Let It Be And Let It Go | Frenemies

Life is hard. People are not perfect. If we cannot cultivate the ability to let things be and to let them go, we’ll never get anything done. 🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour📓 Grab your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://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, 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  "Let it be and let it go. They didn't have to say it, but they did. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. And it hurt. It was frustrating. It was so, so unnecessary. But now you have a choice. What will you do about it?" Can you remember, as Marcus really said, that you don't have to turn this into something? Can you grab the other handle, as Epictetus advised, the one that allows you to move on, to not be wrecked, or distracted, or made worse by it? "Life is hard. People are not perfect. If we cannot cultivate the ability to let things be and to let them go, we'll never do anything done. Certainly we'll never have much in the way of happiness or freedom. You are strong enough to leave

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  this alone. You are wise enough to let it be. You don't have to let it suck you in. You don't have to let it break your heart or your focus. But will you?"

• 1:45Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It is October 18th. Today, we're talking about frenemies. This is my entry from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, holding a cloth edition here, but- Oh, there's a Target sticker on here. It says, "First copy bought at Target, May 21st." It says, "Right after CDC changed mask guidance." Oh, that's funny. This is a little pandemic artifact, I guess. I must have bought this when they started carrying the book at Target. Well, cool. Anyways, here's the quote from Marcus Aurelius's 1115. "There's nothing worse than a wolf befriending sheep.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  Avoid false friendship at all costs. If you're good, straightforward, and well-meaning, it should show in your eyes and not escape notice." It's pretty obvious that one should keep away from the wicked and two-faced as much as possible, the jealous friend, a narcissistic parent, the untrustworthy partner. And at first, Marcus Aurelius is reminding us to avoid false friends. And I would say he probably, as the emperor, you know, there would have been plots everywhere and intrigue everywhere. His dear friend, Avidius Cassius, attempts to kill him, to overthrow the emperor. He would have been worried about assassination attempts. He would have been worried about spies. He would have been worried about people with ulterior motives.

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  We hear from Epictetus, just the kinds of people that were in Nero's court. He tells us about someone sucking up to Nero's cobbler to get in the emperor's good graces. Marcus Aurelius would have had to be constantly on guard against two-faced, false friends. But what if we try to turn it around? What if instead, we ask about the times that we have been false to our friends? Ultimately, that's what Stoicism is about, not judging other people's behavior, but judging our own. We've all been a frenemy at one point or another. We've all been nice to their face, usually because there was something in it for us. But later, in different company, we said how we really felt.

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Or we strung someone along, cared only when things were going well, or declined to help even though somebody really needed us. This behavior is beneath us, and it's worth remembering the next time we accuse someone of being a bad friend. I've been watching this horrendous reality show lately with my wife, The Secret Lives of Mormon Housewives, or something like that. And anytime you watch one of those Bravo shows, or these reality shows, it's horrifying. They're like, what is wrong with these people? But the Stoics say exactly as we were trying to talk about in today's entry, like, it's not about pointing out the sores or the flaws in other people. Seneca says it's about scrubbing them off yourself.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  And so when you see someone behaving that way, when you see them acting two-faced, when you see their ulterior motives, when you see the drama that they stir up, when you see their just profound lack of self-awareness, right? What you should take from that, the main thing you should see, and that is, you're not that different. It's repulsive to you, but it's not unfamiliar, is it? It's not inconceivable, is it? You've done things like that. We all have. And that's what I think we want to take from today's message. I think that's ultimately, when Marx wrote, says, "Avoid false friendship at all costs." I think he's trying to think about when he may have been a false friend, and we all have. So that's today's message.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  Be good, be decent, be honest, be a good friend. Last week, remember honesty as the default. If you have to say, hey, I'm going to be honest, or hey, I'm your real friend here, what is that saying about who you are in other cases? Who you are when no one's looking? How you are when you're not prefacing things like the, "I'll be straight with you here." Or when you go, "No offense intended." Does that mean you normally intended offense? We're not that different than these people. We all have these tendencies, but we can work on it. We can improve it. Stoicism can help us get better. And that's what today's message is about.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out, dailystoic.com/email.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out, dailystoic.com/email.