It’s Never an Accident | Ask Daily Stoic

Our true character comes out under pressure. So we must train that character, we must develop our bodies, we have to put in the work. Your ticket to a live Q&A with Ryan Holiday 👉 https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations-month-2026🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  It's never an accident. It wasn't some freak of circumstances that allowed Marcus Aurelius to be great amid disaster and unbelievable power. It wasn't a coincidence that Cato was the last honest man in Rome, a brave and solitary figure standing against the tide. It wasn't an accident that earned Stockdale the Medal of Honor in the Hanoi Hilton that allowed him to ride out seven years in solitary confinement and torture. No, it wasn't. It was Epictetus who said that the whole point of philosophy was to be able to meet whatever life threw at you with, "This is what I trained for." And that is precisely what these men had done. In fact, Marcus Aurelius thanks Rusticus at the beginning of Meditations

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  for teaching him that he needed to train and discipline his character. Cato, as we said, trained his whole life in how he dressed, to what he ate, to how he spoke for some future moment when he would need to stand up, defend the Roman Republic. And Stockdale? Stockdale liked to joke that his plea beer at the Naval Academy prepared him for torture and prison. And of course, his study of philosophy didn't hurt either. And neither did his training in the Navy's SER program, Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. And now that training program is built around much of what Stockdale learned from experience. No one magically steps up in the big moments. No, we revert to our level of training.

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  Our true character comes out under pressure. So we must train that character. We must develop our bodies. We have to put in the work. Because when life's true tests arrive, and they will, we need to be ready to respond with both confidence and confidence. And that comes from preparation, not luck. It is never an accident.

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome back to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've said before, like, Meditations isn't a book that you have read, it is a book you are reading. And it is a book I have both read and it is a book I am reading. And there are things that I missed the first time I read it, and the second time I read it, and then the third time I read it, things that are only appearing to me now as I, as I pick it up. Here, let me grab it off the shelf. Like, I grab it and I pull the leather bound down and I spin to something and, and that you might see what the life of a good man is like. Someone content with what nature assigns him and satisfied with being just and kind himself.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  How many times have I read that passage? Many, many, I'm sure. But there's something about picking it up at random and reading it and rereading it. And it just happens to be that you, you take something new out of it each time, or something new strikes you each time. The randomness of it is a sort of part of my practice. As you know, this has been Meditations Month here at Daily Stoic. We've been reviewing Meditations in a variety of different forms. Done episodes about it, we've done deep dives about it. And then we're doing our Q and A about it on the day after Marcus Aurelius's birthday, on the 27th. I'd love to see you in there. Just to give you a little teaser of what that's like, here's some of the questions from last year's Meditations Q and A.

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to join us, if you want to keep doing this deep dive into Marcus Aurelius with us, take our Meditations course, the book club we're doing, well, we'd love to have you join us. You can sign up right now, dailystoic.com/meditations. I will link to that in today's show notes. But in the meantime, here's me answering some questions from Meditations.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Hi, Ryan. Thank you.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  It was nice to take the course and revisit Meditations. It's been a while since I've read it in detail. I dip in and out of it once in a while. One thing that always strikes me, and I'm curious for your opinion on it, or maybe direction to other readings, is when he talks about the cycles of, I think, generations, humans, empires. 749 always strikes me as a good example of that. But he's got other passages, 1027 and so forth, that I always make note of. Just, yeah, on cycles and seasonality. I know you've talked about dark energy and how that sort of makes a reappearance.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  And I've heard Robert Greene has touched on this when he's in the, I think, Laws of Human Nature. He's got a chapter on that from Machiavelli. Anyway, just curious on your thoughts on that and maybe other readings you might point to in addition to Meditations.

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the Stoics did seem to think of history and indeed the sort of whole arc of the world as this sort of cyclical thing. I think we get a sense from Marcus that he believed that sort of human beings have always been human beings and have always sort of had the same vices, always done the same things, been drawn to the same types of characters, made the same mistakes. And he finds himself that he didn't live in some sort of unprecedented future, that nothing was new under the sun, that this is just how it always went. And we shouldn't be surprised or disappointed or alarmed by any of this. And I think that's a good lens into where we are now.

