Does The Tantrum Help? | 6 Stoic Reminders You Need to Hear

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Does the tantrum help? It was unexpected. It sucks.

• 0:22Ryan Holiday?

  It's gonna hurt. Things happen, things that are not our fault, things that we didn't expect, things that are gonna cause problems. From travel delays to embezzling employees, from world events to family drama, fortune behaves as she pleases, the Stoics tell us. And often, it seems that she pleases to displease us. Okay. But what does getting upset about this do? Does yelling and screaming change anything? Does spiraling fix it? Does finding someone to blame make you feel better for more than a few minutes? We've been quoting that great Phoebe Bridger's line recently. "I've been known to throw a tantrum when things are not the way I imagined them." Does the tantrum help?

• 1:07Ryan Holiday?

  You tell your children it doesn't. You tell them that it doesn't get them what they want. You tell them that it's a bad look. You tell them that you don't reward that kind of behavior. You tell them it's no longer age appropriate. Yet here you are getting upset with the person behind the airline counter. Here you are typing a rude email. Here you are ranting on social media. Here you are throwing the TV remote across the room. Get over it. It happened. As we said, the only thing that will make a difference is getting to work.

• 1:48Ryan Holiday?

  If I was gonna put a curse on someone, I think a curse I might put on them is that you are going to have very strong opinions about everything you see and hear, about everything that people do, about everything that people say. Right? This is a recipe for misery, for torture, for endless distraction, for missing the things that are actually important. This is why in meditations, Marcus Rilis reminds himself that we always have the power to have no opinion, that we don't have to let certain things upset us, that we can ask ourselves, is this thing essential? Is this something that I should be focused on? Does it really matter? And so when we eliminate the inessential, when we focus on what really matters, when we limit the number of opinions we have, he says it gives us the double benefit of doing and saying and thinking about the essential things better. So this isn't apathy.

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  This isn't, you know, sort of checking out. But it is saying, hey, is this thing important? Does this actually matter? Is this a distraction? Is this something they're trying to get in my head about? Right? And the ability to put those aside and focus on what truly matters, on what's actually essential, that is a superpower. And that is the way out of the curse that we would wish on our enemies. We want our opponents to be endlessly bogged down in every single little trivial thing while we focus on what's actually important and where we can actually make a difference. It's kind of insane. We put up with so much shit from strangers, right? And civil society demands that we be patient with that person in front of us in line, the person who cut us off in traffic, that employee or that coworker that just never does things right.

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  And so it's kind of strange the way that when we do lose our temper, it's never at those people. It's at the people we love the most. You'll repeat instructions 30 times to someone you work with, but if your spouse says "what" too many times, you lose it. God forbid your son leave his shoes out when you asked him not to. Seneca had this great line. He said, "Let us not be angry with good people." But that's what we do. It's not so much a paradox as it is a problem of proximity. Because they're closest to us, we have the most interactions with them. But it's also because they're closest to us, we know they'll put up with it. And there's something very sad and tragic and I think fundamentally un-Stoic about this. I think Stoicism is first and foremost about trying not to be angry with anyone,

• 4:02Ryan Holiday?

  trying to be in command of oneself, to not lose one's temper. But then let's really think about who's getting the brunt of our frustration? Who are we shortest with? The fact that we can get mad at someone because they love us enough to put up with it, because they're kids and they have to live with us, it's not an excuse. Remind yourself of all their positive traits. Remind yourself of what actually matters to you. Remind yourself of how important they are to you. Remind yourself of all they have to put up with from you. "Let us not be angry with good people." That's what this philosophy is helping us with. So even though he's very famous and very important,

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Rilis makes a lot of effort in his writings to remind himself how worthless fame is. He lists a lot of names in meditations, emperors who came before him, famous poets and playwrights and power brokers. He's saying how unfamiliar these names, which were so important not very long ago, already are. It's like what Taylor Swift was talking about when she says the who's who of who's that. Marcus Rilis is saying that's what we'll become. It doesn't matter how important we are, how powerful we are, how much money we make. We all slip into oblivion very quickly. He says, "Words once common now sound archaic, and the names of the famous dead as well. Everything fades quickly," he says, "and is forgotten." What is eternal fame, he says?

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's emptiness. It's worthless. So what do we prize instead? Being a good person now, doing good, being virtuous. You make your own luck, the Stoics would say. You are not unlucky. You make your own luck. But they don't mean that in the way that some people do. They're not saying that the world is fair, that the world is a meritocracy, that all you have to do to be successful is want it really bad. No, Marcus Rilis says we make our own good fortune in life. And we do that, he says, "through good character, good actions, and good deeds." We can't make the world good, but we can be good inside that world. That's what the Stoics are saying. Seneca said it was one of the great mysteries of the world. If you put all the wisest minds and smartest people together, they couldn't tell you

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  why people seem to value their property and money more than their time. Because one is non-renewable, one we're running out of. And he said, "It's crazy." He thought this was absolutely insane. Despite what the song says, you can't get your dawns back. Once time passes, it is dead. You have died along with it. We are dying every minute, Seneca says. We are dying every day. So we must live accordingly. He says, "Whoever takes time from you better give you something in return. You must protect this finite resource." The benefits of Stoicism are clear. It offers resilience. It offers fortitude. It offers courage. It offers productivity and focus and self-command. This is all great.

• 6:56Ryan Holiday?

  And these are the reasons people have been talking about and sharing the ideas in Stoicism for thousands of years. Because it works, because it makes you better. But it's important that we don't miss that for all that Stoicism offers, it also asks a lot of us. It doesn't just ask a lot of us in terms of deprivation and hard work. It asks a lot of us morally and ethically. Just that you do the right thing, Marcus Rilis says in meditations. The rest doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're cold or warm, tired or well-rested. It doesn't matter if people recognize or appreciate it. Right? There were Stoics who gave their lives for these abstract notions of courage and discipline, and most of all, justice and wisdom. So Stoicism asks a lot of us. It asks that we be a good person. It asks that we be principled. It asks that we be kind.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  It asks that we be public-oriented, that we do works for the common good. So if your attraction to Stoicism is all the things that it does for you and you ignore what it asks of you, you're just using it to become a better sociopath. And that's not who the Stoics were. And that's certainly not who they wanted you to be. You can't pick and choose. Stoicism is a well-rounded philosophy that, yes, offers a lot to us, but it also asks a lot of us.