The Daily Stoic - We Are All In Debt | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Debt. It’s a word that carries heavy, negative connotations. But actually, there is a different kind of debt we are less aware of, one that doesn’t drown us but builds us up.Our premium edition of Meditations is crafted to last for generations—making it the perfect keepsake to display proudly and pass forward as a gift to someone who has made a difference in your life.Pair it with "How to Read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (A Daily Stoic Guide)" to make sure you squeeze all the practical advice you can from this powerful book. Get both today and save $20!🎙️ 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.

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Usually when I travel, I'm staying in an Airbnb. That is when I'm bringing my kids. We make a whole experience of it. And usually what I do is I pull up Airbnb, I look at guest favorites, I type in, okay, we want this many rooms, this many bathrooms, we want a pool, we want a washer and dryer, whatever it is. And you can find an awesome place to stay in.

And I've been doing it now, crazy me, at least 15 years I've been staying in Airbnbs, basically since it came out. I love Airbnb and you should check it out for your next trip. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

For more, visit Daily dailystoic.com. We are all in debt. Debt, it's a word that carries heavy negative connotations. It makes us think of credit card balances, student loans, the ever-growing national debt, burdens that weigh us down and with the power of compounding interest in fees can seem impossible to escape. But actually there is a different kind of debt that we are less aware of, one that doesn't drown us but builds us up.

It doesn't come with a balance sheet or a due date, but still it grows invisibly, imperceptibly with every conversation, every example, and every moment of guidance given to us. It's the kind of debt that Marcus Aurelius opens meditations reflecting upon, what he has learned from various influential individuals in his life. In the Gregory Hayes translation, which is just my favorite, book one is titled debts and lessons and the 17 entries spanning nine pages and more than 2,000 words make up nearly 10% of the book. And debt is the operative word in that title. He owed those people so much.

Marcus Aurelius knew that he was the product of so many mentors, influences, advisors, and teachers. He couldn't have been successful without Fronto, Rusticus, his mother, his brother, his adopted father, Antoninus, and so on. He understood that what they had taught him, showed him, opened his mind, and hurt too were priceless. And also that this debt wasn't something he could ever pay back, but that he could

acknowledge and ultimately pay forward. Each of us is a sum of these debts. We are products of our influences, our environments, our families, our friends and circumstances. Success or failure is a collaborative effort. We are in the end a reflection of the debts and lessons we have received from countless people in our lives. And this is a good balance to carry and a better one to transfer to others. And look, I myself am deeply indebted to Mark Sturulius' meditations and so is, you know, a generation or generations of leaders and thinkers and everyday people like you and me. And that's why we, I partly wanted to pay that forward by making like a really special edition of meditations. I got the rights from

Gregory Hayes and his publisher. We worked with this amazing boutique leather bindery in the UK. We worked with these great designers. I think it's the most beautiful, the best edition of meditations out there. You can grab that right now. I'll link to it at store.dailystilk.com. You can also pair it with our how to read meditation. If you wanna do a deeper dive into those debts and lessons,

who those people are, what it means, you can do that. And we'll throw in this cool guide as part of a deal. I'll link to all of that in today's show notes. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, where we do the Q&As. My kids are in the other room. One of them just shouted shouted fire in the hole

So I have no idea what that means. It can't be good Jonesy. What fires in the hole. What are you doing? Why do you go in kaboom? What's up? Ah, they're playing Minecraft. All right, so they're not doing any science experiments. So that's good My life changed in Amsterdam many years ago In fact, you wouldn't be listening to this episode if I hadn't been at a conference in Amsterdam many years ago. In fact, you wouldn't be listening to this episode if I hadn't been at a conference in Amsterdam back in 2013 or so. Tim Ferriss was there, we were hanging out.

And I told him I was working on this book called The Obstacle is the Way. And he said, hey, can I buy the audiobook rights to that? Maybe I'm thinking about doing an audiobook publisher. And he did, and he helped make The Obstacle is the Way a success. And that led later to the Daily Stoic and the Daily Stoic Podcasts and all this stuff.

So I think very fondly of the Netherlands. In today's episode, I'm gonna take you to a different city in the Netherlands. Back in November, I was in Europe to do some talks and I went to Rotterdam for the first time. Back on November 13th at the RTM stage at the Rotterdam Ahoy, I gave a talk about stoicism. And then the audience asked me some questions and I'm gonna bring you a chunk of those questions now.

