The Daily Stoic - We Forget These Heroes | How To Organize Your Life Like A Stoic Philosopher

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Cato defying Caesar. Rutilius Rufus going into exile. Marcus Aurelius on the battlefield.These were great and daring deeds of course. Lesser known of course, are the deeds of the Stoic women.📚 Books Mentioned: Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday | https://store.dailystoic.com/The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon | https://www.thepaintedporch.comThe Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson | https://www.thepaintedporch.com🎙️ 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.

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. When I travel with my family, I almost always stay in an Airbnb. I want my kids to have their own room. I want my wife and I to have a little privacy. You know, maybe we'll cook or at the very least we'll use a refrigerator. Sometimes I'm bringing my in-laws around with me or I need an extra room just to write in. Airbnbs give you the flavor of actually being in the place you are. I feel like I've lived in all these places that I've stayed for a week or two or even a night or two. There's flexibility in size and location. When you're searching you can

look at guest favorites or even find like historical or really coolest things. It's my choice when we're traveling as a family. Some of my favorite memories are in Airbnb's we've stayed at. I've recorded episodes of a podcast in Airbnb. I've written books. One of the very first Airbnbs I ever stayed in was in Santa Barbara, California while I was finishing up what was my first book,

Trust Me I'm Lying. If you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend you check out Airbnb for your next trip. 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 and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. ["The Last Supper"]

We forget these heroes. The deeds of the famous Stoics were down to us. Cato defying Caesar, Rutilius Rufus going into exile, Thrasya defying Nero, Marcus Aurelius on the battlefield. These were great and daring deeds, of course. Lesser known, however, are the deeds of the Stoic women, the defiance and bravery of Portia Cato, the final words of Cornificia. Marcus Aurelius's daughter is just as impressive as the final moments of Seneca. These are just a few of the Stoic women we've heard about.

How many countless generations of stoic women went ignored, their courage and virtue unreported. Thomas Wentworth Higginson is another such figure we talked about recently. A 19th century translator of Epictetus, he was an active abolitionist and a leader of black troops in the Civil War. In his fascinating essay on courage,

inspired by the stoics, he makes a similar note of just how many incredible and inspiring examples are left out of the historical narrative, either by neglect or bigotry. Agents of the Underground Railroad, he wrote, report that the incidents which daily come to their knowledge are beyond all Greek, all Roman fame. These men and women who have tested their courage in the lonely swamp against the alligator and the bloodhound, who have starved on the prairies, hidden in holds, clung to locomotives, ridden hundreds of miles, cramped in boxes,

head downward equally near to death if discovered or deserted, and who have then, after enduring all this, gone voluntarily back to risk it over again for the sake of wife or child? What are we pale faces that we should claim a rival capacity with theirs for heroic deeds?" he said. What matter if none below the throne of God can now identify the nameless Negro in the Tennessee ironworks who during the last insurrection said he knew all about the plot but would die before he

would tell? He received 750 lashes and died. Yet where amid the mausoleums of the world is there carved an epitaph like that? These omissions are not just injustices to the marginalized but they do a disservice to us too. We deprive ourselves of stories that would uplift us, of examples that we could learn from. Men and women benefit by knowing of the life of poor Chiquito. Just as Americans, and indeed all people, are better off from learning about Epictetus, a slave in Rome. They also deserve to be inspired by the deeds of enslaved people in much more recent times. These men and women who survived, who resisted,

who loved and sacrificed deserve more than namelessness. They were stoic in ways we cannot even imagine. They were brave in ways we cannot even comprehend." I talk about some of these lesser-known stoics and lives of the stoics, obviously stoics like Agrippinus and Portia Cato. And then some of my favorite books in the Painted Porch are like Sharon McMahon's new book The Small and the Mighty. I like this wonderful book The Warmth of Other Suns. I always love stories about heroic people whose heroism I had not even heard of. I'll link to some of those in today's show notes. Check it out. There's nothing less stoic than disorganization and chaos, than winging it.

