Don’t Let It Change You | How To Actually Be Happier In 2024 (According to the Stoics)

So eventually a group of corrupt Romans contrived to have Cato assigned to a posting in Cyprus, a veritable hotbed of misdeeds and sin. It was a place where politicians got rich, where they had fun, where they lived the colonial high life. “You will come back from there a far more agreeable man and more tame,” one of them predicted to Cato. They weren’t trying to bribe him, they just wanted to expose him to how things were supposed to be done. They wanted him to get a taste. This was what Marcus Aurelius was warning about in Meditations where he talked about “imperialization,” about being stained purple, about being “Caesarified.” The status quo doesn’t like people who buck it. No, the status quo contrives to apply pressure and persuasion on us, to get us to go along. It tries to change us, tries to lead us away from those pesky virtues of courage and temperance and justice and wisdom. If you want to learn more about Cato, the Stoics all other Stoics admired, the man that George Washington made his hero, check out our video: 5 Stoic Secrets from the Man of Principle (Cato the Younger). We also dedicate a whole chapter to Cato in Lives of the Stoics (signed copies here!).✉️ 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?

  Don't let it change you. Cato was too good for his own good. Some Romans thought he didn't take bribes, he didn't cook the books, he wasn't motivated by ego, and worse, he seemed to expect others should follow this same moral code. "They didn't want to." "We can't all be Catos," went the expression, usually said with a shrug before someone did the wrong thing. So eventually, a group of corrupt Romans contrived to have Cato assigned to a posting in Cyprus, a veritable hotbed of misdeeds and sin. It was a place where politicians got rich, where they had fun, where they lived the high colonial life. "You will come back from there a far more agreeable man and more tame," one of them predicted to Cato. They weren't trying to bribe him, they just wanted to expose him to how things were

• 1:09Ryan Holiday?

  supposed to be done. They wanted him to get a taste. This is what Marcus Aurelius was warning about in Meditations, where he talked about imperialization, being stained purple, about being Caesarified. The status quo doesn't like people who bucket. No, the status quo contrives to apply pressure and persuasion on us, to get us to go along. It tries to change us, tries to lead us away from these pesky virtues of courage and temperance and justice and wisdom. We have to be strong like Cato. We have to resist. We have to come back, as he did the same person we were when we left. We have to keep fighting to be the person that philosophy wants us to be. And by the way, we have a really good video and a really good podcast episode, all about Cato. If you want to learn more

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  about him, you can check out Five Stoic Secrets from the Man of Principle. I'll link to that. And of course, I have a chapter all about Dierk Cato in Lives of the Stoics. So check that out also.

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  Mark Sereley says that ambition is tying your well-being to what other people say and do. It says sanity is tying it to your own actions. Try to want everything to happen the way that it will happen. Very little is needed for the happy life. It's all within yourself.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  There's this image that the Stoics were unfeeling and unfun, that they sort of shove everything down, that they're joyless, which couldn't be further from the truth. When people think of Stoicism, I think the last thing they think is happiness. 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. 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. Doesn't mean exuberant excitement and pleasure.

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  That's not what the Stoics thought of happiness as. We're going to talk about strategies for Stoic happiness, what that looked like for Stoics.

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  What is the number one source of our unhappiness? It's focusing on things that we don't control. It's we're worried about this, we're anxious about that. We're hoping that this will happen, or that that won't happen. We basically take our chance at happiness and we hand it over to random events. And this is where the key, essentially the premise of Stoicism comes in. Epictetus says the chief task in life is to separate things into two buckets, what's in my control and what's not in my control. And he says, "The only way to happiness is to cease worrying about things which are beyond my power of control." So when you narrow your focus from the things that everyone thinks about, from the things that everyone worries about, from all the things that are outside your grasp, and you decide to focus instead on what's up to me,

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  you have a much better chance of being happy. Voltaire said, "The most important choice you make each day is to be in a good mood." Your mood is something you control. If you decide, hey, I'm gonna be in a good mood today, you have a much better chance of being happy than the person who wakes up and says, well, I hope everything goes right today. And if I get everything that I want, and if nothing bad happens, and if everyone's nice to me, then I can be happy. Then I can have fun. That is not a recipe for day-to-day dependable happiness. But look, for the Stoics, ultimately, what's in our control is our thoughts and our actions. Everything else is up to someone else. Marcus Aurelius says, "You have power over your mind, not events." He says, "Realize this, and you will find strength." But I would say, "Realize this, and also you will find happiness."

