Have You Been Infected Yet? | There is Philosophy in Everything

In the year 165 AD, a plague began to break out in Rome. Brought back from the far eastern corners of the empire, the virus spread from person to person, house to house, until nearly all of Rome was overwhelmed. The doctors could not keep up. Neither could the morticians or the grave diggers. Rome’s economy was devastated. Millions died, millions fled. And the plague simply dragged on, year after year, without serious respite for over a decade. As we reflect now on this third anniversary of our own plague, it’s worth evaluating what you may or may not have been infected with. Marcus broke into tears whenever the victims of the pestilence were mentioned–he knew how much had been lost, literally and figuratively. It’s important, whatever the future holds, that we do not needlessly add ourselves to that casualty list.---And in today's Daily Stoic reading, Ryan ruminates on the importance of balancing the philosophy of study with applying it to real life experiences. After all, philosophy is what you do, not something you say.✉️ 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 Meditations.📱 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 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.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  Have you been infected yet? In the year 165 AD, a plague began to break out in Rome. Brought back from the far eastern corners of the empire, the virus spread from person to person, house to house, until nearly all of Rome was overwhelmed. The doctors could not keep up. Neither could the morticians or the gravediggers. Rome's economy was devastated. Millions died, billions fled. And the plague simply dragged on year after year without serious respite for over a decade. Thirty-six months ago, history repeated itself all over the world when COVID-19 began to spread in similar fashion. A new virus, the right conditions,

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  an epidemic became a pandemic. Our public health was better. We didn't futilely burn incense like the Romans, hoping to ward off incense. But in the end, we were at the mercy of a force outside of our control just the same. We had to adjust. We had to accept. We had to face, some of us more directly than others, a very real threat of death. Death in the air, bodies in coolers in the streets, plans to use public parks to handle the overflow. Maybe you got COVID, maybe you didn't. Historians debate whether Marcus Aurelius ever actually caught the measles or smallpox that was the Antonine Plague and whether he died of it or not.

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  But Marcus himself was interested in another virus that spread at the same time. As he wrote in Meditations, "There are two types of pestilence in the midst of an epidemic, or indeed, any crisis. There is the one that can destroy your life, and there is the one that can destroy your character. Selfishness, cruelty, indifference to the fate of your fellow humans, cowardice, desperate, panic buying, paranoia, crippling anxiety." These things were seen in Marcus's time, just as they were seen the last few years. The same goes for scapegoating, and demagoguery, and misinformation, and all the other things that crisis can bring out in leaders and populations alike. Perhaps you were infected like this, or perhaps there was something more personal you caught

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  during the pandemic. Bad habits, relapse, screwed up priorities, skewed values. Barring a bad case of long COVID D effects, this may last longer than the coronavirus. As we reflect now on this third anniversary of our own plague, it's worth evaluating what you may or may not have been infected with. Marcus broke down in tears whenever the victims of the pestilence were mentioned. He knew how much had been lost, literally and figuratively, and it's important, whatever the future holds, that we do not needlessly add ourselves to that casualty list.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  I think for me, coming to read Meditations as a plague book, as I did, starting in 2020, it just totally changed what I got out of Marcus, and it helped me so much over the last few years. It was in those early days of the pandemic that I wrote "The Boy Who Would Be King" to my own sons, to sort of pass along some of the... The messages of Marcus Aurelius, I had the time, I tried to decided I'd use it productively. And it's also when we decided to do the leather edition of Meditations, the one that I turned to the most during the pandemic, which you can also check out at store.dailystoic.com. I hope everyone is continuing to be safe, to be smart. You don't let it rule your life, of course, but you also don't pretend it doesn't exist

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  because it does exist. Certainly, it's existing for other people who are in the hospital with COVID at this very moment. And who knows what the future holds. All we can do is be ready, be smart, and be good to each other.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  There is philosophy in everything. Eat like a human being, drink like a human being, dress up, marry, have children, get politically active, suffer abuse, bear with a headstrong brother, father, son, neighbor, or companion. Show us these things so we can see that you have truly learned from the philosophers. That's Epictetus's Discourses 321. Plutarch, a Roman biographer, as well as an admirer of the Stoics, and sometimes critic of the Stoics, and as it happens, his grandson or his nephew, we're not quite sure, becomes one of Marcus Aurelius's philosophy teachers. But anyways, the point is that he didn't begin his study of the greats of Roman literature until late in life. But as he recounts in

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  his biography of Demosthenes, he was surprised at how quickly it all came to him. He wrote, "It wasn't so much the words that brought me into full understanding of events as that somehow I had a personal experience of the events that allowed me to follow closely the meaning of the words." And this is what Epictetus means about the study of philosophy, too. Study, yes, but live your life as well. It's the only way you'll ever actually understand what any of it means. And more important, it's only from your actions and choices over time that it will be possible to see whether you took any of the teachings to heart. Be aware of that today when you're going to work, going on a date, deciding whom to vote

