given me wisdom. It's

given me courage. It's given me a sense of ethics and principles and so much more. And that's what the Stoics have been doing for people for thousands of years. And if you are interested in taking your study of Stoicism a little bit further, or ideally to the next level, I would love to have you join us in Stoicism 101. Ancient philosophy for your actual life. We do it every year around this time. It's a 14-day deep dive into the Stoics, into Stoic philosophy, what it can teach you, how to apply it, who the Stoics were, what they have to offer us. And my favorite part of it is the office hours we do where you get to ask me your most pressing questions about stoic philosophy, along with thousands of stoics all over the world. I'd love to have you join us. You can sign up right now

at daily stoic.com slash 101. Every day I send out one stoic inspired email to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. If you want more stoic wisdom in your inbox, you can sign up at daily stoic.com slash email. It's totally free. I'm unsubscribe at any time. We'd love to have you. dot com slash email.