You Must Do This Dance | Cultivate Indifference

While most of us will never be an emperor or a rock star, we can imagine what it would be like. It would be so abnormal as to be dehumanizing. Indeed, this is what a lot of famous people say—that they often feel like an animal at a zoo. The point isn’t to say that we should pity famous people or even that we should try to avoid fame. The point is to say that, when we come across a famous person who seems to have stayed normal, we should learn how they did it.---And in todays Daily Stoic Journal reading, Ryan discusses the power of cultivating a certain type of indifference towards the struggles that enter into our lives.📚 You can get a signed copy of Stillness is the Key at The Painted Porch.✉️ 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, including the new Stillness Key.📱 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. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  You must do this dance. While most of us will never be an emperor or a rock star, we can imagine what it would be like. We can imagine what it would be like to be recognized everywhere we go, to have thousands or even millions of people chant our name, to be constantly interrupted by a fan wanting a photo, to try to put on a disguise to go grocery shopping. It would be so abnormal as to be dehumanizing. Indeed, this is what a lot of famous people say. They say, "It feels like being an animal in the zoo." The point here isn't to say that we should pity famous people, or even that we should try to avoid fame. The point is to say that when we come across a famous person who seems to have stayed normal, we should learn how they did it. In a recent profile of the Grammy-nominated

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  musician Maggie Rogers, who used her downtime throughout the pandemic to earn a master's degree from Harvard Divinity School, the writer in residence at Harvard's Divinity School, Terry Tempest Williams, was quoted as saying, "The bridge between a public life and a private life is stillness, having time to remember who you are and who you are not." And Rogers dances between motion and stillness. As it happens, this is how Marcus Aurelius stayed normal, too. It's how he avoided becoming Caesarified, as he put it, "died in purple." He took his time to rejoice in perfect stillness, to borrow his expression. He took time to slow down and clear his mind. He took time to look up at the stars, he said, "to consider his insignificance." He took time to remind himself repeatedly in

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  his journal, who he is and who he was not. You don't need to be a famous person to get value out of having some practices in your life that allow you to slow down and check in with yourself. Maybe it's journaling, maybe it's strenuous exercise, maybe it's frequent calls with a childhood friend who knows you better than anyone, who keeps you grounded. Whatever it is, you must carve out time for stillness. You must do the things that remind you who you are and who you are not. You must dance between motion and stillness. You must stay normal. I think as we sort of wrap up this year here, this idea of slowing down, getting to a place of stillness, starting the next year from a place of stillness is all the more important. Still, This is the Key now came out, I can't believe it,

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  three, going on four years ago now. And of all the books I've written, it's the one whose ideas I find myself returning to most often because I need them. I'm busier than ever, get recognized more than ever, have more going on than ever. But the world feels like it's going faster than ever. And so stillness is so important. And I'm wishing you much stillness as we wind up this year and start the next one. If you haven't checked out Stillness is the Key, I hope you do. You can get it anywhere books are sold. We've got some signed copies at The Painted Porch or at store.dailystoic.com.

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  Cultivate indifference.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  This comes to us from this week's meditation in the Daily Stoic Journal. Some people spend their lives chasing good things, health, wealth, pleasure, achievement. Others try to avoid the bad things with equal energy, sickness, poverty, pain. And these look like two drastically different approaches, but in the end, they are the same. The Stoics continually reminded themselves that so many of the things we desire and avoid are beyond our control. Instead of chasing impossibilities, the Stoics trained to be equally prepared and equally suited to thrive in any condition. They trained to be indifferent. And this is a great power. And a cultivation of this skill is a very powerful exercise.

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  Of all the things that are, some are good, others bad, and yet others indifferent. The good are virtues in all that share in them, the bad are vices in all that indulge them. The indifferent lie in between virtue and vice and include wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, and pain, Epictetus's Discourses. My reasoned choice is as indifferent to the reasoned choice of my neighbor and as to his breath and body. However much we've been made for cooperation, the ruling reason in each of us is a master of its own affair. If this weren't the case, the evil in someone else would become my harm, and God didn't mean for someone else to control my misfortune. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, 856.

