The Daily Stoic - You Don’t Get a Choice | Circumstances Have No care For Our Feelings

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Certainly, Marcus Aurelius would have related to the sentiment. Floods. Plagues. Wars. A troubled son. Personal health issues. “Haven’t I given enough?” we had him say in a recent Daily Stoic video. But the thing is, life doesn’t care. It has no time for your questions. It pays no mind to your limits.“I don’t think I’m up for this,” the novelist John Gregory Dunne said to his wife as they left the hospital after rushing to check on their daughter who had just been admitted. He was down about his career. He wasn’t feeling great about his own health. He was sick about his only child. He was worried it would be a long and hard road out for all of them. Joan Didion, his steely, stoic wife, responded with something we can imagine Marcus Aurelius reminding himself of in Meditations: “You don’t get a choice.”-In today's Daily Stoic excerpt, Ryan reminds us that in life things will be frustrating, awful and painful but it never cares about us. We can waste energy on things out of control. You can grab the The Daily Stoic here.✉️ 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.📱 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.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcasts. 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 don't get a choice.

After everything that's happened in the last few years, we're tired. After everything that's happened in the last few years, we're tired. After everything that's happened in your life, after everything that's gone wrong the last couple weeks, you think to yourself, I can't handle one more thing going wrong. Certainly Marcus Aurelius would have related to that sentiment. Floods, and plagues, and wars, a troubled sun, personal health issues. Haven't I given enough? We have Mark Spreelus say in a recent Daily Stoke video.

The thing is life doesn't care, has no time for your questions, pays no mind to your limits. I don't think I'm up for this. The novelist John Gregory Dunn said to his wife as they left the hospital after rushing to check on their daughter who had just been admitted. He was down about his career. He wasn't feeling great about his own health.

He was sick about his only child. He was worried it would be a long and hard road ahead for them. Joan Didion, his steely Stoic wife, responded with something we can imagine Marcus Aurelius reminding himself of in meditations. You don't get a choice, she says. and meditations. You don't get a choice," she says. Fortune behaves as she pleases, the Stoic said. Life disposes. It decides. The only thing we get a choice in is how we respond. If you want to focus more on your well-being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical,

mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial. You can listen to Audible on your daily walks. You can listen to my audiobooks on your daily walks. And still, this is the key. I have a whole chapter on walking, on walking meditations, on getting outside. And it's one of the things I do when I'm walking. Audible offers a wealth of well-being titles to help you get closer to your best life and the best you. Discover stories to inspire sounds to soothe and voices that can change your life. Wherever you are on your well-being journey, Audible is there for you. Explore bestsellers, new releases,

and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. ["Odd and the Bells"] Circumstances have no care for our feelings. This is the February 23rd entry in the Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdomdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. This is the hard cover printed in, let's see here. Printed in the United States of America, it says 13.

So this is a pretty old one because we've been through many other printings. Got the leather bound in the Daily Stoic store as well. Today's quote, I don't know how many weeks in a row this is Marcus Aurelius, but I love it, cause he's my man. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 738. You shouldn't give circumstances the power to rouse anger,

for they don't care at all. Actually, I like the Hayes translation a lot too. I've got it from memory. It's seared in my mind from my first reading, I think. He says, and why should we feel anger at the world as if the world would notice? A significant chunk of Marx's realist's meditations is made up of short quotes and passages from other writers. This is because Marx wasn't necessarily trying to produce an original work.

Instead, he was practicing, reminding himself here and there of important lessons, and sometimes these lessons were things he had read. This particular quote is special because it comes from a play by Euripides, which, except for a handful of quoted fragments like this, is lost to us. From what we can gather about the play, the hero comes to doubt the existence of the gods. But in this line, he is saying, why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take these things personally?

After all, external events are not sentient beings that cannot respond to our shouts and cries, and neither can not sentient beings. They cannot respond to our shouts and cries, and neither can the mostly indifferent gods. That's what Marcus was reminding himself of here. Circumstances are incapable of considering or caring about your feelings, your anxiety, your excitement. They don't care about your reaction. They are not people.

So stop acting like getting worked up as having an impact on a given situation because the situation doesn't care at all. A couple of things jump out to me here. Number one, it's worth noting just how cool that is. There's a line in meditations from a play that if Marcus Aurelius had not written down, had not been such a fan, had not jotted it down in his diary, we would not have it. It would be totally lost to us. It's interesting to think of Marcus as this literary conservator, this, this savior of ancient texts, but he is. That's what we know about that line because he wrote it down because it jumped out to him. He liked it. Maybe he didn't get it perfectly. Can't compare

it against the original. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? And then something else I found out about this. I was, forget why it jumped out at me, but I thought, like, who was Euripides to Marcus because I knew Euripides is a it's a Greek Playwright and Marcus is Roman Greece was the powerhouse Then Rome supplants it, but I was like how far You know kind of all blurs together right you BC AD There's all the ancient world. How far from the, and it jumped down at me. So anyway, so I looked, you know, when does Euripides die? When does

Marcus die? They're separated by centuries, not like one or two, but like five or six. And in fact, I remember looking it up. Euripides was further from Marcus Aurelius Euripides was further from Marcus Aurelius than Shakespeare is from us. So first off, just the incredibleness of how great work can last. So it seems weird that we're reading Marcus 2000 years later, how we got so good at preserving things. But even in the ancient world, they had ancient texts and history and they marveled at, you know, great lines and quotes and that they preserved them for centuries. This is just so friggin cool. So Marcus is thinking of Euripides the way that we think of Shakespeare today.

Although you do get the sense that it didn't seem so ancient from them because life maybe hadn't changed as much. Right? Like Euripides and Marcus obviously lived in very different worlds and Euripides would have been, had his mind blown by Marcus. By Marcus's world and Marcus would have thought he was living in the future, right? Which he was, but I do think there'd be more culture shock if you fast forward it to today or transported any of those to today. I didn't actually see the whole movie, but the most recent Indiana Jones, you know, I think it's Archimedes sort of marveling

at this airplane that Harrison Ford crashes, it somehow goes back in time. Literally my only understanding of the movie is watching it on the screen next to me on an airplane. But I understood that's what I understood was happening. Maybe I'm totally wrong. But anyways, the other big thing, the actual wisdom of the quote here is incredible.

He's just right. You know, the pandemic was awful and frustrating, but it didn't care about us. The virus was indifferent to us. It didn't give a shit about us. It didn't give a shit about us. It didn't give a shit about our plans. It didn't give a shit about people we loved. Didn't give a shit about anything because it's not capable of doing that.

And understanding that so much of the world is that way. I do love the idea, Marx Realists later in meditations talks about not treating inhumanity the way it treats human beings. So not letting the impersonal, awful, cruelty, overwhelmingness of the world make you into that kind of person. But it is understanding that being angry

at objective events, being angry at the march of time, being angry at natural disasters, being angry at cancer, being angry at mortality, being angry at these things that are frustrating, tragic, and painful, and all these things. It doesn't change anything. And so why waste that extra energy? It's not making a difference. You can shout at the gods, but they will not be moved. And I think that's the lesson that Marcus is trying to pass on or that Marcus noted from Euripides,

preserved it all those centuries later. And then all these centuries later still, here we are talking about it. That's the power of a great quote. That's the power of writing things down. It's beautiful. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening.

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