The Daily Stoic - You Can’t Keep It From Happening | How To Get Through Life's Most Difficult Situations

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

When he was starting out in Hollywood, Judd Apatow began to have panic attacks. The stress of rewriting a script. Getting a film in on time. Managing all the moving pieces on a project. He felt the enormity of the pressure and like a lot of us, he took that to an irrational extreme.The Stoics would say panic, stress, and anxiety are feelings, and you can’t prevent them from happening. And if you try to suppress these emotions, like stuffing junk in your closet, it eventually comes exploding out. The bill inevitably comes due…and with interest attached.Today, Ryan explores how the Stoics approached getting through life's most difficult situations using the same principle that Friedrich Nietzsche developed as a formula for human greatness: Amor Fati - a love of fate.🎧 For a limited time, you can purchase The Daily Stoic ebook for only $1.99 on Kindle✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic Journal.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. You can't keep it from happening. When he was starting out in Hollywood, Judd Apatow began to have panic attacks. The stress of rewriting the script, getting the film in on time, managing all the moving pieces on a project. He felt the enormity of the pressure and like a lot of us, he took that to an irrational

extreme. If this movie is bad, he would think it's all my fault. He would look around at the actors on set and think to himself, I can take them all down if I don't make this scene historically great. And as he thought those kind of thoughts, his temperature would begin to rise, his heart would start pounding and his surroundings would begin to feel like they were closing in on him. As Abhittah experienced more and more panic attacks, he learned the right way in the wrong way to deal with them. As he says in his book, Sikr in the head, the secret was that you don't try to have a panic attack because that makes it worse. You don't run away from it.

You allow yourself to feel it and you remind yourself that everything will all be fine, that nothing's going to happen. When you try to stop at its like taking a mirror and smashing it on the ground and stamping on the bits and creating a thousand mirrors. The Stoics would say that panic and stress and anxiety are feelings, and you can't prevent them from happening. And if you try to suppress these emotions like stuffing junk in your closet, it eventually comes exploding out. The bill inevitably comes due with interest attached. Stoics is as we have said, it is not suppressing your emotions. It's not

what a stoic does. A stoic learns to feel and deal with their emotions. As we've talked about, a stoic seeks out help. As appetite, how did they go speak to a therapist? They notice patterns and understand how they go and where the off ramps are. As Marcus really has did, you can process stuff in your journal, whether it's panic attacks or stress or anxiety or some destructive emotion. You can't keep it from happening, with sheer will or discipline. But you can get better at responding when it happens.

You can become a better friend to yourself as Sena could told us. You can pick yourself back up off the floor and keep going, a little wiser, with a little more perspective than the last time. going, a little wiser, with a little more perspective than the last time. Acceptance is a word that we struggle with because it seems to be this, it seems to resign. But the Stoics, Epictetus said we have to learn how to practice the art of acquiescence,

accepting the things that happened to us is actually the first step in being able to respond to them, to turn them into something. There's a powerful Stoic concept called a more faç, which we're going to talk about in today's episode. So Thomas Edison is, he's America's most successful inventor. He's sitting down for dinner with his family and a man rushes in. The factory is on fire. And Edison shows up on the scene and he sees it. His life's work up in flames.

His son is standing there shell-shocked. And what does Edison say? Edison says, go get your mother and all her friends. His life's work up in flames. His son is standing there shell-shocked. And what does Edison say? Edison says, go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again. And some people thought he lost his mind, but he actually goes on to repeat a line from a Kipling poem about triumph and disaster

treating these two imposterous as the same. What Edison is realizing as a stoic does is that some things are just out of our control. We can't change them, no amount of whining or complaining or weeping is going to affect them, but we can control how we respond. That's what Edison does. He tells a report to the next day, I've been through stuff like this before. He says it prevents an old man from getting bored and he starts rebuilding.

He actually takes a million dollar loan from Henry Ford in six weeks. It's partially back up and running. In six months, it's fully operational. And the third act of Edison's life is rebuilding after this disaster. And I want you to think about that as well. That's the idea that you'll never see something like this again. You can at least enjoy the absurdity,

the surreal beauty of it. And then you can say this prevents me from getting bored. Now I'm gonna get back to work and I'm gonna turn this into something. You have two options. You can want things to turn out a certain way, or you could welcome them the way they happen. Epic Titus says, he says, you could want them to turn out as you want them to, or you could decide that you want them to turn out how they've turned out. And so this is essentially the discipline for the Stoics.

