Remember That This Moment is Not Your Life | The Six Stereotypes Of Stoicism

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  It can be easy to forget it in the depths of winter, or the doldrums of summer, or in the middle of an interminable divorce, or the brutal bear market. You know, when it feels like forever, when it feels like things will never change. You just lose track. You get confused. You start to give up. "January ain't the whole world," Bon Iver sings in the song "Short Story." He's saying that winter doesn't last forever. No season does. And it's also worth pointing out that January isn't winter for the whole world either. But again, this is easy to forget when the news is dark or everything is going poorly at work. You can start to think it will always be this way, or that it is this way for everyone,

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  or that it's going to get worse. "Your child is sick," Marcus Aurelius reminds himself in meditations. "Leave it there," he says. "You don't have to tell yourself that they might die from it." Extrapolation, we have to understand, is the enemy. January is January. A slump is a slump. They're not fun, but neither are they the whole world or forever. "Remember that this moment is not your life," goes one of the most quoted lines in "The Obstacle is the Way." It is just a moment in your life.

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  When people hear the word Stoicism, they often think cold and emotionless, suppressed, repressed. But in all my years of writing and thinking about Stoicism, and also practicing it in my life, I can tell you that's not true. It's not supported by the scholarship. It's not supported by the practice. So much of what people think about Stoicism and the stereotypes about it are totally wrong.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  I think one of the things that people don't like about Stoicism is this idea that it's about suppressing your emotions, because we know that's not healthy. Just stuff it down, don't feel it. Sometimes people call this toxic masculinity. That's not what the Stoics were doing at all. Seneca says, "No amount of philosophy takes away natural feeling." The Stoics write beautiful essays on grief, they write beautiful essays on anger. They're talking about processing these emotions, understanding where they come from, understanding why giving yourself over to them is probably unhealthy. But they're not saying just stuff it down. They know that that never ends well for people. So Stoicism is really the ability to rationally analyze and understand our emotions. I wouldn't say that a Stoic is emotionless.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  Do they try to be less emotional? Sure. And we all know, when we get too emotional and we're making big decisions, bringing emotions to it often leads us astray. And look, the Stoic art of journaling was a place to process your emotions. Anne Frank said that paper is more patient than people. What Marcus Verliss is doing in his meditations with frustrating, obnoxious, annoying people or situations, he was working through his thoughts. He wanted to dump it out on the page, instead of dumping it out on someone else. You want to process the emotion, not suppress them. The Stoics were not repressed, they were just not controlled by their emotions. That's what the Stoics say. They say, "The greatest empire is command of yourself." So who's in charge? You or your emotions?

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  That's what the Stoics talk about when they talk about emotion. They wanted to get to a place of ataraxia, or stillness. "The world is crazy and chaotic enough, let's not add our own chaos and craziness to it."

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Nothing blows apart the notion that the Stoics were humorless more than the idea that an early Stoic named Chrysippus literally dies of laughter. The exact joke is sort of a "you had to be there" kind of a thing. It's lost to us, but they don't tell us this as a cautionary tale. He had a sense of humor and he laughed so hard that he died. Seneca said that the philosopher has two choices. He said, "We could go the way of..." Of Democritus and cry over the sadness and the frustratingness of life where we could go the way of Herakles and laugh. And so the Stoics knew that life could be dark, they knew that life could be hard, they knew that life could be painful, and they saw humor as a form of relief from this. The Stoics were funny. Most smart people are funny.

• 4:38Ryan Holiday?

  When you get the essence of something and you really understand it, you can see what's absurd about it, you can see what's ridiculous about it, you can see what's funny about it, and you can enjoy that. And also, humor was a way to not take themselves so seriously. We can imagine Marcus Aurelius needing humor so he wasn't corrupted by all the power and flatterers around him. Seneca joked that if you can learn to laugh at yourself, you will never cease to be amused. So the Stoics were also turning this incisive sense of humor on themselves, they were laughing at themselves first. So we have to cultivate this. The Stoics not only had humor, but they actively cultivated that sense of humor because it's an important Stoic skill.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  A huge misconception about the Stoics is that they're unfeeling and uncaring. The four core Stoic virtues, I have them tattooed on my wrist here, are courage, okay, self-discipline, okay, wisdom, yeah, we get that, but the other is justice. Throughout the Stoic writings, there is this profound emphasis on kindness, compassion, empathy. Marcus Aurelius, one point in Meditations, he's frustrated with someone, he's annoyed by them, and he says, "But ask yourself, when have you acted like that?" Even his first powerful passage in Meditations, where he talks about how people are frustrating, he says, "Okay, but you can't be implicated in that ugliness. You have to remember you were made to work with these people, that you come from the same place, that you share this affinity for each other."

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's one of the most consistent themes, actually, in Marcus Aurelius's writings, is this sympathy for this connection to other people, and the essentialness of that. It says, "Good character and acts for the common good." So yes, the Stoics do try to focus on what they control, but empathy is something we control, sympathy is something we control. The Stoics had this exercise of eccentric circle. So yeah, there's us in the middle, and we care about ourselves, but then we care about Our family, we care about our neighbors, we care about our community, we care about our country, we care about humanity. Part of the work of the Phallus, he was to pull those outer rings inward. Marx realist says, you have to remember that what injures the hive injures the bee. We're all interconnected.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  You can't allow someone else to suffer, to be a victim of injustice without it harming you in some way. You can't harm another person without harming yourself in some way. The Stoics are deeply compassionate individuals. They care about justice, they care about making the world a better place. Why else would they have written these works of art? Why else would they have served in politics? Why else would they have tried to make a difference? They didn't care. Of course they cared. One of the hardest things for people to stomach about Stoicism is this idea of resignation. And I think people think, I didn't get where I am accepting things. No, I pushed, I changed things.

