This Isn’t The Way To Practice Detachment | Ask Daily Stoic

Seneca wasn’t fond of philosophers you could recognize. Not by their fame, but by their uniform. In his time, just as it is in ours, there was a type of person who, in reading about the Diogenes types or the tough Stoic types, thought that philosophy required that they give up their worldly possessions or start dressing like a bum. Today, these types try to signal their virtue by driving a beat up old car or by showing you how little they own. See, they say, I am practicing detachment. See, I don’t want like you want. But these appearances can be deceiving. And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan presents his part two of the Q&A from the Daily Stoic Stoicism 101 course in which he discusses the idea of being able to practice your philosophy wherever you are, the ins and out of the Stoic passions, how to go about reading ancient texts, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy, just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members, or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Seneca wasn't fond of philosophers you could recognize, not by their fame or by their uniform. In his time, just as it is in ours, there was a type of person who, in reading about the Diogenes types or the tough Stoic type, thinks that philosophy required that they give up their worldly possessions or start dressing like a bum. These types try to signal their virtue by driving a beat-up old car or showing you how little they own. "See," they say, "I am practicing detachment. See, I don't want life you want." But these appearances can be deceiving. As Seneca reminds us, "We should not believe the lack of silver and gold to be proof of the simple life." The simple life is not a matter of externals. It's about what's going on inside.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Someone can be a billionaire flying on a private jet, totally at peace and indifferent to money, just as someone else, much less well-off, might be grinding their teeth in envy and resentment. You can swear off materialism, but if you trade it for demanding to be recognized for your superiority and purity, is that really an improvement? Or if you live frugally but obsess over every dollar, miserly extracting as much savings from every situation and interaction, what kind of peace is that? The simple life is defined by its simplicity, by its gratitude, by the ability to enjoy whatever is in front of you, whether that's millions of dollars

• 2:13Speaker 01

  or a nice chicken sandwich. It's not the lack of money that we should be pursuing, but a lack of angst, a lack of resentment, a lack of insecurity. That's what wealth is.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  So I guess I'm kind of working through some career stuff right now, but I think this kind of applies to anything, you know, and I like this idea of where you are is where you need to practice your philosophy, right? You can just do that anywhere, right? So how do you kind of keep that, hold that idea and then hold the other end of the idea that now I'm looking for something else or I'm either aspiring or striving elsewhere?

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was actually just writing a daily Stoic email about this. There's this letter between Marcus Aurelius and his rhetoric teacher Cornelius Fronto. And Fronto says, "Look, against your will, you must put on the purple cloak of the emperor instead of the coarse cape of the philosopher." Meaning, like, "Life chose you to do this, and that's where you're going to have to sort of shine." And I like the idea that for all of Marcus's sort of freedom and power, he's constrained by this, you know, opportunity, but also obligation that is sort of foisted upon him.

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  Now, in the ancient world, obviously, there was a lot less mobility, sort of socially, economically, culturally, you know, there were literally ranks of classes. And the idea of like, "Well, just because my dad was a blacksmith doesn't mean I want to be a blacksmith," right? That didn't exist. So it's not a perfect analog that, you know, because we do exist in a time with sort of mobility and some agency that would have been incomprehensible to a Marcus Aurelius. So I don't know if there's like a clear-cut answer of when you should stick, when you should quit, but I think his idea that whatever it is that you're doing is a chance to be

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  philosophical, is a chance to practice the philosophy. I think, I was asking someone about this recently who'd like sort of transitioned jobs or careers or something, and I said, "You know, how do you know that you're not leaving because you're scared or intimidated?" And he said, "The test was, is the thing you're going to do harder or riskier than the thing you're leaving?" Right? So it's like if Marcus Aurelius was was turning down being the emperor because he just wanted to study books and philosophy quietly alone in his room, that's kind of a cop out. Do you know what I mean?

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Conversely, if you know, he's studying bricks, books alone in his room, and he gets this opportunity to be emperor, you know, that's a bigger opportunity, a better opportunity. It's a more challenging thing, and I think that's why he accepts it. So that might be a decent fitness test to think about.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess just ultimately looking at using your philosophy to understand your own motivations.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Got it. Cool. Thanks.

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  Jerry.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Hi, thanks. And we're feeding other people saying, thank you so much for hosting this course. I've been learning a lot about it. And I'm kind of new to Stoicism, so I don't know all the Latin phrases and all that, but I still kind of get stuck on the passions aspect. And I'm wondering if it's because the Greeks and the ancients, they define passions as different because I understand that, you know, the lust and anger and desire, keeping them in the balance. But, you know, kind of finding your flow and what you're, you know, what you're really engaged in wanting to do, I find that as a passion too. So I wonder if you could talk about that or put something in the chat of where I can learn more about that.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, if if you look at the Wikipedia page for the passions, let's pull it up here. In philosophy and religion, the passions are the instinctive, emotional, primitive drives in human beings, including, for example, lust, anger, aggression and jealousy, which a human being must restrain, channel, develop and sublimate in order to be possessed by wisdom. I so I think that's a good definition because it's not just saying you are sublime. Is that just saying you suppress them? In some cases, it's about channeling them or developing them properly. Right? So obviously, passion, as we speak about it in the modern world,

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  is sort of the, you know, the idea of like loving what you do, being committed to it, having a calling or something. I don't think the Stoics would be instinctively.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  You know, instinctively object to that, but there's a great, you know, there's a great chapter in Cal Newport's book, which I know we talked about him last time, but he and I were just talking about this, and his book's so good, you can't ignore it, they can't ignore you. It talks about, like, I think it's a woman who was really unhappy with her job, and her passion was yoga. So she quits her job in a sort of a fit of inspiration and opens a yoga studio, which of course, she has no experience or qualifications or money to do, right? So basically, her passions, her passion, which is a good thing, it's

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  good to want to master something, blind her to the reality of the situation at hand. So I think Cal's point was like, don't do it. I would say maybe the middle ground is, sure, you can, you can pursue this passion for yoga, but it has to be developed and sublimated and channeled, so you can effectively exploit it and utilize it, rather than be used by it in the way that, you know, you get some feeling of lust or anger, and it carries you over and it makes you do something that almost immediately after you have a lot of regret about.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for that clarification on that. Appreciate it.

• 8:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course. Lance?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Hey, Ryan.

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  My question's related to the, I guess, more the mechanics of actually reading the source material.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  I've only started reading that, I've got Discourses, that's my first foray into the actual material.

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  And my impression is that it's not the same as reading fiction, where you're not going to plow through 40 pages all at once.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  How do you read it? How do you digest it? Like mechanically?

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. So, so it's always important to, and this is why the intros of the books are really important, but whenever I read an ancient text of philosophy, I also go and I read the Wikipedia page, I try to read some articles about it, I try to read the Wikipedia page of the author, I try to get some understanding of the context in which this was created. But for Epictetus, this is a great example. So Epictetus did not write the book that you're holding, right? But you could tell this from the title, because it's called Discourses, but it's not even his...

• 9:28Ryan Holiday?

  Version of the discourses. What happened is, you know, 2,000 years ago, Epictetus is giving some lectures and one of his students, Arian, is there writing it down. So this is like if you, this would be like if it turns out that one of your college professors is considered, in retrospect, one of the wisest people that ever lived. And I went through a box of stuff in your basement and I found your notes from that class. Right? Like, it would be kind of a snapshot of a snapshot of a snapshot. Like, we don't know why Epictetus was talking about this. We don't even know if these are

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  exact quotes or not. So it's important that you understand the context in which Epictetus is talking about, which is, he's kind of lecturing to a group. And then that, those notes are kind of being sort of transcribed back to us. So I think Epictetus is good to read in chunks, to really, like, you know, to read a few paragraphs at a time. I like, I've mentioned some of the Princeton University Press editions of, like, specific collections where it's sort of organized by themes. There's also an even more accessible edition of Epictetus. It's so accessible that some people sort of object to the translations. But Sharon LaBelle did a book called The Art of Living.

• 10:53Ryan Holiday?

  But you can read, it might be good to read these two side by side, The Art of Living and The Discourses. But that would be a good way to think about, think about Epictetus, that you're kind of reading them in chunks, but that you're also reading the lecture notes of a student. And so it's not designed to be super readable.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Awesome. Thank you.

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. What else?

• 11:21Speaker 05

  Hi.

• 11:22Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  Hey, Ryan, you inspired me to watch Gladiator.

• 11:25Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  And so I'm watching it, I'm going, well shit, he got annihilated while he was practicing the virtues.

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 11:36Speaker 05

  Um, so my question to you is, how many times do you go down before you say, fuck the virtues? I'm gonna annihilate someone back.

• 11:47Ryan Holiday?

  I, I guess, uh, I guess when I watch that movie, I don't see, uh, Commodus as, as winning. You know what I mean? And this is a really important Stoic idea, which is that in the short term, uh, there might be certain advantages. Uh, you may be giving up certain advantages by deciding to live by a code. Um, but the alternative is far more terrifying and unimaginable. Um, and then, I mean, look, in the end Commodus, uh, does, does lose and, and, and Rome is sort of restored. It's a fictional movie, of course, but you know, does, does, um, does Commodus sort of have more fun, uh, from time to time?

• 12:31Ryan Holiday?

  Does he get to indulge in sort of vices that, that Maximus would never allow himself? Of course, but I think Commodus is a great example of the real cost of doing that, uh, which is it comes at the cost of your soul and your humanity. Uh, let's do Wilmie. Is that how you pronounce that?

• 12:50Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 12:51Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 12:53Speaker 06

  Hi, Ryan. Well, thank you so much. Uh, it's, it's, it's an honor. It's an honor.

• 12:59Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you.

• 13:00Speaker 06

  I've been following you for a couple of years at least and, uh, and, and I admire a lot your work. I, I even like, it's an inspiration for me. Uh, my question, uh, for you is something that, um, you, you, you, uh, well, about Marcus Aurelius, right? That life isn't just about business. I am the kind of person that I, I'm an execution person. I like to be busy. I like to do a bunch of things. I like to plan a lot. And, and it's, it's almost like, uh, um, like a slavery for me.

• 13:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. I, I know that feeling very well.

• 13:47Speaker 06

  I, yeah, like, I, I see you with, with your farm, with your journal, and I realize that I, I need to, to make time for meditating, for my journaling, for things like that. But in the end, I, I, well, I think you've got me, right?

• 14:04Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I totally do. So, uh, my, my wife catches me doing this, uh, pretty often, and she goes like, "This is not an item for your to-do list," right? "You can't just put this on here and just go from thing to thing to thing. This is not how one lives life." And so, I think that's what Marcus is saying to himself. So, don't be all about business, don't turn everything into a job, don't make everything a process or a system to be optimized. That's just ultimately, not just a recipe for misery, but it strips out the meaning and the, the, the ability to experience, you know, the sort of the moment that you're

• 14:44Ryan Holiday?

  in. So, you know, you mentioned my farm. I mean, I, I had to make some decisions a few years ago about sort of how I wanted to set up my life to sort of counterbalance those impulses or urges. So, like, if I'm living in New York City, I have more trouble controlling that impulse than I do out in rural Texas. So, I'm, I'm not saying that, that everyone should or could do that. I'm just saying, like, you kind of got to figure out, you know, what, what makes you tick and what parts of those you want to encourage, uh, and then, and then sort of how you counterbalance those things. So, it might just be how

• 15:28Ryan Holiday?

  you set up your life, how you set up your day, what sort of, you know, whether it's, "Hey, you know, if I have my phone in hand, I'm going to be working. So, when I come home, I put my phone in a drawer and I don't touch it for an hour," right? That sort of, like, sort of, uh, I might think about stuff like that.

• 15:46Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thank you, Ryan.

• 15:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. I'm trying to figure out, you know, how to associate some of these things, like the journaling, the meditations, to some feel like executing something.

• 15:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and look, I think the morning before you get sucked into other stuff is the best time to do that.