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  Not just resilience, not just the ability to muddle through, but to say, again, "I control my mood. I control what I'm gonna do about this. I control this little window of stuff today, and I'm just gonna crush it there. That's where I'm gonna focus. And because I'm focused there, I know I can make myself happy."

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  And what I think is one of the best passages in all of Meditations, but certainly the most illustrative, Marcus Aurelius says, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." And I think if we're shortening that to a mantra, we'd say, "Good character, acts for the common good." Or, "Good character, good deeds." Meaning that you work on yourself, of course. That's a huge part of Stoicism. But it's also about what you do for others, whether you're being a positive difference-maker in the world. Marcus Aurelius refers to the common good something like 80 times in Meditations. And so, it's really important that we don't see Stoicism as this, simply this interior philosophy. It's about perfecting the self or working on the self so one can make a bigger difference in the world. That's the motto that I think you wanna try to live by every single day.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  You wanna say to yourself in every situation, "What am I doing for others?"

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  If you want more tranquility, more happiness, Marcus Aurelius says, "You have to do less. You have to say, 'No more.'" When you eliminate the inessential, the Stoics say, "You get this double benefit of doing the essential things better." That word, "less," that's been my word of the year for my wife and I. Less stuff, less commitments, less travel, less drama, less wasted time. Our goal is to eliminate the inessential things so we can do the essential things better. And so should you.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  People think money will make them happy, which of course it doesn't. Although up to a point, money can contribute to your happiness. But generally, people think if I'm wealthier, I will be happier. Well, I'll tell you how you can become wealthier right now. It's by wanting less stuff, by needing less. Seneca says poverty is not being poor. Poverty is wanting more. And he's not being flippant. He's not trying to say that some struggling mother on welfare does not have it hard. What he's saying is that there are rich people who are very poor. And they're poor because they're comparing themselves to other people. He says they're poor because they're greedy, because they're insatiable, because they think when they get a million more dollars, or a billion more dollars, or maybe it has nothing to do with money. Maybe it's when they win another Super Bowl.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  When they get this other thing, then they will be happy. Right? So they, again, by focusing on something they don't control, right, something that's in the future, they've deprived themselves of happiness right now. So your wants and your happiness are in a tension with each other. So if you can decide to be grateful and satisfied and good with what you have now, you have a certain amount of wealth and you have something to be happy for. Mark Serenius says, "Look, we want all this other stuff, but we forget that if we lost what we had right now, we'd be sad. Also, if we didn't have it, but someone gave it to us, we'd be grateful." Right? So I think wanting less and being grateful for what you have is a great way to produce happiness now. Epictetus says, "Wealth is not having many possessions, it's having few wants." And again, what do you control?

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right? You control the want part of things more than you control how much you have.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  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 Serenius 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 actions. 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. You can't let other people do it because then you've handed over your happiness, your wealth, everything to somebody else.

• 8:56Ryan Holiday?

  The central idea of Stoicism is that adversity is unavoidable. It is a fact of life. The future is uncertain. Actually, the future is certain. Things are gonna go wrong. Things are gonna be difficult. You're gonna face challenge. That's what the Stoics knew firsthand. That was the essential fact of existence to them. "There was nothing we could do to make it go away," they said, "but we could prepare ourselves. We could strengthen ourselves. We could be ready for that to happen." Epictetus said, "The whole point of philosophy is to get to a place where, whatever happens, you're able to say, 'This is what I trained for.'" So the Stoics were always challenging themselves mentally, physically, spiritually. They were seeking out difficult experiences,

• 9:38Ryan Holiday?

  trying to get out of their comfort zone, to prepare for what could happen.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  There was a Stoic, his name was Chrysippus, and he's supposedly one of the only people to ever die of laughter. Do you believe that's possible?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I think Chrysippus had a heart attack or was doing whatever synthetic drug was around then and had a good old laugh that tipped it off.

• 10:04Ryan Holiday?

  You never laughed so hard that you thought you could die?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:09Ryan Holiday?

