What Has It Stolen From You? | Ask DS

We are the creators of our anxiety. Which means we can also be the ones to do something about it. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius put it like this: “Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” To serve as a reminder of this, we have created the Daily Stoic Anxiety Medallion. Grab your own at the Daily Stoic Store!✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are 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.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  What has it stolen from you? You left way earlier than you should have because you got nervous and stressed before your flight. You were a mess the whole trip because you were worried something might go wrong while you were gone. You spent the whole last couple of months dreading convincing yourself that the news you were waiting for would be horrible. And how did it end up going? You missed time with your family, spending it instead, sitting at your gate for no reason. You missed the vacation, the time with friends, because you were not present. You built up this whole scenario in your head, and it turned out to be nothing. Anxiety. Just think about how much it's stolen from you, how much you missed because of it. A few times that it turned out to be right, sure, sometimes there

• 1:23Ryan Holiday?

  is traffic, sometimes alertness and vigilance pay off. But for the most part, as Seneca reminds us, we suffer more in imagination than reality. And as a result, we do suffer in reality. "He who suffers before it is necessary," Seneca wrote, "suffers more than it's necessary." Being trapped in the tunnel of anxiety, unable to think straight, emotions speeding like a runaway train, it is a crippling experience. But fortunately, the Stoics had an answer to freeing ourselves from stress and worry almost 2,000 years ago. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius put it like this, "Today I escaped my anxiety," he says, "or no, I discarded

• 2:03Ryan Holiday?

  it because it was within me in my own perceptions, not outside." What Marcus understood was that anxiety comes from inside the house. We are the creators of our anxiety, which means we can do something about it. We can stay in the present moment and not get lost in the past or the future. We can remind ourselves that we are not our emotions, that, as Epictetus said, "It's not events that upset us, but our opinions about them." We can zoom out and take the bird's eye view, or Plato's view, as Marcus called it, reflecting from a larger perspective and recognizing how small our lives are in the grand scheme of the universe. You could argue that Stoic philosophy is basically a set of tools designed to help us combat our anxiety and worries, to help us focus on what we control.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  Which is actually why I've been working hard on this thing here at Daily Stoic I got on my desk. It's a powerful little device to bring that lesson, that perspective from the Stoics on anxiety and worry. You can carry everywhere you go. It's, I don't know if you've seen like our Memento Mori coin, which is supposed to be a reminder of mortality. This one is much more explicit. It's got this cool hole in the middle. On the front, it says the Greek phrase for, is this in my control? Is this up to me? And then on the back, it has those quotes from Seneca and Marcus that I was talking about, about how we don't escape our anxiety. We discard it because it's within us. And that when we suffer before, it's necessary. We suffer more than is necessary. There's this cool hole in the center. As I've been recording it the whole time,

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  I've been spinning it between my fingers. My kids are, let's say, neurodivergent, if you will. We have these like little fidgets, just little toys they can play with to sort of get out their nervous energy. Well, that's what this is. And it's also got this cool snake on the front, representing the Auroboros, the snake eating its own tail, which is sort of what we're doing when we're feeling anxious. The idea is like, I wanted a reminder of, how much time am I spending consumed by anxiety? 10 minutes, 30 minutes, three hours, all day? And what if I cut just a little bit of that in half? What if I prevent that spiral from happening? How much happier and healthier would I be? And that's the idea of the Daily Stoic Anxiety Coin, fidget, whatever you want to call it. And we're launching it today. You can check out, I'll link to a photo of it in the description. And it's really awesome.

• 4:17Ryan Holiday?

  You can grab it, dailystoic.com/anxiety. And check it out. I think you'll really like this one.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am just in the closet of my house trying to put away the suitcases. There's a funny joke that I have in right thing right now. Truman was asked what he did the first day after coming home from being president. And he said, I took my suitcases up to the attic. So I just got back from Sydney and it was amazing. I spoke to 2,000 people in Sydney, almost 2,000 people in Melbourne. One of the coolest experiences I ever had, there were these beautiful venues. I don't get to talk to like you guys that much. And normally when I'm doing my talks, it's like, and you've heard them here on the podcast before, usually it's to like a corporate audience or a conference or, you know, like some, some specific

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  group, like a sports team that brought me out. I don't usually get to like sell tickets and meet fans who've read the book. So it was an amazing experience. I'm still coming down from it. But then the realities of what Truman's talking about, you gotta put the suitcases away and go back to your regular life. And this is the first little Q and A episode that I am recording since getting back. And I wanted to bring you, you weren't able to travel all the way across the oceans, if you don't happen to live in Australia. I wanted to bring you some of the questions that they asked in the audience at the event. So I'm gonna bring you that. And if you want to ask me a question, I'm going back on tour in November. I'm going to be in Vancouver and Toronto, London,

