The Daily Stoic - The Time To Start Doing This Is Now | What's Up To Us, What's Not Up To Us

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?” Epictetus says. Start Now.The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge is 3 weeks of ALL-NEW, actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy, to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2025. Why 3 weeks? Because it takes human beings 21 days to build new habits and skills, to create the muscle memory of making beautiful choices each and every day.Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge today to sign up.Get The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.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.

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. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to

do a deeper dive setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on something to think on something to leave you with to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it. The time to start doing this is now. We all have vices, we all have flaws, we have habits as Seneca said, that turn us into

slaves. We have things we know we want to change. We know this, but why do we struggle to do anything about it? What happens? Nothing happens. And if we're not careful, our whole life can pass by this way, the world changing around us while we sadly remain exactly the same. "'You're an old man now,' Marx really wrote to himself

in meditations lamenting his lack of progress on some unnamed habit. "'It's time to stop being a slave,' he said, "'to no longer be pulled along like a puppet on strings, "'to stop being dissatisfied with today and afraid of tomorrow. It's time. Change isn't easy.

It takes work, real, deliberate, consistent effort. Quitting smoking, taming your temper, being more present at home, getting over your envy, shedding a few pounds, breaking your smartphone addiction, drinking less or reading more, it's not gonna happen by accident. But what is getting rid of one bad habit like that worth? What would that freedom feel like?

What would you give to add a new positive way of thinking or acting into your everyday life? Well, that's what we're all coming together to do in January. Thousands of stoics all over the world, people just like you struggling, growing, trying to make that satisfying progress towards becoming the person they know they can be. We're all coming together for the 2025 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. I'm going to be in there. Maybe you're thinking about joining me. Maybe you're thinking about joining us, but you've been putting off signing up.

Well, stop. Let's do it together. Why not kick 2025 off with 21 actionable challenges presented one per day built around the best exercises in stoic philosophy and designed to help you do exactly what Mark Struis was talking about, rising up, driving out the bad, taking action on becoming the person

you know you're capable of being. And this year we've taken the last seven years of doing this challenge, plus everything we've learned, everything I've written about, all the insights from the Stoics, distilled them into what I think is our most powerful New Year, New You challenge. I think 2025 is gonna be the best challenge we've ever made.

And look, 2025 is gonna be a challenging year, so hopefully it will get you off on the right foot. It's not a rebrand. We redo the challenge every year. It's new stuff, new experience, new challenges, and I think it's going to really help you. I know I'm excited about it. I know I'm going to make a bunch of changes from it.

I know there's things I did in 2024 and in 2023 and in 2022 that came specifically from challenges in the New Year, New You Challenge. It's gonna be awesome. We're gonna build resilience through discomfort. We're gonna let go of emotional baggage. We're gonna form positive habits. We're gonna strengthen relationships.

We're gonna focus on what matters. And I'd love to see you in there. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash challenge. It starts on January 1. So stop procrastinating, sign up, I will see you in the daily stoic new year new challenge. How much longer are you going to wait to demand the best for yourself? That was Epictetus's question. Well, let's answer it with the daily stoic new year new you

challenge and I'll see in there at daily stoic.com slash challenge. There's just two days left to sign up. Let's answer it with the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, and I'll see you in there at dailystoic.com slash challenge. There's just two days left to sign up. Let's do it. I'll see you in there. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've got my Daily Stoic Journal in front of me. Let's riff on today's entry. This is the first week in the Daily Stoic Journal and it

starts with the most important stoic task that there is. What's up to us and what's not up to us? Epictetus's handbook, the Inchoridion, begins with the most powerful exercise in all of Stoicism, the distinction between things that are up to us in our control and the things that are not up to us. It is this, the dichotomy of control, that is the first principle in the entire philosophy. We don't control many of the things we pursue in life, yet we become angry, sad, hurt, scared, and jealous when we don't get them. In fact, these emotions, those reactions are about the only thing we do control. If that is the only lesson to

journal on and think about this year, consider it a year well and philosophically lived. And then Epictetus' discourses, which we actually open the Daily Stoic with, so I'll riff on that in a second, but he says, look, the chief task in life is simply this, to identify and separate matter so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil, not in uncontrollableable externals but within myself to the choices that are my own? And then in in Caribbean 1 1 he riffs on what is and isn't in our control He says some things are in our control while others are not we control our opinion our choice our desire our aversions

