What Would You Do Less Of? | What Expensive Things Cost

Ryan explains why the practice of Memento Mori is so important, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal. Get a Memento Mori medallionin the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://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 the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it. What would you do less of? We spend so much time on stuff that doesn't matter, that we don't even like. Maybe it's a job or a commute to that job. Maybe it's doom scrolling on our phone or answering emails. Maybe it's arguing with a spouse.

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe it's arguing with strangers on the internet. You know the kind of stuff that you just kind of get sucked into. You hate it, but you let it fill up so much of your life. Marcus Aurelius, frustrated with some obnoxious thing that was consuming his days, once asked himself, "You're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore?" And that's the thing about memento mori. It's clarifying. If you had unlimited time, maybe you wouldn't mind spending two hours a day in traffic. Maybe you wouldn't need to steer clear of the cesspool of Twitter or the endlessness of your inbox. But if death was suddenly real to you, if you were given only a few months or years to live,

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  what would you immediately spend less time doing? What would the "this" that Marcus Aurelius referred to be? And would you cut it out? Well, cut that thing out now, not later, because death is real. We do not have unlimited time. None of us do, which is why we have to get serious now.

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  What expensive things cost? And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living", by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night we keep thoughts like this at hand, write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. "From the cynics, the Stoics learned the powerful practice of focusing on the true worth of things,

• 2:40Ryan Holiday?

  that the cost of an item isn't simply what it's sold for, but what it costs the owner to own. So much of our desire for material goods comes at the great price of both anxiety and the loss of our serenity. And even when gained, these things often leave us more anxious and less serene. So today, spend some time reflecting on what the things you buy actually cost you, and see if they are really worth what you have been paying." And that's from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. And we have some quotes from Seneca and Epictetus here. "So concerning the things we pursue and for what we vigorously exert ourselves, we owe this consideration: either there is nothing useful in them, or most aren't useful.

• 3:25Ryan Holiday?

  Some of them are superfluous, while others aren't worth that much. But we don't discern this and see them as free, when they cost us so dearly." That's Seneca's Moral Letters. Then we have Epictetus. "If a person gave your body away to some passerby, you'd be furious; yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so that they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. Have you no shame?" Epictetus asks. And then we have Diogenes Laertus quoting Diogenes of Sinope. That's Diogenes the cynic. He says, "We sell things of great value for things of very little and vice versa." You know, they say the best things in life are free.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  And that's not really true, but I would say that a lot of things are much more expensive than they appear. Right? So we chase these things. We want these things. We want a fancy car and then we're worried about making sure nothing happens to that fancy car. I remember a few years ago, I put new floors in my house. And on the one hand, I hated the old floors and it made the house look better. And they were easier to walk on and improve my life. But then we had kids and now all of a sudden, there's this part of me that worries about the floors all the time. Right? I don't want them to get scratched. I don't want water to sit on them. And the dog went to the bathroom.

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  And so this thing that cost me money, it was not cheap to put new floors in the house. Didn't just cost what it cost. It cost all the anxiety. It cost the arguments between me and my wife about who's to blame for this scratch on the floor from the couch. You know, it cost goodwill between me and my kid. Uh, because I'm like, hey, why did you spill, you know, that part of you that just blurts out, you know, trying to protect things? Um, and the truth is, it really doesn't matter. I remember I was, uh, I was talking to a therapist about some version of this and she said, "Just write it off, like write it off in your head. You spent the money. It's gone." You can't try to keep it all together, right?

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  You can't try to keep it pristine. It's like the people who buy a toy and then they want it in mint condition. I mean, this is, this is not just a violation of the law of entropy. It's a violation of the law of happiness. You will not be happy if this is how you're spending all your time trying to keep everything in one place, trying to keep them together. It's an illusion. It will not last. You cannot do it. You have to be able to let go. That's the old Zen saying that it. You know, the cup is already broken, the cup is already broken. The Stoics knew that expensive things cost even more than their price tag. That's why there's the great story of Epictetus. He has this lamp, it's stolen. The next day, he says, "I'm gonna go get a cheaper lamp,

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  so I don't have to worry about it getting stolen ever again, and I don't have to be sad that it's missing ever again." So for the Stoics, remember, it's not just what actually is valuable and isn't. You know, a lot of times, we ascribe value to things that are superficial and meaningless and pointless. But also, it's realizing that you are spending even more money than you think on things, and you're spending your happiness is really what you're spending on. So I want to leave you with that thought. It's not that you live in a pigsty, you don't care about anything. You should try to keep your things nice and not unnecessarily wear them down. But you also cannot resist entropy. You cannot resist time. You cannot resist wear and tear.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  And if you do so, it comes at the expense of the most important thing, which is time, and the other most important thing, which is your happiness, and the other most important thing, which is the relationships, the people in your life. So you only have so much time to think or worry or spend time on things. Are you gonna spend it trying to preserve your floors? You're not even gonna live there forever. You're probably gonna tear them out at some point, anyway. No, focus on what matters. 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. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out.