The Daily Stoic - This Is The Day | How Stoicism Can Make You Happier

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

This is what we tell ourselves: Someday I will write my book. Someday I will travel abroad. Someday I will learn how to play guitar.But someday soon, you will no longer be able to say, “someday…”---“A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.” – SenecaThe Stoics believed in living a virtuous life, one with the potential to bring us personal happiness and fulfillment. And that’s one of the reasons a person may choose to live after their fashion. After all, what good is philosophy if it doesn’t ultimately bring us happiness?But in Stoic philosophy, it’s the pursuit of virtue and good character that allows us to get there. For the Stoic, the pursuit of virtue is the pursuit of happiness. If we can live virtuously, a good life will follow.---If you want your own physical reminder of Memento Mori to create priority, humility, and appreciation for life, you can pick up one of our Memento Mori medallions to carry in your pocket everywhere you go. It is a part of our 2022 Daily Stoic Gift Guide, which is packed with 13 great gifts for the Stoic in your life.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🎓 FREE GUIDE to Stoic philosophy: https://dailystoic.com/freeguideCheck 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 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. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music

or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the day. This is what we tell ourselves. Someday I'll write my book someday. I will travel abroad someday. I will learn how to play a guitar. But someday soon you will no longer be able to say someday. So we must adopt the mindset of the great Stephen Pressfield. In his latest book, Put Your Ask Where Your Heart Wants To Be, which he talked about recently on the Daily Stoke podcast, Pressfield writes, Here's my frame of mind as I sit down to work. This is the day he says, there is no other day. This is the day. There is no other time today is the Super Bowl. Today is the day I give birth.

Today is the day that I die. Not tomorrow, Mark Serela said, choose to be good today. Do your job as a human being, as a writer, as a parent, as a politician today. You can't waste this chance. You can't put it off until later. You cannot wait until you are more secure. No. Now is now. You'll never have this moment again. Amen to Mori. The circumstances are never going to be perfect. You do not have plenty of time. Now is now. Today is the day. That's my momentum worry coin.

I think about it all the time playing with it on my desk right now. So in that carry always, it's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public. It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different momentum worry reminders, of course. But if you want to get this one, which we make here, in the US, in a mint in Minnesota, that's been in business since 1882, you can check it out in the Daily Stoke store or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, The Painted

Porch on Man Street where we sell them as well. It's Game Changer, so check it out. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. I think the stereotype of the stoke is not just unfeeling, but not happy. It's also part of that, right? You don't think when people hear the word stosis and they don't enjoy, they don't think laughter, they don't think, you know, living one's best life. And that's a shame because I think when I wrote

lives of the Stokes, that was the thing that I found the most heartening was that the Stokes were human beings. They got married, they had kids, they liked jokes, they liked having fun. They went to the theater, they did live life to the fullest and they tried to get to that place that Aristotle was talking about, you dimineia or human flourishing. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode,

how stoicism can make you happier or some stoic keys to happiness. Stoics thought that the virtuous life was synonymous with a happy life. They didn't necessarily just think, you know, happiness was getting everything you want all the time. In fact, they thought that was a recipe for unhappiness. But in today's episode, I wanna talk to you about this under-explored idea in the Stoic Canon, which is happiness. What is the number one source of our unhappiness?

It's focusing on things that we don't control. Epictetus says, the chief task in life is to separate things into two buckets, what's in my control and what's not in my control. And it says, the only way to happiness is to cease worrying about things which are beyond my power of control. So when you narrow your focus from the things that everyone thinks about, from the things that everyone worries about,

from all the things that are outside your grasp and you decide to focus instead on what's up to me, you have a much better chance of being happy. Ultimately, what's in our control is our thoughts and our actions. I control this little window of stuff today and I'm just gonna crush it there. That's where I'm gonna focus,

and because I'm focused there, I know I can make myself happy. People think money will make them happy. Well, I'll tell you how you can become wealthy right now. It's by wanting less stuff, by needing less. Right? Senaqa says, poverty is not being poor.

Poverty is wanting more. He's not saying that some struggling mother on welfare just not having heart. What he's saying is that there are rich people who are very poor. So your wants and your happiness are inattention with each other. So if you can decide to be grateful and satisfied and good with what you have now, you have a certain amount of wealth and you have something to be happy for. Epictetus's wealth is not having many possessions, it's having few wants. In Buddhism they say that craving is the source of suffering by focusing on what you have rather than what you don't have. The stoics and the Buddhists both say you are eliminating a source of unhappiness. And I think when

we're talking about wanting less, the other path the happiness related to this is the idea of simplification. Marcus Reyes has asked herself, is this essential? Because most of what we want and do and say is not essential. We chase things we don't want. We chase things we don't actually care about. We make life so much more complicated than it needs to be.

