The Daily Stoic - Time Is a Violent River | Stop Being Surprised By This

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

 Are we doing the work we know we should be doing? Or are we letting hour after hour, day after day, simply drift past us? -- Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist, bestselling author, and the founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting platform that gives parents practical tools for raising emotionally healthy kids. Named “The Millennial Parenting Whisperer” by TIME, Dr. Becky is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be and host of the chart-topping podcast Good Inside with Dr. Becky. 👉 Check out Dr. Becky’s community and platform for parents: Good Inside📱 Follow Dr. Becky | Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify   📚 Grab signed copies of Dr. Becky’s books Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be and Leave Me Alone!: A Good Inside Story About Deeply Feeling Kids at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎙️The Daily Dad Podcast | Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here |  https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | 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/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail--Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are.--Wealthfront’s high-yield cash account: https://www.wealthfront.com/stoicThis experience may not be representative of other Wealthfront clients, and there is no guarantee of future performance or success. Experiences will vary. Ryan Holiday, who’s a client of Wealthfront, receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage for paid testimonials in his podcast, creating a conflict of interest. More details available via the referral link. The Direct Deposit Plus Investing Program from Wealthfront Advisers LLC and Wealthfront Brokerage LLC provides eligible clients a 0.25% APY increase above the base APY on eligible Cash Account balances (up to an overall boosted rate of 4.30% for a limited time when including the three month 0.75% APY boost for new clients) when you direct deposit $1,000 a month, plus open, fund, and maintain an investing account. Wealthfront may change or end the program at any time and determine eligibility at its discretion. Terms apply. Full details at wealthfront.com/promo-terms.The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC ("Wealthfront Brokerage"), Member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The Annual Percentage Yield ("APY") on cash deposits as of January 30, 2026, is representative, requires no minimum, and may change at any time. References to the APY for the Wealthfront Cash Account, including any APY increase, are to the APY paid by insured depository institutions that participate in our cash sweep program (the "Program Banks”). Wealthfront Brokerage does not pay interest. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where they earn the variable APY.Instant and same-day withdrawals use the Real-Time Payments (RTP) network or FedNow service. Transfers may be limited by your receiving institution, daily caps, or participating entities. New Cash Account deposits have a 2–4 day hold before transfer. Wealthfront does not charge fees for these services, but receiving institutions may impose an RTP or FedNow Fee. Processing times may vary.. Fees & Eligibility requirements may apply to certain checking features.Investment advisory services are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Securities investments are not bank deposits, bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Time is a violent river. Sometimes it really does feel like it, doesn't it? Sometimes it feels like our lives are moving so quickly. With today turning into yesterday and next week becoming last week, you wake up, you work, dinner, bed, repeat. And other times it feels like time. It feels like time. is moving very slowly, like the day or the week or the winter won't ever end. But time never stops flowing. It never lets up. In meditations, Mark Surrealis reminds himself not to get lost in this, to lose the perspective of what is happening. Time is a river, he writes, a violent current of events glimpsed once and already carried past us. Another follows and is gone. Like a river, time can deceive us. From the bank, the water, the water, can look almost still. You step into it and you realize how powerful the current actually is,

how quickly it is carrying everything away. Everything is moving towards a finality. We are powerless to stop this. All we can do is respect it as we would, a river or any body of water. We can pay attention to where we are. We can appreciate what is passing before us. We can prepare for what is ahead. We can decide what we're going to do with the stretch of water we happen to be in. Are we spending time on things that matter. Are we present for the people we love? Are we doing the work we know we should be doing? Are we letting hour after hour, day after day simply drift past us? The river is moving either way. That's life. If you've ever talked to your bank or cell phone company or insurance or whatever, you know, customer service where you're talking to robots and you're getting that

endless loop, it's not fun for you and I have the customers. It's also not great for the company, right? They know they're not serving their customers well. When a person has to intervene, that person is dealing with someone who's mad at them. It's a whole system that I think is due for a rethink. And that's where 11 agents come in. 11 agents is a platform for AI voice and chat agents that can actually listen, understand, and resolve customer issues. They can look up your account that can process requests. And then they hand it off to a person when needed. It's made by 11 Labs, the AI research and product company known for their realistic voice and audio models in over 70 languages. If you've heard AI voices that actually sound, you know, natural,

it was probably 11 Labs. I actually was shocked. It was listening to this audio book. I found out it was produced by 11 Labs. If you run a business or handle customer service operations, you can start with a demo at 11labs.io slash doic and see how 11 agents can fit into your workflows and help build experiences that your customers and employees will actually love 11labs.io slash stoic 11 labs.io slash stoic. It has been insanely hot here in Texas and we live in an old house and the AC cannot handle it. It just can't keep up. But you know what can keep up?

