Every Day is a Day of Thanks | Funny How That Works Out

Ryan discusses how a Stoic thinks about gratitude, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $250 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org and pick podcast and enter DAILY STOIC at checkout. 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 really is 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.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  Every day is a day of thanks. The Stoics saw gratitude as a kind of medicine, that saying, "Thank you for every experience," was the key to mental health. "Convince yourself that everything is a gift of the gods," is how Marcus really is put it, that things are good, always will be. And it didn't just mean you should do this on special days like Thanksgiving, which the US is celebrating today, but on all days. Yes, it's great to be thankful for the usual candidates, for our families, for our health, for living in a time of peace. This being the first Thanksgiving that America is not at war in 21 years.

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  To be thankful for the food that is laid out in front of us. But we should also find a way to say, "Thank you for the less obvious things, for the setbacks, for the people who wronged us, for having our life disrupted by the pandemic, for the loss of a job, or whatever difficulties we might be experiencing. That nagging pain in your leg, thank you. It's making me take things slow. That troublesome client, thank you. It's helping me develop better boundaries. That mistake you made, thank you for reminding me to be more careful, for teaching me a lesson. That damage from the storm, thank you. The damage exposed a more serious problem that I'm now solving."

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  The pandemic, thank you for all that time at home for my family. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to restructure my life, to rethink how I do things. Thank you for showing me what is and isn't essential, and on and on and on. When Epictetus talks about how every situation has two handles, this is what he means. You can decide to grab on to anger or appreciation. You can pick the handle of resentment or of gratitude. You can look at the obstacle or get a little closer and see the opportunity. So as you gather around your family and friends this Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or any other celebration you might partake in, of course, appreciate it and give thanks for all the

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  obvious and bountiful gifts that this moment presents. Just make sure that when the moment passes, as you go back to your everyday, ordinary life, that you make gratitude and thanks a regular part of it. Again, not simply for what is easy and immediately pleasing, but for all of it, for every day and everything. Funny how that works out. As for me, I would choose being sick over living in luxury, for being sick only harms the body, whereas luxury destroys both the body and the soul, causing weakness and incapacity in the body and a lack of control and cowardice in the soul.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  What's more, luxury breeds injustice, because it also breeds greediness. That's Musonius Rufus, Epictetus's philosophy teacher, in his lectures. And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by yours truly and 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.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  Stories about lottery winners tend to share one lesson. Suddenly coming into a great deal of money is a curse and not a blessing. Just a few years after they get their big check, most lottery winners are actually in worse financial shape. They've lost friends, they've gotten divorced. Their whole lives have been turned into nightmares as a result of their obscenely good fortune. And in fact, there's a funny little story about Musonius Rufus himself in this regard. Musonius is dealing with this particularly obnoxious man who everyone knows is bad and cruel and a liar and deceitful and, you know, all the lists, you know, all run down the list of bad character traits and he's got them. And Musonius Rufus noticing

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  this decides that decides to award the man some money. We don't know the context, but he, "Give that guy some money." And everyone is aghast. "How could you reward this guy? He's awful." Musonius Rufus looks and smiles and says, "I agree. That's why money is exactly what he deserves."

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  And I used this entry in today's book to riff on one of my favorite bits of Metallica lyrics. If you haven't heard the song, "No Leaf Clover," I think it's an unreleased track. It only exists on the Metallica S&M album where they perform with a symphony. But the lyric says, "And then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way."

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  And that's why it's interesting how the most common response from, say, a cancer survivor compared to a lottery winner, the person who went through the thing we all dread and fear is, was the best thing that ever happened to me. It's funny how that works out, right? The things we think we want, we get and turn out to be curses. The things we dread and fear and try to prevent happening, they inevitably do happen. And we are very often transformed and improved by them. Obviously, this is a bit simplistic. Don't want to make light of anyone's experiences.

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  But I think it's an important way to think about it. The thing you don't want to happen may well be the very best thing that could happen. And the thing that you think you need to happen, that you're mad hasn't happened, that you think you've been unjustly deprived of because it hasn't happened, may be the worst thing that could happen. There's the Oscar Wilde line that, you know, you can get, the blessing and the curse is getting everything you want in life. And I think that's what Musonius Rufus was talking about. But I think at the core of it for the Stoics, this all just comes down to character. The person of good character, the person who can act with moderation and balance,

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  who knows what's important, who's got a good set of values. Whether they win the lottery or they get that tragic cancer diagnosis, they're going to be all right. They're going to turn that into something, right? It's the person with the rotten soul, the bad priorities, that doesn't know what they value or why. That's the person who's going to struggle. So instead of trying to get or not get certain things, I think we should, as Epictetus says, just try to make ourselves adaptable to circumstances. Try to cultivate the character, the character traits that allow us to endure either a great blessing or a great misfortune.

• 7:58Ryan Holiday?

  And I think ultimately, that's what the Stoics mean when they talk about indifference, that we're good, whatever it is. Do we prefer to win the lottery than go broke? For sure. But we can handle both.

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.