The Daily Stoic - You Can Shut Your Ears | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners.

But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree'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. You can shut your ears. Beating up to the German blitz, it was said that in London, you could feel the anxiety in the air. Britain's then first lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill would have been particularly high strung. A debt payment was due in a month. He had no money. His sons gambling and drinking problems were getting worse.

There were blackout rules strict rationing and the endless Cascade of noises and disturbances as construction crews worked to defend the city against attack. It was during all this that Churchill goes for a walk as he crossed paths with a newsboy cheerfully whistling Churchill let out some tension. Stop that whistling! He snapped at the boy. Why should I, the boy said? Because I don't like it, and it's a horrible noise, Churchill said. Well, you can shut your ears, can't you? Churchill was furious, his face flushed red with anger. He kept walking, and then repeated to himself with laughter. You can shut your ears, can't you? And it's true. As Mark

really said, you don't have to turn this into something. You can sharpen the selectivity of your eyes and ears. You can choose to let the whistling newsboy drift right on by. You can choose to pretend that you didn't just read that tweet. You can choose not to remember that you were even hit. This Kato did after being attacked at the bats. All the rudeness, all the things you take offense at, all the things that frustrate you, all the sounds that you hate, all the writers whose opinions make you angry, you can tune it all out.

You can stay above the noise. You can not have an opinion. You can shut your ears. And when anger begins to flush your face, you can turn it to laughter. Try it. It's life-changing. And by the way, this story comes from The Splendid and the Vile, which is a great book by Eric Larson. I sell it to Pain in Ports.

If you haven't read it, you should definitely check it out. I'm Matori. I'm the D.A. Council for this team. And I had this question. Why should one, rigidly, follow-estersism rather than be eclectic and take the best of different traditions? Because I think if you're boxing yourself in a very rigid system, you can compromise other aspects like spontaneity or under button, you know, emotions like passion or even pain often help you overcome those obstacles as well. So why we should restrain ourselves that much. I don't think that we should. I wouldn't say that you should, you should, you should, I wouldn't say that you should rigidly follow stosism.

One of my favorite stoke fingers is Cedica, but what's remarkable as you read Seneca, the Stoic, is that the philosopher he quotes the boast is Epicurus, his ostensible rival, and he says, look, you should read like a spy in the enemy's camp, that you should be very familiar with all the other traditions. And he says, all quote a bad author author if the line is good, meaning that he'll take from anyone. And so, look, the stokes, I think, were remarkably on point about a lot of things, and especially

when you consider they were, you know, figuring this out 2,000 years ago, without any understanding of neuroscience or biology or psychology or even our modern understanding of human rights and all of these things, right? So if they were alive today, I feel like they would be practitioners of a much broader philosophy that would borrow from and absorb the best innovations from all of the other schools. So I do try to read eclectically, I've certainly integrated all sorts of ideas from Eastern philosophy into the stoicism that I write about. Even when I talked earlier about Amor Fati, that Latin expression is from the 1800s. It's actually from Nietzsche

who hated the stoics, but he happened to be very aligned with the Stoics in this one idea of sort of loving one's fate and finding the way to find good at it instead of resenting it. So I'm very much myself in a collectic sort of student of philosophy. I think if you are dogmatic or doctrinaire about it, you are artificially limiting yourself. And you should take from anything that improves your life

and makes you a better person or better at what you do. Practicism at the end, which is one of the aspects you were mentioning in your book as well, I think it knew in the action discipline, right? Mm-hmm. So.

Absolutely. All right. All right. Hi. That's Babis. I'm Greek, not a philosopher. I'm running the North American commercial business. I'll come back to the kids' question that Mike had. I have two daughters, teenage age, where the phone is the extension of their hand.

Sure. teenage age where you know the phone is the extension of the hand sure and part of the social media I think it's been more time looking at phone than doing other things sure and sometimes when I'm trying to tell them my guys Life is not a rehearsal but what? No or no perception is reality Like again, that are you talking about? Sure.

So at this age, when all the parents want to kind of prepare the kids before they go to their real life, when they're going to stand by themselves, do you have any ideas, practices, how you take those kids and try to, I don't know, put them into that. It's not thinking it bit different. Well, when I first really fell into stoicism in my early 20s, I think one of the reasons it resonated with me was because it confirmed all of the things that I'd heard from my parents

and grandparents, but had rolled my eyes at when I heard it, right? So I think part of it is understanding again this idea of You know focus on what you control you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink right or the The Zendex pressure that when the student is ready the teacher appears It's understanding that you know you're gonna you can give them all the information But when it actually clicks is not something that's up to you and you probably can't force upon them prematurely. So I think understanding that, hey,

