Have You Considered This? | Don't Hide From Your Feelings

The sooner you realize that you are not the center of the universe or the intended recipient of everything, the more understanding you can be, the less judgment you’ll feel required to have. 🎥 Watch Kate Bowler's episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCGloOAQOS8 📘 Grab the hardcover edition ofThe Daily Stoic https://store.dailystoic.com/products/the-daily-stoic-signed-edition by Ryan Holiday:https://store.dailystoic.com/ https://store.dailystoic.com/products/the-daily-stoic-signed-edition 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Have you considered this? One of the most remarkable and revealing criticisms of Marcus Aurelius's meditations is that it's repetitive. Marcus talks about death a lot, talks about fame a lot, talks about the weight of being the leader of an empire a lot. So yeah, some people ask, "Why is it so repetitive?" To which the reply is pretty obvious: "That's because the book is not for you." It seems to escape people that the most powerful man in the world was not writing Meditations, whose title in Greek is "to himself", was not thinking about them when he wrote it. No, he was thinking about what he needed. And when you realize this, it helps you not only appreciate Meditations as a unique work of literature, but it should help you be a little more accepting

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  and tolerant of other things you don't like. That comedian that you don't think is funny, has it occurred to you that perhaps they don't think of you as their audience? That author, whose books have never appealed to you, maybe she wasn't writing it for you. That new movie that came out last week that you refused to see, what if the director never intended for someone like you to enjoy it? We had this experience even at Daily Stoic. People will sometimes complain about a video we've done, that it's similar to something we've done in the past, or that people ought to just read the original Stoics, as if everyone in the world saw the first video we did, and as if everyone in the world is as comfortable reading an ancient text as they are. Not everything is for you. Not everything is about you.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  Most things, in fact, have a context, a specific audience, a telos. The sooner you realize that you are not the center of the universe or the intended recipient of everything, the more understanding you can be, the less judgment you'll feel required to have. And you can appreciate things for what they are, a work of art or a product that was made for the audience it was intended for, whether that be a certain demographic or the emperor himself.

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  Don't hide from your feelings. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic. And our quote today is from Seneca in his essay to Helvia, his mother. "It's better to conquer grief," he says, "than to deceive it." We've all lost people we're close to, a friend, a colleague, a parent, a grandparent. And while we were suffering from our grief, some well-meaning person did their best to take our mind off of it or make us think about something else for a couple hours. However kind these gestures are misguided. The Stoics are stereotyped as suppressing their emotions, but their philosophy was actually intended to teach us to face, to process and deal with emotions immediately instead of running from them.

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  Tempting as it is to deceive yourself or hide from a powerful emotion like grief by telling yourself and other people that you're fine, awareness and understanding are better. Distraction might be pleasant in the short term by going to the gladiatorial games, as a Roman might have done, but focusing is better in the long term. That means facing it now. Process and parse what you are feeling. Remove your expectations, your entitlements, your sense of having been wrong. Find the positive in the situation, but also sit with your pain and accept it, remembering that it is a part of life. And that is how we conquer grief. I had Kate Bowler on the podcast. She has this book called Everything Happens

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  for a Reason and Other Lies I've Been Told. And the point, she finds out she has cancer and all these people come and go, oh, it happened for a reason. Everything happens for a reason. And her response was, I'd love to know the reason, right? She was rejecting these sort of platitudes that we give people when they are grieving, to try to take their mind off it. We distract them. We want to make them laugh. We say, oh, I've been through that too.

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  There's no way out but through feeling, thinking, dealing with, you know, the Stoics knew grief. As Seneca was writing that essay to his mother, he was grieving himself. He'd lost a child. As I've been going back through meditations, we have this leather bound edition and I'm rereading it like a fresh copy. And for whatever reason, I was just skipping through it and I found all the different instances where Marcus was talking about like loss and children, which is extra haunting when you think about how many he lost, five, six? We don't know exactly, but almost more of his children did not survive to adulthood than did. He buried five, six children, just the magnitude of that grief.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  And if we take meditations, then as a much more personal book, a book of a man working through his grief, trying to conquer it, not deceive it, it's both very humanizing and haunting at the same time. Marcus isn't different than you and I. He's not this magical robot, but he was someone who put in the work to deal with, to think through, to talk about his emotions. I just, I hate this stereotype of the Stoics as being unfeeling. They were feeling, they just tried not to be overwhelmed, overcome, paralyzed by those feelings. And part of the way they did it was by working on them. So, you know, this

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  month in the Daily Stoic is about death and grief and mortality. And I think it's important for those of you who are grieving, for those of us who are grieving, who have lost someone or may lose someone. You know, it's okay to cry about that. There's a story about Marcus crying about the loss of one of his tutors. That's a human thing. If you're still crying about it, paralyzed by it a year later, you should probably get some help. You're probably torturing yourself. You're probably doing something that they, the person you are mourning, would not dream of wanting or cursing you with. So you've got to deal with it. You've got to face it. You've got to process it. That's the only way out. There is no way out but through.

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  That's today's message from the Daily Stoic. And I hope you guys are getting ready for the holidays. I hope you're thinking about your New Year's resolutions. Happy holidays. We'll talk soon.

• 7:18Ryan 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.