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  Rotterdam, and Dublin. I'm super excited. And I hope you come. You can grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour. You can get all the ticketing stuff there. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And then maybe you'll hear yourself on a future episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast when I do the Q and A. I know we're doing like a VIP Q and A beforehand, or if you've got like sort of privacy questions you don't want to ask in front of a huge audience, we can do that there. And then there'll be a Q and A at the end of the talk as well. So come see me in London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto in November. I'll link to those, ryanholiday.net/tour. And thanks to everyone, if you weren't in Sydney. Thanks so much for coming. Truly highlight of my life. I loved it there. It was an awesome experience. And enjoy.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  So you said that you can see that the world is probably becoming more crazy than it may have been. So you looked back into the past and maybe also why things didn't work out for certain civilizations and societies. So when you look into where we are right now, do you see some parallels? That might mean we have to watch out for something, and do you maybe see some differences which means maybe we are better of this time and maybe we will figure it out?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Marx and Marxism is in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. So once and someone will be like, "Oh, this is scary, this is real, it could happen, so those issues don't last forever." Now again, the decline and fall of Rome took hundreds and hundreds of years. And you could argue that the Pope is still the Emperor of Rome. He has the same title, "Pax in maximis," that Marx and Marxists have, right? So this idea that, you know, this moment we're in is the pivotal moment that everything matters. That can be in a way like working ourselves up into a state of anxiety and worry. I'm not saying that that can rule the world, of course it does, and there are definitely alarming things that are happening.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  But I try to sort of step back and see a longer term view and I try to put it some, what do I control? Or it's important for me to do? How can I not be a part of the bad stuff that's happening and how can I be a part of the solution? Good stuff. I mean, the Stoics were definitely cognizant of the way it was easy then and now to be caught up in trends or fates or, you know, frenzies. Like, Criticus, one of the so far, said, "If I wanted to be part of a mob, I would not have become a philosopher." And so Stoicism has to be able to cultivate, again, an ability, a strict character.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  It doesn't let us get caught in the excesses or the evils of the moment that we happen to be in. And I think this is a real Stoic problem. Stoic opposition, they were just like a perennial thorn in the side of a tyrannical empire. So, to me, it's not a stoic, it's not a non- stoic, they're involved. They also have a sense of what's in front of them, that they have to focus on, that they can make a difference. And that's kind of how I think about it. Whether these are the end times or not is a question for either people hundreds of years from now. Or it's a question that'll, you know, come with its own answer, I mean, when you have a real life.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Hi, Ryan. I've been a fan of yours since thirteen, and I wrote an email. Yes, you're applying some advice that changed my life, so thank you for that. Hey, maybe you'll be normal.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  My question relates to the idea, this idea that Stoics can encourage sort of passiveness or extinguishes the fire of life. What Stoic strategies or supplements to Stoicism that we use to count them? Yeah, I've never quite gotten that, because, okay. Something happens, the world is a certain way. To change it or respond to it, you first have to accept that it happened the way it is, right? And so the Stoics talk about the art of acting essence, or the idea of ascent, by not A S C E N T, but A S S E N T, acceptance. That's what they're saying.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  You first have to accept things as they are, you have to accept the facts on the ground. If you are in denial of them, or you are focused on how unfair they are, or whose fault they are, or how annoying it is, or how you warned everyone that it was gonna happen this way, but what you're not doing is focusing on the part of it that isn't your control, which is the response, which is what happens next. So that, I, yes, it gives a lot of resignation and acceptance in the Stoics and in Stoic writings, but I see that as like the first part of a sentence, and then there's an "and", right, or that's step one, and step two is, well, now what am I gonna do about it?

• 10:59Speaker 03

  My question is about ego and seeing it in other people and maybe wanting to help. So you could work on yourself constantly. But as you write in Paralog, who am I to judge someone else? So have you encountered that situation? Do you have a solution for that?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing about ego is although it masks the behavior, it sometimes appears as strength. People up close see how easy it is to manipulate, right? To direct, because the person's vulnerability is how they see themselves or how they want things to be. I'm going to do a funny example, because I'm writing about this and what I'm doing now. The intelligence agents who were responsible for briefing Donald Trump on who's president, the presidential briefing, like collection of the most important things that the most important person in the world needs to know. He's so egotistical and fragile, he's not interested in all these things that are happening.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  What they found is the more they made it about him, right? The more they put his name in it, the more responsive he was to things, right? And I bring this up because we don't think about how vulnerable ego makes us and how people who understand us see that ego without how they manipulate and direct us and use the information they give us to our own purposes, right? So I guess what I'm saying is that that's another reason you have to be careful about ego, that's the fragility that it creates. But when we think about ego, if someone has it and we want to help them with it, without about, without some, without fragility, then what? I think where you have to start is just remembering that no egotistical person

• 12:48Speaker 02

  has ever been convinced of anything when they were challenged head on in or about that thing that they're egotistical about, right? So it requires some creativity or prudality. You got to go around, right? You got to convince them that it was their idea all along, right? And so when we think about ego, we want to think about it seems so transparent in the people and the vulnerabilities it creates and then I just think it's imperative that we go, okay, how, when I am managing up?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  And telling my boss what they want to hear, sandwiching his bad news and in between some good news or some compliments or whatever, right? And we go, oh, so silly. Think about how people are doing that to us. That's the real lesson we should take from that. Not to become paranoid, but to become, oh, okay, I can see how this is holding me back as the CEO, the boss, the parent. This is holding me back from getting what I say I want, which is truth, information, honest, honesty, right? That's in some other thing.

• 13:58Ryan 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.