I'm gonna tell them all the things that I think are important. I'm gonna repeat these things a million times. I'm gonna try to model them, but that there's probably a delayed activation for any of these ideas, right? And you have to, I think, reassure yourself that they are listening more than it seems that they are. They're just one not going to give you the satisfaction of acknowledging it. And two, have it quite had the life experiences experiences that allow any of this stuff to really make sense, right? To me, one of the really amazing parts of the Stoke tradition is this thing that they get from Herod cleatis,

this idea that we never step in the same river twice, right? Even though the ideas are the same, it's that we're different when we step in it just as the river is the same, but the idea that, you know, you can hear it once, you can hear it 50 times, but it's when you're in it just as the river is the same. But the idea that you can hear it once, you can hear it 50 times, but it's when you're in the right place at the right time that suddenly it all clicks and it starts to make sense. So I think I might give yourself some credit that you're doing the things that are right,

you're telling them the things, but they're just not in a position for that to truly click at it, it will happen with time and you've got to sort of trust that process. But I agree of course, you know, this is the opposite of the philosophical life, right? This is instant gratification, endless stimulation, endless provocation, and that's certainly not where you want to come from. I think all of us are lucky.

I'm just at the probably got in right before the door closed, but sort of remembering what life was like before it was intermediated by this thing before it consumed all facets of our life. I was just reading Chuck Klosterman's book on the 90s, which is an amazing history of the 1990s. It's a totally different experience. It's like they live in a different world. I think with time, hopefully there will be a nostalgic appreciation for some of these old ways of doing things. I do try know teach good habits with my kids on the phone, but it's probably a losing battle ultimately Which is probably good for your business good for your business. That's so great for the world Well, I'll miss my son is twenty-three. I can tell you is it isn't possible?

But to look at this they will find their own way can tell you it's a reasonable possibility, but to what gives this, they will find their own way. Right, I have a question to you about the ocean. I can be follows, a famous guy in the moment is a silenced ski in the Ukraine needs. Yeah, of course. And I personally believe that if you make really great leadership, what can we learn from him, how we act and what what he is doing in the moment? Isn't it, I mean, you can watch Zalinsky on the Ukrainian dancing with the stars, which he won in like 2006. This is the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian movie. And here he is staring down, you know, a nuclear superpower with sort of sheer courage and a nuclear superpower with sort of sheer courage and determination. I mean, I think a couple things about that situation. One, it's a reminder that it's not

invoked to discuss the sort of the great man of history theory, right? Obviously, it's politically incorrect and that it's just called the Great Man of History Theory. But we live in a time where we look at everything as systemic or structural that there are these enormous forces that are shaping and shifting the world that like one human being can't make a difference. But almost all the analysis about this, you know, somewhat inevitable conflict was thrown out the window because one human being changed

the equation, like one guy, a different leader, it would have gone in a totally different direction. And so to me, it's a reminder of the sort of agency that we have as human beings that we often take for granted. In the way that, you know, how much of our world has been shaped by the singular inventions or creations or decisions of people. And there's a, I think, it's easy to feel disempowered, but when we look at these individuals, I think it should empower us. There's this great expression of what one man with courage makes a majority, again, is all sexist language, but that a singular person can change the direction of things, whether it's Charles DeGaulle or Zelensky or Antelomarcal.

That one person, their force of will, their personality, their decisions can shape the whole direction that things go. I think that's very inspiring. To me, the other thing about Zelensky talking about social media is, Zelensky and the Ukrainians have clearly figured out that there are two wars that they're fighting. There is the physical war, which they've done a remarkable job of, but there is also the information war. And they have run circles around the Russians, which is not an easy thing to do, given that the Russians are the ultimate practitioners of information war. But they have won the meme war, the information war, the narrative war, and how brilliant

that is, and that we have to understand that the future will be these two, if not just, I forget who said it, but the perception is reality, right? That the story you tell, the narrative, the multimedia interactive participatory narrative of your cause or your organization or your invention or your brand, that this matters just as much as how many tanks you have and how big your army is and how much money you have. So I found that to be also very educational and informative, just sort of watching them do this because I think it can be easy. My first book is about sort of medium manipulation, but this is it just these images, these things

that we're hearing about, this line, oh I don't need a ride, I need ammunition, you know, this is also very choreographed, and very deliberately and brilliantly done. That doesn't just happen, and I've been following that quite closely as well. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa. The Stoa, Poquile, the Painted Porch, and Ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of

the Stowe. We're calling it Daily Stowe Life. It's an awesome community. You can talk about, like today's episode. You can talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stowe's system to be better in their actual real lives. You get more Daily Stowe meditations over the weekend, just for the daily stoke life members, quarterly Q&As with me, clothbound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and this is the best part, all our daily stoke courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our new year, new U challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two week trial, totally for free.

Check it out at dailystokelife.com. 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. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Codopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some

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