You Can, But Should You? | 12 (Stoic) Remedies For Feeling Lonely Or Depressed

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

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  You could, but should you? Sure, you could get away with it. You would be following the rules, compliant with what the law allows. It's within your right in the tax code or the contract to do so. You filed the quarterly reports, gave the public disclosures or proxy statements. Or maybe it's not, but maybe you could get away with it. Maybe nobody would ever find out. We're all great at making excuses, at finding reasons to justify our actions. We tell ourselves that other people are doing it, so why can't we? We're not hurting anyone or breaking the law, are we? It was only a white lie, wasn't it? And yet... We can't sleep at night. That pit in our stomach won't go away. We won't stop worrying about getting caught. And all the while, we run away

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  from the inescapable truth that we did something wrong, and we know it was wrong. There's a story about a Spartan king who accidentally ran into two of his subjects, a youth and a youth lover in a crowd. The subjects were embarrassed and tried to hide their blushing cheeks, but the king noticed right away. "Son," he replied, "you ought to keep the company of the sort of people who won't cause you to change color when observed. If it makes you ashamed, if it's something you would never say in public, if you would only do it at night, obscured by the shadows, what does that say?" In some cases, it's hard to know what it means to do the right thing. But here's a pretty simple test we can apply most of the time. "Try not to do anything," Marx really said, "that requires walls or curtains."

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  If we are inclined to hide it, we probably shouldn't. If we dread the publicity, we're not living or doing right. We should strive for the opposite. We want people to see what we're doing. We should be the kind of person who, the more they hear about us, the more they respect and admire us. And this idea of doing what's right, of living in a way that makes us proud of who we are, this is the idea behind the new book. It's me, Ryan, again, sorry, breaking the fourth wall. This is the idea behind Right Thing Right Now. Good values, good character, good deeds. The book comes out on the 11th, but if you preorder now, we've got a bunch of awesome bonusers for you. Bonus chapters, you can get signed, numbered first editions. Ordering them from dailystoic.com/justice is the only way to get them. You can even have dinner with me at the Painted Porch with a bunch of other fellow Stoics.

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  And I love, I'm asking you to support it. It would mean a lot. If you've gotten anything from these emails over the years, it would mean a lot to me if you could preorder it. Dailystoic.com/justice. Grab Right Thing Right Now. Good values, good character, good deeds. It's cheap. You've got unsigned copies, cheaper than you can get them on Amazon, by the way. So if you're looking for guidance to live in a way that makes you proud of who you are, or if you're just curious about what's in the new book, the third in my Stoic Virtue series, just head over to dailystoic.com/justice to grab your copy now.

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism doesn't exactly come off as the happiest, lightest philosophy. And there's good reason for that. Life is hard. Life is difficult. Life can break our hearts. Other people can break our hearts. And all of the Stoics experienced this. They experienced depression and loneliness and pain and grief and anger and isolation and not being appreciated, all the things that we struggle with, the Stoics struggled with. In Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, that's what you're seeing. You're seeing the most powerful man in the world struggle with his emotions, struggle with feelings of anxiety and frustration and isolation and self doubt, and try to work his way through it.

• 4:00Ryan Holiday?

  And yet amidst this darkness, the Stoics understood, as Marcus Aurelius would say in Meditations, that our soul is dyed by the color of our thoughts. Life is dyed by the color of our thoughts. So if we only focus on the negative, if we don't have tools or strategies for dealing with what life throws at us, we're not going to end up in a good place. So if you're lonely, or depressed, or tired, or frustrated, dealing with emotional issues, this video is for you. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to everyone from the NBA to the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And what we're going to talk about in today's episode is Stoic strategies for dealing with life's difficult situations and the difficult emotions it brings up. And I think you're really going to like it.

