Don’t Be a Power Slave | What Are You So Afraid Of Losing

Ryan talks about the nature of power and using it for the common good, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.→ We hope you join us in the 2022 New Year New You Challenge. It kicks off in a little over a week. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up before sign ups end on January 1st! Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. This holiday season, give yourself or a loved one a gift that keeps getting better night after night. Right in time for the holidays, give the gift of better sleep and a present that will keep giving back, everyday of the year. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic for exclusive holiday savings. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  Don't be a power slave. You wonder why people don't stand up and do something. The CEO of a large company, the elected official, the general, the athlete. Aren't these powerful people? They hold office, they have millions of dollars, they have large platforms. Yet they stand silent, they look the other way, they hold their fire. It's because they don't see themselves as powerful. Not yet, anyway. The congresswoman has an eye on a senate seat, so she's waiting. The CEO thinks that after their options vest, then they'll be in a better position. The millionaire is trying to become a billionaire first. The athlete says after they sign their long-term deal. The general, once they retire, then, then they'll do something.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  The great Iron Maiden song and album, Power Slave, is all about what happens when one becomes addicted to power. It's like a drug. Your first experience is utterly intoxicating. But from that moment forward, you will never feel like you have enough. You will never want to risk losing what you have. So you're constantly chasing while simultaneously trying not to be caught out. You're not in charge, it is.

• 1:52Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius fought all his life against succumbing to this addiction. In fact, meditations was really his treatment plan. Over and over again, he warns himself, do the right thing, to not consider the consequences for his career. He tells himself to wait, to be good today, rather than choose tomorrow for when he's older. He refused to be a slave to power and instead used the power he did have to do things for other people. We all have to fight this battle, whatever our station in life is. We have to fight it now, because there are things that need doing now, not later. What are you so afraid of leaving?

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  What are you so afraid of losing? And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. You're afraid of dying, Seneca says in Moral Letters. But come now, how is this life of yours anything but death?

• 3:21Ryan Holiday?

  And Seneca tells us an amazing story about an obscenely wealthy Roman who was carried around by slaves on a litter. On one occasion, after being lifted out of a bath, the Roman asked, am I sitting down yet? Seneca's point was essentially this, what kind of sad, pathetic life is it if you're so disconnected from the world around you that you don't even know whether you're on the ground or not? And how did that man even know then if he was really alive at all? Most of us are afraid of dying, but sometimes this fear begs the question, protect what exactly? For a lot of people, the answer is hours and hours of television, gossiping, gorging,

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  wasting potential, reporting to a boring job, and on and on and on. Except in the strictest, most literal sense, can one say that this is actually life at all? Is this worth gripping so tightly and being afraid of losing?

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  Doesn't sound that way. That's actually one of my favorite passages, my sort of favorite callouts from Marcus in meditations. He goes, "You're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore?" And his point is that we just do so much pointless stuff. We waste so much time and then we're afraid of losing time as if that isn't like our day-to-day existence. And his point wasn't nihilism, that life is worthless, like, hey, you know, you're in traffic, what's even the point of being alive? His point was, why do you waste so much time? Why do you do these things voluntarily? Remember, Marx's question about is about like, is this essential, right? Because most of what we do and say is not essential, right?

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Most of us live these sort of sheltered, meaningless, wasteful lives unnecessarily, right? No one has a gun to our head, we just, we just go along with the flow, we go along to get along, we don't want to question, we don't want to be uncomfortable, we don't want to push outside our, our boundaries. And we don't see what a contradiction this is with our professed love of life or, you know, desire to maintain that life. It's like, you say you love and respect someone, but then look at your actions. Are you, are you really proving that day-to-day, right?

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  So you say that life, you love your life, that life is important to you, that you would be mad if someone took it from you, but how do you treat that same life? That, to me, is the sort of the haunting rhetorical question that Marcus and Seneca are both stumbling on. You're afraid of dying, but come now, how is this life you're living anything but death? Man, that's hard. But you have the power, we all do, to change that. We should be able to say, "What are you talking about? Look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this." And I feel like I can say that to a certain degree.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  I have a family that I love and cherish and don't take for granted. I have work that I'm proud of, that I think makes a difference, that I pour myself into, that also I enjoy for its own sake, not just the results, right?

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  I don't take my time for granted. I don't agree to things that I don't want to do. I feel good about my contributions to society. I don't think I'm part of the problem, part of some problems, but for the most part, right? I feel like I I'm leaving the place better than I found it. I feel like I served the common good, as Marcus says. All those are a good answer to that question. But I could see very easily if I made different choices, if I drifted a certain way, if I'd been a little less strict with myself, how that could end up very different. And maybe that's where you are right now. And the point of this reminder, this, this, this idea from the Stoics is to catch yourself before it's too late to change, right? Marx really talks about how some of us are like

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  this animal at the games, just sort of torn up, chewed up, just begging to be brought back tomorrow, right? It's like, no, get out of the Colosseum, man. Do it differently. Do it differently. And we chose this entry, put it, you know, right towards the, the end of the year for a reason. And I hope it leaves you something to chew on, to think about today. You're afraid of dying, but how is this life yours, anything but death? Don't just leave that question hanging there, although that, that does some of the work. Give me an answer, right? Think about your answer. Think about what you have to show

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  for it, right? Think about why it's better for you to be alive than not, right? Think about positive contributions you could be making and go make them, right? Think about the things that you waste your time with, that you shouldn't be wasting your time with, and stop doing it. That's your prescription for today. I hope you're spending some time with family. It's a good answer to this question, right? Hope you're spending a little time reflecting, enjoying the stillness of the, the winter here. And I hope you're doing well. And if we're both lucky, I'm looking forward to another year of the Daily Stoic with all of you. We'll talk soon.

• 8:57Ryan Holiday?

  Demand more of yourself in 2022. And one of the ways you can do that is by joining us in the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. All you have to do is go to dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up. Remember, Daily Stoic Life members get this challenge and all our challenges for free. But sign up, seriously. Think about what one positive change, one good new habit is worth to you. Think about what could be possible if you handed yourself over to a little bit of a program. We all pushed ourselves together. That's what we're going to do in the challenge. I'm going to be doing it. I do the challenges, all of them alongside everyone else. I'm looking forward to connecting with everyone in the Discord challenge, all the other bonuses. Anyways, check it out.

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  New Year, New You, the Daily Stoic Challenge. Sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge.