No One Gets Away With This | Stoic Secrets To Living In Accordance With Nature

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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 and how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  No one gets away with this. None of the Stoics led completely unblemished lives, as I talk about in Lives of the Stoics. You should read it. Zeno got carried away in his turf war with his former student Aristote. Junius Rusticus botched the trial of Justin Martyr, and only martyred the guy. Seneca got caught up with Nero. Even the faultless Cato had his weird wife-swapping scandal, and Marcus Aurelius screwed up his succession plan. The Stoics were people. They were in public life for a long time. In fact, most of them lived surprisingly long lives. So it should not surprise us that they made a couple of decisions that they'd probably like to do over again, that they had character flaws that turned out to seal parts of their fate, that none of them had perfect records. We could actually apply the logic of one of Marcus Aurelius's

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  famous passages here. Is a perfect life possible? Can one spend decades out in the world and always make the right call, always act with perfect virtue? Of course not. So when we come across some of those mistakes and the foibles in the Lives of the Stoics, we should say to ourselves, okay, this is one of those errors. This is one of those black marks. It's to be expected. It's understandable. It's part of being human. There was no way they'd get out of life without doing something like this, perhaps more than once. And by the way, we should also apply this same treatment to ourselves. That thing you're kicking yourself about, that failure you feel ashamed of, that lapse of judgment or discipline, that's just one instance in a long life of someone aspiring to virtue.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  This logic doesn't excuse the error, but it does contextualize it, gives us a chance, if we keep going, if we continue to do more good than bad, to balance it out.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  One phrase you hear pop up in the Stoic writings quite a bit is this idea of living in accordance with nature. All the Stoics talk about it, but you know, one thing they didn't do is define that particularly well. Did they mean human nature? Did they mean outside nature? Did they mean some sort of metaphysical nature? Probably some combination of all of the above. But I want to talk about one of those which is most interesting and I think most accessible to us. The idea of living in and with nature. That's one thing you see abounding in the Stoic writings. Marcus Aurelius is writing beautifully about the way that stalks of grain bend over low under their own weight. Talks about animals, the way there's flecks of foam on the boar's mouth. Seneca writes a whole

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  series of books on natural questions, on sort of what we would today call biology and anthropology. So the Stoics were definitely fascinated with this, and they weren't your sort of classroom-bound, bookish philosophers. They were people who got outside in the world. And that's what I try to do. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. Of course, this is my life. This is what I get excited about. But I also live on a little ranch outside Austin, Texas, where I try to spend a good chunk of my time. I try to do things outside every day. I try to be out in nature because it makes me happy. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Some Stoic strategies to live in nature, to appreciate nature, and get happiness and joy from nature.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  Nothing makes me happier, for instance, than going to see my two donkeys. I have Buddy and Sugar. That's them right there. So Buddy I bought on Craigslist for $100, maybe the single best purchase and investment I've ever made. And then the Sugar, we got her for, I think, $300 on Craigslist. And they're just the sweetest. Hey!

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Sugar is much moodier than Buddy. I'd say Buddy's a bit of a sex pest, if I'm being perfectly honest. But he's a nice boy.

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  I think one thing, I realized one time, I walked over and I was just sort of watching Buddy. He's just standing there for like hours and hours. I realized he's not comparing himself to anyone, right? He's not wondering if he's adequate or not. He's just alive, right? He's just still, right? You know, that expression, "human being, not human doing." Buddy doesn't wrestle with that at all. He's just present, look at him.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  When I go out and I see the animals, when I spend time with them, it calms me down, makes me happier, makes me more grateful, makes me more present. Then I can bring that energy back towards my regular life, toward my job, towards the world that is not calm and chill like they are. And you know, there's something about animal energy. This is why they do equine therapy, for instance. Just being around the animals, feeling them, having to adjust your mood, having to read their mood. There's something very special and powerful about that. And so, yeah, he was a hundred dollars and he's kind of a lot of work sometimes. Not really, he's pretty low maintenance. But, uh, but he pays us back in many, many ways. Mostly just being alive and being a good example. And one time you fought off a mountain lion, didn't you Buddy?

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  Remember? You still have some scars. It was... Buddy, where's your scar? Somewhere around here.

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  Neck was all bit up. That's what they do, they're livestock guarding animals. Their job is just to sort of be around, to keep the cows company. And they keep bad stuff away, that's what Buddy does. And then Sugar gets us a baby every once in a while. Buddy and Sugar have a baby every year or so, about 13 months. And we name it Booger. And then we, uh, we spread the love and we share it with friends. Let's see if Sugar will let me pet it today, she's kind of grouchy.

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  Sugar, you got something on you.

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  Sugar's a little smaller than Buddy.