• 4:45Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca said that the mind must be taken on wandering walks. He said, otherwise you'll break, you'll be too tense. I totally agree. I try to start my day with a walk, and I try to end my day with a walk. I don't even consider it exercise, although it is that. To me, it's putting the body in motion, it's slowing the mind down. I'm getting outside, I'm connected with nature. Maybe I'm having a conversation with someone else that I care about. And even though I'm moving, I'm getting closer to a place of stillness. Walking to me is a magical cure-all. So if you're not walking every day, you're not as happy or as healthy as you could be. So listen to the Stoics and take a walk.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  There's a famous Stoic story. Cleantheus is walking down the streets in Athens, and here's this man talking to himself, criticizing himself, berating himself. And Cleantheus stops him and he says, you know, remember, you're not talking to a bad person. I think one of the things that loneliness does is this sort of vicious cycle where because we're away from people, we don't feel good about ourselves. Because we don't feel good about ourselves, we isolate from other people. This Stoic idea of being kind to yourself, being a friend to yourself, it not just lessens the burden of that loneliness, but it also makes it more possible for you to put yourself back out there. First off, I just like the idea of Cleantheus walking up to someone who's clearly lonely, who's clearly not having a good time, who's clearly very hard on themselves, and like

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  a brother, like a friend, reaching out and just saying something to him.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  I like that, but I also like what he actually said. The message there, I think, when we are down in those depths, when we're in dark places, when we have isolated, when we do feel disconnected from people, we have to remember that we're not bad people and how we talk to ourselves matters. And the decision to treat yourself like shit is not a good decision. There's a line by the band The Head and the Heart, something like, "Until you learn to love yourself, that door is locked to someone else." Which I think is beautifully said. Like, if you don't think you're worthy of friendships, or relationships, or connection, or love, how is anyone else gonna see that in you? So it starts by realizing you're not talking to a bad person. You're not a bad person.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  It starts with, as Seneca says, being a better friend to yourself.

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  I imagine you wanted this thing for a long time. You wanted to be successful, you wanted to be famous, you wanted to do great work, to break out, and that happens. What does it actually feel like to get there? Was it a delivery on all your hopes and dreams and expectations, or was there a little bit of a letdown?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting, because this became front-page news a week or two ago, because I did, I think, Bill Maher's podcast, and I was talking about this idea of suffering and, you know, the human struggle for happiness, finding happiness. I mentioned, like, I spent a great deal of time on The Office, really unhappy. Of course, it was misquoted and taken out of context, and it said, "Rainn Wilson miserable on the set of The Office. Rainn Wilson spent the entire Office unhappy." You can Google it. It's incredible how the media works, headline after headline after headline, making it seem like I'm this ungrateful, miserable fuck. The fact is, is that no matter how well things are going for us as human beings, we have a tendency towards anxious discontent.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  And my dukkha, my suffering, my anxious discontent on the set of The Office was, you know, I wanted to be a bigger movie star. I had a crack at doing a bunch of movies, they didn't turn out very good, and people didn't really watch them. And actually, some of them, they are pretty damn good, but people didn't watch them, and they didn't work at the box office, and, okay, that's fine. But at the time, I was just pulling my hair out, like, "Ah, damn it, I want this movie deal, and why can't I have this, and why can't I have that? And how come he's getting offered this, and I'm not?" And, you know, envy, and pettiness, and self-seeking. Again, I'm so grateful for that test, because I look back on it now, and I'm like, "You dipshit." You were on the, that was the-

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  You had it all.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  You had it all. It was the greatest job ever. Why couldn't you have just enjoyed it more? And I wasn't, I wasn't a spring chicken. I was, you know, I, I got cast in The Office. I was thirty-eight, I think, when I started playing Dwight, you know, so well into my forties. By this last several years, I, I was in a much better place, you know, it was kind of earlier on, year three, four, five, right in that area of The Office. But yeah, I had, I mean, it was, it was beautiful. It was a great group of people and a beautiful job and nice pay and got along great. And I was playing one of the great TV characters of all time and lots of doors were open to me and getting invited to festivals and hotels and this and that and the other thing. And just enjoy it. Getting nominated for Emmys, like,

• 9:34Speaker 01

  revel in it. It doesn't get better than this. It really doesn't. Like, oh, you, you're a TV star, but oh, you need to be a, a movie star?

