The Daily Stoic - You Can Wake The Dead | Don’t Be Mad At Good People

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Every time we open a book, watch a documentary, or listen to the words of someone long gone, we’re waking the dead.🎥 Watch Ken Burns’ interview on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R1jQy8O_mo📕 We’re excited to announce that we’ve put together a special leatherbound edition of The Daily Dad just in time for the holidays! Check it out at dailydad.com/leather🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. So for this tour I was just doing in Europe, we had I think four days in London and I was with my kids, my wife and my in-laws. So we knew we didn't want to stay in a hotel. We'd spend a fortune. We'd be cramped. So we booked an Airbnb and it was awesome. As it happens, the Airbnb we stayed in was like this super historic building. I think it was where like the first meeting of the Red Cross or the Salvation Army ever was. It was awesome. That's why I love staying in Airbnbs.

To stay in a cool place, you get a sense of what the place is actually like. You're coming home to your house, not to the lobby of a hotel every night. It just made it easier to coordinate everything and get a sense of what the city is like. When I spent last summer in LA, we used an Airbnb also. So you may have read something that I wrote while staying in an Airbnb. Airbnb has the flexibility in size and location that work for your family and you can always find awesome stuff. You click on guest favorites to narrow your search down. Travel is always stressful. It's always hard to be away from home. But if you're going to do it, do it right. And that's why you should check out Airbnb.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. You can wake the dead. It's a magical thing, a superpower, if you think about it.

No mortal can raise the dead. No one can bring back someone who's left this world, except of course, the artist. Someone once pointed out to the filmmaker Ken Burns, who has a must listen episode of the Daily Stoke podcast, do check it out. I'll link to it in today's show notes. They pointed out that his job was mind blowing. Look at what you do for a living. They said you wake the dead.

And if you've ever watched one of Ken Burns' documentaries, this makes perfect sense. Through the photos that he slowly pans across, through the diaries he has voice actors read, through the historians he interviews, Burns brings the Civil War back into the present moment. He puts us in the ring with Jack Johnson. He puts us with Da Vinci in Florence, he wakes them from the dead. And as it happens, Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, received a very similar prophecy as a young man. The secret to wisdom, the oracle told them, was to have conversations with the dead. It wasn't until years later that as Zeno listened to a bookseller read a dialogue from the long-dead Socrates that he realized that this is what books allow us to do.

Indeed, this is what philosophy is, a conversation with Marcus Aurelius, a walk with Seneca, a chance to examine Cato in the flesh. Every time we open a book, watch a documentary, or listen to the words of someone long gone, we are waking the dead. We are bringing them back into the present, giving them voice, allowing their experiences and wisdom to shape our lives. And in so doing, we become part of something eternal, a chain of memory and meaning that stretches across time.

Through this superpower, we ensure that the dead are never truly gone and that their lessons continue on. Hey, it's Ryan. gone and that their lessons continue on. it's one page a day. Well, I'm going to change plans a little bit because I have in my hands this you might hear this. That's not my old bones cracking. That is a fresh right out of the box copy. The leather edition of the Daily Dad. It's got these gilded pages that have never been broken before. So it's like your genome cracked for the first time. It's awesome. I'm really proud of this thing. We've got a small run of them that we just did. If you haven't read the Daily Dad, it's stoic parenting lessons, one page a day, wisdom from the ancients,

from great parents throughout history on what I think is our most important job. And so I thought I would read an entry from that today, like we've been doing every once in a while, because a lot of them are very stoic inspired. This does not correspond with today's date. This one is actually the April 11th entry, which is an important one to me.

It's something I'm working on. And the quote is from Ambrose Bierce. Now you might think, what does he have to do with Stoicism? Well, would you believe that his father's name was Marcus Aurelius Bierce? And that his uncle, his father's brother's name was Lucius Verus Beers.

So he is steeped in Stoicism from day one. He's associated more with, I guess, a modern tradition of cynicism, but I found him to be a Stoic guy. Don't be mad at good people. April 11th in the Daily Dad book. You can grab that at store.dailydad.com. Here's the quote, speak when you are angry

and you will make the best speech that you will ever regret. And then here's the stoic inspired meditation. When you lose your temper, whom does it inevitably seem to be with? Your family. It's strange, we'll still make some pretty rude behavior from strangers on the street, but God forbid your son leaves his shoes out.

You're a professional while asking your assistant for the thousandth time to do something, but you're short with your spouse because they couldn't hear you over the noise in the other room. It feels like a paradox, but really this is a problem of proximity. Precisely because they're closest to you,

you have more opportunities to get upset with them than anyone else. It's a sad, twisted state of affairs. The people who are bad but far away are rarely targets for our rage, but the people who are mostly good, who on the whole have helped and loved us many more times than they've hurt us, they're the ones who get the brunt of it. Let's not be angry at good people, Seneca writes in his essay on anger. Today, when you find yourself getting upset with someone you love, remind yourself that their positive traits far outweigh whatever is bothering you in the moment. Remind yourself that yelling doesn't make your kids hear you better. Remind yourself that they probably know that they messed up and probably feel bad enough already. Remind yourself how small they are. Remind

yourself how good they are. The fact that we can get mad at someone because they love us enough to put up with it or because they're kids and they have to live with it and us. It's not an excuse. We should try not to get upset with anyone. But if we're going to get mad, let's make sure that our object of frustration is a target of offense, not of opportunity. I just think about, yeah, the shit I put up with from people I care so much less about than my kids, than my wife, and how upside down that is. That's what today's message is about.

That's what Seneca was talking about. You know they're good. You know they mean well. You know they're trying. You know that you want your relationship with them to last. You know that that's the most important thing is how they feel about you and how they understand that you feel about them. And yet you're going to make this thing more important.

And that's a shame. It shouldn't be this way. We've got to stop doing that. Again, this isn't to say you should flip it upside down, go get mad at everyone. It's just saying, hey, remember who you're talking to. Remember how important they are to you. Just because they will put up with it, just because they have to put up with it is not an excuse.

And the Stokes clearly struggled with this. Mark Shreeles talks about being tolerant with others, even though he's strict with himself. He had to work a lot with his stepbrother. Again, think of it kind of as a challenge, right? He thanks the gods, right? For the fact that he had the kind of brother he did, whose character challenged me to improve my own,

whose love and affection enriched my life, right? He rose to the challenge. His brother was very different. His brother had flaws. His brother, you know, caused problems. But Marcus there is talking about how he used that as a chance to manage his temper, to manage his emotions. And we've got to do that with our family,

with our spouses, with our kids. Don't get mad at good people. Treat them well. Get that temper under check. Think about how you're talking to them. Think about your tone. Think about how often you're just saying the same crap over and over again and what kind of message that is sending. That's today's message. That's what The Daily Dad is full of, just like The Daily Stoic is. If you like the leather-bound edition of The Daily Stoic, this is made by the same bindery there in the UK, really proud of it.

Again, that sound, I just love it. I've got this brown one sitting on my desk, the Daily Dad 366 Meditation on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids. If you want one that'll really stand the test of time, you can grab that at store.dailydad.com. I'll link to it in today's show notes and I'll leave you to it.

I'll link to it in today's show notes and I'll leave you to it. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get for listening, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. 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. This holiday season, give your loved ones only the best from L.L. Bean.

Keep them warm and dry all winter long with weather resistant outerwear. Versatile, durable and available in a wide range of styles, you'll find outerwear for the whole family. From casual outings to outdoor adventures, L.L. Bean outerwear keeps the warm in and the cold out. Give only the best gifts from L.L. Bean at Oakville Place, Georgian Mollinberry, and CF Shops at Don Mills.