The Daily Stoic - This Is Why We Don’t Change | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: December 26, 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. So for this tour I was just doing in Europe, we had I think four days in London and I was with my kids, my wife and my in-laws. So we knew we didn't want to stay in a hotel. We'd spend a fortune. We'd be cramped. So we booked an Airbnb and it was awesome. As it happens, the Airbnb we stayed in was like this super historic building. I think it was where like the first meeting of the Red Cross or the Salvation Army ever was. It was awesome. That's why I love staying in Airbnbs.

To stay in a cool place, you get a sense of what the place is actually like. You're coming home to your house, not to the lobby of a hotel every night. It just made it easier to coordinate everything and get a sense of what the city is like. When I spent last summer in LA, we used an Airbnb also. So you may have read something that I wrote while staying in an Airbnb. Airbnb has the flexibility in size and location that work for your family and you can always find awesome stuff. You click on guest favorites to narrow your search down. Travel is always stressful. It's always hard to be away from home. But if you're gonna do it, do it right. And that's why you should check out Airbnb.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with daily Stoic life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

This is why we don't change. It happens every year, every single year. It doesn't matter how many times it gets brought up, how many reminders, how clear the deadline is. Every year a flood of people sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. And they do it on January 2nd and on January 3rd. In fact, those two days are often the biggest signup days

of the whole thing, even though the challenge starts and has started for the past seven years on January 1st. Now you could say better late than never, and of course we do, although it's a lot of work for Ashley who works in Daily Stoke's customer service, but this is also a perfect real world example of something Marcus Aurelius and Seneca warned us about, procrastination.

These people aren't hearing about the challenge for the first time. They wanted to kick the year off right, but like the rest of us, they told themselves the same lie we all do. "'I'll do it in the morning,' they said. "'I'll make sure to sign up after I get through Christmas. "'I'll remember to do it later.'"

And then life happens. Distractions pile up. The to-do list gets longer. And then we never do it. You could be good today, Marx Realist writes, but instead you choose tomorrow. We all do this and we do it for things much more important than New Year's resolutions. It's not because we're lazy or careless. We just tell ourselves we have more time, more time to breathe, to think, to act. Later feels safer, easier, more comfortable than now. And all fools have that delusion in common, Seneca said. That's why we're always about to do something, about to sign up for something, about to get serious, but

never do. We make lists and resolutions, plans and promises while the clock ticks on and suddenly the moment is gone. The opportunity passes. The challenge starts without us. We never got around to what we always intended to start. And so we stay the same as we ever were. The good news is it's never too late to start.

The bad news is that waiting for tomorrow can cost us our best days and eventually our best life. And that's what the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge is all about. Even signing up for it is itself version of this idea. If you're interested in doing it, then do it. Choose today instead of tomorrow. Show up no matter how imperfect or inconvenient

because as the Stokes remind us, the only time we truly have is now. The time to move forward with clarity and purpose, it's now. The time to join us in the challenge is now. Not tomorrow, not after Christmas, not on January 2nd, but now. No more wasted time, no more drifting, no more broken resolutions. So do it. Go to dailystoic.com slash challenge. Join me and thousands of other stoics all over the world doing 21 days of stoic inspired challenges in a row. It's going

to be awesome. I can't wait to see you in there. Sign up now while it's on your mind. dailystoic.com slash challenge. Don't wait for tomorrow. You already know what will happen or rather you know what won't happen if you do. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's been a crazy year. Put out a book, did a speaking tour. Let's see, I was in almost 10 countries, maybe more. A lot of different countries, kids.

My son started second grade. My other son is in his last year of kindergarten before he has to switch schools, doing some renovations of our house, double the size of the bookstore. I've got, I don't know if you can hear that, but I'm almost done with my edits on the the wisdom book, which I started back in January. I did this cool book with George Raveling. I don't know, it's been a busy

year. It's been a good year. I ran myself a little ragged. I'm gonna try to do a little bit less this coming year, try to do things better. That's kind of what my wife and I are thinking about. I was talking about this last week, like, as you go into the new year, what do you wanna do differently? How do you wanna challenge yourself to be better? And I've been trying to challenge myself