And that's why the stoics develop routines, why they set standards, develop habits, practices. They took the structure of things seriously. Life without design, Seneca says, is erratic. And so their ability to make order from this chaos, why we organize the trivial parts of our lives, is to free up resources to do important and meaningful stuff. We get freedom from the order and the structure. So that's what we're going to talk about in today's video. I'm going to share some daily habits, some lifestyle practices, standards, and structures set

forth by the Stoics that you can use today to get your life in order. When practiced consistently, these are habits that will help you achieve your goals and make you someone that people can count on and respect. We're going to split this video up into two parts. First part is going to take you through a day in the life of a Stoic, outlining some of the non-negotiables they're committed to for a well-designed day. And then the second part is going to be some Stoic lifestyle principles, high level standards and practices to keep in mind that will give you a more organized and peaceful life.

You have to win the morning. In fact, one of the most relatable parts of Marcus Aurelius's meditations is book five, where Marcus Aurelius has an argument with himself. It says, at dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being. It says, or is this what you were created getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being. It says, or is this what you were created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm. Right? A stoic attacks the morning, a stoic wins the morning, a stoic gets up early.

And it's impressive when we realize that he didn't have to do this. He didn't really have to do anything. One of his predecessors basically abandons the throne for an exotic island. The emperor had so much power, so much responsibility, and yet Marcus is practicing a foundational daily habit. He is getting up early and he is getting after it because winning the morning is key to winning the day and winning at life. I want to get up, get my most important things done. I want to get the hard things out of the way while I still have the most energy, while I'm still the freshest, while I haven't been dragged down

into the muck of distraction or frustration or any of those things. So a foundational daily stoic practice is get up early, get after it, don't huddle under the covers and stay warm. Don't hit the snooze button a million times. Life is short. We gotta get up and get after it. And we gotta get after it early.

So how do we know that Marcus Rulis got up early? We know he got up early because of another foundational daily practice, the journal. That's what meditation is, the journal of the most powerful man in the world. And the list of people ancient and modern who practice the art of journaling is almost comically long and it's fascinatingly diverse. We have Oscar Wilde and Susan Sontag, Queen Victoria, John Quincy Adams, Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Sean Green,

the baseball player, Mary Chestnut, Brian Koppelman, Anis Nin, Franz Kafka, Ben Franklin, and countless others. Right? Some people journal in the morning, some did it sporadically, some like Da Vinci kept their notebooks on them at all times. The idea is you've got to make time and space for reflection, not sometimes, but every day. Seneca, the stoic philosopher, talks about how he did his writing and reflecting time in the evening. He said when darkness had fallen and his wife had gone to sleep, he examined his entire day. He says, I go back over what I've done and said I hide nothing from myself and I pass nothing by. And then he would go

to bed and he said he found that the sleep which follows self-examination was particularly sweet. You got a nice evening journaling routine. It leads right into a good night of sleep and then an early wake up. Foucault, who was a big fan of the Stoics, would talk about this ancient genre of writing notes to themselves. He actually called the journal a weapon for spiritual combat, a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness to overcome difficulty, to silence those barking dogs in your head, to reflect on the day that's past, to take note of things that struck you throughout the course of the day, to feel wisdom flow

through your fingertips and onto the page. Anne Frank writes in her beautiful diary about how paper is more patient than people. That's why journaling is such an important daily practice. Life is frustrating, life is confusing, life is overwhelming, and on the page, we can slow the mind down, we can find a way to peace. We can ask ourselves tough questions. You know, where am I standing in my own way?

What's a step I can take towards getting better? Why am I so worked up on this? What blessings can I count? Why do I care so much about these people? What am I avoiding here? Why are my fears deciding what I do or don't do? Journaling is, as Julia Cameron said, a kind of spiritual windshield wiper. It's a break from the world, a framework for the day ahead, a way to break down and analyze

the day you just had. And it may well be the most important thing you do, and that is why the Stoics did it every day. We all have to be readers. The foundation of Stoicism comes from a prophecy from the Oracle of Delphi. A young Zeno is visiting the Oracle and the Oracle tells him, you will become wise when you begin to have conversations with the dead. And it's not until many years later

that he ends up in a bookstore in Athens and he hears the bookseller reading some of the dialogues of Socrates, a man who had died some years previous. And that's when it hits Zeno. Books are a way to have conversations with the dead. We are talking to people who are no longer with us benefiting from their wisdom.

So the Stoics are readers. You just have to be. Seneca talks about how we have to linger on the works of the master thinkers, not just read, but read and reread and reread. That's what a book like Meditations is about. It's a book you, you don't just read once, but a book you are reading on an ongoing basis.

So part of your stoic practice, your daily stoic practice, has to be making time for reading and for wisdom. And this ties in well to the journaling practice. You read, you journal about what you're reading, you go out and experience things that's informed by what you're reading, or it directs you to things that you should read.

So a stoic makes time for reading. But not just any book. There's a joke, Epictetus, here's one of his students bragging about reading some obscure philosopher who is particularly dense, and he says, you know, if they had been a better writer, you'd have less to brag about. And so the reading that we do,

it shouldn't be to impress people, it's not to check a box, we're reading for information we can use in our lives. General James Madison, a modern day Stoic, talks about how if you haven't read hundreds of books, particularly about what you do for a living, about your space, he says you are functionally illiterate. We don't want to learn by trial and error that which we can learn from the trials and errors of others.

We have to read every single day. It's a basic stoic practice. We have to treat the body rigorously. When we think of an ancient philosopher, when we think of a philosopher, generally we don't tend to think of an athlete. We don't think of someone who's strong and tough. We tend to think of a nerd.

We think of a turtleneck university professor, an old guy in a toga, but the philosophers were active. Socrates wasn't just a soldier who was brave in battle. Socrates was also known by his friends as someone who could wear a thin cloak in wintertime. He was tough. He liked to harden himself against the elements. Seneca was not only active, a big walker,

he took these cold plunges every day. When Nero went to kill Seneca, he found that he had trouble finding an opportunity to poison him because Seneca was subsisting on food he could forage for himself out in the woods. The point is, the Stoics were active. They were outdoorsy. They were not simply your bookish philosopher. Actually, when I was introduced to the Stoics,

the same day I bought Mark Shrevely's Meditations, I bought this book called The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It's an amazing book. I tell this story in The Obstacles of Way and Discipline is Destiny. Theodore Roosevelt was born a sickly young boy. He had asthma and his interests were academic. He liked to be inside.

He was nearsighted. And one day his father sat him down and said, look, Theodore, you've got the mind, but I don't think you have the body. He was actually expressing a timeless bit of wisdom. This idea of mensano incorporisano or a strong mind and a strong body. And young Theodore looks at his father and he says, okay, I will make my body. And this is where we get the active, outdoorsy, adventurous Theodore Roosevelt,

the man who embraced the strenuous life. And you know, after he was president, he took this journey down the Amazon on an unexplored river. And you know what he brought with him? He brought a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations as well as Epictetus' Handbook. So the Stoic philosopher is active.

Marcus Aurelius hunted and wrestled. There was a Stoic boxer. There were Stoic runners. Roosevelt tried to get a couple of hours of exercise in a day as president. So what do you think Teddy would have thought of our sedentary digital lives, our excuse that we're too busy or too tired

or that we weren't born that way? Like we're meant for so much more. Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus said, obviously the philosopher's body should be well prepared for physical activity. Because often he said the virtues make use of this as a necessary instrument for the affairs of life. He says we must train ourselves, discipline ourselves

to cold and heat and thirst and hunger, meager rations, hard beds and avoidance of pleasures and patience under sufferings. Says from this the body becomes strengthened and becomes capable of enduring hardship. It's ready for any task. A daily practice for the Stoics had nothing to do with reading or writing, but getting out there, getting active, getting after it. Retreat the body rigorously, Seneca says, so that it is not

disobedient to the mind. Mens sana, incorporate sano, strong mind in a strong body. So in addition to their daily practices, there were some sort of philosophical conceptions or beliefs that helped the Stoics live well-ordered, productive lives. And the first is that they try to avoid procrastination. The one thing all fools have in common, Seneca says, is they're always getting ready to live. They say, oh I got to wait for things to go back to normal. I got to wait for the right conditions. I got to do this first. I got to do that. I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it in the morning. And where does this get them? It gets them nowhere. It gets

them nothing. They never do it. I'll do it tomorrow is the biggest lie in the morning and where does this get them? It gets them nowhere, it gets them nothing. They never do it. I'll do it tomorrow is the biggest lie in the world. You could be good today, Marks really says in meditations, but instead you choose tomorrow. What the Stoics try to do is if something is worth doing, they wanna do it now, they wanna get started now. They're disciplined enough and also humble enough to know that there's something entitled about procrastination. It assumes that you have the discipline and the time and the

opportunity to do it later and we don't know that for sure. The the graveyard of lost potential we might say of wasted time and wasted years is people who needed to do something else first. Putting things off is the biggest waste of life Seneca wrote. It says it snatches away each day as it comes and it denies us the present by promising us the future. He said, the whole future lies in uncertainty. Live immediately. I think he's saying, do it now.

Get rid of, I'll get to it later from your lexicon. Do it now. Marcus Aurelius had a pretty simple recipe for a better life. He said, if you seek tranquility, do less. He said, the question we have to ask ourselves with everything is, is this essential? And he says, because when you eliminate the inessential,

you get the double satisfaction of doing less better. So much of what we do, what we spend our days on, what we spend our lives on, we don't need to do. We do it out of habit, we do it out of guilt, we do it out of laziness, we do it out of not wanting to seem rude. We do it because we think we have forever or we have unlimited time

and then we wonder why our heart isn't in it, we wonder why we don't have time to do the actual important things. If we could do less inessential stuff, we'd be able to do what is essential better. And we get that tranquility that Marcus Aurelius is talking about. We have to cultivate the power, the ability to say no, the ability to prioritize, the ability to eliminate.

If we want tranquility, if we want productivity, it's about more wood behind fewer arrows. It's about really sticking with the things that are important and eliminating the inessential and the unnecessary. There was a Greek word that we get from the Stoics, Cosmeotis, and this is about order. This is about keeping things clean. When I'm feeling overwhelmed, when I'm feeling behind, I often look down at my desk and go, of course I feel

this way. Of course my life is this way. Look at it. This is a metaphor. Gretchen Rubin, who I've interviewed on the Daily Stoke podcast has this great line, she says, outer order, inner calm. So one of the things we have to do is get our stuff organized, keep things clean and simple and elegant. Like what does your desktop look like? Your digital desktop and your actual desktop?

Are you drowning in papers? Is your office a mess? Do you have a million unread emails? Is your phone filled with alerts? Creating order and systems, eliminating noise and interruptions, creating order from the chaos of life is key to protecting that sort of stoic sense of purpose

and direction and clarity. Seneca talks about how, look, sometimes life is messy and chaotic, but to needlessly be plunged into that is irresponsible. So how do we create order and structure in our lives? How do we set up systems? How do we automate things? If everything in your life is dependent on willpower, is dependent on constant excavations, you're going to be exhausted. So you got to create order and systems. You got to keep things clean. You got to stick with systems and structure, or you're going to get overwhelmed. In a world of social media and instant gratification, shamelessness and awfulness, we need boundaries

more than ever. You know, like minding your own business, keeping your private life private, not oversharing, not letting people drag you down, not getting entangled in other people's dysfunctions or entangling them in yours. Being strong enough to communicate what you like and dislike respecting other people's space and preferences. It's like basic stuff, but it's pretty rare these days. We're surrounded by oversharers and hot messes, doormats, drama queens, busybodies, pushovers,

gossip mongers. Boundaries are about drawing some lines around yourself. Healthy borders that help determine what you share and what you won't, what you let in, what you don't, what you focus on and what you don't. Actually, one of the opening passages in Meditations is about this very idea. Marcus Relius starts book two, he says, when you wake up in the morning, tell yourself the people I will deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, and jealous and surly, right? But he's not just saying, hey, the world is gonna be awful. He's saying this is what boundaries are about.

