A Person Without Boundaries Is Not a Person | 7 Stoic Keys To Happiness

It’s clear when you read about Cato and Marcus Aurelius that these were men of great reserve. Antoninus, too. They were friendly and kind of course, and to people who knew them well, there was frivolity and fun, but they kept something back from strangers. They were self-contained. Today, Ryan examines why having the discipline to create strong boundaries for yourself is how you define who you are, especially in the age of social media, He also presents seven Stoic principles to adhere to on your quest to live the virtuous life.📔 Visit The Painted Porch for signed copies of Discipline is Destiny.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  A person without boundaries is not a person.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  It's clear when you read about Cato and Marcus Aurelius that these were men of great reserve. Antoninus too. They were friendly and kind, of course. And to people who knew them well, there was frivolity and fun, but they kept something back from strangers. They were self-contained. This was a rare thing in Rome, and it's a rare thing today. We are surrounded by oversharers and gossip mongers. People celebrate being hot messes, not just getting up in your business, but getting you up in theirs. We have busybodies and energy vampires, trolls and toxic narcissists. Nobody thinks before they say things. Nobody holds back. Social media has created an epidemic of poor boundaries, which in turn has created a culture

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  full of people with poor self-image, low self-esteem, and very little sense for where other people end and they begin. The advent of a new year, I think, is a perfect time to commit to having better boundaries in your life. Boundaries between work and your personal life, boundaries between you and people in your life, to draw some healthy borders between what you'll share and what you won't, what you'll accept and what you won't, how you'll treat others and how you expect to be treated. What is your responsibility and what isn't? As Jay-Z explained once, particularly in regard to adjusting to his success and fame, "It's about knowing who you are and just doing what's comfortable for you, not letting other people pull you in a thousand different directions. Because if you allow it," he says,

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  "people will have you doing all kinds of stuff." But that stuff has to make sense for you. The Stoics talked about knowing your place and path in life. They talked about tuning out gossip and keeping your distance from flawed people, about not picking up bad habits from others, about reserve and dignity and poise, about not caring about what others think. This is difficult stuff. It takes a lot of self-discipline, but it is the key to health and happiness and in the case of Marcus and Cato and Antoninus. It's also the key to greatness.

• 2:32Ryan Holiday?

  Actually, Boundaries is the last chapter that I put in Discipline is Destiny. I thought the book was done. And then I just kept coming back to this idea that bound, you know, discipline isn't just like working really hard. It's not just abstaining from eating this or that. It's not just not losing your temper, but the, the discipline to be like, this is who I am. This is what I'm comfortable with. This is what I'm not comfortable with. Speaking up, saying those things. I know the pandemic really challenged my boundaries in a lot of ways, especially early on from a health perspective. You know, different people had different things they were comfortable with and going, here's what I'm comfortable with. I don't feel weird about it. Here, I'm going to say it. I'm going to speak up to be heard, all that kind of stuff. So it was the last chapter I owned in the book, I wrote in the book. I think one of the most important ones.

• 3:14Ryan Holiday?

  And I just think it's important that we, we understand this more expansive idea of discipline and this discipline, it determines who we are. That's the premise of Discipline is Destiny. If you haven't read the book, I think you'll like it. Sound like crazy. It's been an honor to hear from all of you who have read it. You can check it out. Discipline is Destiny, The Power of Self-Control, anywhere books are sold. You can grab the audiobook, which is doing awesome. You've got signed copies at The Painted Porch or at store.dailystoic.com.