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  for, calling your parents in the evening, waving to your neighbor as you walk to your door, tipping the delivery man, saying goodnight to someone you love. All of this is philosophy. All of it is experience that brings meaning to the words. I've talked about this a couple of times, but as an example of this in my own life, obviously, I've read Marcus Aurelius many, many times. But in the pandemic, it just hit me in this different way. I realized, well, pandemic and having kids, there's two examples. But the pandemic, realizing, oh, he was writing this during the plague. And that this was a lens, a filter, this was affecting the mood and style and tone

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  and directing even what he was thinking about. And then, so as we've gone through COVID, I just came to understand Marcus in this whole other way. My experiences, as Plutarch was saying, my personal experience of events allowed me to follow closely the meaning of the words, or rather, it helped me understand the words at a deeper, more profound level. When I had Robin Waterfield on the podcast, when we were talking about meditation, he has this great new translation annotated edition of Marcus Aurelius, which you should check out, we carried in the painted porch, and I did like a three hour interview with him for the podcast. But as I was reading it, I just, I never, I obviously, I knew Marcus Aurelius as a

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  father, but only once I had kids, I came to understand some of the things that Marcus was writing about as a father more deeply, that there was, that it was there, hidden in plain sight. This is that idea, we don't step in the same river twice. You come back to the book, you experience something different, it hits you different, you're looking at it from a different angle, your experiences are informing what's going on. And so realizing that Marcus was talking about having children so often and his relationship with his children, it just, I got something different out of the book. And then, of course, COVID and parenting, when you're just worried that something could happen to your kids, as many things did happen to Marcus Aurelius's kids, I just got something out of it at a deeper level. But that's not really what today's.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  Episode is about, or today's entry is about. In fact, it's kind of about the opposite. It's that words are important, of course. But philosophy is something you do, not something you say. Right? Obviously, I've written a lot about the Stoic principles of, let's say, justice or generosity. Right? That's me communicating about philosophy. But, and I was just posting about this on Instagram. I had this a couple of weeks ago. I had this idea. I was like, I was seeing what was happening in Ukraine. And I said, like, how can I make a difference? How could I contribute? What should I contribute? What's my obligation to contribute? And I had this idea. I had someone on my team.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  I was like, you know, those big stack of books, like in the corner of the office, all the international translations? Go through and give me all the Ukrainian and Russian editions I had. And then I texted my agent and I said, hey, can you like run through a calculation and tell me what the total revenues from me selling rights to Russia and Ukraine have been over the last 10 years? And he did that. And then I took a photo in front of the store and I just said, look, I feel overwhelmed by this. I'm seeing the images on the news. I don't know what to do about it. But what I am going to do is donate my royalties from these two territories to the people who are being affected by what's happening right now.

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm not saying this to brag, like, oh, look at this nice thing I did. But what happened from doing that, about a week later, I got a call from Tim Ferriss. And Tim said, hey, I loved your posts. And I said, what are you talking about? The thing you posted on Instagram? Now, a week had gone by. Oh, he was like, I meant the Ukraine thing. And what had happened is that Tim had been thinking about what he could do about it. And he'd seen my post and he decided to do it. And then Neil Strauss saw that Tim had posted it and Robert Greene saw that I had posted. And all of a sudden, all these authors decided to do the same thing. Right? And I don't know what that adds up to, but it's a lot of money donated to this thing.

• 10:24Ryan Holiday?

  And it came from me feeling as this, coming from the seed of what the Stoics say, which is our job is to try to make the little bit of difference within what's our control, right? I don't know Vladimir Putin. I can't tell him to stop doing this, right? Like, I can't go over there and fight. I'm not in a position to make policy decisions, but I can try to do a little bit. Within my own sphere, I can try to put my money where my mouth is literally. And I can try to apply the philosophy, follow the philosophy. And then as it happens, that creates a snowball effect that helps other people. And, you know, hopefully, and I've heard from a bunch of other authors that are doing the same now. But the point is, that's what Stoicism is.

• 11:07Ryan Holiday?

  Not like me, I'm the Stoic, because look at what I did. But what I'm saying is Stoicism is not writing about the things, thinking about the things. Stoicism is taking action on the things. It's putting the words into practice. As Epictetus says, "Don't talk about the philosophy, embody it." It's trickier for me as a writer about Stoicism. That's literally my job. I do talk about it, but I also have to try to be about it, as do you. So I hope as you listen to Daily Stoic, as you read the Daily Stoic, as you participate in this universe of stuff, as a fellow traveler on this path, I hope you understand that it's not just about the inner work on yourself.

• 11:48Ryan Holiday?

  It's not just about being a little tougher, a little more resilient, focusing on what you control mentally. It's also what you do. How do you apply these ideas in the real world? Which I tried to do here. I call on you to do the same thing. You can check it out on Instagram. The charity I donated to, I donated to one that's being put on by Flexport. They're like a logistics company. They're donating, they're, they're leading, they're handling logistics of getting a whole bunch of items to refugees in and around Ukraine. And then I also donated to a Ukrainian charity called Come Back Alive, which you can Google both of those and find them out. But maybe this isn't the cause for you, maybe it's not what speaks to you, but what can you do?

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  Where can you not just talk about this Stoic idea of justice, but where can you actually be about it? That's what we're talking about, and I hope that inspires you a little bit as well.