In a word everything of our own doing we don't control our body our property our reputation our position and in a word everything of our own doing. We don't control our body, our property, our reputation, our position, and in a word everything not in our own doing. And even more the things in our control are by nature free, unhindered and unobstructed, while those not in our control are weak and slavish and can be hindered and are not our own. And then, 1.22, he says, we control our reasons, choice, and all acts that depend on moral will. What's not under control are our body and any of its parts, our possessions, our parents, our siblings,

our children, our country, anything with which we might associate. Look, I think what Epictetus is saying here is that not just the wisdom of the serenity prayer, you know, you separate things into the categories and you only focus on what's up to you, but that a lot of things that we think of as being up to us are not even up to us, right?

Really at the absolute core of it, what we control are our thoughts, our emotions, our opinions, we don't control what happens, control how we respond to what happens, but even then within a constrained amount. And this might seem kind of resigned or a sad way to start the year, but I don't think it is. I think it's the only way to start the year.

It's certainly the only way I thought we could start the daily Stoic, which I'll read to you the January 1st entry. The single most important practice in Stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we can change and what we can't, what we have influence over and what we do not. A flight is delayed because of weather. No amount of yelling at an airline representative will end a storm. No amount of wishing will make you taller or shorter or born in a different country.

No matter how hard you try, you can't make someone like you. And on top of that, time spent hurling their self at these immovable objects is time not spent on the things we can change. The recovery community practices something called the Serenity Prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Attics cannot change the abuse suffered in childhood. They cannot undo the choices they have made or the hurt they have caused. But they can change the future through the power they have in the present moment.

As Epictetus says, they can control the choices they make right now. The same is true for us today for the year that stands before us. If we focus on making clear what parts of our day are within our control and what parts are not, we will not only be happier, we will have a distinct advantage over other people who fail to realize they are fighting an unwinnable battle. It's funny, I think when we're younger,

we have an outsized view of what's in our control and what isn't. And as we get older, we ratchet that back, which is ironic because as we get older, we're also more powerful, more successful, et cetera. But you just realize, like, look, you don't control what other people do. I mean, even the longer I've been a parent,

it's not the less strict I am, but I do feel a more chill I am because I've made the mistakes, I've tried to control things I don't control. I've seen where my anxiety or stress or worry or whatever gets me. And I cultivate the ability to step back to focus on what I control.

I was playing on the floor with one of my sons and my other son drew on my jacket with a pen a couple of days ago. And it's like my favorite jacket. It's like ruined, he rode all over it with a red Sharpie. I don't know why I didn't notice, but I didn't. You know, I was mad. I was like, hey, look, like no amount of being mad

at a child is going to undo the ruined jacket, right? And what's the opportunity that I wanna seize here, right? What good is it to make this person feel bad about what happened? No amount of yelling is gonna undo what happened. So I wanna take the opportunity to talk about, instead, calmly, respectfully talk about what it means to respect other people's persons, their stuff, et cetera,

and to talk about, hey, how would you feel if I did that to something that you like or that you care about, right? And I didn't do it perfectly, but my wife and I were talking about it after, just like how, compared to how our parents would have reacted, how different it was. But the idea is, look, I just control what I do about it.

I just control how I respond. I just control whether I let my emotions get the best of me or not. Or when I catch myself, at what point in that process do I walk it back, right? What's up to us and what's not up to us? I feel like so many things that I'm upset about, that I get in arguments about, what I'm really saying is,

I wish that hadn't happened. I want to undo that that happened. That's not how life works. That's not something that's up to me. And so I'm't happened. I want to undo that that happened. That's not how life works. That's not something that's up to me. And so I'm practicing the idea of getting a little bit better at letting go of that thing, of moving on from that thing. And so must you. This is a year that we try to focus more on what's in our control. We argue less with reality. I have a whole set of note cards. It's a theme I often journal and think about how often I find this. We're in arguments with reality. We wish

things were different. They weren't the way that they were. And this isn't like resigning yourself to the state of society. This is resigning yourself that something that happened did happen. It is done. It is in the past. Arguing and relitigating and relitigating, it doesn't change it. You don't have the power to make it unhappen, but you do have the power to decide how it's going to make you feel, whether it harms you or not, what you do about it, who you are because of it. 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 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.

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