This is What To Do With Joy

It’s because life is unpredictable, it’s because nothing is certain that we must find joy and happiness where we can.🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ 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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  This is what to do with joy. We tend not to see the Stoics as happy people. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is dark, his critics say. Even a fan would concede it's not the lightest fare. Epictetus spoke of the brutality of existence often, mostly because as a slave, he knew it well. Seneca, for his part, spoke so much about death, there's literally a modern collection of his writings titled "How to Die." It's actually quite good, by the way. So where was the room for happiness? For joy? For sucking the marrow out of life? Paradoxically, it was right there in that dark stuff. Or rather, it was a product of that dark stuff. In one of his consolation essays, Seneca, who himself lost a child and was exiled in the same

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  short period, writes to Marcia that "She must snatch the pleasures that your children bring. Let your children in turn find delight in you." He says, "Drain joy to the dregs without delay. No promise has been given you for this night. Nay, I have offered too long a respite," he says. "No promise has been given even for this hour." It's because life is unpredictable. It's because nothing is certain that we must find joy and happiness where we can. Enjoy our children. Do things that are fun. Drink deeply from this moment that you're in. Because while you're in it, it's about the only certain thing there is.