This is the discipline of Ascent. Are you going to wish things or a certain way? Are you going to accept them as they are? That doesn't mean you accept the injustices of the world per se. But it means if it's raining, you're happy that it's raining. If it's cloudy, you're happy that it's cloudy. If it's sunny and hot, you're happy that it's sunny and hot. If you're born short, you're happy that you're short. If you're tall, you're happy that you're born tall.

You accept things as they are. You make the most of it. This is what the idea of a more bot is. Accept things. Be happy that things are the way that they are. That you were given what you've been given and then get to work using it. That's what stoicism is about. The stoics were really big on acceptance. And acceptance is a scary word to ambitious people because we didn't get where we are by accepting the status quo or by resigning ourselves

to things. But to the Stoics, this acceptance of external events of things that are outside of our control was the first step in moving forward in using them in some way. And so there's a Latin phrase that the Stoics were fond of and it's a more faulty that translates to a love of fate, not just acceptance but an embracing of those circumstances, whatever they may be.

And so for Marcus Aurelius, he said that what you throw in front of a fire is fuel for the fire. And that's the image that they thought about for good and bad events. When we look back on the bad things that have happened to us in life, with enough time, with enough distance, we come to accept them, maybe even feel grateful for them. We know that without those things, with the break up, or the failure, or the embarrassing mistake,

or the accident, we wouldn't be where we are now. But in that moment, that was the furthest thought from our mind. We were fighting it, we were resenting it, we were wishing it was otherwise. If later you're going to feel good about it. If later you're going to give yourself that gift, why delay it? Why not give it to yourself now? Practice the art of acquiescence.

Don't resent it. Don't fight it. Accept it for what it is. And understand even if you can't see it in this very moment, in the end you will come to see this as a positive. You will come to see it as good. You will come to see it. It's a thing that made you who you are and how it couldn't have been anything different. It's been a rough year, like just a rough year for everyone. But Marcus Aurelis, at the end of his life, he was facing death even, the scariest thing that a human can face, he said,

remind yourself of all the things that you've been through and what you've had to endure. He was trying to buck himself up to go, of course you can get through this, think of all the things that you've gotten through in your life. And that's what you have to think about with what you're going through today, big and small. You've been through things like this before.

You can get through this. You've gotten through worse. And when you know that, it helps you. That when Edison's factory burns down, he says, I've been through things like this before. He's like, it's gonna prevent me from getting bored. I'm gonna use this. And that's what Astaoq does.

They use their past experiences to inspire and motivate them and give them confidence for whatever it is that they're having to face right now. The more foxy coin, which is the idea that it's also a niche of race of sort of loving everything that happens to you, not resenting it, not fighting against it, not caring around a crud or a burden, but sort of embracing it

and finding a good in it. Where does that fit in with our human nature? Well, it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position is when something bad happens, why me, you know, to feel sort of a grievance. A lot of what I'm talking about in this book is overcoming some of these natural elements of human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose, another way. And Morphati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's like for Nietzsche, it was, this is life.

Life involves pain. Life involves adversity. You're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. Your friends and family members, they're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that means to not love life itself. Obviously you've gone through some adversity in your own life,

for you to be. It's easy to talk about a Morphati, especially when you're talking about, I'm going to love that my plane is delayed or you know that my there's some trouble with the printer and my book or something. How have you tried to practice a Morphati recovering from a stroke? You know that's like you were writing a book about stoicism and obstacles the way and then you got robbed and you had all these things up. Sure. And you were being tested Well, I had a stroke and it's like the ultimate test for me. I've never had to go through something like this because I'm somebody who's very physically active

and independent and suddenly I can't use the left side of my body and I'm completely dependent. And the initial reaction is the natural reaction. Oh man, damn, why did this happen? This is so unfair. Why me? You know, only I could just keep swimming and doing my life the way it was.

I'm so upset. And I talk in the book, your natural reactions, you don't have to fight them. You have to take the next step, which is the next day after you've gone through this, is to analyze your own emotions and why you're feeling that way. So I've had to go through that process, and it's actually been extremely powerful for

me. I have to retrain my body. Every day I have to learn how to use my fingers again, like a baby, and I'm learning how the mind works. I'm learning about patience and frustration about my own limits. And I can't necessarily say I love my stroke. I think there would be faults of me to say something like that. I don't love that this happened, but I've accepted it and I've discovered how it can make me a better and stronger person. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out

at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke 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 with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. It 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 of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty.

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