at the beginning of every year for the last seven or eight years. We do this Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. Been doing it for seven years now, thousands of stoics all over the world. Every year we come up with like 21 stoic inspired challenges to kick off the year. So anyways, I'd love to have you join us. You can sign up at dailystoic.com challenge, but that's

not what today's episode is really. Today's episode is one of the best parts of that challenge, which is that we have these live Q&As. We do three live sessions. We've done them every year. So we have hours and hours of people asking kind of like New Year's resolutions, stoic inspired questions, self improvement questions. We've just been doing this a long time and I thought I'd bring you some questions from one of those Q&A's today. We picked some of our favorites. I think this is from the 2024 edition of the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge. I would love to see you in the 2025 edition of the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge. I would love to see you in the 2025 edition of the Daily Stoic New Year New Challenge. Sign up right now at DailyStoic.com slash challenge.

I will see you in there. Maybe you can ask me a question and we'll get after it. It starts on January 1st. Don't procrastinate. I'll see you in there. Talk soon. Bye. If you could like download one like skill or attribute to this next generation that's coming up like matrix style, right?

Just plug them in and they have this ability or knowledge or wisdom. What would that be? And I guess the second part would be like if you could give that to parents, what would that be? Yeah, I was thinking about this recently. There's this kind of this, there's this fear among older people now that young people are, you know, very fragile, you know, like that everyone has a mental illness, you know, that sort of everyone as a sort of is aware of this or needs this kind of special treatment. I don't fully buy that. I think it's wonderful that, you know, people are actually taking care of issues and getting diagnoses for things instead of just self-medicating.

But I do think that just because you found out that you have this predilection or that predilection, right, or there's this problem or this problem, like life is still life, you still have to figure out a way to do what needs to be done. And what I sort of like about stoicism and what I think it passes to us is this idea of like, look, it is what it is, and then you still have to do this stuff, right? You still have to do what nature or duty demands. And so I would love to give people the ability to sort of simultaneously have awareness

about their limitations or their circumstances or the consequences that it's caused and then be able to go, okay, but that's here, and then you still wanna get over here. And so now you have to figure out your own unique way with those strengths, but also, or sorry, with those weaknesses, but also with those strengths

that allows you to do that thing. Does that make sense? Well, so we both have seen like a huge spike and uptick in depression, anxiety, definitely like ADHD type diagnoses that pop up. I sit in meetings where we go through every student that has some sort of support that's needed and we go through how we can help them and I come in from a similar angle to you. I hope that they see that not as something that gets in the way, but something that they get to

navigate, right? Navigating through that is going to make them stronger. But you say, I hope they're aware. Like, my kids are not aware. Like, they are totally oblivious sometimes of like basic stuff. You know what I mean? It's tough. It is. It is, but they're lucky to have you and I appreciate it all. I kind of found the daily stoic during the beginning of the pandemic, which coincided with my own diagnoses, speaking of mental health, of depression and anxiety and something I've been kind of navigating since 2020,

but there are times where I feel like, you know, we always, it all comes down to your choice, you know, like all you have at the end is your mind. It sometimes feels like my mind is not trustworthy when I'm having like an anxiety spiral or I'm really in my depression. But that got me thinking about people who maybe experienced that on a grander scale,

like the outliers of folks with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. And I'm curious what the Stoics would think about that when all you have is your reason choice and maybe you don't have that reason choice, maybe your choice is taken from you. So what are your thoughts on that? No, look, obviously 2000 years ago, even 200 years ago, or 20 years ago, our understanding of mental illness and mental health and sort of what was in our control and what isn't in our control was far more limited. So I think the stoics are somewhat exclusionary or simplistic when they say these things, not intentionally but just as far as they understood the world that they didn't they didn't have a full picture. But I think you're an interesting example. So it's like, you you understand that you have depression. And you understand that this was going to I think, Faye's question earlier, which is like, okay, my mind is doing a certain thing

right now, maybe you don't realize it in the very, the very moment that it's happening. But after a certain amount of time, it dawns on you or you're able to get, have some suspicion as to what's happening, that is such a actually fascinating and incredible thing that like the mind can be doing a thing. And then some other part of the mind recognizes

that the mind is doing an unhealthy thing or going in an unhealthy direction, just in the same way that when you're meditating, you get a first glimpse of that when you're having thoughts and then you're like, well, where are these thoughts coming from? And then you're having thoughts about the thoughts that you're having as you're having them.