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  And then we've got this little lake here, which sometimes we go fishing in. Hunting and fishing, as far as hobbies go, teaches all sorts of amazing philosophical lessons. Patience, of course. Ingenuity, of course. Silence, of course. And then, you know, some certain resiliency, a certain gratitude for the gifts of nature. And then, you know, you gotta learn these skills, right? Fishing is a skill. Hunting is a skill. Cleaning a fish, or a deer, or a hog is, it's gross, but it's a skill. And then from that skill, you get certain benefits, right? And that's what life is. I think one of the things I've had to learn when I go hunting, especially, I talked to

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  Peter Attia about this on the podcast, I'll show you a chunk of that. One of the experiences I find when I'm hunting is, so first off, you have this, this sort of awareness. And then when you see the thing that you are looking for, you get that rush, that flood of emotion, the recognition, the practice of having to calm down the adrenaline dump because you know it's not going to be productive. To me, I get the most out of hunting just in the unusual practice or the building of that muscle, which I feel like you don't get to so consciously do in the rest of your life.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's an amazing experience, that you're right, there is no comparison to that in regular life. All of the best laid plans can go right out the window in the fog of war. And in archery especially, this is a much bigger issue. So I only hunt with a bow and arrow. In archery, the goal is obviously for the most rapid and humane exploration of the animal. So therefore, you want to be as close as possible so that the risk of a subpar shot is gone. Well, anybody who's hunted elk knows that when you're 50 yards or less from an elk... Elk during the rut. I mean, you can smell it. You can feel its spit hitting you at times.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  By the way, if it gets really angry, it'll charge you and it will destroy you. It could impale you. You now have to be able to calm yourself down to do something that is very technically hard, which is shoot a bow and arrow. I worked with this guy named Joel Turner, who's, I think, one of the masters of teaching the process of the perfect shot. And you've probably heard of like target panic, right? Target panic is a real issue in anything, but boy, especially in archery. How do you get out of target panic? Well, it turns out you have to shift your focus from the aim to the process of the

• 9:04Speaker 01

  shot and you have to turn it into something called a closed loop process as opposed to an open loop. So, an open loop process is something that you do without thinking that can't be stopped mid-process, whereas something that is closed loop, everything you're doing is being done slowly enough that you can stop at any moment and your only capacity is to focus on that thing. You can't be thinking about anything else. Now, that's not an easy thing to do. That in and of itself is a remarkable skill. But, once you have that skill, all of a sudden, even when an elk is screaming and, you know,

• 9:44Speaker 01

  it's just total chaos in the midst of wherever you are, you can sort of focus on the process and not the aiming, which is the thing that you would net. By the process, I mean the shot process.

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  Having to calm yourself down, having to understand that your racing heart rate here is not your friend, that your emotions here are not necessarily your friend and to calm yourself down and to be in command of oneself to do this thing that you have to do. Obviously, people who fight in wars or respond to real crises are, you know, experience this in a real way, but hobbies that challenge us in that way, right, are really good. Plus, they get us outside. There's this great passage from Theodore Roosevelt where he goes out. He goes out, he spends all, you know, days in the rain, whatever. He ends up getting what he wanted, which he says is a reward. He says, "But if one actually needed a reward," because the reward was doing all the stuff, right? I think that's one of the things you learn when you go hunting is you have to detach

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  from the results a little bit. You have to actually experience the process. "Hey, buddy." You have to experience the process. You have to be present for it. You just have to understand that you can do everything you want to do right, but then you also just have to turn yourself over to the gods, so to speak, right? How's the weather that day? What are the animals doing that day? There's a certain acceptance, the art of acquiescence, as Epictetus calls it. So you practice that too. So I think hobbies that get you out and challenge you, there's a reason Marcus Aurelius goes hunting. There's a reason hunting metaphors abound in the ancient world because they obviously had a different food system than us. They didn't have the luxury of just magically getting everything from the supermarket.

• 11:27Ryan Holiday?

  They had to learn how to do things. They had to understand where their food came from, and so do we.

• 11:37Ryan Holiday?

  Getting out into nature is one of the most wonderful things there is. That's my donkey, he's yelling right there. When I'm out on my farm, when I'm walking, that's where I get most of my ideas. That's where I get a good chunk of my happiness. Lately, when I've been walking around on the farm, when I've been doing chores down at the farm, I've been wearing these new Tacovas boots that the folks at Tacovas were nice enough to send over. Tacovas is an awesome boot brand. Their western boots for men and women are handmade from the most premium leathers. The boots are Austin-designed, Texas-tested, and handmade in the boot-making capital of the world, Leon, Mexico. They're your traditional western boot, but Tacovas has innovated on comfort, style, and service. And Tacovas is western to their core.

• 12:20Ryan Holiday?

  Tacovas believes in western for all. Just head on into one of their stores. You'll be greeted like family, offered a boot shine and a drink, and get custom-fitted for a new pair of boots. And if you can't make it into a store, Tacovas delivers the most premium quality and the most comfortable western wear right to your door. Visit tacovas.com. That's T-E-C-O-V-A-S dot com. Point your toes west.

• 12:49Ryan Holiday?

