The Daily Stoic - What To Do When the World Feels Like Too Much

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It is just starting to get real hot here in Texas. So I'm excited to get on the road. We're going at the end of the week. We're going to the West Coast because I've got to talk in.

Starting point is 00:00:32 Portland and I've got a talk in San Francisco, both much cooler places than Texas during the summer. You can come see me and grab tickets at Daily Stoiclive.com. Then I've got some other dates, I think in August. I think I'm doing like the Midwest. But in October, I'm going back to Australia and New Zealand where I'm not only going to be doing some talks, but I'm going to do a lot of swimming and sightseeing. It's one of my favorite places in the world. Because of those gigs, I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago with Ryan Shelton and Hugh and Josh Van Kulenberg.

Starting point is 00:01:09 They gave me a dose of that Australian hospitality. And I don't know. I thought there was some good stuff in here. I wanted to share. I asked them if I could run a chunk of that interview. You can listen to the full episode over on the Imperfects podcast. You can watch it on their YouTube channel at The Imperfects. Look, the Stoics are not perfect.

Starting point is 00:01:28 Stoicism is not about perfection. It is about trying to get better always. Epictetus says, just because we despair of perfection doesn't mean we despair of the pursuit of it. So how do we get better? How do we work on ourselves? How do we make those little improvements day-to-day? That's sort of what we talk about in today's episode. And, you know, I try to get better on each one of the talks that I do.

Starting point is 00:01:53 So I hope to see you in Portland on June 8th, San Francisco on June 11th. Was it Minneapolis on the 18th of August, Chicago the next day, Detroit the day after that. And then I'll be over in New Zealand on October 13th. Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th, Perth on the 21st, and then I think some East Coast dates in the U.S. closer to November and December. You can grab all those tickets at daily stoiclive.com. But let's get into today's episode. All right, so I got these two talks in Portland and San Francisco in early June, and I've got to figure out what I'm going to wear.

Starting point is 00:02:34 You know, normally I just wear a heavy metal shirt and running shorts or something, but I can't do that on stage. And I can't wear the same stuff on stage for all of the events because it would screw up the video. And that's why I'm shopping on Quince right now. I want something that looks good on stage, that I'm not going to sweat through. It's not going to get super wrinkled. Quince has got great t-shirts, they've got great light sweaters, and everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen so you're paying for

Starting point is 00:03:06 quality, not brand markup. And Quince goes way beyond clothing. They've got sofas and ceramic cookware, premium betting. It's the kind of brand you can end up recommending to everyone for everything. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com. slash stoic for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns, now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash stoic for free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com slash stoic.

Starting point is 00:03:37 You know what silently kills sales teams? The inability to see what's happening in their pipeline. And part of the reason they can't do that is because they use software or CRM that's so complicated that people don't even log in. I do this all the time. You get some tool and you're like, I'm going to use it. and then it's so complicated, you don't use it. And that's where today's sponsor, PipeDrive comes in.

Starting point is 00:03:59 It's an easy, intelligent CRM loved by growing sales teams, and most important, actually used by them. Pip Drive gives your team one complete trusted record of every customer in deal. It's all centered around a visual pipeline where you can see everything, what stage a deal is in, what needs to happen next. And then you've got complete clarity on your entire sales process in a glance. It's fast as setup, easy to learn, and genuinely delightful to use. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join over 100,000 companies already using PipeDrive.

Starting point is 00:04:33 And RLink gives you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head over to pipe drive.com slash stoic to get started. That's PipeDrive.com slash Stoic. You can be up and running in minutes. What we thought we would do today is the three of us have thought about an issue or something we're struggling with with our own lives. We'd love to share that with you and just get your thoughts from a stoic point of view and how maybe Marcus and his mates would have, you know,

