This Is The Day | How Stoicism Can Make You Happier

This is what we tell ourselves: Someday I will write my book. Someday I will travel abroad. Someday I will learn how to play guitar. But someday soon, you will no longer be able to say, “someday…”---“A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.” – SenecaThe Stoics believed in living a virtuous life, one with the potential to bring us personal happiness and fulfillment. And that’s one of the reasons a person may choose to live after their fashion. After all, what good is philosophy if it doesn’t ultimately bring us happiness? But in Stoic philosophy, it’s the pursuit of virtue and good character that allows us to get there. For the Stoic, the pursuit of virtue is the pursuit of happiness. If we can live virtuously, a good life will follow.---If you want your own physical reminder of Memento Mori to create priority, humility, and appreciation for life, you can pick up one of our Memento Mori medallions to carry in your pocket everywhere you go. It is a part of our 2022 Daily Stoic Gift Guide, which is packed with 13 great gifts for the Stoic in your life.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🎓 FREE GUIDE to Stoic philosophy: https://dailystoic.com/freeguideCheck 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:32Ryan Holiday?

  This is the day. This is what we tell ourselves, that someday I'll write my book, someday I will travel abroad, someday I will learn how to play guitar. But someday soon, you will no longer be able to say someday. So we must adopt the mindset of the great Steven Pressfield. In his latest book, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be, which he talked about recently on the Daily Stoic Podcast, Pressfield writes, "Here's my frame of mind as I sit down to work." This is the day, he says, "There is no other day. This is the day. There is no other time. Today is the Super Bowl. Today is the day I give birth. Today is the day that I die. Not tomorrow," Marcus Aurelius

• 1:15Ryan Holiday?

  said. "Choose to be good today. Do your job as a human being, as a writer, as a parent, as a politician, today. You can't waste this chance. You can't put it off until later. You cannot wait until you are more secure. No, now is now. You'll never have this moment again. Memento mori. The circumstances are never going to be perfect. You do not have plenty of time. Now is now. Today is the day." That's my memento mori coin. I think about it all the time. I'm playing with it on my desk right now. It's something I carry always. It's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public. It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different memento mori reminders, of course, but if you want to get this one,

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  which we make here in the US, in a mint in Minnesota, that's been in business since 1882, you can check it out in the Daily Stoic Store. Or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, The Painted Porch on Main Street, where we sell them as well. It's a game changer. Check it out.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think the stereotype of the Stoic is not just unfeeling, but not happy is also part of that. Right? You don't think, when people hear the word Stoicism, they don't think joy, they don't think laughter, they don't think, you know, living one's best life. And that's a shame, because I think when I wrote Lives of the Stoics, that was the thing that I found the most heartening, was that the Stoics were human beings. They got married, they had kids, they liked jokes, they liked having fun, they went to the theater. They, they, they did live life to the fullest, and they tried to get to that place that Aristotle was talking about,

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  eudimenea, or human flourishing. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode, how Stoicism can make you happier, or some Stoic keys to happiness. Stoics thought that the virtuous life was synonymous with a happy life. They, they didn't necessarily just think, you know, happiness was getting everything you want all the time. In fact, they, they thought that was a recipe for unhappiness. But in today's episode, I want to talk to you about this underexplored idea in the Stoic canon, which is happiness.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  What is the number one source of our unhappiness? It's focusing on things that we don't control. Epictetus says, "The chief task in life is to separate things into two buckets, what's in my control and what's not in my control." And he says, "The only way to happiness is to cease worrying about things which are beyond my power of control." So when you narrow your focus from the things that everyone thinks about, from the things that everyone worries about, from all the things that are outside your grasp, and you decide to focus instead on what's up to me, you have a much better chance of being happy. Ultimately, what's in our control is our thoughts and our actions. I control this little window of stuff today, and I'm just going to crush it there. That's where I'm going to focus, and because I'm focused there, I know I can make myself happy.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  People think money will Make them happy. Well, I'll tell you how you can become wealthier right now. It's by wanting less stuff, by needing less, right? Seneca says poverty is not being poor, poverty is wanting more. He's not saying that some struggling mother on welfare does not have it hard. What he's saying is that there are rich people who are very poor. So your wants and your happiness are in a tension with each other. So if you can decide to be grateful and satisfied and good with what you have now, you have a certain amount of wealth and you have something to be happy for. Epictetus says wealth is not having many possessions, it's having few wants. In Buddhism, they say that craving is the source of suffering. By focusing on what you have rather than what you don't have.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics and the Buddhists both say you are eliminating a source of unhappiness. And I think when we're talking about wanting less, the other path to happiness related to this is the idea of simplification. Marcus Aurelius says, ask yourself, is this essential? Because most of what we want and do and say is not essential. We chase things we don't want, we chase things we don't actually care about. We make life so much more complicated than it needs to be. I think the pandemic was so powerful in this regard. In March of 2020, when life shut down and suddenly we weren't traveling, we weren't going to meetings, we weren't as busy as we have in our whole lives. My wife and I looked around our farm and we're like, I don't think we've ever been here and truly noticed how wonderful it was.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  So we found these wild blackberry bushes in our backyard. We watched more sunsets in a row than we'd ever seen. So by simplifying, by removing all the extraneous, the inessential things, I was reminded of the power and the importance of the essential things. If you want more happiness in your life, start by removing complexity, particularly unnecessary complexity. One of the things we tell ourselves that's going to make us happy, that's part of the happy life is like, can't wait to go on vacation. When I hear people talking about all their crazy travel plans, I think, why not try to build a life that you don't want to escape from? Why not try to build a practice where you can get that peace and that relief from inside yourself? The other thing tied up in our modern definition of happiness is like pleasure.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  Whether it's drugs, or alcohol, or sex, we think that thing, this external thing, is going to feel so good, it will create happiness. So we think that if our marriage is unhappy, we'll be happier with this person. But we actually end up causing ourselves so much unhappiness. There's a great novel by Tom Wolfe about Stoicism, called A Man in Full. There's this really haunting scene where this sort of rich, successful real estate developer, you know, he wakes up next to his second wife. He divorced his older wife, and she's this young, beautiful person. But he's just like, who is this person? Like, we have nothing in common. He's basically just wakes up one day and realizes that in chasing pleasure and success, he actually got himself to a place of profound unhappiness. Peter Thiel, the billionaire,

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  I once heard him at an event say something like, "You want to look for things for pleasures that don't have diminishing returns." And I think that's right. When I look out the window of my backyard, I can see nature. It never gives me less pleasure than the first time I saw it. Sunsets, sunrises, playing with my kids, these little pleasures, I never get tired of them. But chasing the newest thing, buying a new car, buying something fancy, having expensive this or that, just get old really quickly. And so the Stoics would say to try to find pleasure or happiness in simple things you control that never grow old. When I think about the moments that I felt happiest, they were moments of stillness. They were moments of focus. I think if I had to give you a secret for happiness, I would say it's that, it's presence,

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  being in the present moment. Marcus Aurelius talks about the perfect sphere, rejoicing in its stillness. No one is less happy than the person who's pulled in a million directions. I think the Stoics would say that one source of our unhappiness is other people. In fact, Marcus Aurelius's thing about the obstacles away comes from talking about frustrating people. And he opens Meditations by saying, "Look, the people you meet today are going to be frustrating, and stupid, and jealous, and mean." Right? He knows the reality of our fellow human beings. And they're not great. So part of happiness is being prepared. If you go through the world naive, delusional, expecting everyone's going to be your friend, everyone's going to be nice to you, everything's going to go your way, you are going to be constantly disappointed and that is an obstacle to happiness.

• 8:50Ryan Holiday?

  But what is a source of happiness is also other people, people you care about, people you're connected with, the people that you've built your life around. And I know this doesn't feel stoic, but it is within reason. Marx says he learns from sexists, the philosopher, to be free of passion but full of love. Love for his fellow human beings, love for the common good, love for the people that he loves. I don't want you to think that being a stoic is like cutting yourselves off from attachments. Relationships are a key part of this too. Now, that doesn't mean that you hand over your happiness to other people. It does mean you have to understand that people are going to mess up, people are flawed. You have to understand all of this too. And in fact, I think by understanding that you put yourself in a position to not be so vulnerable to it.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  And another key part of happiness is of course eliminating things that make you unhappy. What traumas do you have? What wounds do you have? Where are you struggling? Well, maybe you're unhappy in part because you had a traumatic or a painful childhood. But just pretending that you didn't, just stuffing it down, just gritting your teeth and bearing it, that's not going to contribute to your happiness. In fact, that's going to cause unhappiness because you're going to repeat that pattern in future relationships. You're going to believe that you're undeserving of happiness. So then getting help, asking questions, this is a key part of this too. Stoicism isn't stuffing the emotions down. It's processing the emotions, it's dealing with the emotions. So you have room for the positive, wonderful emotions like happiness. What is Seneca's letters?

• 10:17Ryan Holiday?

  But Seneca writing these joyful, fun letters to his friend Lucilius. And you can tell that friendship is a key part of the Stoic. And you can tell that friendship is a key part of being successful as a Stoic. No man is an island and certainly not a Stoic. In fact, the Stoics think that other people are what we're here for. And relationships to me are the most profound source of happiness. I hope you like this video. I hope you subscribe. But what I really want you to subscribe to is our Daily Stoic email. One bit of Stoic wisdom totally for free to the largest community of Stoics ever in existence. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email. There's no spam, you can unsubscribe at any time. I love sending it, I've sent it every day for the last six years.

• 11:00Ryan Holiday?

  And I hope to see you there at dailystoic.com/email.