You Are Not Alone | Pay Your Taxes

“Sometimes it can feel like you’re a solitary warrior. Certainly Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations reads like that at times. He feels like the last honest man. The last good man. The only one keeping the faith.”Ryan explains the struggle that we all share, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is also brought to you by stamps.com, a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere right from your computer. Send letters, ship packages, and pay a lot less with discounted rates from USPS, UPS, and more. There’s NO risk. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.***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/dailystoicSee 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?

  Bienvenidos a otro episodio del Podcast Daily Stoic. El jueves hacemos doble trabajo, no solo leyendo nuestra meditación diaria, sino también leyendo un pasaje del libro "El Daily Stoic: 366 Meditaciones sobre la Wisdom, Perseverancia y la Art of Living", que escribí con mi maravillosa coautora y colaborador, Stephen Hanselman. Así que hoy os daremos una rápida meditación de uno de los estoicos, de Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, y luego un análisis de mí. Y luego os enviaremos al mundo a hacer lo mejor posible para convertir estas palabras en obras.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  "No estás solo. A veces puede sentirte como si fueras un guerrero solitario. Ciertamente, las meditaciones de Marcus Aurelius leen así a veces. Se siente como el último hombre honesto, el último buen hombre, el único que mantiene la fe. A menudo nos sentimos así sobre el cause por el que estamos luchando. Nos sentimos así sobre el trauma que llevamos desde la infancia, sobre nuestros miedos, que es solo nosotros contra el mundo. Pero esto es incorrecto. Piensas que tu dolor y tu derramación de corazón son sin precedentes en la historia del mundo", escribió James Baldwin. "Pero luego empiezas a leer y te das cuenta, como Baldwin hizo, que los libros le enseñaron que las cosas que me atormentaron eran las mismas cosas que me conectaron con todas las personas que estaban vivas,

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  o que hubieran sido vivas. Y esa es la ironía de las meditaciones. El diario privado, destinado a nadie, logra apelar a los muchos. Se convierte en universal. La vida de Marcus y el dolor y la pérdida eran tan únicos, y aún así tan relacionables. Si solo otros emperadores habían escrito tal libro, o si alguien lo hubiera hecho, tal vez podría haberlo leído y sentido un poco menos solo, afortunado por ese sentido de simpatía, de sus conexiones incontables a un mundo tan diverso. Bueno, no es demasiado tarde para nosotros. Como James Baldwin, tienes que leer para liberarte del hilo de la tormenta y la niebla que se encuentra alrededor de tu cuello cuando crees que eres el único que lo ha atacado. Tienes que salir de tu interior. Tienes que entrar en las mentes de otras personas

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  y dejar que ellas entren tuyas, lo cual es algo de lo que Marcus Aurelius habla. Tienes que entender que no estás solo. Tus luchas son compartidas. Hay personas que luchan aún más que tú. Conecta con ellas, incluso si están muertas. Y si puedes, trate de poner algunos de tus propios pensamientos ahí fuera, porque puede ayudar a alguien más que lo necesite.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  Pay your taxes. Nothing will ever befall me that I will receive with gloom or bad disposition. I will pay my taxes gladly. Now, all the things which cause complaint or dread are like the taxes of life, things which, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope for exemption or seek escape. Seneca Moral Letters, 96:2. As your income taxes come due, you might be like many people complaining at what you have to fork over to the government. Forty percent of everything I make goes to these people? And for what? First off, taxes go to a lot of programs and services that you almost certainly take for granted.

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  But second, you think that you're so special? People have been complaining about their taxes for thousands of years. And now, they're dead. Get over it. Third, this is a good problem to have, far better than, say, making so little that there's nothing left over to pay the government, or living in anarchy, or having to pay for every basic service in a struggle against nature. But more important, income taxes are not the only taxes you pay in life. They are just the financial form. Everything we do has a toll attached to it. Waiting around is a tax on traveling. Rumors and gossip are the taxes that come from acquiring a public persona. Disagreements and occasional frustration are the taxes placed even on the happiest of relationships.

• 3:58Ryan Holiday?

  Theft is a tax on abundance and having things that other people want. Stress and problems are tariffs that come attached to success, and on and on and on. There are many forms of taxes in life. You can argue with them, you can go to great but ultimately futile lengths to evade them, or you can simply pay and enjoy the fruits of whatever you get to keep. You know, it's funny, we do this entry, this is the entry from April 15th, we do this on, you know, Daily Stoics Instagram every year. Mostly I just do it now to provoke the reaction, because I think it's funny. But everyone gets so upset. "How dare you say that I should pay my taxes? Taxation is theft. Screw the government."

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  Blah, blah, blah. It always reveals the sort of deranged libertarian streak, deranged extreme libertarian streak, sorry, that can sometimes exist in a philosophy of Stoicism, which is about resilience and independence. But to me, it so misses the point. First off, because we're not just really talking about literal taxes. But what's so interesting about Seneca's metaphor is he's saying that the taxes of life, that everything has a tax on it. There's the part you get, you want, and then the fee attached to it, the toll. There's, there, there, nothing is free, is what he's saying. And I think that's really true. He says, "I pay the taxes of life gladly." He wasn't saying, "I gladly pay the emperor my tax," right? He's talking about a metaphorical tax.

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  But the other tax is important here, too. As, as we've seen over the last year in the pandemic, the, the cost of bad government is very high. The, the, the, the cost of a society that doesn't invest in things like public health is very high. And we don't, we can, the regulatory state failed us in so many ways. So I'm not simply saying that the more taxes you pay, the better the system you get. But this idea that government is the enemy, or that the state is the enemy, would be preposterous to the Romans, who were, uh, preposterous to the Stoics, who were active participants in public life,

• 6:13Ryan Holiday?

  who saw their country as something worth serving. And look, I'm not saying you should pay more taxes than you have to. I'm just saying, we have an obligation to each other. We have an obligation to the less fortunate. And we also, and this is the most of it part, have a legal obligation, that, a legal inconvenience that is a function of modern society. And to spend your time bemoaning, or whining, or getting angry, or getting into conspiracy theories about it, is a waste of time. Find out what you owe in taxes.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  Try to minimize it where you don't necessar, where, where those taxes are unnecessarily high. You know, do whatever you need to do, and then move on with your life. You'd almost always be better, and I think this is Seneca's main point. Instead of trying to avoid these little costs all the time, just live a life where you don't have to sweat something like that. Try to be successful enough, try to focus on the fact that in most cases complaints over taxes are champagne problems. That's what the Stoic is talking about. And that's what we're talking about today. So I hope today's entry didn't make you too upset. But if it did make you upset, well then, you need to work on your Stoicism.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  And of course, the reading practice we talk about in the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge. It's a great way to do this. We have all sorts of recommendations about rabbit holes to go down, topics to study, specific books to read that will help you not just feel less alone with the leadership challenges you're facing, but less alone as a human being in this crazy messed up world we're in. So check that out, dailystoic.com/readtolead. And of course, you get all our Stoic challenges for free if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com.