I think the pandemic was so powerful in this regard. And in March of 2020, when life shut down, and suddenly we weren't traveling, we weren't going to meetings, we weren't as busy as we have in our whole lives. My wife and I looked around our farm and we're like, I don't think we've ever been here and truly noticed how wonderful it was. So we found these wild blackberry bushes in our backyard. We watched more sunsets and a road than we'd ever seen. So by simplifying, by removing all the extraneous,

the inessential things, I was reminded of the power and the importance of the essential things. If you want more happiness in your life, start by removing complexity, particularly unnecessary complexity. One of the things we tell ourselves that's going to make us happy,

that's part of the happy life is like, can't wait to go on vacation. When I hear people talking about all their crazy travel plans, I think why not try to build a life that you don't want to escape from? Why not try to build a practice where you can get that piece and that relief from inside yourself?

The other thing tied up in our modern definition of happiness is like pleasure, whether it's drugs or alcohol or sex, we think that thing, this external thing that's gonna feel so good, it will create happiness. So we think that if our marriage is unhappy, we'll be happier with this person, but we actually end up causing ourselves so much unhappiness.

There's a great novel at Tom Wolf about stosis, we call him Man in Full. There's this really haunting scene where this sort of rich, successful real estate developer, and he wakes up next up next to second. Why if he deforest his older wife and she's this young, beautiful person, but it's just like, who is this person? Like, we have nothing in common. He's basically just wakes up one day and realizes that in chasing pleasure and success, he actually got himself to a place of profound unhappiness. Peter Teele of the billionaire, I once heard him at an event say something like,

you want to look for things for pleasures that don't have diminishing returns. And I think that's right. When I look out the window of my backyard, I can see nature, it never gives me less pleasure than the first time I saw it. Sunset's, sun rises, playing with my kids. These little pleasures, I never get tired of them

But chasing the newest thing buying a new car buying something fancy having expensive this or that Let's get old really quickly And so the stones would say to try to find pleasure or happiness simple things you control that never grow old When I think about the moments that I felt happiest the moments were moments of stillness. There were moments of focus. I think if I had to give you a secret for happiness, I would say it's that it's presence, being in the present moment. Arx really talks about the perfect sphere

rejoicing in its stillness. No one is less happy than the person who's pulled in a million directions. I think the Stokes would say that one source of our unhappiness is other people. In fact, Mark's really is a thing about the about the obstacles away comes from talking about frustrating people. And he opens meditations by saying, look, the people you meet today are going to be frustrating and stupid and jealous and mean, right? He knows the reality of our fellow human beings.

And they're not great. So part of happiness is being prepared. If you go through the world, naïve, delusional, expecting everyone's going to be your friend, everyone's going to be nice to you, everything's going to go your way, you are going to be constantly disappointed and that is an obstacle to happiness. But what is a source of happiness is also other people. People you care about, people you're connected with, the people that you've built your life around. And I know this doesn't feel still, but it is, within reason. Mark's Reyes says he learns from sexist to philosopher to be free of passion, full of love. Love for his fellow human beings. Love for the common good. Love for the people that he loves. I don't want

you to think that being a stoked is like cutting yourselves off from attachments. Relationships are a key part of this too. Now, that doesn't mean that you hand over your happiness to other people. It does mean you have to understand that people are gonna mess up, people are flawed. You have to understand all of this too. And in fact, I think by understanding that you put yourself in a position

to not be so vulnerable to it. And another key part of happiness is of course eliminating things that make you unhappy. What traumas do you have? What wounds do you have? Where are you struggling? Well, maybe you're unhappy in part because you had a traumatic or a painful childhood.

But just pretending that you didn't just stuffing it down, just gritting your teeth and burying it. That's not going to contribute to your happiness. In fact, that's going to cause unhappiness because you're going to repeat that pattern in future relationships. You're going to believe that you're undeserving of happiness.

So then getting help, asking questions. This is a key part of this too. This is a misstuffing the emotions down. It's processing the emotions. It's dealing with the emotions. So you have room for the positive, wonderful emotions like happiness. What is Seneca's letters,

but Seneca writing these joyful, fun letters to his friend, Lucilius, and you can tell that friendship is a key part of the stoic, and you can tell that friendship is a key part of being successful as a stoic. No man is an island and certainly not a stoic. In fact, the stoics thing that other people are what we're here for, and relationships to me are the most profound source of happiness. I hope you like this video. I hope you subscribe. But what I really want you to

subscribe to is our daily stoic email. One bit of stoic wisdom, totally for free, to the largest community of stoics ever in existence. You can sign up at dailystoch.com-email. There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it. I've sent it every day for the last six years and I hope to see you there at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke, early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies

like Headspace, Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet.

your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet.