Avoid This Sickness | Role Models

“Nobody wants to get sick. We don’t want food poisoning. We don’t want the flu. We don’t want COVID-19. This is why we protect our immune system, wash our hands, take care of ourselves. Good. Health is important. But what about, as the great Phoebe Bridgers put it, emotional motion sickness?”Ryan explains why you should build up your emotional resilience, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is brought to you by GoMacro. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See 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, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Avoid this sickness. Nobody wants to get sick. We don't want food poisoning. We don't want the flu. We don't want COVID-19. And this is why we protect our immune system, wash our hands, take care of ourselves. Good. Health is important. But what about, as the great Phoebe Bridgers put it, "emotional motion sickness"? It's not quite the same as a virus, but it overwhelms our lives just the same. One day, we're angry. The next, we're elated. We're frustrated, excited, worried, relieved, paranoid, entitled, swooning, and then depressed. We're obsessed, and then annoyed, fascinated, then bored, mad as hell, and then overcome with gratitude. We love, hate, love, hate, love, hate, love, hate, hate, love, love, hate.

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  Sometimes, we're all these things in the course of a single day, even a single hour. It makes us crazy. It can kill us if we're not careful. So, we need to take precautions. Remember, Stoicism is not about not having emotions. It's about protecting yourself against the extreme ones. It's about not letting them rule your life. There are going to be times when we catch something, of course. But if we build up an immune system, we'll be able to prevent ourselves from being overrun by them. Grief, anger, fear, frustration, these things happen. What matters is that we don't whip-saw between them, that we use our reason and our training to process them. And this is how we avoid emotional motion sickness.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  Role models. Adoption was a widespread practice in Roman society, especially the senatorial class, and as a provision for imperial succession. Marcus Aurelius was himself the adopted son of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who himself was adopted by the Emperor Hadrian, so that Marcus could one day succeed them both to the purple. While Seneca was never adopted, his brother Novatus was, becoming Gaius, who in the New Testament refuses to press charges against Saint Paul. But Seneca liked to look at the phenomenon of adoption the other way around, saying that we can always choose whose children we want to be. For him, Cato, the towering, resolute Stoic who railed against Julius Caesar in defense

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  of the Republic, was always standing by in his mind. The first book of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, in fact, is a catalog of all the people that Marcus had learned from and the lessons he had taken from their lives. So this week, take a minute to think of the models that you can follow, wise and admirable people that you can measure yourself against. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, which I forgot to record yesterday, my apologies. But you can check out the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, by me, Ryan Holiday, anywhere books are sold, including The Painted Porch, my bookstore, at thepaintedporch.com. "We like to say that we don't get to choose our parents," Seneca said, "that they were given to us by chance.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yet truly, we can choose whose children we'd like to be," that's in on the brevity of life. But then, in Moral Letters, Seneca said, "We can remove most sins if we have a witness standing by as we are about to go wrong. The soul should have someone it can respect, by whose example it can make its inner sanctum more inviolable. Happy is the person who can improve others, not only when present, but even when in their thoughts." I think for me, this idea of choosing whose children you want to be is great, right? Whether you had amazing parents or the world's worst parents, you can also choose to be the children of the greats of history. We did a Daily Daddy email not long ago, where Bruce Springsteen is talking about being an ancestor or a ghost. You know,

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  who are the ghosts that haunt you and who are the ancestors that inspire you? And how can you choose to follow in the right footsteps? For me, Robert Greene is kind of an adopted father. He's about my father's age, but he's who I want to be as a person in many ways. Professionally, he's deeply inspiring to me. The way even that he has spent so much time and energy and patience shaping me into the writer that I became, that in and of itself has been inspiring and is an example I try to follow in. So like, I've never met Marcus Aurelius, I'm not related to Seneca,

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  I have no lineage that puts me back into ancient Rome with Epictetus, but we can still be the descendants of these people. We can still be their children. James Baldwin was famously talking to his nephew and he said, "You come from steady peasant stock, people who built the railroads, people who escaped via the Underground Railroad, people who responded to the blows of fate in life with dignity and poise and creativity and perseverance." Now, is this literally true? Does he know for a fact about the railroads or the Underground Railroads? No. But we choose what tradition we hail from. We choose whose child we want

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  to be by the example that we follow, by the heroes we give ourselves in our mind. And that's what today's entry is about, and I hope you take a minute to think about whose footsteps you're following in and what example you are setting, so that perhaps someday, someone else might choose to be adopted by you. 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.