What is always cool? My bed. Thanks to my eight sleep pod. The pod is this smart mattress cover. It cools both sides of the bed independently. My wife's at one temperature. I'm at another one. It even gently vibrates me awake in the morning instead of an alarm.

It's got built-in sensors that monitor sleep stages, heart rate, respiratory rate. It tracks your sleep, gives you sleep suggestions. And that's why pod users report up to 32% improvement in sleep quality and up to 30% more deep sleep. Use my code Daily Stoic at 8Sleep.com slash daily stoic for up to 3,000. $350 off and you can get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't love it. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I just had a little incident with the kids. You know, we're just hanging out. It's a slow day.

Ordered them some fast food and it came without the sauce they wanted. And they were pissed. I mean, they were pissed because we waited too long for them to eat. So they were mostly just hungry and sort of had a decreased ability to deal with this. But it's also because it's hard when your kid. You have like expectations. You have thoughts. You have a way you wanted it to go.

You have a way you like things. You are dependent on other people. It's not like they could have ordered themselves. And then so when it doesn't go the way you wanted, you feel betrayed, you feel angry. You feel surprised. You feel scared, whatever, right? All these things. which is part of childhood, but it's also part of life.

Like, adults act this way all the time. People who know better, people who it is not age appropriate for, they do it. So, of course, kids do it. I don't know. It just made me think of what I wanted to talk about in today's episode because one of the things the Stoics talked about over and over again was sort of preparing premeditation, right? Not pessimism, not catastrophizing, but preparation. They wanted you to think ahead about what was likely to happen.

As Seneca said, the unexpected blow lands heaviest. They wanted you not to be surprised by difficult people, by delays, by frustrations, by interruptions, by inconvenience. Like when you expect something that has less power over you, when you're prepared for it, you're less likely to be knocked off balance by it. So even though, you know, my wife had specifically asked like in the order for the thing, she'd put it in the notes on the DoorDash order. It didn't happen. But you know what? I was like, hey, I remember last time this happened, we had an extra one, and I shoved it in the center console of the car. Boom, I ran outside and got it. Were they totally pleased and

appreciated this rabbit I pulled out of my hat? No, again, but this is kids. I know this is how it goes. I didn't let it surprise me. So that's what we're talking about in today's episode with one of my favorite people and favorite parenting experts, Dr. Becky. She is a clinical psychologist. She's a founder of Good Inside, the host of the Good Inside podcast, the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Good Inside, one of my favorite parenting books. Also, two wonderful kids books that I recommend. I'll link to that in today's show notes. But we were talking about how kids can be hurt and surprised by unexpected things, but also we as parents shouldn't be shocked and surprised when our kids act like kids. So in this little episode, we're talking about deeply feeling kids, which I have two of, talking about how to deal with frustration, emotional vaccination, a term I love.

And this stoic idea that we should not expect figs in winter. We have to stop being shocked when human beings act like human beings, when children act like children, when Murphy's Law, which predicts all these things going wrong, makes things go wrong. Let's get into it. And again, if you haven't read Good Inside, go read it right now. We have signed copies in the store. I'll link to that. And we have signed copies of her children's book, another one I've been reading about.

And I will link to that as well. We allow ourselves all the time to be surprised by the completely predictable. And when you're really surprised as a parent, that's one of those moments when our feelings do take us over. Humans don't like to be surprised. They really don't. And so we can't control everything. But step one, I think, is actually just thinking, okay, let me look at my day. Are there hotspots?

Can I start to connect the dots? For a lot of families, leaving the house is a hotspot. For a lot of families, the transition to dinner is a hotspot. For a lot of families, the transition to bed is a hotspot. And just the going to bed is a hot spot. Basically, transitions are the problem. Transitions are really hard. They're really hard for kids because they're always engrossed in something where things feel familiar and comfortable.

and they're being asked to kind of leave that situation to go to something a little less known or a little more uncomfortable, which, by the way, we have to ask our kids to do those things. But when you think about it that way, yeah, that's hard, you know, especially as a kid. And we tend, me too, I'm not above this, to be an efficiency mode during those moments. And one of the things I keep thinking a lot about is just the difference between being efficiency mode and connection mode. And I think efficiency and connection are inherently in opposition to each other. And even for anyone listening to think, like, which is more comfortable for me, there's no morality to either. Just knowing which is more comfortable probably gives you all insight into which side you need to move into. So it's really, really common to be an efficiency mode for those transitions.

So I'm trying to get my kid to dinner. And I'm like, come on, like, put away those toys, come to dinner. Of course that's going to lead to my kid's bigger reaction. Then I'm going to get frustrated because I'm just trying to move the night along. My kid's trying to still play with blocks, right? And so even that framework, okay, so that tends to be a hot spot for us. My anger takes over. My kid's frustration takes over.

