Sometimes You Just Lose (But That’s No Excuse) | A Proper Frame Of Mind

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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?

  Sometimes you just lose, but that's no excuse. It would be wonderful if it were otherwise, but it isn't. Sometimes the good guys lose. Sometimes they lose a lot. Sometimes they lose for a very, very long time. Thrasse and Rutilius Rufus, Musonius Rufus, members of the so-called Stoic Opposition, they did not beat tyranny, not at the time, anyway. Mostly what they got was executed or exiled. And what of Cato, the most famous and steadfast of the Stoics? He bled out in his bedroom alongside the Roman Republic he sought to preserve. In more modern times, we are wrong to remember the Civil Rights Movement as an endless series of successes.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  No, it was, for generations, mostly one heartbreaking failure after another. That's life. It's not fair. It's not all parades and triumphs. It's setbacks and narrow defeats. It's sacrifices and pain that comes up empty. There's a line from the poet Lucian, grandson to Seneca, that goes, "Each side claims a high authority. The conquering cause pleased the gods, but the conquered pleased Cato." Does that mean that all lost causes were good ones? Hardly. In fact, that line adorns many Confederate monuments, a cause that deserved to lose. But it is a reminder. It's not always going to go your way.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  Still, we must stay at it. In the end, Nero did fall. So did Caesar. Ultimately, Cato's example inspired Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers. Eventually, the Civil Rights Act did pass, and things have gotten better. We have to stay at it. We have to accept the losses that come without accepting the status quo. We should not give up. We should not give in to despair. We must keep going.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  This is the February 2nd entry from The Daily Stoic. Today's quote comes from Meditations 2:2, the one and only Marcus Aurelius. "Frame your thoughts like this," he says, "you are an old person. You won't let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you'll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future. We resent the person who comes in and tries to boss us around. Don't tell me how to dress, how to think, how to do my job, how to live. This is because we are independent, self-sufficient people, or at least that's what we tell ourselves.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yet if someone says something we disagree with, something inside us tells us we have to argue with them. If there's a plate of cookies in front of us, we have to eat them. If someone does something we dislike, we have to get mad about it. When something bad happens, we have to be sad, depressed, or worried. But if something good happens, a few minutes later, all of a sudden, we're happy, excited, and want more. We would never let another person jerk us around the way we let our impulses do. It's time we start seeing it that way, that we are not puppets that can be made to dance this way or that way just because we feel like it. We should be the ones in control, not our emotions, because we are independent, self-sufficient people."

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  And I guess Seneca would say, are we really independent, self-sufficient people? He says, "Show me a man, show me a person who isn't a slave." He says, "You know, this person's a slave to their mistress, that person's a slave to ambition, this person, a slave to power or status," or, you know, all the things, right? How many of us are slaves to coffee, slaves to our schedules, slaves to, you know, outrage points, slaves to the news, just slaves to stuff? We're just hooked, right? We're just hooked. It's in charge, right? My phone's in the other room, thankfully, because it makes this statement a little bit more powerful. You go, you know, who's in charge? Are you using the phone, or is the phone using you, right?

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  Do you have social media accounts, or do those social media accounts have...

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  You. And so the way in which we're jerked around, we're not actually in control. Wretched habit is in control, as the Stoics would say. That is not freedom. So it doesn't matter if you're rich or powerful or important, or legally, you can do whatever you want. You actually can't. You're not in control. You're not self sufficient. You're not free. You know, I've talked about this before, but Epictetus is in Rome roughly the same time as Seneca, and they're both adjacent to Nero and Nero's palace. Epictetus is owned by one of Nero's secretaries. Seneca is Nero's advisor. Epictetus is literally a slave, but in

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  some ways, he's more free than Seneca, who tries to quit working for Nero at one point and can't, and then is ultimately killed by Nero. But Epictetus looks around and he just sees, he sees these people are not self sufficient. They are not free, because although they are powerful and important, it's their ambition, it's their ego, it's all these other things that make, he sees someone sucking up to Nero's cobbler at one point, right? He realizes that, that the powerful, important people in Nero's court are slaves, just as Seneca was saying they were. And then he extrapolates out, like even just regular people in regular life, you know, people who are controlled by their temper,

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  people who are controlled by their base, you know, physical urges, right? People who can't not do stuff because their body, or habit, or impulse, or their emotion tells them to do something, right? That's what Marcus Aurelius is trying to free us of, right? Seneca talks about how if you handed your body over to, they handed your body over to someone, you'd be livid. But then you hand your peace of mind over to people all the time. And so we can imagine Marcus himself struggling with this. He's saying, you're an old person. How much longer are you going to be? Tied up in these impulses, in these habits, in this way of living.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  You've got to free yourself now while you still can. And that's today's message. This is obviously something we should all be thinking about and trying to work on. How free are we really? How self-sufficient are we? Who's in charge? Us, or the urges us, or the emotions us, or the habits? And let's free ourselves and set up that proper frame of mind while we can.

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.