He says, but I won't let them implicate me in ugliness. He says, none of them can hurt me. And I think what boundaries are about creating space, creating buffers. So not everyone and everything has access to your mind. This is the Stoic concept of an inner citadel. Things that are outside us can't be allowed to touch us. The news of the world, the annoying coworker, the noises coming in.

One of Seneca's letters, I open stillness is the key with this, is Seneca trying to concentrate in work in the midst of a very's letters, I open stillness is the key with this, is Seneca trying to concentrate in work in the midst of a very busy and noisy Rome where people were always trying to get at him where he had to tune out a lot of distraction. And so the ability to have these boundaries to be self-contained, self-sufficient, is just a key stoic practice to having a well-ordered and well-functioning life. So you might think if the stoics were all about routine and structure and order that they were really rigid. And it might seem contradictory for me to tell you that they're not, right? This is a video about organizing your life. And here I am telling you this idea of formlessness.

But formlessness comes to us from the great Robert Green. He says it's the most stoic law of power. And again, that might not be what you think of the stoics because the stoics were all about rules and structure and discipline. But life is unpredictable. There is so much outside of our control. If you need things to be a certain way,

if you can't adapt and adjust, you're gonna have a hard time. In Meditations, Mark Schuyler says that adaptability is the ability to look at what life deals you and say, yes, that's just what I was looking for. So yes, we have our preferred way of doing things, but we can handle them however they are. Cato was one of the most vaunted and towering of the Stoics, but he never gave an inch on anything, even in the face of the most unrelenting pressure. And this, in the end, made him not so effective politician. He refused compromise in every form.

He insisted on tradition down to the letter and that rigidity became a kind of fragility. We need the ability to adjust and embrace change. One of the Queen's mottoes, which I loved, was if things are gonna stay the same, then things are gonna have to change. My routine has changed so much since I had kids, since I moved to Texas, since I became a writer,

different phases and seasons of my life, my routine is always changing. But these overarching principles, these deeper ideas, these commitments, that allows me to shuffle those things around but still hold true to the same basic concepts. Epictetus was once asked by one of his students, like, what are you supposed to do? And Epictetus didn't have an answer for him.

And the student finally said, no, you gotta tell me what to do. And Epictetus said, it would be better if you asked me to help make you adaptable to circumstances. That's what we have to ultimately be as Stoics, adaptable to any and all circumstances, no matter what's going on in the outside world,

we find ways to be productive and efficient and focus on what's essential inside of them. And the last final, and I think most brief thing, and focus on what's essential inside of them. And the last final, and I think most brief thing the Stoics use to shape their days and lives is a reminder of how short life is. "'You could leave life right now,' Park Shruth says in Meditations, "'let that determine what you do and say and think.'"

Seneca's view was even more of a paradigm shift. He says, don't think of death as this thing in the future that you're moving slowly towards. He says, death is happening right now. He says, the time that passes belongs to death. So as we decide how to structure our days, whether to procrastinate or not, what order to put them in or not, to do things or not,

we have to remember we are purchasing these things in front of us with our most precious resource, our time, something we can never get back. And so we have to be present, we have to prioritize, we have to be humble, we have to be flexible because life is short. Memento more, you could go at any moment, let that determine what you do and say and think and how you live. 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. I'm Raza Jaffrey. And in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Witold Pilecki, the spy who infiltrated Auschwitz.

Resistance fighter Witold Pilecki has heard dark rumours about an internment camp on his home soil of Poland. Hoping to expose its cruelty to the world, he leaves his family behind and deliberately gets himself imprisoned. The camp is called Auschwitz, a hellish place where the unimaginable becomes routine. Pilecki is determined. He needs to organise the prisoners, build a resistance and get the truth out. Except when the world hears about the horrors of the camp, nobody comes to the rescue. In the end, it's just him, alone,

with only one decision to make. Accept death or escape. Follow the Spy Who on the Wandery app or wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Infiltrated Auschwitz early and ad-free with Wandery Plus.