The Daily Stoic - This Never Makes Things Better | The View from Above

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

Ryan talks about the perils of anger, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal.The Stoics have some of the smartest and most applicable insights about getting your anger contained. For a high level introduction to some of those insights, check out this article: Anger Management: 8 Strategies Backed By Two Thousand Years of Practice. Or if you really want to get serious about conquering your anger, sign up for our course: Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Anger. 11 days of challenges, exercises, video lessons, and bonus tools based on Stoic philosophy and aimed at helping you deal with your anger in a constructive manner. Learn more here!Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic podcasts early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. 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 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. 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 never makes things better. You have a big presentation in front of a group of people in your nervous. You've got young kids in your anxious. You're running your own business and you're worried. You're in a combat zone and you're scared. These are all difficult things, no question, but it's important to realize that those nerves,

the anxiety, the worry, the fear, they almost never make things better. They don't help you operate heavy machinery better, they don't help you remember your lines better, they don't get you anywhere faster. When the Stoics talked about not adding to your troubles, this is what they were referring to. What we're trying to do is hard enough. Life is a difficult balancing act on its own. Adding in, oiling, consuming, distracting, upsetting emotions. It doesn't help.

Contrary to what you're telling yourself, anxiety is not making you a better parent. Hyper alertness is not making you a better soldier or a better speaker. It's flooding you with cortisol and wearing you down. It's weighing you down. It may well be making you worse, driving your kids crazy, eating up your practice time, destroying morale in your organization. Calm down, focus on what you control. Push those extreme emotions away.

Be present, be relaxed, do your best. That's all you can do because that's all there is. The view from above. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Steuert Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, every day and night we keep thoughts like this at hand, write them, read them aloud and talk to yourself and others about them.

You can check out the Daily Stalk Journal, anywhere books are sold, you can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stalk store at store.dailystalk.com. And so today's entry is about taking the view from above. The way to escape petty concerns and the worries of daily existence requires taking some time and getting it with the stoics like to call the view from above. This was something Marcus Eurelius reminded himself to do regularly. He had learned from Heraclitus that everything in the world was constantly changing and that remembering this can eliminate so many stresses and concerns. So this week, don't just look at what you're dealing with in your life up close.

Try to see it from far away too. Try to describe what another larger perspective would look like life up close, try to see it from far away too, try to describe what another larger perspective would look like of your problems, of your worries, and of your obsessions. And Marcus really quotes here from Plato, he says, how beautifully Plato put it, whenever you want to talk about people, it's best to take a bird's eye view and see everything all at once, of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings, and divorces, births, and deaths, noisy courtrooms, or silent spaces,

every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets, all blended together and arranged, and a pairing of opposites. This is from Meditations, 748. Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them. Marcus also says in meditations, think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life. And then we have Heraclitus. He says, the cosmic order, the same for everyone, wasn't made by any God or human, but always wasn't always will be an eternal fire kindled in measures and

extinguished in measures. Look, it's easy when you're thinking about something, when you're dealing with something, when you're way deep in something, for it to feel like the most important thing in the world, for it to feel unprecedented, for it to feel overwhelmingly big. But when you zoom out, I know it's been a little while for me, but when you're in an airplane and you look down and you see these enormous fields or these whole cities, or you even see the town, sometimes when I'm flying in Austin,

I can see the road I drive to get to my house, and I can see my tiny little house. It just shrinks everything down into its proper proportion, which is to say it makes it really, really small. Because we are really, really small. We are ants. You look at ants on an ant mound, fighting over little seeds and tiny things. It's easy to think, oh, these silly little creatures, but that's us. We are them. We are tiny. And by taking this view from above thinking of it with this perspective is really, really important. And it cuts you down to size. It's crazy to think, if you haven't seen the blue marble photo, it's actually this is the

icon on the back of our sympathy, I'm a daliant. It's crazy to think no human was able to see earth from a distance until the 1970s. Right? The highest perspective we could get from it was from a mountain, you know, like 10 or 15,000 feet or whatever. It wasn't until relatively recently, like when your parents were kids, if you're my age, that we were even able to truly see our own planet from a distance. But Edgar Mitchell talks about this feet, one of the astronauts, he talks about this feeling you get

in space when you see the Earth from a distance. And he talks about how immediately clarifying it is, how immediately you feel a deep connection, a profound connection to your fellow humans, how all your petty silly concerns go away and all you want to do is help to be of service, to be good, to focus on what matters. And this is what Marcus is trying to do 2,000 years ago when it was a dream that human beings would ever enter space. He's even then

imagining himself along the stars. He's trying to wash away the dust of earthly life, he's trying to get perspective. Well, look, you have the benefit of doing that. You can get in an airplane. You can look at the satellite view on Google Maps. You can recall your memory of the heights that you've been to, looking down from the Empire State Building or that tower in Dubai, if you've ever been there.

You have the ability to take Plato's view, literally and figuratively, in a way that the Stokes would have never imagined. And yet, here we are tweeting about nonsense, fighting over nonsense, acting like those silly ants that we think were so much better than. Take Plato's view, get some perspective today. Also look at history, you know, just think about Marcus really saying, what people were concerned about now

in 2000 years distant, the perspective that it gives us and what people will be thinking about of this very moment, 2000 years from now. This is so humbling and so important. You've gotta do it. Check it out, take Plato's view. And hopefully you'll be calmer and wiser when I talk to you next week. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoog 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. 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 on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded, with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air, from the usual Wall Street

buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse. An SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondery, comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to episodes

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