We're both no longer the driver in our car. What can I do about it? So very simply, even before involving your kid, to be able to finish this sentence is so powerful as a parent. I expect blank to happen and I can cope with that. I expect my kid to give me a hard time coming to dinner. Yeah. And I can cope with that. I expect my kid to not listen the first time I scream from the other side of my house.

Put on your shoes. We have to leave right now. And I can cope with that. The expectation plus the reminder that we can cope allows us to have a very different reaction when those moments come. It's almost bizarre. It's like, well, my kid didn't listen. Like, you almost feel powerful. Like, oh, I did kind of, I kind of predicted that.

You know, you know it's coming, which is one of the things that really allows us to stay as a driver in the car and then be more productive and actually getting our kid out of the house. Yeah. Why are we surprised? Like my kids are the slowest people to ever exit a vehicle. Like in the history, like they're just so slow. And yet it surprises me every time and I get frustrated by it all the time. Right. Like they have shown me definitively that they do not get out of cars quickly.

And yet I'm out of the car quickly expecting them to have gotten out and then frustrated that they're still in it. I think this is just, you know, the inherent issue with being human. We all can be fairly egocentric. It sounds like when you get out of the car, by the way, Ryan, like me, I'm like, we are parking the car to go do something. Let me just be clear. I'm not parking to just chill in the car. So I am so ready. I don't even want to do this thing. You want to do the thing. That's exactly right. I have no interest in going to your soccer game where you're perfectly average at best. It's not even how I want to spend my Saturday, but that's what we're doing. But either way, I'm locked in. I know what I'm doing. And so we do all. And I do too.

We have a hard time separating me versus you. I want to get out of the car right away. And even if my kid likes soccer, they're, I don't know, they're in the car. They don't have a sense of time. They're not thinking about being on time for soccer practice, right? It's just not how their minds work. And I think that mismatch often is why we're kind of surprised by the predictable, which means, though, there's, again, something very hopeful, even just once a day. And if this is your example, you can say, okay, every time I get in the car, I'm going to make sure there's a Post-It that's just visible to me. And it's literally just going to say something simple. My kids are going to be in stalling mode. My kids are going to be in comfortable in the car mode when we park. I expect that to happen and I can cope with it.

It will actually change what you do. I actually bet you'll get them out of the car faster because you won't spend whatever we all spend, 90 seconds, five minutes yelling at them about how they never listen. Right. It's funny how stoic that is. I mean, there's a stoic concept of premeditoshio malorum. Do you know what this is? No. And Latin, that's just a premeditation of evil.

So Seneca says you're going to go on a journey by ship. Okay. What could happen on a journey by ship? There could be a shipwreck. There could be pirates. There could be storms. Yeah. There could be a quarantine.

There's all these things. And you should know this and you should expect those things to happen. And there's another one where Cato's going like, okay, you're going to the baths. What happens in a bathhouse? There's smells and there's noises and you bump into people. And I think what you're adding to it, which I really like is this sort of affirmation at the end, which is like, and that's not a big deal. I can handle it. Yeah.

It's funny. I have this phrase I think about emotional vaccination. It's kind of similar, right? If I say to myself, this is going to be a hard. part of my day. I don't like at dinner when my kids won't come and then they end up complaining. I'm not trying to say that's enjoyable to me at all, but we can't make hard moments enjoyable, but we can make them predictable if they are predictable, right? And so to vaccinate yourself, oh, let me imagine that. It's going to be a little annoying. You know, nighttime is another example. Usually when you

put your kids to bed, especially when they're young, you are so ready to be off dad mode or mom mode. Yeah, you're ready to clock out. Yeah. And it's the exact same moment your kid wants. eight more minutes with you. So nobody's wrong there. It's just a bad kind of match. And again, if we say to ourselves, okay, I want to be out of the room X time, probably not going to happen till X plus eight minutes, right? Let me just get ready for that. What am I going to do in that time? I can cope with that. Everybody ends up winning. When the surprise is what makes it worse, the Stokes would say. Like the unexpected hurts more. Yes. And so by expecting it, you're taking away some of the power in advance.

A hundred percent. Maybe you didn't know this, but we actually have another podcast. We do a daily parenting show as well. And we'd love to have you join us. If you want ancient wisdom, modern psychology, best practices, all of that, you know, basically what we do for the Daily Stoke, but applied to what I think is our most important job being a parent. While the Daily Dad is a short message you can listen to while you're brushing your teeth,

making coffee. After you drop the kids off at school, whatever it is, you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. I will link to it in today's show notes, or you can just search the Daily Dad podcast.