The Best Way To Arm Yourself | We Were Made For Each Other

Ryan talks about way to prepare and act in the face of immorality, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  The Best Way to Arm Yourself. Perhaps you remember the final scene of the movie Gladiator. Maximus is wounded severely, and he's fighting against Commodus, who he has just temporarily disarmed. "Sword!" Commodus shouts to his Praetorian guards, "Sword!" But the soldiers refuse to help him. Maximus, bleeding badly, drops his sword and begins to drift into unconsciousness. His family is waiting for him in the afterlife. He walks towards them, but with a final exercise of will, he seizes command of himself. Commodus comes at him with a dagger. With his bare hands and faltering strength, Maximus fights Commodus to submission and then kills him,

• 1:23Ryan Holiday?

  as Commodus impotently struggles against the very weapon he tried to wield. Victorious but dying, Maximus uses his last breaths to order Rome to be restored to the vision of Marcus Aurelius. It's a fictional scene, of course, a goosebump-inducing one, to be sure. But also, in its own way, it's an illustration of one of the best passages in Meditations. "Be a boxer, not a fencer," Marcus Aurelius writes to himself. "It's better to have your weapons be a natural part of you than to be something you have to pick up." Commodus is dependent on his sword. He's dependent on the power of his office. He's dependent on fear. He's at the mercy of his own bodyguards. But Maximus?

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  Maximus is his own master. He moves under his own power. He is ruled by dignity, by his own strength, by his own principles, by his own weapons. He doesn't need anything or anyone, not to be great, anyway. Even when he is bleeding out and under attack, all he has to do, as Marcus Aurelius writes, is clench his fist. Who are you? Commodus or Maximus? Self-reliant or an impostor? A tyrant or a gladiator? A boxer or a fencer? If you're being truly honest, what would your final exercise of will look like?

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  We were made for each other. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the Bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "You'll more quickly find an earthly thing kept from the earth and you will find a person cut off from other human beings."

• 3:30Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 9:9. Now, naturally, Marcus Aurelius and the rest of the Stoics were not familiar with Newtonian physics. But they knew that what went up must come down. And that's the analogy that Marcus is using here. Our mutual independence with our fellow human beings is stronger than the law of gravity. Philosophy attracts introverts, to be sure. And the study of human nature can make you aware of other people's faults and can breed contempt for others.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  So do struggle and difficulty. They isolate us from the world. But none of that changes that we are, as Aristotle put it, social animals. We need each other. We must be there for each other. We must take care of each other and allow others to care for us in return. To pretend otherwise is to violate our nature, to be more or less than what it means to be a human being. You know, one of my favorite quotes of Marcus Aurelius, it's not obviously attached to today's entry, but he says, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." And Marcus Aurelius talks about common good, this idea of our connectedness,

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  this idea of sympathetic, like 80 or so times in meditations, I mean, just over and over again, he talks about it. And that's not because he's emperor, that's because it's what Stoicism teaches, that we're connected. We're part of this cosmic whole, that we're here for each other. In fact, the whole point of Stoicism, one later Stoic says, is to take our immediate circle of control, ourselves, our family, et cetera, and expand it outwards. Or rather, pull people on the way distant edges of the circle of our concern down closer to the center, to connect with them, to care about them, to do things for them.

• 5:25Ryan Holiday?

  That was not just our obligation, that was the good life, according to Marcus Aurelius. I think that's what I was both inspired with early on in the pandemic and then have had so much trouble dealing with. And I know it's not been perfectly Stoic, the way that I've dealt with it, but it's, I'm a human being and it's hard. But when you see people acting so vehemently antisocially, when you see people deliberately tearing at the fabric of our connectedness in the middle of a public health crisis, right? Polarization is always a problem, right? Dividing people against each other is always a problem.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  But when you do it and the direct result is that people needlessly die alone in hospital rooms because they were infected with a deadly virus, because someone... Someone convinced them that, say, vaccines didn't work, or convinced them that masks didn't work, or convinced them that this was nothing, they should just go about their lives and, you know, that it didn't matter. And it's sadder still when those people realize that their decisions have affected other people. Maybe it's someone who caught a case of COVID and it didn't affect them, but then their mother, or their father, or their grandmother, or their grandfather, as I happen to know, it's happened to some extended, to some friends and their extended family.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  The guilt of realizing then, when it's too late, it's too hard to do, and it's impossible to do anything about it, that our actions have consequences and that we did one of the most unforgivable things there is in this world, which is externalize the consequences of our actions onto other people. We are meant for each other. We are part of a whole. The reason I decided to take COVID seriously in my family is not because I'm particularly worried about my health, or my young children's health, or my wife's health. We're all healthy, have very little in the way of pre-existing conditions, have access to good medical care, can, you know, afford to miss out on work or whatever, if something were to happen.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  What I said to myself from the beginning, because this is what Stoicism teaches, that I didn't want to be part of the problem. I didn't want to make it worse for anyone else. Right? Didn't want to be a conduit. I didn't want to be a vector, to use the medical term, for something that could inflict pain or death on someone else, to the best of my ability. And I've, obviously, not perfect at this in the rest of my life, nor have I been up until this point, but it was an eye-opening experience. Right? We have to think about how our actions affect other people. We can't cut ourselves off from caring about other people. I was laughing, in a way, although also shaking my head,

• 8:19Ryan Holiday?

  when Kyrie Irving announced that he wasn't going to be vaccinated because he was doing what was best for him. Now that's an ironic thing for a guy who plays a team sport for a living to say, right? The whole point is that we don't do what's best for ourselves. We try to do what's best for the team, for society, for the common good, as the Stoics talk about. That's today's message. Thank you for bearing with me. Thank you, the vast majority of you, who have internalized this message, have done the right thing, cared about other people. Be well and be safe out there. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.