They Felt This Weight | Don't Make Things Harder Than They Need To Be

It’s easy for academics and critics to dismiss the Stoics as depressing or dark. They’re not wrong, exactly, because it’s true: There are some dark and depressing passages in Meditations. Seneca is not always cheerful. Both writers seem to dwell on death, they paint life as something that can be painful and tragic, they speak of Fortune as something not to be trusted—that the ground beneath your feet can shift in a moment, shattering everything around you. But what’s unfair about this criticism, insensitive even, is that it totally ignores the context and the experience of these men—of all the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius buried six of his children. Six! Seneca lost a child and was exiled to a distant island on trumped up charges all at once. Can you imagine what that must have been like for them?“Grief from the loss of a child is not a process,” a mother is quoted as saying in the fascinating book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe which examines the opioid crisis. “It’s a lifelong weight upon one’s soul.” Marcus Aurelius and Seneca bore that weight—of course it shaped what they wrote and thought. There was an exchange between Marcus and his teacher Fronto about how he felt “suffering anguish” in his bones from the loss of Fronto’s grandchild. When we interviewed the philosopher and translator Martha Nussbaum on the Daily Stoic podcast, she spoke quite movingly about the loss of her own daughter. She pointed out that Cicero, a philosopher who wrote extensively on the Stoics and buried his daughter Tullia, was transformed by grief. It changed him. How could it not have? One book on this topic we’ve recommended over the years has been Death Be Not Proud by John Gunter, who was similarly trying to make sense of the short but inspiring life of his son Johnny. Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air is also worth reading. And Seneca’s writings on death have been collected in an interesting edition called How To Die.-✉️ 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. 📢 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. 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, and 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.

• 0:39Ryan Holiday?

  They felt this weight. It's easy for academics and critics to dismiss the Stoics as depressing or dark. They're not wrong, exactly, because it's true. There are some dark and depressing passages in meditations. Seneca is not always cheerful. Both writers seem to dwell on death. They paint life as something that can be painful and tragic. They speak of fortune as something not to be trusted, that the ground beneath your feet can shift in a moment, shattering everything around you. But what's unfair about this criticism, insensitive even, is that it totally ignores the context and the experience of these men, of all the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius buried six of his children, six, and Seneca

• 1:23Ryan Holiday?

  lost a child and was exiled to a distant island on trumped-up charges all at once. Can you imagine what it must have been like for them? "Grief from the loss of a child is not a process," a mother was once quoted as saying. "It's a lifelong weight upon one's soul," she said. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca both bore that weight, and of course, it shaped what they wrote and thought. There's an exchange between Marcus and his teacher Fronto about how he felt suffering anguish in his bones from the loss of Fronto's grandchild.

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  The philosopher and translator Martha Nussbaum spoke on the Daily Stoic Podcast quite movingly about the loss of her own daughter. She pointed out that Cicero, a philosopher who wrote extensively on the Stoics and buried his own daughter, was transformed by grief. It changed him. How could it not have? It's preposterous and callous to say that the Stoics were unfeeling robots, that they were depressing. No, they felt pain very deeply. They were shattered by loss, as any person would have been. What we get in their writings is a very earnest and very human attempt to make sense of that pain, to try to explain to themselves most of all, a world where such tragedies are possible.

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  And so, we should actually see the Stoics as heroic, because they kept going, because they saw any light at all amidst so much darkness and loss.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  The Enemy of Happiness. It's quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for that which we don't have. Happiness has all that it wants and resembles the well-fed. There wouldn't be hunger or thirst. That's Epictetus's Discourses 324. "I'll be happy when I graduate," we tell ourselves. "I'll be happy when I get this promotion, when this diet pays off, when I have the money that my parents never had." Conditional happiness is what psychologists call this kind of thinking. Like the horizon, you could walk for miles and miles and miles and never reach it. You'll never get any closer.

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario. As pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chances at happiness here and now. So locate that yearning for more, for better, for someday, and see it for what it is: the enemy of your contentment. Choose it or your happiness. As Epictetus says, the two are not compatible.

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  That's a heavy one, I think. The idea that yearning is the enemy of happiness. Sometimes I'll talk to really successful people who have like a lot of money. And be like, what are you doing? Like, why don't you just relax or whatever? I'm always, I always find it fascinating when you hear that they have a number. So maybe they have a million dollars, but their number is $10 million. Or maybe they have $10 million or their number is $100 million. They've told themselves that when they get X, then they'll be okay. Then they'll be good. But they never get there. There's, from a different Zeno, there's this Zeno's paradox.

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  The idea of like, if you're like walking from here to the other side of the room, and you go halfway there, and then halfway there, and then halfway there, and then halfway there, you'll never actually arrive, right? Because it's always half, there's always more, there's always some half left of the distance. But I think that's kind of what yearning is. We tell ourselves, oh, when I get this, when I get this, when I get this. But we never get there, either because it's not actually something that a person can possess, or because we move the goalposts. Like, oh, all I want to do is win a championship. And then you do it, and then you're, oh, all I want to do is win back-to-back championships to prove it wasn't a fluke.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  And it's like, oh, but now I want to win it on a different team to prove that it wasn't a fluke there either. Whatever it is, right? We move the goalposts. That's the tricky thing about yearning, is it never gets there. I think it's still, this is the key, but there's a quote I love from Stefan Zweig, the novelist. And he says, "In the history of conquerors, no conqueror has ever been surfated by conquests."

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Alexander the Great said, "Aren't we gonna conquer the world together?" And his men said, "No, we wanna go home." And the truth was, he always would have found something new, something beyond it, always would have kept pushing. And the result of that was, he not only lost his life, but I think he lost a lot of happiness as well. So contentment, and I've read a study many years ago that said like, young people associate happiness with accomplishment, older people with contentment. I think they've learned something along the way. It's a hard one lesson, I'm sure. But we can, even if we can't fully internalize it or understand it or accept it now, we can try to approximate it. We can try to incorporate some of it.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  We can fake it till we make it, which is that we don't need anything. We can be happy now. That doesn't mean that we don't keep trying. Of course, we keep trying. Of course, we keep doing. But we try to do those things from a place of fullness, from a place of, "That'll be a nice extra", as opposed to a place of yearning, that I'll be happy if this, once this, after that. It doesn't happen, man. It's a myth. It's a shimmer, it's a mirage. You'll get there and you will realize it was a figment of your imagination, or worse, your mind will fool you so much, you won't even realize you're there. It just feel like, "I just gotta go a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further." And you never arrive.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  And at the cost comes your life and your happiness. But for people who don't wanna do things, this is not a particularly important or tricky subject. For those of us who are ambitious, those of us who are driven, those of us who are talented, it's something we really have to wrestle with. So I'm wishing you the best. You're enough as you are. Yearning is the enemy of your happiness. Remember that. And be safe, be well, everyone. We'll talk soon.