And so we don't wanna be simplistic or dismissive or cruel to people who have things like, more serious mental illnesses, cruel to people who have things like, you know, more serious mental illnesses. But it to a certain degree, it's the same, it's a similar process, right? Is one have an awareness of the, you know, thing that they're doing? And then how does one seek treatment for that thing to the best of their ability? People around them have to treat them differently. And there's certain different standards,

but like Kanye West clearly has some sort of mental problem. Does that excuse, is he fully responsible for what's happening? No, but does that mean he's not responsible for his terrible antisemitism and racism and the destruction and pain he's caused people? Yeah, he kind of is responsible because he could be treating this.

He could be doing things differently and he's not. Is there also a certain amount of culpability for the people around him who could be doing something about this? Yes, also. So I think you raise a good point. It's not as simple as simply we control our thoughts and that's it.

But even when our thoughts are not in our control, we have the ability to seek treatment, to ask for help. Or at the very least, when we come back to our senses, we have the ability to apologize, to make amends, right? We have the ability to sort of course correct when we go in a direction that we didn't mean to go or didn't want to go or shouldn't have gone. Thank you. Yeah, it's a great question. How you doing, Ryan? Good, good.

So I love the Daily Dad. I shared your quote, I think, from the last Daily Dad with higher staff where you talked about, what if we stop counting the right answers and starting counting the right things kids do? Yes. And I think I think we struggle with that in schools, especially as the kids get older. So my question for you would be and I share this story a little bit in a chat is how do we teach our students and our kids that they do have some control and the example that I'll use. My son played his first kid pitch game. And the first time he came up, he got a hit. Next time he came up, he

walked. And I talked to him a lot about the stuff that you talk about. So we get back home that night, I said, what made you want to swing at bad pitches? He said, my ego. And he was eight years old at the time. And I would just be curious because I love your work with the Daily Dad. You know, what would you say to help kids that don't have a mother or father in their life that shows them that they do have control? When you're dealing with kids that come from so much trauma

and their ACEs scores through the roof, what message would you send to educators how to help those kids? First off, that's so great that your son had the awareness to go, that's why I did what I did. I mean, to learn that lesson, you know, as a kid, I mean, it's still gonna be so hard

as it is for all of us in life to not do things out of ego, but to even be aware that that's a factor warping the decisions or choices that you make, that's just incredibly ahead of the curve, which is awesome. I think your point that like certain people have been taught certain things, have access to certain things,

have had modeled for them emotional regulation, healthy relationships, et cetera, and other kids haven't, is just such an understated reality of the world that we're living in. Certainly, athletics, you know, demonstrate this because you take people from totally unequal backgrounds, cultures, lifestyles, families, etc. And then you put them on a field where supposedly everyone is equal and the rules are the same. And then you wonder why there's different outcomes and different ways to respond to different things. To me, that's a microcosm of society as a whole. We tend to understand it better in sports and then are less forgiving and understanding

via in the classroom or, you know, in other parts of life or society. But I think the ability to, I think what we have to do is model. And then we also have to be, even if it's late in that person's life, like not like it is for your son to be able to go like, hey, why did you do what you did? Right?

And why do you think it didn't work out? Right? When I interviewed this guy, Randall Stutman, he was a leadership, you know, he's a leadership expert, we interviewed him in the leadership challenge. And I think the episodes on the podcast as a whole, he was saying something that as a leader, like, he's like your job, like, when somebody is doing something that doesn't make sense to you, you know, you want to go like, don't do that, or you want to criticize that they did it, or hold them accountable for doing it. But he talked about sort of asking them what they think they're doing is such a powerful question. Because very often, going back to Socrates, who said we never do wrong

on purpose, we think we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, or we're doing our absolute best. And it's only until someone has the patience and the understanding and the empathy to allow us to see what we're doing from a new way or to understand that we have more power over what we're doing than we think we do, this can be so eye-opening and transformative. And so I think any chance we have to give people access to that, to basically the core of what stoicism is,

it's just, it's an incredible gift. 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

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