The Daily Stoic - What You Propose, Fate Will Dispose | Respect The Past, But Be Open To The Future

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stokeic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author

and collaborator, Steve Enhancelman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus Marks, Relius, Seneca, then some analysis for me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery'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. Marked here before about the toughest part of Marcus Aurelius' legacy, how can a man so committed to justice and moderation have allowed his unstable son, Commodus, to succeed him? It's inexplicable, it's a major failing. But what if it was more complicated than that? Marcus Aurelius had 13 children, six of them boys and therefore eligible to be heirs. In 166 A.D. when Commodus was five and his other son Marcus and Ius Varis was just three,

Marcus actually named them both Caesar, hoping they could both be raised to be great co-emperors, and that each boy would balance out and help the other. But Varis would die tragically just three years later in complications from routine surgery. Of Marcus's six boys, five of them would die before Marcus did. Imagine that, one terrible blow after another. There were plans that Lucius Varus, Marcus' co-emperor, would have an error that would co-rule with Communis, but that too was foiled. Marcus proposed a plan, but as the expression goes, God disposed of it.

It's not as if, as is the case with so many rulers, that Marcus simply planned to live forever and could not even consider the idea of someone ruling after him. It's not as if Marcus was blind to the faults of his children or the pressures of the throne. He was in fact well aware of all of this and worked incredibly hard to come up with a solution, but fate kept knocking them down. This is life, isn't it? So much of it is outside of our control. Exactly when we need to be cut a break, we get another bad break. That's no excuse for Communists, of course. It doesn't explain whatever was wrong with him,

nor does it exonerate Marcus Realius as a parent or as an emperor. But it is important context. We propose fate disposes. We mice and men lay down our plans and they are dashed to pieces. That's life, that's history, let's have a little humility about it.

Respect the past, but be open to the future. This is today's entry August 25th in the Daily Stowett. Won't you be walking in your predecessors footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way all blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneer these paths aren't our masters but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone, and it hasn't been monopolized. That's Seneca's moral letters, 33. Traditions are often time-tested best practices for doing something. But remember that today's conservative ideas were once controversial cutting edge and innovative. That's why we can't be afraid to experiment with new ideas. In Seneca's case, he might be

embracing some new philosophical insight that improves on the writings of Xenoer Clientes. In our case, perhaps a breakthrough in psychology improves upon the writing of Seneca or markets, really. So perhaps we have a breakthrough of our own. If these ideas are truer and better embrace them, use them. You don't need to be a prisoner of a dead old man who stopped learning 2000 years ago. People often ask me, you know, what would the Stoics think about this or that? Would the Stoics go to therapy? Therapy being one I've talked about a lot of times. Of course they would. You have to understand that the Stoics are frozen in time in a way by no fault of their own, right? When I say that Seneca stopped learning 2000 years ago, it's not his fault. I mean, he died, right? He didn't get to read Darwin.

He didn't get to read Montaigne. He missed out on the enlightenment, right? He missed out on the Renaissance. He missed out on the Industrial Revolution. They missed out on everything, right? They missed out on the Declaration of Independence. They missed out on Lincoln. They missed out on Martin Luther King, right? They missed out on the suff of independence. They missed out on Lincoln. They missed out on Martin Luther King. They missed out on the suffragettes. They missed out on sojourner truth. They missed

out on people who made massive breakthroughs in how we think about things. The Stokes talk about justice in the abstract, and justice is a virtue and ideal, but then we've we've had innovations as a society as we've gone along as to what justice means. Who deserves justice, right? Mark Seria's talks about how he learns about justice from from Cato and Helvides and Thrasia, but clearly not enough, he still lived in slave society and did nothing about it, right? He would have benefited from, again, the Declaration of Independence, but he would have benefited from the abolitionists, right? He would have benefited from the advancements that happened after.

There was a quote I like from Churchill. Again, not a perfect person who was wrong about so many things, but a friend and a colleague of church else said something about how church of venerated tradition but hated convention. So I like this distinction between, you know, the timeless principles or ideals that we try to live by, that we try to orient ourselves around, and then just the kind of practices that are just there that we leave on the question. I'll give you a good example at the core of stoicism, and I've talked about this before. Cato, the elder, the great-great-grandfather of Cato, was there when

stoicism was introduced to Rome from Greece. I tell the story in the lives of the stoics, but he's there, and he hears these different philosophers debating philosophical ideas. Maybe he kind of likes Stosis, but when he heard from the other philosophers, he was like, nope, this is not good. I don't like this new stuff. And he tried to ban them from Rome. And you think about the irony that just a generation

or two later, his grandson is a well-known philosopher and is known as a philosopher for thousands of years. Kato himself is conservative, has these ideas, he's a protector of the mosme or the old ways, but the old ways are not actually one thing, they change, they evolve, they have to. I talk about this in discipline and destiny actually, which you can preorder now at dailystalk.com slash preorder. But there's a quote that Queen Elizabeth favors. It's some Italian novelist who said, if things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change.

Right? So yes, we venerate tradition, but we challenge convention. And the Queen has done this over and over and over again. She's even the Beatles song, the Queen, the Queen, she changes from day to day. She evolves, she adapts, she inputs new information. And I think this is what Santa Cah is saying, right? You respect the past, but you're open to the future. You're willing to question the past, where it's wrong. You're willing to adjust from what you inherited from the past to make a better future. And where would we be if this never happened, right?

Not in a good place. So the Stoics understand that change is inevitable, and in fact, tried to be progressive, tried to change, tried to adjust, and again, I'm using conservative and progressive, you're not in the American political sense, but the larger sense, you have to do this. Truth is open to all of us.

The ones who pioneered your paths are not masters, but guides. Open to that change, accept it, look for new information. All that stuff ultimately supplements and improves upon this wonderful philosophy that we study. That's why I bring in new examples.

That's why I try to read academic research. That's why I talk to experts. So I even vet it through my own experience. Do not feel that the stillings are giving you doctrine or dogma, right? They are giving you principles, principles matter. Principles should be venerated, but conventions, but the status quo, but the way we've always done things, the mosme or that, is to be challenged. It must be challenged. That's where I'll leave you today. Think about where stoicism is incomplete to

you, where it should be adjusted, where it can be improved, what new things you're adding to it, because that is an important, powerful thing to do. It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Dio Stoke to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks.

Are you gonna let those weeks slip by or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall and every single week that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in

that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystow.com. Sush, M.M. calendar. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on Page Six

or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy

pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents,

but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondering App. music or the Wondry app.