• 9:41Ryan Holiday?

  We want more. We're, we're never satisfied.

• 9:48Ryan Holiday?

  Being a kid from California, my ranch here in Texas seems enormous, right? Anything more than a small backyard seems enormous. But of course, when I zoom out and look at it from a drone, or I've flown over it in an airplane a couple of times, it suddenly gets really, really small. In meditations, a handful of times, Marcus Rivas talks about zooming out and taking Plato's view. He wouldn't have been able to get up as high as we did, but he also had, his empire was also one that stretched almost the entirety of the known world. And yet, he tried to remind himself how small this really was. He talked about how the edges of the empire with little armies fighting over it were like ants fighting over a piece of food. Talked about when you zoom out from the moment that you're in and

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  you see the larger history, the larger context, you realize that this has been the same thing happening over and over and over again. That's the famous biblical verse about how one generation comes, another goes, but the earth abideth forever. The sun also rises. That's where Hemingway gets the title there. It says, "The sun goeth down and hastens to the place where he arose." The idea is that everything in the world has happened before, right? Babies have always been being born, people- We've always been squabbling over things. People have always been fighting over things. People have always been lusting over things. People have always been stupid. People have always been ungrateful. People have always been afraid. They've always been here. They've always been doing this. That's the perennial theme even of meditations.

• 11:16Ryan Holiday?

  Not only is Marcus really is talking about it, but he's illustrating it, right? You read the pages of this 2,000 year old book, and you see that as much as humanity has changed, as much as the world is different, it is also exactly the fucking same. The rhythm of life continues, even if technology disrupts, even if world events disrupt. And we have to find a way to take solace in this, to take humility in this, to get some clarity and perspective from this. We have to zoom out. We have to realize that the things we think are very big are actually quite small. And then the things that we think are quite small are actually timeless and connect us to all humans who've ever lived. That's why we zoom out and take a bigger perspective.

• 11:58Ryan Holiday?

  Most of the exercise that I do is very solitary. I like running. I like swimming. I suffer by myself, which is great. That's how I like to do it. But there is also something special about suffering with other people, doing hard things with other people. Seneca talks about doing this cold plunge to start the new year. There's things that have existed for hundreds of years, polar bear clubs where everyone gets together and they do something really hard and challenging with each other. One of the best ways to find community is around the things that you struggle to do by yourself. CrossFit gyms, great communities. Martial arts, great communities. Races or physical challenges, Spartan races, warrior dashes. Doing really hard things with other people

• 12:41Ryan Holiday?

  is a way to pull people together. There's a great line from Marcus really is where he says, "We're like soldiers storming a wall. So what if you slip and you have to ask a comrade for help?" Nothing helps you realize that you're all in something together when it's something that each of you is struggling to do by yourself. So I think facing discomfort is great generally. Facing discomfort with other people is how you quickly become a member of a tribe. This is what 12-step groups, what recovery groups have been doing for also like 100 years. People at their rock bottom, when they need help, when they are struggling, coming together and learning how to be part of an organization that isn't a top-down organization, we're

• 13:24Ryan Holiday?

  going to tell you what to do, but a collective, a community-driven organization where you're all coming together and you're getting comfort from each other as you do uncomfortable things together.

• 13:38Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca had this word, eusthemia, which he said is the sense of the path that you're on, and he said, not being distracted by the path that crisscross yours, especially from those who are hopelessly lost.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  It takes an immense amount of discipline, I think also confidence, just like sort of self-awareness to go like, here are the things I want to do, here's when I want to do them, and like not really paying attention to what other people are doing or everything that's coming into your inbox.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  It takes all those things, right? If you're not too caught up in that chase and in your own ego and everything, you actually learn to like really settle into the fact that you intellectually grasp, oh, I'm not comparing myself to what Ryan's doing, whatever he just did, like he's on his own path, and you find that it doesn't make you go like, what about me? I did do that at 25, and like now, when I hear about that, I don't go like, huh, like what am I gonna do, you know?

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  Basically, nothing lasts. That's the very Stoic idea. In Meditations, Marx really says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver, same thing happened to both. They were both buried in the same earth. There's that Latin saying, sick transit gloria, right? All glory is fleeting. We think that if we become famous, or popular, or important, right, this says something about us, it makes us immortal, but it doesn't. You're eventually inevitably invariably forgotten. Nothing lasts. It doesn't matter. You could be the biggest thing in the world, and then one day, you're not. Suddenly, you're not. One of my books, Stillness, hit number one, and then you know what happened the next week? Someone else was there, right? I've had a good run, but it'll go away eventually, and inevitably invariably always does.

• 15:18Ryan Holiday?

  So what does matter then? The Stoics would say just being a good person, doing good work, focusing on what you control. That's it.

• 15:30Ryan Holiday?

  Nobody is more unhappy than the person who's never gone through adversity, Seneca says. He says, because they've never been permitted to prove themselves. That's something I try to remind myself when stuff gets hard, when I run into a bunch of obstacles in a row, when it doesn't turn out the way that I want it to go. I'm going, hey, this is an opportunity. This is a chance for me to practice the virtues. That's what the Stoics say. The obstacle is the way. It's a chance to practice virtue, to practice excellence. But more importantly, it's a chance for me to prove myself, if only to myself. Yes, of course, I would have liked it to go the way that I wanted it. And I might feel a little unhappy that it's not that way. But I'd be more unhappy if I never got this chance, if I didn't get this practice, if I didn't get these reps with things not being the way that I wanted them to be. So I embrace that opportunity. I do the practice willingly.

• 16:13Ryan Holiday?

  I take the rep and I get better for it and ultimately happier for it.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  The most beautiful writing that Seneca did, he wrote these four essays that are called his consolations. And they're him consoling people who have lost someone. In one case, it's his mother who lost him. He's being exiled. I think this idea of the Stoics is having no emotions, being emotionless, having no heart. It totally misses it. It's about not being overwhelmed and ruled by or destroyed by those emotions. But it's certainly not stuffing them down and pretending they don't exist. Sometimes it's about using the mind to understand, here's why you're feeling this way. This way is not rational. This isn't a good way to feel. And then I think in other times, you've got it all perfectly worked out in your head and the heart needs to come and overwhelm that and be like, it's more complicated. There are people involved, like we're talking about with formlessness.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other.

• 17:12Ryan Holiday?

  In meditation, the Marxist realist talks about being the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the raging sea falls still around. That idea of stillness, of being present, of locking in, to me, it's everything. It's happiness. It's also where great work, where that flow state comes from. It's where joy comes from. It's where connection comes from. It's where gratitude comes from. So just lock in, calm down. It doesn't matter what's happening in the outside world. Slow down, lock in, let the waves crash around you and eventually everything will quiet down. You will quiet down and you will do what you need to do in this very moment.

• 17:50Ryan Holiday?

  Don't seek for things to happen the way you want them to happen, but want them to happen the way that they have happened. Wish for them to have happened the way that they did. That's Epictetus. He obviously precedes Nietzsche by a couple thousand years, but Nietzsche had this idea of amor fati, right? Amor fati, it translates to a love of fate. Instead of needing things to be a certain way, instead of simply accepting them as they are. Nietzsche and Epictetus say that human greatness, human happiness is in loving things as they actually are. Saying, "This is the way that it's supposed to be. This is wonderful that it is that way. It was chosen for me." And this isn't even necessarily to say that you just accept the world as awful and unjust and you never try to change it. But you say, "No, no, it was set up this way

• 18:33Ryan Holiday?

  so I could be who I am capable of being inside of it." That's what this reminder of it means to me. Marcus really talks about how what you throw on top of a fire is fuel for the fire that turns it all into flame and brightness. That's what we're talking about. Amor fati means that you embrace life as it is. You embrace situations as they are. Instead of fighting them, instead of running from them, instead of resenting them, even instead of just tolerating them, you love them. That is the path to happiness and to greatness.