Everybody Wants To Rule The World | Don't Unintentionally Hand Over Your Freedom

For as long as there have been groups of people, people have wanted to be in charge of those people. For as long as there have been armies, people have tried to use them to conquer, to rule, to accumulate empires. Was it worth it? Did they enjoy it? Did it mean anything? Few, if any of them, ever bothered to honestly answer that question. This is what makes Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations such a remarkable and unprecedented text. Here you have the most powerful man in the world, head of the most powerful army on earth, a victorious general whose triumphs warranted an 130-foot tall marble column lauding his achievements. And what did he say that all this amounted to? Not much! Meditations is Marcus Aurelius’ refutation of the idea that you should want to rule the world. It strips it of its glamor and delusions (literally at one point, Marcus breaks down the feast he was given, removing, he said, “the legends that encrust it”). Being famous is empty, he tells us. Being remembered is worthless. Power is corrupting and an immense burden.✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  "Everybody wants to rule the world. They fought their whole lives for it. They sacrificed family for it. They sacrificed happiness, ethics, moral tranquility for it. For as long as there have been groups of people, people have wanted to be in charge of those people. For as long as there have been armies, people have tried to use them to conquer, to rule, to accumulate empires. Was it worth it? Did they enjoy it? Did it mean anything? Few, if any, of them ever bothered to honestly answer that question, which is what makes Marcus Aurelius's meditation such a remarkable and unprecedented text. Here you have the most powerful man in the world, head of the most powerful army on earth, a victorious general whose triumphs warranted 130-foot-tall marble column lauding his achievements. And

• 1:25Ryan Holiday?

  what did he say this all amounted to? Not much. Meditations is Marcus Aurelius's refutation of the idea that you should want to rule the world. It strips it of its glamour and its delusions. Literally, at one point, Marcus Aurelius breaks down the feast he was given, removing, he said, "the legend that encrusted." Being famous is empty, he tells us. Being remembered is worthless. Power is corrupting and an immense burden. Don't be fooled," he is saying to his successors to the crown. He is also saying this to us in our own, more humble fields. The top spot is not what you think it is. Don't trade your life and your identity for it. Don't lie to yourself. Don't become the monster necessary to acquire it and to keep it."

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  Don't unintentionally hand over your freedom. This is the March 8th entry in The Daily Stoic. I'm holding the hardcover in my hands, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. But of course, you can get it as an audiobook. You can get it as an ebook. We've even got a cool leather edition in The Daily Stoic store. The quote in today's entry, if you haven't seen it, comes to us from Epictetus's Incredian Handbook. Talked about that before. But this also ends our streak, I think of, we ended it last week, but we had like five, six, seven entries from Marx's Realist in a row.

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  But now we've got two from Epictetus in a row. It's one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus. This is from Incredian 28. He says, "If a person gave away your body to some pastor by, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. Have you no shame in that?" Epictetus asks. Instinctively, we all protect our physical selves. We don't let people touch us, push us around, control us where we go. But when it comes to the mind, we're less disciplined. We hand it over willingly to social media, to television, to what other people are doing, or thinking, or saying. We sit down to work, and the next thing you know, we're browsing the internet. We sit down with our families,

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  but within minutes, we have our phones out. We sit down peacefully in a park, but instead of looking inward, we're judging people as they pass by. We don't even know that we're doing this. We don't realize how much waste is in it, how inefficient and distracted it makes us. And what's worse, no one is making this happen. It's totally self-inflicted. To the Stoics, this is an abomination. They know that the world can control our bodies. We can be thrown in jail or tossed about by the weather. But the mind, that's ours, and we must protect it. Maintain control over your mind and perceptions, they'd say. It's your most prized possession. We did a Daily Stoic email.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe last year about how armies fight over these little bits of territory. People are trying to accumulate these enormous business empires. They want to be financially independent, politically independent. They want to control physical stuff. They want to control idea. They want to control all this stuff out in the world, basically. But they ignore what Seneca calls the greatest empire. And in the kids book we did, The Girl Who Would Be Free, Epictetus's father says, calls it the empire between our ears. Right? We fight for physical space, but we ignore what controls our mind. We relinquish control of our own mind. We hand it over to social media. Right?

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  We hand it over to distractions. We hand it over to jealousy, envy, gossip. We just hand it over to other stuff. Seneca said it's the most baffling thing in the world, right? That we protect physical property. We protect our bodies, protect our money, but we let people steal our attention. We let people steal our time. The one thing that you can't get more of, the one thing that once you give it away, you can't get it back. And that's, that's so strange. And so it requires discipline. It requires, it's a battle. You know, the term in the military community is control the battle space. You have to control the battle space of the mind.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  You can't unintentionally hand over relinquished control of your most precious resource, your attention, your finite amount of time. When you let people get inside your head, when you let them skew your sense of self, your priorities, your interests, you let them get riled up. Like I, right? We're in an election year. It's actually the biggest election year in the history of the world. I think so many different countries are going into elections this year. So I'm not just talking about this from my biased, somewhat concerned American perspective. But, you know.

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  A bunch of people are battling for that space in your head. And I don't just mean the political candidates. I mean, the media, right? For the election in America has been going on for like two years. It's basically been going on for four years. And there's a bunch of people with very vested interests in making you monitor events in real time. Again, not the candidates, but the news entities. Right? The people who want to solicit donations from you. The poll, like, everyone wants you to be watching this as though it's a horse race when it's not. But they want you to be watching the individual ups and downs. This scandal, this gap, this. And how much of that actually matters, right? How much of this could be avoided if you would just sit down, do some thinking, read a few,

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  you know, intelligent things? And then you'd be able to make your decision and go, I'm not going to follow that. I'm not going to monitor that because I don't control that outcome. I already thought about who I'm going to vote for. I already know what my values are. Everything else is noise. I think about this with sports, right? I love sports, but I have to not watch the sort of ESPN shows. And I know I had Stephen A. Smith on the podcast. I think he's a fascinating guy, but, you know, his job is to get up and create controversy and debates about things for which the debate and the controversy has no impact. It's just opinions about reality, not reality itself. And so when you unintentionally, look, maybe for entertainment, sometimes it's fine.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm just saying you have to control that space between your ears. You have to command the greatest empire, command of oneself. Right? You hand over your mind to anyone who comes along. Epictetus says, so they may abuse you, leaving you disturbed and troubled. I put myself out there on social media. I just did this. So I was so disappointed in myself. I, some thread popped up on Reddit or whatever, or maybe it didn't even pop up on Reddit, like a Google alert, which I should probably turn off. But maybe someone emailed it to me. I don't remember. So the point is, I saw this thread and I could tell from the subject line, it was going to be a bunch of people shitting on me. And so why would I click that? But I clicked it anyway. And I read it and I just,

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  my wife came out after she put our youngest down. I put the oldest down and I was just like, I did it. I just read this thread. Now I just feel so not good, right? Why did I do? And she was like, why did you do that? I didn't have a good answer. I was unintentionally handing control of my body over to people who were going to abuse me, disturbing me and troubling me. I'm not ashamed of it, but it was just a stupid waste of time. It didn't make anything or anyone better. So that's the message today. Hope everyone is doing well. Try not to be too rattled by what's going on in the world. Try to control the battle space. Command the

• 9:36Ryan Holiday?

  greatest empire. Control the empire between your ears. I'll talk to everyone soon.

• 9:45Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.