The Daily Stoic - You Always Lose When You Lose Your Temper | Respect The Past, But Be Open To The Future

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 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, visitdailysteoic.com. bad things have happened. That's just a fact. Because getting angry rarely makes things better, even if it helps you get what you thought you wanted. It taxes your heart. It causes you to be mean

Starting point is 00:01:11 to other people to win. You had to lose your self-control. That is not to say you should merely accept everything in life. The Stoics were not passive weaklings. It's that they preferred persuasion, patience, and persistence to yelling. They focused on addressing the root causes. not catharsis. How much worse getting mad is than the things that caused it, Seneca said. Anger always outlasts hurt, he advised. Best to take the opposite course, would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog? So if you want to win at life, at philosophy, at accomplishing what you set out to accomplish, then you need to rein in your temper. You'll need to figure out the opposite course to develop more than one kind of response to

Starting point is 00:02:00 things you don't like. It's easy to get angry, but it's more effective to remain calm. You come up with solutions. Tame your temper. Don't make problems worse by getting angry. We've been working on something in that regard over at Daily Stoic. We're calling it the pause and reflect medallion. It's something I've been carrying in my pocket, holding it in my hand. I've got it right here spinning it on the desk. It says pause at reflecta on the front in Latin. it's got a picture of a mirror. I want to get a look of myself and what I look like when I look angry. I want a reminder to count the letters of the alphabet before I say what I'm about to say. Because again, delay is a good remedy. I've never lost my temper and felt good about it

Starting point is 00:02:45 after I always regret it. The idea is that between the stimulus and the response, we have a little space, one where we can decide what we're going to do and who we're going to be. Actually, on the back, there's a little piece of advice from Thinodorus being an advisor to the Emperor Augustus. He said that whenever you feel yourself getting angry, don't do or say anything until you've repeated all 24 letters of the alphabet to yourself. That's what it's about, right? Pause and reflect. Really think about this. And you can grab that at Daily Stoic. dot com slash pause. And I think it's a great everyday carry or reminder to have with you in your house. Check it out.

Starting point is 00:03:52 be walking in your predecessor's footsteps, I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered 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 Zeno or Cleanthes. In our case, perhaps a breakthrough in psychology improves upon the writing of Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, or perhaps we have a breakthrough of

Starting point is 00:04:42 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 2,000 years ago. People often ask me, you know, what would the Stoics think about this or that? Would a Stoic 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 2,000 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 Montana. He missed out on the Enlightenment, right?

Starting point is 00:05:22 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 suffragettes.

Starting point is 00:05:39 They missed out on Sojourner Truth. They missed out on people who made massive breakthroughs in how we think about things. right? Like the Stoics 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 Surrealus talks about how he learns about justice from Cato and Helvidius and Thrasia. Clearly not enough. He still lived in a 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?

Starting point is 00:06:20 He would have benefited from the advancements that happened after. There was a quote I liked from Churchill. Again, not a perfect person who was wrong about so many things. But a friend and a colleague of Churchill said something about how Churchill venerated tradition but hated convention. So I like this distinction between, you know, the timeless priest. 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 unquestioned.

Starting point is 00:06:57 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 Lives of the Stoics, but he's there, and he hears these different philosophers debating philosophical ideas. Maybe he kind of likes Stoicism, but what 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 Moss Maorum, the old ways. But the old ways are not actually one thing. They change. They evolve. They have to. to. I talk about this in Discipline's Destiny, actually. 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,

Starting point is 00:08:04 she changes from day to day. She evolves. She adapts. She inputs new information. And I think this is what Seneca 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, try 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. Be open to that change,

Starting point is 00:08:53 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 Stoics 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 Moss Mayorum, that is to be challenged.

Starting point is 00:09:25 It must be challenged. That's where I'll leave you today. Think about where stoicism is in bleed 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. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoag podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you.

Starting point is 00:09:52 It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of 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. You know,

The Daily Stoic - You Always Lose When You Lose Your Temper | Respect The Past, But Be Open To The Future

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