They Are Cut Off From Truth | A Little Better Every Day

Millions of people have been cut off from the truth. We can be sympathetic to this without assenting to it.📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/Protect your Daily Stoic Journal from the wear and tear of everyday use with the Leather Cover: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  They are cut off from truth. Chances are, you're not that angry at the victims of Bernie Madoff. You don't get mad at someone in a bad relationship, you help them get out. You feel sorry for someone who has been brainwashed into a cult or a multi-level marketing scheme. And yet, when it comes to politics or culture war issues, specifically today's political demagogues, we act very differently. We call them names, we judge them, we blame them, as if it is not the exact same scenario, as if they haven't been fed a steady diet of lies and appeals to emotion. Not just recently, but for decades. In Meditations, Marx realist quotes Epictetus, who himself is riffing on Plato, "to remind us that against their will, people's souls

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  are cut off from truth." He was talking about the people that frustrated and disappointed him, the people that supported bad policies who did and said untrue things. They were not wrong on purpose, they thought they were correct, largely because someone had misinformed and even manipulated them. The same is true today. Millions of people have been cut off from truth. We can be sympathetic to this without assenting to it. We can understand that had our upbringing been a little different, our algorithm gone a little differently, we might have ended up in the very same place.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  A little better every day. This is week four in the Daily Stoic Journal. This week's entry is, "The Stoics saw their lives as works in progress. They didn't believe they were born perfect, but they believed that with work and dedication, they could get a little better every day. There is real delight in this progress," as Epictetus quoted by Way of Socrates. Marcus Aurelius avidly pursued his own education and improvement, eagerly looking for advice, for mentors, and historical examples. Well, let's follow that example this week and see how you get a little better as each day passes. "We must keep constant watch over ourselves," and as Seneca phrased it, "put each day up

• 2:51Speaker 01

  for review. Looking back on our day helps us to better understand where we may have fallen short and gives us tangible feedback for how to improve and grow. Only what you measure and record can be monitored. Only what you put up for reflection can be learned from." And our first quote is from Seneca's Moral Letters. "I will keep constant watch over myself and most usefully will put each day up for review, for this is what makes us evil, that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do, and yet our plans for the future descend from the past." Marcus Aurelius from Risticus, he said, "I learn from Risticus to read carefully and to not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole and not to agree too quickly

• 3:36Speaker 01

  with those who have a lot to say about something." And then Epictetus says, "But what does Socrates say? Just as one delights in improving his farm and another his horse, so I delight in attending to my own improvement day to day." This is Epictetus's Discourses 3:5. As I think about the decade and a half now I've spent studying Stoicism, I sometimes marvel at like who I was when these ideas first hit me and how far I've come. In some ways, I look at how not far I've come and how I'm still find myself making the same mistakes over and over again, which Marcus remarks about in Meditations. He goes, "Look, you're still an old man, and yet here you are. You're afraid of death, you're losing your temper, you're prizing the wrong things." But the truth is, he had come very, very far.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  And I feel like I have come far. I'm not perfect, I'm not where I want to be. But I can't deny that I have made progress. And so that's what Stoicism is, it's progress. What does that progress look like? Well, one of my favorite observations from Seneca says, how do I know I'm making progress as a Stoic? He says, I'm a better friend to myself. Are you, right? I don't know when you first came into understanding these ideas, what you first read, but it's wonderful in those moments where you catch yourself and you go, this really would have rocked me before. This really would have sent me off before. I really wouldn't have caught myself before. I think about this even with my marriage with my wife, like just things. We were talking about something the other night and it's like, yeah,

• 5:06Speaker 01

  we're just coming around to realizing that when you do this, I do this, or that I do this and, you know? And so on the one hand, it's like, man, things would have been easier if we figured this out earlier. And yet it's also wonderful that we're figuring it out now. And the time it's going to save us and the frustrations it's going to save us and the heartache it's going to save us. Right? You delight in your improvement day to day. You make little bits of progress. Can be taken too far if you only look at what you can do better. If you only look at where you fell short. If Seneca's sort of putting yourself up for the review every day becomes a kind of torture. That's not the idea. The idea is that we, you know, we push ourselves to get better. We notice where we've made improvement. I interviewed Michael Dell on the podcast and he had this great acronym.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  He says pleased but never satisfied. That's how the company celebrates the success it's had, how he celebrates the success he's had or the improvements he made. But that doesn't mean you rest on your laurels. That doesn't mean you call it. No, you're always trying to get better, right? And the person who focuses on where you can get better, who is pleased but not satisfied, that's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. That's how we get better. That's how we push ourselves. That's the idea. So if you think of Stoicism then as a day to day journey, a week to week journey, a year to year journey. Right? It's not a magical transformation. It's something you work. As they say in sobriety circles, it works if you work it.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  The idea is if you work it, if you make small improvements, if you try to apply them here and now, a little bit every day, it adds up, adds up. Wellbeing is realised by small steps, as Zeno said, but it's no small thing. So the little tweaks, little breakthroughs, little conversations, all the things that have happened for me over the years, they're not major. Not any one of them is probably worth writing home about. That's why I don't tend to put myself in the books. But cumulatively, you know, it's changed the course, the bearings, the direction of my life in a really, really big way. And I know that's true for lots of you, and here we are at the beginning of the year. Let's, um, let's set out to make some small improvements day to day over the next 12

• 7:15Speaker 01

  months and, and think about who you would be if you made 1% improvement every day for the next year, every week for the next year, every month for the next year, every year for the rest of your life, right? That adds up. It adds up. Small steps, but it's no small thing. That's the message from the Daily Stoic Journal, which of course you can pick up at store.dailystoic.com.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say thank you.