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the types of politicians that we have today. I don't think any of their personalities would be surprising to the Stoics. Some of the political dysfunction we have certainly would have been familiar to Cato or to Seneca or to Marcus Aurelius. Maybe if there was anything that they would be surprised by, it would be the progress that we've made, the way we've gotten out of some of these traps, some of the vexing sort of problems that we've solved, the things we've been able to tackle as a society over the intervening 2,000 years. But one of the things that you get when you study the Stoics is all the similarities. And then you're also struck by some of the unfathomable differences. You know, the past is a foreign country, they say, but not.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  Not a radically unfamiliar foreign country. And I think that's always what is so striking about meditations. Like, on some level, Marcus Aurelius's life and the role that Marcus Aurelius lived should be incomprehensible to us. I mean, this is a guy within an arranged marriage. This is a guy who's the head of an enormous empire. This is a guy who owns slaves. This is a guy writing in a foreign language. You know, there are all these ways that he shouldn't be like us. And yet, he still has to get out of bed in the morning. And he still is insecure, or has anxiety, or has ambitions. He's still fundamentally a human being. And I think that's what makes him so recognizable and relatable to us.

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  And so when Marcus Aurelius is saying "you," although he means "me," he accidentally ends up meaning all of us. And that is the beauty and the power of meditations. Deborah, you're up. Hello.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  How are you?

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  I'm doing great.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  When you read meditations, what passages are the biggest struggle for you, either in terms of just trying to understand physically what it means?

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Or personally, that you really grapple with?

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  That's a great question. Um, yeah. You know, it's funny, I don't have my OG copy on me. I have a new one here in front of me. But it's funny to watch as I go through it. I can see that I ask questions to myself when I read it the first time, that, you know, I've subsequently been able to answer, or differing opinions as I go. I mean, when Marcus Aurelius talks about the idea of living in accordance with nature, that's not a concept the Stoics define super well. There are also, I think, some passages in meditations that feel, uh, almost nihilistic. You know, he says, this is Book 636,

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  "Asia and Europe, distant recesses of the universe, the ocean, a drop of water, Mount Athos, a molehill, the present, a split second in eternity, miniscule, transitory, insignificant." You know, there are moments, uh, you know, there's one passage where he goes, "What does it matter if you live to be old or not? What do you care?" There's just some passages where, I wouldn't say Marcus seems depressed, but he does seem...

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, almost excessively cynical or yeah, there's just a darkness to it. And I sometimes struggle with those. That's not exactly how I think about it.

• 9:07Ryan Holiday?

  You know, continual awareness of all time and space of the size and life and the span of things around us, a grape seed in infinite space, a half twist of a corkscrew against eternity. So there's something about that that seems kind of sad and insignificant. And then book 1016, the one immediately above it, he says, to stop talking about what a good man is like and just be one. So there's this kind of tension in Marcus Aurelius where he's like, we're all infinitesimal and small and don't matter. And, you know, nothing lasts. And then he's like, but make sure you do good stuff, you know, that that tension sometimes strikes me. And I think I've wrestled with that for, for quite some time as, as I've read meditations. And I, I sometimes wonder like, if you saw him the day that he wrote

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  that, would you be like, oh, he was just in a mood that day? You know, what's the, what's the, where is he coming to from that? I think about that quite often.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 10:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Great question. And let's do Joseph.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  My question is, when you read meditations, he kind of mentions, when somebody wrongs you, you should think about it in the way of that person wronging themselves. And we should try to not let it kind of take the weight that it does on us. My follow up to that is, well, you know, undisputably, that's a great mindset to have. How does that kind of work with like the struggle of reality and being a human being that does take the weight from those things?

• 10:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think what he's saying is first off, that we're all sort of part of this, you know, interconnected universe. And so when we harm one thing, we harm all things. But I think he's also saying that they're harming themselves by making themselves the kind of person that would do that thing. Right? So by stealing from you, yes, they're harming you in the sense they're taking something from you, although the stoics would go, did you really need it? You know, did you really lose anything by losing it? But they're also saying that one thing that did happen is that that person became a thief. Right? And, and that that is undeniably not a good thing to be. And so by doing it, they became that thing. I think that's what Marcus is saying. Now, Look, someone comes and steals your life savings, you know?

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  Again, okay, you still have your life, you know, you still have, you know, your character, you still have all these things. Sure, I think I get what the Stoics are saying. And yes, that person degraded themselves by being the kind of person that would steal someone's life savings. But it doesn't change the fact that you now still have to figure out how you're gonna afford to live in retirement. So I think it's a philosophical point that is easier to stomach, the smaller the stakes. But the bigger the stakes doesn't change the same fundamental assumption. It just means it's so true, it's just still kind of a big thing that you have to deal with, right? And, and again, I bet if you were talking, if you read a passage like

• 11:57Ryan Holiday?

  that in meditations, and then you were talking to Marcus Aurelius, and you were like, okay, but I still have to figure out how I'm gonna live in retirement. I don't think he'd be like, yeah, well, get over it. That's, you know, it's nothing. I do think as human beings, you know, the Stoics would have been understanding and empathetic and perhaps even generous. But they're just trying to get you to see it that way. I don't think if, if you were to come to Marcus Aurelius and go, hey, someone just, you know, stole my life savings, or, or hey, you know, my child just died. He would go, yeah, but you knew they were mortal when you had them. You know, he would say, hey, when that happened to me, here's how I felt, right? And one of the things I reminded myself of was X, Y, and Z. So I think there's sometimes, when we take the words in isolation,

• 12:41Ryan Holiday?

  they can feel a little blasé, or a little black and white. But when we actually look at who the Stoics were as people, and, and I would also say, who we are aspiring to be as people, we can add a little more empathy and patience and understanding here.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  All right. Well, thank you so much.

• 12:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course. Somebody's asking a question about a Stoic official who, who they realized he couldn't be bribed when they were, when they saw him cooking radishes, that he wasn't materialistic at all. I believe that is a chapter in Right Thing Right Now, or maybe in Discipline is Destiny. And it's, it's not Cato, I think it's one of Cato's heroes. Yeah, it's in Discipline is Destiny, about sort of keeping your needs small, if I'm remembering correctly. Indira?

• 13:25Speaker 04

  Hi, Ryan. Thanks so much. After all the content that you put out there, it's so inspiring. As I'm reading meditations, I keep seeing pleasure come up sprinkled all throughout and I'm getting the sense that he feels that pleasure is innately wrong and I I'm just grappling with that.

• 13:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't know if you would say it's innately wrong. I think he's he's certainly pushing back against, you know, sort of outright hedonism or against against doing whatever you want, whenever you want it. I think there's a skepticism in the Stoics about the permanence and the power of pleasure, you know, that that that it's rather fleeting, that building your life around doing things so you can have this sort of ephemeral experience is probably not worth what people are often willing to give up to get it. Although the Epicureans themselves, although they have this reputation as being hedonists, talk

• 14:26Ryan Holiday?

  about this too, you know, the idea of that it's not just how you feel when you are getting the thing, but how do you feel after the regret or the shame or the pain that you inflicted on someone else. So, yeah, I don't think the Stoics were anti-pleasure, but they they did look at it with some skepticism and they prioritized it differently than than, you know, we got to, again, imagine who Marcus Aurelius is seeing quite often. And we can kind of see better pictures of this in Epictetus's writings. So Epictetus lives in the court of Nero, and although he is quite powerless, he's surrounded by very powerful, rich and

• 15:07Ryan Holiday?

  important people. And he sees it the ways in which they are actually more enslaved than he is, because they're trying to be richer than other people, they're trying to outdo each other, they can't endure setbacks or, you know, sort of ordinary life because they've become so soft and entitled by their pleasures. So I think Marcus and the sort of general Stoic writings, when we hear them talking about pleasure, we should probably contextualize how often this is a reaction against the Decadence and the over indulgence of people of their class and space, right? Like, there's a story that Epictetus tells about this Roman who, you know, spends through most of their money and they go to Nero and they go,

• 15:52Ryan Holiday?

  "Hey, I'm like basically down to my last million dollars." And Nero goes like, "Oh, my God, how can you bear that?" Like, the idea of not being a millionaire was, you know, the worst fate that these guys could imagine. That's how sort of spoiled and out of touch they were, right? And so I think that's kind of the pleasure that the Stoics are reacting against.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.