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  How else would we get progress if we didn't push, if we didn't try? That's true, but remember, the core element in Stoicism is the idea of focusing on what you control. We have to accept something before we can act upon it. We don't control what happens, but we control how we respond to what happens. There's this great Stoic practice of amor fati. Nietzsche, who talked a lot about the Stoics, he said amor fati is to not merely bear what is necessary, but love it, embrace it. This doesn't mean you never try to change things or improve things. Of course you do. But you have to accept that some things are not in your control. You have to accept the parts of it that are not in your control, so you can focus on the parts of it that are in your control. If you think about Marx's realist's life, he experiences death and loss, natural disasters,

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  one problem after another. An ancient historian says he doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved. His whole reign is involved in a series of troubles. But when Marx's realist decides not to see that as unfortunate, to say, hey, I was made for this, I'm going to turn this into something. That's what makes him Marcus Aurelius. He says, "The impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way." That's Stoicism, the decision to accept this. But then to choose to make it a meaningful, significant, important part of your life, to rise, to meet that challenge, to grow because of it. That's the famous Stockdale paradox. Stockdale says, "You have to unflinchingly accept the reality of the situation and at the same time hold that you will turn it into something that in retrospect you wouldn't trade away."

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  So it's totally wrong to think of the Stoics as passive. They were incredibly active. They did practice this art of acquiescence, this little bit of acceptance first and foremost.

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  So Stoicism is morbid, right? Seneca talks about death so much in his writings that there's a collection of his writings just called "How to Die." Of course, all the Stoics did die. That is the fate of all humans. It's the one thing we all share in common. "I wear a necklace," says Memento Mori. And then the reminder for Marcus Aurelius, you know, "You could leave life right now." Yeah, he says that. But the important part, the operative part of that expression was, "Let that determine what you do and say and think." Epictetus went as far as saying, "As you tuck your child in at night, you should say to yourself, 'They will not make it until the morning.'" That's so morbid and dark. Who wants to contemplate the death of their child? The purpose of meditating on the mortality wasn't to be depressing in the Stoics.

• 9:51Ryan Holiday?

  It was to be invigorating, to remember to use your time wisely. Seneca says, "It's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it. We're more protective of our money and our property than we are on the one non-renewable resource." How crazy is that? Marcus Aurelius was unfortunate enough to bury multiple children. When he practiced Epictetus's exercise, which we know that he did, he was trying to remind himself, "Don't rush through this. Don't take it for granted. You don't know how much time you have. Balance the books of life each day," Seneca says. "Don't put stuff off and don't think of death as this thing in the future, far away, you don't have to consider. Instead, think of death as something that's happening right now. We are always dying. So we have to get up close and familiar with it.

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  We have to know what it is because it's happening to us constantly. And we want to let that inform how we live and the decisions we make."

• 10:54Ryan Holiday?

  Sometimes people will say, "What do I care about a philosophy that's just a bunch of old, dead, rich, white guys?" And this too could not be further from the point. Sure, there's Marcus Aurelius, who's the emperor of Rome, but he's not representative of the Stoics necessarily. I mean, his favorite Stoic philosopher was Epictetus, and Epictetus was a slave from Greece. The Stoics cover the full social spectrum in ancient Rome, and it's important that we realize that the Roman Empire covers an enormous swath of territory, including Africa and Britain, Greece, the Far East. In Marcus Aurelius's time, the Romans made contact with the Han Dynasty in China. Stoicism was founded amidst adversity and disaster. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, loses everything in a shipwreck.

• 11:39Ryan Holiday?

  He washes up penniless in Athens, but he would say he made a great fortune when he suffered that shipwreck because it led him to discover Stoic philosophy. Then and now, the Stoics have been an incredibly diverse group: men and women, black and white, every culture, every economic condition, every circumstance you can imagine. There's been someone there interested in and practicing Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius is trying to remind himself actively in meditations. He says, "There is no role so well-suited to philosophy as the one he was in," but that's true for all of us. However you have come to Stoicism, whatever you have going on in your life, it's inclusionary,

• 12:21Ryan Holiday?

  it's open, it's available to you. You can apply it to your life right now. And this is why Stoicism has endured for 20-plus centuries, because it's been relevant to people in all walks of life for all time. It's universal. And that's why Stoicism is more popular than ever. Sure, it's popular with men, but it's also extremely popular with women. I see that in the sales and the numbers and the followers of my own work. It's popular internationally. It's popular in professional sports and parenting circles. It's popular amongst billionaires, and I get letters from prisoners. If someone tries to prevent Stoicism as not for you, they're missing the point. And if you think Stoicism

• 13:04Ryan Holiday?

  is not for you, you are falling prey to the biggest misconception about it there is. The Stoics weren't perfect. They didn't have all the answers. But they were something more than the caricature of what Stoicism is sometimes portrayed at. So if Stoicism is interesting to you at all, if some of these reservations were what's holding you back, then I hope you'll give Stoicism a shot and I hope you'll check it out. I sent out a free daily email, one piece of Stoic wisdom every single day. It's received by over a million people all over the world, the largest community of Stoics who have ever lived. And I assure you, they are not humorless and morbid and depressed

• 13:46Ryan Holiday?

  and uncaring. No, these are people just like you. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/email. I hope to see you there.