  Musonius Rufus has a whole essay on how farming is the profession best suited to philosophy. I don't know exactly what he means. I think he's saying that cultivation, I think he's saying that patience, I think he's talking about hard work and dedication. I think he's talking about being outside. It's a profession unlike, I don't know, something more exploitative, something more manipulative. It's something that forces one to play by certain rules. Isn't quite as virtuous a profession. I don't exactly farm stuff, but I would say that getting this place, what it's forced us to do is learn a bunch of skills we wouldn't have otherwise learned, to understand the world in ways that we probably otherwise wouldn't

• 13:32Ryan Holiday?

  have had to do. There are so many moments when we wanted to give up, when we wanted to go back towards an easier life, when we wanted to live like everyone else. It makes you responsible. We're responsible for these guys. We're responsible for the chickens. We're responsible for keeping everyone safe, for taking care of them, for making sure that they're fed. These are all, I think, great traits that challenge you, that force you to grow up, force you to be responsible. But you get a lot out of it in exchange, which of course is the essence of what the Stoics are talking about. And maybe that's what Musonius Rufus meant when he said that farming is the only profession that a philosopher should embark on.

• 14:14Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things about being outside, being in nature, especially being out in the country, is it's quieter. And it forces you to be present, to observe. It calms you down. Like, I'm just noticing the different prints that I'm seeing here. I saw some raccoon prints a few minutes ago. You gotta be on the lookout for snakes. The donkeys were walking behind me earlier. I don't want them to sneak up on me. You're just always noticing, right? I think that's a beautiful part of meditation. You see that Marcus Rios had cultivated kind of the poet or the artist's eye. He's noticing these little things. He says, the flecks of foam on the boar's mouth. He says, the furrowed brow of the lion. He's cultivated a kind of presence. Winston Churchill, who falls in love with painting at middle age,

• 14:56Ryan Holiday?

  one of the things it does is it gets him outside into nature in a way that... As a very ambitious, busy, sort of worldly guy, he wasn't doing, right? You look at Winston Churchill and you go, yeah, this isn't a guy who's going for long runs or bike rides, but getting out in a field and painting, watching a sunset, you know, observing a flower, it forces him to slow down, to notice and be present. Like right now, where I am, it's not the most beautiful, right? All the leaves have fallen, we're still dealing with a bit of a drought in Texas, although we finally got some serious rain last week. The more I live here, the more I spend time, I find beauty in all the different seasons, if I look for it, right? If I try to be observant and notice and find, oh, that's cool, I didn't see that before.

• 15:39Ryan Holiday?

  I've lived here now for going on 10 years and, you know, even though I've walked every inch of this, I find things that I missed the whole time, or I find something that washed up, or I find something new that's happened, right? And that's one of the things you're doing. You're walking around, you're checking the fences, you're just monitoring what's going on. You're present, it's not work, but being responsible for all this, you have to be aware. As you cultivate land, a piece of property, or a place on earth, it's also cultivating in you a kind of presence and awareness. And I've found that to be immensely beneficial.

• 16:16Ryan Holiday?

  If you want some semblance of the cycle of life and death on the farm, these are some bones of a cow I had to put down. I think this is a deer or boar or something, but like, look, just walking, as I'm walking back to the fence, I'll show you.

• 16:39Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, this is, uh, you know, I think a leg bone from one of the cows, and then the dogs were grabbing it and playing with it. That's just how it goes. So anyways, there's a certain stillness to being around it, but there's also this kind of sobering reminder of memento mori. Same thing will happen to us eventually, right? You know, we're not that different than even, even than a cow. Hopefully, nobody will eat us, but what do we care? We'll be dead. Let me show you the goats, too. That's turtle.

• 17:07Ryan Holiday?

  That's Bucket. And that's Watermelon. Turtle is from Brent from Saragordo. He had her here in Austin. He was actually kidnapped and then he came back and then Brent couldn't drive her all the way out to California. So he lives with us now. This is Watermelon. We rescued him. Bucket is our first goat. We had another goat that we really love named Biscuit. And we'd been here maybe two years. Biscuit got out, went over to our neighbors, escaped and got impregnated, came back, had babies, you know, a while later. And we called the neighbor and he had more experience with goats. He said, could you help us? Unfortunately, she died in childbirth. They were huge calves.

• 17:52Ryan Holiday?

  I think one of them was stillborn, this whole thing. And, you know, we were really sad. We go to the point about there being life and death. We were really sad about it. And then as our neighbor was helping us clean up, you know, he was consoling us. And then he said, hey, can I have the babies and the goat that it all died? And we said, why? And he's like, I'm going to barbecue them and feed them to my dog. And it was just like, whoa, this is a different life, man. But it's, it's that point of like, you know, you think you're special, but you know, someone will eat you when you die if you're not careful. I think the idea is that you can see Stoicism anywhere and everywhere. And that's in fact, in life that we should look for these lessons. That's what I do. That's why I love living out here.

• 18:35Ryan Holiday?

  You can see the philosophical lessons, not just in the pages of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but in, in a cow, in a goat, in a painful experience, in a goose going missing. And these are the ways that the words sort of, you read about them and then you have to experience them in some way. Living out here in the country has been a constant reminder of that. Some very happy, fun days, like today, when we get a new calf. Some sad days when we have to bury something or put something down or lose it or sell it. But such is life, such is Stoicism. I'll see you soon.

• 19:10Ryan Holiday?

  When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up. Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which 3/4 of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com/email.