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  When people think of Stoicism, I think the last thing they think is happiness. Because part of what that lowercase stoicism means to people in the English language is like, has no emotions. And we think of happiness as being a very emotional state. But I think to the Stoics, happiness was also the removal of destructive emotions, things like envy, or fear, or avarice, or aggression, or ambition. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've not only written now 10 books about Stoic philosophy, but I'm a real human being for whom happiness is important. Aristotle talks about happiness as eudaimonia, human flourishing. And I think that's the place that Stoicism is trying to get you. And so in today's episode, we're going to talk about some Stoic strategies for happiness.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  Doesn't mean exuberant excitement and pleasure. That's not what the Stoics thought of happiness as. We're going to talk about strategies for Stoic happiness and what that looked like for Stoics. You can't base your happiness on external approval because the Stoics would say it is firmly outside our dichotomy of control. It's not up to us. Mark Serealia says that ambition is tying your well-being to what other people say and do, meaning you don't control it, meaning they can take it away from you, they can reject you, they can deprive you of it. He says sanity is tying it to your own action. You have to have the internal compass that says to yourself, I'm doing good work. What I'm doing matters. This is the right thing. This is success. You have to define that for yourself.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  You can't let other people do it because then you've handed over your happiness, your wealth, everything to somebody else. It's really easy to feel dissatisfied. Deirdre Roosevelt says comparison is the thief of joy. Seneca quoting Epicureus says, if you don't regard what you have as enough, you'll never be happy, even if you're the ruler of the whole world. So for the Stoics, for the Epicureans, it was about enough. What is the right amount? It was about figuring out how to be grateful, how to be happy for what you have, rather than lying to yourself and telling yourself, if I get this thing, if I just do this, if I get this recognition, if I win this achievement, if I win this high office. That's what Cicero and Seneca get so wrong is they're, they think that if they just get to the top, then they'll be happy. No, this is enough, right?

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta figure out what enough is. Enough is where happiness comes from because enough is what you have right now, right? We all have enough right now. And if we could see that, we would be happy. Joy or happiness or delight, that's not an emotion we associate. But the Stoics experienced that. Epictetus says, me, I delight in my own improvement day to day. I love that. His delight wasn't coming from money or fame or recognition or pleasure. It was from getting better every day. It was from improving. It was from fulfilling his potential. It wasn't based on externals, as the Stoics warn us against. It was based on the inner work he could do on himself. It was knowing that he was becoming a little bit better, a little bit wiser, a little bit more self-controlled, self-contained, a little more resilient.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  That's where the Stoic finds joy and happiness and pleasure. The secret to productivity, but most of all happiness, is to not be so reachable. We have our phones, we have emails, we have watches, we have 50 different social inboxes, and then we wonder why we never get anything done. Seneca says, "If you want to improve, be content to be seen as ignorant about some matters." You can't always know what's going on. You can't always be reachable. Napoleon famously would wait three weeks until he opened his mail because he knew that most issues would resolve themselves. If you are always reachable, you will not be focused on the big, important things. You will not be doing your work, and you will not be philosophical. Instead of talking about happiness, Aristotle uses this word "eudaimonia",

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  which basically means "human flourishing", which I think is a better way of thinking about happiness. Happiness isn't exuberance, it's not excitement, it's not getting everything you want. I think it's a deeper place. It's when you're realizing the potential that you have as a human being in all your forms. And so if we can think then of happiness as that, the byproduct of doing all the things right in your life, wanting the right things, living the right way, prioritizing the right things, doing the right thing. Happiness is the byproduct of that. I think it's a better way to think about it. Viktor Frankl talks about how happiness must ensue. It cannot be pursued.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  It's not a thing you get as a reward here. It's actually the day-to-day-ness of living and acting rightly, or for the Stoics, living and acting with virtue. Very little is needed for a happy life, according to the Stoics. Musonius Rufus, one of the great Stoics, he's exiled four times. And what does he learn, losing everything? He learns how much he was taking for granted. Yes, he misses Rome. He doesn't like being far away, but he reminds himself, "Did I actually experience Rome while I was there? What do I actually need to be happy?" He says, "I need a little bit of food, I need water, I need sunshine." I had those things in Rome. He sort of noticed that he's like one of those people that lives in New York City and brags about all its amenities, but he never took advantage of them. And he realized that actually the simple life was better.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  The simple life was more philosophical. And that he needed very little to be happy, and that what he had was enough. Everyone wants to become beautiful. The Stoics say, "You become beautiful when you make beautiful choices." And I think this is true, when you see someone who is content with themselves, when someone who knows they are getting better, when someone is making positive choices in their life, that it radiates from them, regardless of what their body looks like, regardless of how old they are, regardless of what genetic gifts they have. If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices. Get up, right? Manage your life, have a good schedule. As we talked about before, have a good media diet. Focus on doing difficult things, push yourself out of your comfort zone.

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  Beauty isn't just physical, it comes from who you are as a human being, how you carry yourself, what you think about yourself, what difference you make in the world. If you want to be beautiful, the Stoics say, start right now by making beautiful choices.