The Daily Stoic - Will You Seize This Reminder? Or Let It Pass? | What Expensive Things Cost

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Daily Stoic is based here in this little town outside Austin. When we have podcast guests come in and go, oh, what hotel should I stay at? Honestly, there's not really many great hotels out here, but there are a bunch of beautiful Airbnbs that you could stay in a ranch. You could stay on something overlooking the Colorado River. They've even got yurts in the woods out here. And Airbnb has a million different options, old historic houses.

Starting point is 00:00:32 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.

Starting point is 00:00:51 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.

Starting point is 00:01:41 For more, visit DailyStstoic.com. Spring is the most beautiful of the seasons. Suddenly after a dreary winter, the colors come back, the birds are out, the days last longer, the breeze is light, the days last longer. The breeze is light and the air is cool. But as Philip Larkin's bittersweet poem reminds us, beneath this turning of seasons is a kind of darkness. As the poem goes, the trees are coming into leaf

Starting point is 00:02:17 like something almost being said. The recent buds relax and spread. Their greenness is kind of grief. The inherent message is about the passage of time. Each season brings new life, yes, but also marks the cessation of life. It's a painful truth, the poem says, that's written in the rings of a tree.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Winter is dead and over, and all of us a little more so too. This notion serves as a gentle nudge, reminding us of the preciousness of every moment. It urges us not merely to exist, but to truly live, to seize each season and extract its full potential, which is what we mean when we say here at Daily Stoic that it's time to spring forward. If you did our New Year, New You challenge,

Starting point is 00:03:02 you heard us talking about that back in December. Well, we've got a new one for you. It's called the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. This is the time of year where we're talking about spring cleaning. It's worth pondering how often do we organize not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines and our assumptions as well, reflect on the last week.

Starting point is 00:03:22 How many of those seven days were efficient and as productive as they could have been? Or did you find yourself wasting time over complicating things and falling back on old habits? Or you, like many others, still feeling the lingering effects of winter's inertia? Well, the Daily Stokes Spring Forward Challenge is designed to prompt introspection

Starting point is 00:03:40 into those aspects of your life to help you scrutinize your choices, your relationships and your habits and help propel you towards a life of fulfillment. As Mark's really said, this is what you deserve. You could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow. So the choice is yours. Are you gonna let your New Year's resolutions

Starting point is 00:03:57 fade into missed opportunities and continue with the status quo? Or could you invest 10 days into self-improvement, create some runway for some genuine lasting change, challenge yourself with me and thousands of other Stokes all over the world to spring forward and become the person you inspire to be.

Starting point is 00:04:14 And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash spring. I'll see you in there. We're gonna do a bunch of awesome stuff, Q and A with me, some great lessons, all kinds of great thinking on how to spring forward, grab this next season and get the most out of it. And I'd love to see you join us, dailystoic.com slash spring. And you can also join Daily Stoic Life

Starting point is 00:04:36 if you've been thinking about doing that and get this challenge and all the other challenges we're doing for the rest of the year, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff for free. And you can do that at DailyStoicLife.com. What expensive things cost? From the cynics, the Stoics learned the powerful practice of focusing on the true worth of things. That the cost of an item isn't simply what it's sold for, but what it costs the owner to own. So much of our desire for material

Starting point is 00:05:11 goods comes at the great price of both anxiety and the loss of our serenity. And even when gained these things often leave us more anxious and less serene. So today spend some time reflecting on what the things you buy actually cost you and see if they are really worth what you have been paying." And that's from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. We have some quotes from Seneca and Epictetus here. So concerning the things we pursue and for what we vigorously exert ourselves, we owe this consideration. Either there is nothing useful in them, or most aren't useful. Some of them are superfluous, while

Starting point is 00:05:52 others aren't worth that much. But we don't discern this and see them as free, when they cost us so dearly. That's Seneca's moral letters. Then we have Epictetus. If a person gave your body away to some passerby, you'd be furious, yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along so that they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. Have you no shame? Epictetus asks. And then we have Diogenes Laertes quoting Diogenes of Sinope.

Starting point is 00:06:21 That's Diogenes the cynic. He says, we sell things of great value for things of very little and vice versa. You know, they say the best things in life are free. And that's not really true, but I would say that a lot of things are much more expensive than they appear, right? So we chase these things, we want these things,

Starting point is 00:06:43 we want a fancy car, and then we're worried about making sure nothing happens to that fancy car. I remember a few years ago, I put new floors at my house. And on the one hand, I hated the old floors and it made the house look better. And they were easier to walk on and improve my life. But then we had kids and now all of a sudden, there's this part of me that worries

Starting point is 00:07:06 about the floors all the time, right? I don't want them to get scratched. I don't want water to sit on them. And so this thing that costs me money, it was not cheap to put new floors in the house, didn't just cost what it cost. It cost all the anxiety. It cost the arguments between me and my wife

Starting point is 00:07:24 about who's to blame for this scratch on the floor from the couch. It costs goodwill between me and my kid because I'm like, hey, why did you spill that part of you that just blurts out trying to protect things? And the truth is it really doesn't matter. I remember I was talking to a therapist about some version of this and she said, just write it off, like write it off in your head. You spent the money, it's gone. You can't try to keep it all together, right? You can't try to keep it pristine.

Starting point is 00:07:55 It's like the people who buy a toy and then they want it in mint condition. I mean, this is not just a violation of the law of entropy. It's a violation of the law of happiness. You will not be happy if this is how you're spending all your time trying to keep everything in one place, trying to keep them together. It's an illusion.

Starting point is 00:08:12 It will not last. You cannot do it. You have to be able to let go. That's the old Zen saying that, the cup is already broken. The cup is already broken. The Stoics knew that expensive things cost even more

Starting point is 00:08:25 than their price tag. That's why there's the great story of Epictetus. He has this lamp, it's stolen. And the next day he says, I'm gonna go get a cheaper lamp. So I don't have to worry about it getting stolen ever again. And I don't have to be sad that it's missing ever again. So for the Stoics, remember,

Starting point is 00:08:42 it's not just what actually is valuable and isn't. You know, a lot of times we ascribe value to things that are superficial and meaningless and pointless, but also it's realizing that you are spending even more money than you think on things and you're spending your happiness is really what you're spending on. So I wanna leave you with that thought. It's not that you live in a pigsty,

Starting point is 00:09:03 you don't care about anything. You should try to keep your things nice and not unnecessarily wear them down, but you also cannot resist entropy. You cannot resist time. You cannot resist wear and tear. And if you do so, it comes at the expense. The most important thing, which is time,

Starting point is 00:09:20 and the other most important thing, which is your happiness, and the other most important thing, which is the relationships, the people in your life. So you only have so much time to think or worry or spend time on things. Are you going to spend it trying to preserve your floors? You're not going to live there forever. You're probably going to tear them out at some point anyway. No, focus on what matters. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast.

Starting point is 00:09:47 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. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:10:06 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:10:12 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:10:19 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 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.

Starting point is 00:10:30 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. Shopping local might seem like a tough cookie, but truthfully finding Ontario Made products is a piece of cake. That's why supportontariomade.ca exists. With over 17,000 products listed, everything from cars to cosmetics, it's never been easier to shop local and support Ontario manufacturers of all sizes. When you choose Ontario Made, you're supporting your neighbors, strengthening our economy, and celebrating the incredible products Ontario sells with pride. Discover what's made right here.

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The Daily Stoic - Will You Seize This Reminder? Or Let It Pass? | What Expensive Things Cost

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