  The joke partly survives to us. So apparently, he was like sitting on his front porch, and a donkey walks up and he starts eating out of the garden. And the person rushes up to get their donkey. And he says, "Does your donkey want some wine to wash down those figs?" And then he starts laughing at his own joke. And he laughs so hard that he keels over and dies. So it's kind of the ultimate, like you had to be there, because it makes no sense.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Okay, Chrysippus, I know what happened.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Because that joke is bad.

• 10:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  That's not...

• 10:41Ryan Holiday?

  He died of embarrassment?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  That's not a joke, is what that is. First of all, we tell you what's happening across this life.

• 10:48Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Everything is shit.

• 10:49Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Everything is so, but this is actually my favorite emotion, though.

• 10:54Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Everything in his life has just exploded and then crumbled to rubble.

• 10:59Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  And it was that moment, do you know when everything seems like it's just the worst? And, and you have that realization that I'm just gonna sit here and, and just, there's nothing to be done anymore. It's all rubble and you're sitting in, in just the grief of it all. And then something silly happens and you know, it takes, it's like when you laugh after crying a ton or, or you know, you're sitting in your house, it's been destroyed by a tornado and something silly happens and everyone laughs. When you're laughing in the, in the hospital room after somebody's just died.

• 11:31Ryan Holiday?

  Or like all this terrible stuff has happened and then one more terrible thing happens and you just start laughing maniacally at the absurdity of it.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  That's exactly what happened to him and it was just the dumbest thing. Somebody maybe right before that had, had choked on some, one of somebody he loved choked on wine and died and he goes, you want some wine with that fig?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And died from, from all the major emotions hitting him at once. I think that's what happened because that's a really bad joke.

• 11:58Ryan Holiday?

  Straw that breaks the camel's back.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:00Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:01Ryan Holiday?

  All right. That's an interesting theory. I hadn't, I hadn't thought of that theory.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  But it is my favorite emotion is laughter in the midst of despair.

• 12:09Ryan Holiday?

  And actually there's a thing from Seneca where he's talking about like life is terrible. He basically says, life is terrible.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:14Ryan Holiday?

  You can cry about it or you can laugh at it.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:18Ryan Holiday?

  Like, take your pick.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is pretty beautiful and cruel all the time.

• 12:26Ryan Holiday?

  Don't try to get everything to happen the way you want it to happen. The Stoics would say, try to want everything to happen the way that it will happen. Epictetus, who said this, what he meant is that the stronger your expectations, your desires for things to be a certain way, the more likely you are to be disappointed. This actually intersects with Eastern philosophy. Zen Buddhists talk about willful will. When you have expectations, when you have demands, when you have needs, you're likely to be disappointed. If you can live in accordance with nature, the Stoics would say, if you can accept things as they are, if you can make yourself in sync with the logos, you're much more likely to be happy and you're much less likely to be disappointed.

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  Talking about wanting less, the other path to happiness related to this is the idea of simplification. Marcus Aurelius says, "Ask yourself, is this essential?" Because most of what we want and do and say and get tied up in is not essential. We chase things we don't want. We chase things we don't actually care about. We make life so much more complicated than it needs to be. When the Stoics talk about living in accordance with nature, I think part of what they're saying, it's not like literal nature, but it is commenting on how unnatural and complicated and busy and frenetic most of our lives are. And when you simplify, when you remove stuff, you get closer to kind of who you're meant to be and how you're meant to be. I think the pandemic was so

• 13:50Ryan Holiday?

  powerful in this regard. In March of 2020, when life shut down, and suddenly we weren't traveling, we weren't going to meetings, we weren't as busy as we have been our whole lives. We looked around. I mean, my wife and I looked around our farm and we're like, I don't think we've ever been here at this time of year and truly noticed how wonderful it was. So we found these wild blackberry bushes in our backyard. We watched more sunsets in a row than we'd ever seen. I found out at one point that I'd spent 500 consecutive nights in a row with my children. And I could not have comprehended just how profoundly significant that was, that simplification, that presence, that routine was to my happiness.

• 14:32Ryan Holiday?

  So by simplifying, by removing all the extraneous, the inessential things, I was reminded of the power and the importance of the essential things. If you want more happiness in your life, start by removing complexity, particularly unnecessary complexity. "Very little is needed for the happy life," Marcus Aurelius says. "It's all within yourself."

• 15:00Ryan 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.

• 15:44Ryan Holiday?

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

• 15:51Ryan 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 three quarters 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.