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  There are things in life which are advantageous and disadvantageous. Both are beyond our control. That's Seneca, Moral Letters, 92. This idea of good, bad, and then a sort of a third category is this interesting debate. I talk a little bit about this in Lives of the Stoics. You know, the early Stoics were much more cynical, and I mean, like, much closer to the cynics, the philosophical school, the idea that like, there's good and bad, there's virtue and vice, and everything is one of those categories. And there's a lot of argument about this. I think it's the later Stoics, the more practical, pragmatic Stoics that go, I mean, sure, but there's also stuff in between.

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  There is such a thing as gray area, and it's impractical and unrealistic to assume that there's not. You know, Seneca talks about sort of preferred indifference, like, is it better to be short or tall? I mean, it's not good or bad either way, but he says, if you're short or tall, that's is what it is, but if you had a choice, you'd probably pick tall, right? You'd probably pick rich over poor. It doesn't mean that it's virtuous to be rich, but if you had a choice, you'd choose it. So that's just like a sort of an interesting side Stoic debate. But this main thing is like, look, the Stoic is good either way. That it's not that the Stoics love misfortune and the Stoics

• 6:24Ryan Holiday?

  don't want success or ease or happiness or any of these things. It's no, the Stoics are ready for whatever life throws at them. This sets them up to not be disappointed when life does throw adversity. But it also, and it also puts them in a position where they're not yearning for or craving something good or ease or luck or success. They're, they're just cool with however it is. That's what Zen means, right? You're just philosophical about it. You're just chill about it. You've got an even keel. And so, so this idea of indifference is, is not like nihilism. It's, it's actually this kind of resiliency, this ability to be good with whatever happens, with whatever life throws at you. Would I rather we not have been through this pandemic?

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, probably. But I, I managed to find my space inside of it. I focused on what I could do inside of it. Would I have loved for parts of my childhood to be different? Would I have loved to be a little bit taller? Would I have loved to be this or that? Yeah, sure, if I had a choice, but I didn't have a choice. So I adjust and I make do. You know, Seneca talks, and I think he's quoting from Chrysippus, but, or maybe it's Cleanthes, but he's saying like, look, a wise man wants stuff, but he doesn't need it. Right? We make do with what it is. We're, we're, we're good with the, we play the hand we're dealt. But if you're asking us what cards we want, if you're, you know, as, as the, as the cards are flipping over, is there one we would prefer?

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  Probably. So indifference is this complicated, tricky thing in Stoicism. But I think at the end of the day, it's pretty commonsensical, right? You'd rather be tall, but you're cool being short. You'd rather have use of all your limbs. But if something happened, you'd keep going, right? You know, Seneca says, you'd rather see, but if you lost your eye in battle, that wouldn't be the end of it for you. You'd, you'd adjust, you'd make do. And that's the power of Stoicism. We will respond, we'll endure, we'll survive, we'll make the best of everything. And in that, we're indifferent. But we're actually quite strong and confident because of that indifference. So think about that this week. If you want to journal about it in your daily Stoic journal, great. But try to cultivate the strength of endurance.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  These are my keys. You might hear them jangling there. When I come up to my office here, I grab what is the biggest and coolest and punniest of the keys on my keyring. It's a Stillness is the Key key. As I was thinking about how to create a physical embodiment of a reminder of stillness. I mean, obviously, I've got the tattoo on my arm, but I didn't want to make a coin. I thought I'd make a key. And we found this amazing manufacturer and this amazing designer to help us make something super cool. It's a picture of a rock. It has waves crashing over it, like as Marcus Aurelius said,

• 9:22Ryan Holiday?

  "Be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around." And then it says at the top, it says Stillness. And I've loved this thing. It's on my keyring for my office, as I was saying. And I think you're really going to like this one. It comes in this cool black box. It says Adaraxia. Makes a great gift as a reminder for someone in your life that's maybe too busy, too chaotic, doesn't have enough reflective time in their life, needs to step back, needs to create some peace in their lives internally and externally. You can check this out at dailystoic.com/stillnesskey or just go to store.dailystoic.com and you'll find it there.