You may remember part one of this episode with some other questions, and then we will get into it. How can you finish something or at least get the motivation? It's a big question for me. I'm a fire starter but I'd love to finish the fire as well. Yeah look I do try to read regularly and consistently but I also have little kids so I tend to be more of like a binge reader. When I have time I use that time and then there are periods where I don't get to it for a couple days or sometimes a couple weeks.

A big book that I might be able to burn through, if I really sat down and concentrated, might take me a month because I haven't got the time. But ultimately, like, we're not reading to impress people. We're not reading to fill up a bookshelf or check off a series of boxes. We're reading to use our leisure time. And the ancient Greek sort of root word of leisure there

is basically school. We're supposed to use our leisure time to learn and to grow and to improve and to also rest and relax and replenish. So I love that you're doing it on vacation and make the most of it. Could you be a little bit more consistent in your day-to-day life? I'm sure. I wouldn't be too hard on yourself.

My job is reading, so I make a lot of time for it. If I had a different job, I'd probably not have the same amount of time for it. So I wouldn't be too hard on yourself, but I try to be consistent and I try to find opportunities to read that I would otherwise be doing some other unproductive thing. I'm sure if you looked at the screen time app on your phone, you'd find more than a few minutes you could spare to spend some time reading. And maybe that means you leave know, you leave your phone

in the car, the other room, and that's when you grab a book. My question is, I got into stoicism later in my age. How do we teach this in schools at an early stage? Because I think nowadays it's super important. You know, it's funny, they used to teach Seneca and Marx, Ruelis and Cicero not in philosophy class, but they would teach them in like Latin class. Like as the people were learning to write

and speak languages, they were repeating some of the greatest sentences ever put together by human beings. It was sort of being put into your brain over and over again. And I think it's funny, look, I like DuLingo. It's interesting, I took many years of Spanish in high school, but everything I learned was like, where's the library?

I like to wear pants, you know? There are these sort of nonsense sentences where you're trying to learn the nuts and bolts of the grammar as if that's the purpose of a language. I think about this with like the books that I try to read my kids or that I watch them. You know, these nonsense sentences that we're learning. My oldest, I'm so excited, he got hooked on the Odyssey

as he loves it as this universe, like the Marvel universe, with all these characters. But to watch him struggle to read a sentence just as he'd struggle to read any sentence but to know that it's part of this ancient tradition of great literature and writing and big moral questions I think is something fundamentally wrong with how we teach reading and writing and and school these days we've we've stripped out a lot of these sort of great and classic texts and look if the idea is we're trying to make things

more diverse and draw from not just old dead white guys, I get that. Let's add as many great thinkers and artists from all the different cultures. That's a solution, not, let's get rid of all of them and, you know, replace them with kids' books about, you know, dragons that love tacos or whatever. Although I love that book, and Adam's a friend of mine.

But I'm just saying, it seems weird that all the things that we teach kids are silly when Aesop's fables are also silly, but are teaching profound moral lessons that we're still wrestling with today. I think that's one place to start. I did write two fables about Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus that are for younger readers. I wrote them for my kids.

But the idea isn't like, oh, I need you to know these names. It's that I want you to learn the lessons of these people's lives. Thank you for tonight's lecture. I have quite a simple question. So tonight you started your lecture by saying that living virtuously is asking yourself what is action or choice that you're about to make would make you a good

person. But how can we make sure our idea of being a good person isn't clouded by your own bias or self-righteousness or at least how do you define this? Sure, yeah, look, this is tricky. I struggle with this because you write a book about justice, about doing the right thing, and then there's this impulse to go, well, what is the right thing? What about this? What about this?

What about this, right? And there is this tendency where we take something that I think we largely agree on, or we agree more than we would disagree on what the right thing is. There's a reason that almost every philosophical school and religious tradition has, and probably independently so,

come to some version of like the golden rule, right? So we more or less agree on what is right or just or good. Yes, sometimes there are these vexing context-dependent choices, et cetera, but for the most part, it's pretty clear. And then our impulse is to get away from that clarity or the large swath of agreement and to go towards these edge cases or towards abstraction or towards contradiction. And I think that prevents us, that takes us away from like the more obvious, decent and good things that we could do, right? Look, I think the study of history gives us a lot of case studies and examples of people either striving to do right or people who had opportunities to do the right thing and they didn't and I think one of the reasons you have to

your experience, your understanding has to be rooted in history is it allows you to draw on these cases and go okay okay, so and so did this here, I wanna be more like this, but they didn't go far enough or they went too far. To me, that's the really interesting part of these moral questions, not how do we know what is good and bad? Does free will exist?

What about the trolley problem? What if you say that this is the right thing, but then what about these conditions? And then all of a sudden what we've done is taken away the urgency of should you be doing this? Should you have voted for this person? How could you make more of a positive difference? I think it takes us away from the urgency

and the very real and accessible opportunities that we all have to do and be good in this life. I was wondering, nature is also a great part of the Stoic philosophy. Yes. And if I look at the current state of nature and where it's heading, I'm quite worried. Yes.

How do you look at that point from a Stoic view and from a personal view? One of my favorite quotes from Seneca, he says, you know, the whole world is a temple of all of the gods. And if we can see nature as this kind of holy place, this holy thing, this thing that exists only because either it wasn't ruined by the people that came before us or it was saved by and preserved by the people before us, I think it puts upon us a debt that we have to carry forward and take care of, right? We all sit in the shade of trees that other people planted or didn't cut down. And some of the darkest, worst, awful, you know, most awful parts of the modern landscape

are that way because people did cut down a tree proverbially or otherwise, or did not take care of something, did overfish or over extract, right? And so, yeah, to me, when I think about those concentric rings, the largest most ring is this planet. It's kind of mind blowing to think like, we did not even know what this planet looked like from a distance until like 1971 or 72 when that famous blue marble photo was taken when we finally

got out far enough from the earth's atmosphere that we could you know capture all of it and what astronauts have explained about seeing earth from that distance what I feel when I look at that photo is what Mark Shreves talks about in meditations, the interconnectedness of all people, the silliness and the smallness of wars and borders and boundaries and distinctions between people and eras. And it forces upon us, I think, an obligation to each other and to this ecosystem to take care of it and preserve it. And yeah, by and large, we're doing a horrendous job of that. So grave injustice. If the Stokes didn't talk enough about something, one of those things I would put in there

is how we sort of solve collective action problems like that. So first of all, thank you for being a great inspiration. You talked about this earlier in your talk that one of the philosophers you really enjoyed is someone who was also living as a philosopher. I really enjoy reading your books, looking at all your stuff on YouTube,

because I think you really live the philosopher's life. So thank you for that. So I've been a psychotherapist for 13 years, and then I decided after like a lot of babies to stay at home. So I'm at home for a few years, and the first thing I did a few years ago was buying your Ego is the Enemy book

because I thought in this time being a stay at home person is something that's interesting for your ego. And it is. And I really like being at home. I really like to have our three kids like being one of the centered things in my life. Sure. And by watching your things, for you, your wife and your kids is something that's really important. So my question is, you said in the beginning of the talk that you brought your kids and your wife on the world tour. So I was interested on some of your thoughts, like personal thoughts or stoic thoughts on bringing them

and having them around you. Because I think it's really interesting. It's a good example, but I'm interested in how it is. Yeah. Are you at this point? Well, thank you very much. I would say I'm trying to live a philosophical life. I don't always, I don't try to hold myself up as an example. I try to talk about my own experiences because my own experiences with these ideas is not always easy and it's a struggle.

You know, my son was having a tough time this morning. We had to get up very early to catch the train. And, you know, I caught myself, as I think parents can often do, thinking like, why is he making this so hard? As opposed to thinking what was actually going on, which is that it was hard for him. He was tired or hungry or his routine was disrupted. And I didn't handle it as well as I could have. And I

was, as I was journaling before I came here, that's what I was talking about. Now, this doesn't make it any better for him. Like we didn't have a great interaction about it. I took something from it. And I want to learn and do better next time. And I need to repair that with him. I need to talk about it with him. But part of how I think about it, I have one goal when we go on a trip like this, like when we're traveling together, which is success is not, you know, did we make all our trains and planes?

Did all the talks go amazing? You know, did we check off this many boxes for museums or experiences? did we eat grapefruit successes that we do it again? Like successes that it wasn't so awful and frustrating and we all lost our temper and had a bad time, that we don't want to do it again. Like successes getting to do it again, that both lowers and raises the stakes. For me, that's kind of how I think about it.

But it's going pretty well so far. They're happy that they're not in school mostly, and you know, that they get to stay up late and do stuff. And I feel very blessed that I have the freedom, financially and career-wise to do that. Like to me, if you're really successful at what you do, but the cost of that success is you never see the people that you're supposedly doing it all for.

I'm not sure how great that is or even true that all is. So that's kind of how I think about 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. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. Do you have business insurance?

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