Starting point is 00:05:04 would respond to the issues we had if we were able to take them to them. I know, Josh, if you want to go first, maybe. Yeah, well, yeah, all right. I'll start with something small. So you sort of alluded, there's been a bit of alluding to it today already, but I find myself really struggling with the reality, this is broad, big stuff actually, but the reality of the world. There's so much to be, go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's more. I'll extrapolate more. On a day-to-day basis, I get by pretty well. I've got two kids. I love them. I've got a wonderful wife and things are good. But I find that if I open myself up to the reality of the compounding existential threats in the world, so global warming,

Starting point is 00:05:59 nuclear annihilation, AI, and I don't want to be, I find myself thinking, am I getting sort of drawn into the sort of moral panic that comes along with any new technology with AI? Or is this genuinely a threat? and I feel like if I'm not, I haven't slept perfectly, if I haven't eaten well, if I, if anything has pushed up against my day that's made my mental capacity a little under, and I look at this stuff, I'm bogged down and overwhelmed and overcome with dread. And then that pulls me out of my life and the life that I want to live. Unable to be the dad I want to be. I'm unable to be the partner I want to be. And I think most pertinately for me, I think the thing I feel most precious about in the world is time. And I feel like I'm wasting it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:50 I mean, look, if you're worried about what's happening in the world, I guess as an American, I'm obligated to say sorry because we're responsible for like half of it right now. And when I was in Australia last, I guess this was like maybe 18, 19 months ago, one of the interesting things was like it was so different. to be in another country and watch your guys's news? Because, like, unfortunately, a lot of it still was American news is, like, inescapable. It was sort of run up to the 2024 election here. But it was, you know, from the distance of a different country thousands of miles away,

Starting point is 00:07:29 it did feel less like hair on fire. And I think it's just a reminder that, like, sort of the inputs often determine sort of how we feel and think about these things. Right. And if you're sort of mainlining disaster porn and, you know, sort of worrisome horrible information all the time, like the human brain is just not designed for that. Like I think about, so Marx Reuters is the most powerful man in the world. And basically everything that could go wrong goes wrong during his reign. There's a famine. There's floods. There's a plague. There's wars. There's a coup. It's like terrible stuff all the time. But he probably got less bad news over the course of his

Starting point is 00:08:10 rain than like we get in a week or a month just because like you know he gets like a scroll with like some information on it meanwhile this is like mainlining it directly into our brain you know um it's just not it's just not our information diets are just as unhealthy if not more unhealthy than most people's like actual diet in the modern world right like if there's if there's you know sort of literal obesity there's also kind of informational obesity and then there's also like sort of anxiety obesity like you're just consuming information that's just impossibly bad and designed to sort of put you in that catatonic state because then you'll keep watching right like you'll refresh it again and you'll check it again

Starting point is 00:08:59 so this isn't to say that that we don't have an obligation to be informed and we shouldn't know you know the broad strokes of what's happening in the world but I try to remind people like unless you're like working for a hedge fund or you are literally working in you know uh the highest levels of government you probably do not need to follow things as closely as you are like i i always you were saying you're worried about a i like i would ask like you know so how's that worrying helped the global a i situation so far like you feel like it's making a difference you know are they like oh well was those three guys in australia they're they're putting a lot of brain power on it too and uh you know we can feel it's making a difference.

Starting point is 00:09:41 Like we tend to monitor situations in real time as a kind of substitute for action as a, I don't know, like a junkie basically of just getting our fix. And I try to remind myself, like, from my study of history, that there's not a single time in human history when existential dread was not a pretty pervasive emotion. And obviously we wouldn't be here if that had come true. But the feeling of the existential dread, like, okay, nuclear annihilation is a, like, I would say that we are probably closer right now to nuclear war than we have been in a very long time, again, largely because of America's totally incompetent and irrational leadership.

Starting point is 00:10:27 But unless I'm going to channel this energy into building a bunker in my backyard, like me thinking about it is not really doing anything. What do the Stoics have, I'm sure they do, insight into why it's more alluring to worry than to act? Yeah, I mean, the worry kind of puffs you up, right? The worry is like, well, I'm the center of the universe and obviously this affects me. And obviously, I have a better version of how this should go, blah, blah, blah. And then they're doing it, you know, hey, I'm going to vote. Hey, I'm going to donate to this campaign.

Starting point is 00:11:03 Hey, I'm going to go to this protest. in that we're sort of reminded of how little impact we actually have. I do think there's part of it there. Just the, you know, do you want to think about it and feel fully engaged or do you want to do your little part and then go back to your life? So I think that's part of it. But, but, you know, negative emotions tend to linger and be felt more profoundly than positive emotions. Like they find, like, for instance, in news articles, like negative articles have a higher virality potential than positive articles. And certainly, you know, that's just the extreme between like negative and positive. Like nobody shares, hey, things are pretty okay. It wasn't as bad as we thought. You know,

Starting point is 00:11:51 like that obviously is super not spreadable, right? You do want to share something about the latest outrage about something that's incredibly scary about something that that is uncertain because you can speculate about it. But like, okay, hey, they caught the guy and, you know, now the law is going to take its course. You know, that's not super interesting. But like fugitive at large in your neighborhood, you know, is incredibly activating. And so I think that's part of it. Yeah. It's sort of at a place where like the news is a genre. of entertainment now. And it's, it's, it's, and news, not even just news organizations, but I think any media

Starting point is 00:12:34 publisher, including us, it's like you, you have to put everything through the filter of like, well, we want as many people to see this as possible. And so this is like a thing that we struggle with all the time, especially on like YouTube, where it's like, we know the tricks that we've been told that we have to use in order to get more people to see this. But it just feels at odds with our, it's icky. It feels icky. And so it's a tricky thing

Starting point is 00:13:00 because even, you know, we're so conscious of it. But at the end of the day, it's like if you want to, if you want people to see this really helpful content that we believe is helpful, at a certain point you have to kind of play the game. And then it just makes, everyone's playing the game, then you're playing at these extremes.

Starting point is 00:13:19 Yeah. And it's like, I think having some insight into the game, how the game is played should affect your own habits as far as what you consume, you know? Like, I think it's really important to be informed about what's happening in the world. I would just dispute whether, like, refreshing your Twitter feed is the best way to do it. It's like, pick up a book, right? Go travel.

Starting point is 00:13:40 Talk to an actual expert. You know, there's a lot of things you can do to understand what's happening. And a lot of what's happening is not good. And it's going to require action and change and involvement and creative solutions. It's just, you know, following the news in real time is probably not. the way to do it. You know, sometimes you hear people and they're like, well, I'm just really concerned, you know, what's this going to mean for my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren? And it's like, dude, you're going to be dead. Like, I'm not saying you shouldn't care.

Starting point is 00:14:11 I'm just saying you have children in front of you right now that you're neglecting for, for worries about, you know, how they're going to handle something 20, 30, 40 years from now. And that's really the thing is like we sometimes spend a lot of time and energy thinking about, what things are going to mean in the future, and what that takes us away from is the things we can and should be doing right now. I mean, this is a sort of a massive hypothetical question, but if Marcus Aurelius were alive today and was elected into power and was running America, or maybe like in the not too distant future, we will be able to elect an AI version of Marcus Aurelius to run. I was going to say, strange things have happened to run the country. How do you think

Starting point is 00:14:57 he would be, how do you think it would be different? Like, what would he implement? Obviously, be lots of differences, but what specifically would change, do you think, that we need? Yeah, I mean, look, hopefully he wouldn't be, you know, taking billions of dollars from foreign governments, starting stupid wars, you know. Marcus Reelis is an interesting leader because he's sort of late in the Roman period. Rome's already having a number of problems. It's sort of falling up, coming apart at the seams. He deals with one crisis after another. I do think it's really interesting, you know, obviously we went through the pandemic six years ago, almost exactly. You know, Marks Rilis lived through what's known as the Antonine plague, one of the worst sort of

Starting point is 00:15:43 plagues in human history. And he seems to have done a reasonably good job, you know, listening to the experts. He doesn't, he doesn't take rash action. He doesn't run around with his head cut off. like he's sort of calm and collected and he's empathetic and and, you know, tries to do what he can. So obviously it was striking the first go around with Trump to just sort of watch what, you know, sort of totally ineffectual leadership looks like in the middle of a crisis. But, you know, sometimes philosophers don't make the best, the best rulers. We'd like to think they would. But politics is kind of a tricky, you know, unsexy business of a lot of compromise.

Starting point is 00:16:24 So there was another stoic a few generations before named Cato, who was widely considered, you know, one of the most principled and honest and, you know, sort of towering figures of integrity. And he was just horrible. Like, he was just really bad at it because he couldn't do the kind of dealmaking and campaigning and compromise that was required. So it's kind of interesting. I would like to think that, you know, good people can make for good leaders. that's not always the case. But I certainly think, you know, you want from your heads of state both sort of competence and cunning, as well as, you know, integrity and values.

Starting point is 00:17:08 And I think we're seeing in America what happens when you sort of throw all that out and replace it with, you know, what's effectively like a cult of personality. I'm keen to move to your challenge in a minute, Ryan, but I just have a question for you around I think I'm particularly interested in maybe Epictetus is like what his thoughts would have been on empathy because born into slavery, I feel like empathy can be a double-edged sword. It's something we talk a lot about in our school programs. Empathy can often lead you to action that you mentioned before, but it can also be overwhelming and lead you to worry.

Starting point is 00:17:47 Stoics in general, but also Epictetus, how would he talk about empathy? Well, what's really interesting about Epicetus, so he is a slave, he's not working in the fields, he's owned by a high-ranking member of Nero's administration. So he has this interesting life where he is owned by someone else who treats him very poorly, and yet he's surrounded by incredibly wealthy, powerful people who are jockeying, you know, in the king's court. And what he comes to understand is that there are a few different kinds of freedom, right? There's sort of the literal freedom, and then there is sort of emotional freedom, there's spiritual freedom, there's intellectual freedom. And he sort of realizes looking around at Nero's court that he's actually

Starting point is 00:18:36 freer than a lot of these people. He notices at one point he tells this story about this guy, this sort of powerful Roman who comes in, and he tries buttering up Nero's shooting. maker, like Nero's cobbler, because he wants to get in good with Nero, right? And so he's kissing this guy's ass, and Epictetus goes like, oh, I'm more powerful than this guy. Like, I'm freer than this guy who, because of his business interests, can't tell the truth, can't afford to piss off this person in Nero's administration, and he sort of comes to pity it. And again, this is something we see, you know, we see happening in the U.S. right now where you have these like tech billionaires. who have to stay on the administration's good side.

Starting point is 00:19:23 So they make donations to these, you know, silly projects. They say nice things on social media. They have to attend the, like Tim Cook worth billions upon billions of dollars, has to go to the White House to watch the premiere of the Melania documentary, which was, which, by the way, another billionaire. No spoilers, please, Ryan, I haven't seen. another billionaire Jeff Bezos overpaid $25 million for as a bribe to the administration. So you're like, you would like to think like, hey, if I ever had $100 billion like Jeff Bezos does

Starting point is 00:20:04 or if I was the CEO of Apple, like that'd be pretty sick, right? Like, no one could tell me what to do. I would be the master of my fate. And then you go, no, actually, I'd have to go to the fucking Mulau. I'm going to premiere because if I don't go and then Trump gets mad at me, he's going to slap tariffs on Apple products, and then the stock price is going to go down, and then the investors are going to yell at me, and then my own net worth is going to go down. And so the point is Epictetus is realizing that often power, and Seneca talks about this, too,

Starting point is 00:20:43 because he's there in some of the same moments, that this power is actually a form of slavery And this wealth is actually a like a golden prison. And they're just sort of talking about what it actually means to be, you know, sort of free in command of yourself, what it means to sort of live your life on your own terms. And like what we're actually chasing. And it's just it's just a fact that often the things that we chase that we think are going to make us happy or think you're going to make us free or think we're going to make us feel secure, have the exact opposite. opposite of fact.

The Daily Stoic - What To Do When the World Feels Like Too Much

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.