How Do You Not See This? | Be Stingy With Time

"You consider yourself a programmatic thinker, a political realist, a student of history, a righter of wrongs, a teller of truths. The world is going to hell and you know how to fix it. But maybe you’ve become blind to the way your decisions, your actions, your beliefs are contributing—not to any sort of solution, but rather to the very thing you’re bemoaning. Maybe you’re the problem."Ryan describes why we should be wary of the absolute certainty that we know what is right and wrong, and reads this week's meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today's Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Optimize, the membership that guides you on the path to living right. Optimize offers services like Philosopher Notes, six-page condensed reviews of insightful nonfiction books like Epictetus’s Discourses, Ryan’s The Obstacle Is the Way, and more. Members also get access to 101 video Master Classes, each one an intensive taught by experts about a particular topic. Visit optimize.me/dailystoic and get your first fourteen days free, plus 10% off your membership with discount code STOIC.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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. I wanted to tell you about someone today who's a friend of mine, whose show I've been on many times. And as it happens, is my neighbor out here in the country in Texas. I'm talking about today's sponsor, Optimize. Optimize is created by Brian Johnson, an entrepreneur,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  after he created and sold his first two companies, decided to dive deep into how to live the best life. And that's what Optimize does. Optimize is a subscription service that helps you live a deep and fulfilling life. They've got in-depth reviews of important books, video masterclasses on how to live the good life, daily videos that will help you live better, gets you the core insights you need from the best teachers, whether that's books, experts, or Brian himself. The core of this service is philosopher's notes. Each one is a six-page condensed review of a book that can help you live up to your potential. Brian's covered books like mine, The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy. But he's also done books on Epictetus, Cal Newport, Jay-Z, Admiral McRaven, and so many others. In each philosopher's notes, he distills the core of the book

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  that makes the insights super clear and actionable. And that's not all you get with a membership. You get access to 101 video masterclasses, each one an intensive taught by experts on a particular topic, from optimizing your life, being a digital minimalist, conquering depression or anxiety, and more. And you get daily plus-one videos that give you compelling ideas as well. Optimize is a great service for making over your life in new, exciting ways, all guided by Brian the expert. If you're serious about living life optimally, take a look at Optimize today. Just visit optimize.me/dailystoic. Get your first 14 days free, plus 10% off your membership with discount code STOIC. That's optimize.me/dailystoic

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  for your first 14 days free and 10% off with discount code STOIC. Brian's great. Check it out.

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  How do you not see this? In his notes on the state of Virginia, the always curious Thomas Jefferson mused over the differences between Roman and American slavery, an institution he both criticized and actively participated in. "We should not forget," he said, "just how horrendously cruel Roman slavery was. There are stories of Roman aristocrats feeding slaves to their pet eels. There were laws that dictated if a master was killed, all the slaves were put to death, so as to discourage or deter potential murder plots that were at their hearts, land, and property grabs. It was believed that female and male slaves were kept separate so they could not procreate and burden their masters with the care of a child.

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  Old and injured slaves were similarly sold off as soon as they stopped being useful, just as one might sell a horse that could no longer be ridden, a practice of which Cato the Elder, the grandfather of the great Stoic, was guilty, and Jefferson was fully aware." But what's most instructive about Jefferson's thinking for our purpose is his interest in the talent of Roman slaves. Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, he writes, "their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, in so much as to be especially employed as tutors to their masters' children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus were all slaves."

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  Jefferson's interest in this enslaved talent pool from antiquity sits at the heart of how he managed to rationalize the horrors of chattel slavery here in America. In hundreds of years of slavery in the colonies, which despite his self-interested protestations was probably worse than Roman slavery, there had been no black Epictetus. This was proof, to Jefferson's mind, that there was something fundamentally lesser about blacks as a population, as a race of people, which therefore made the American form of slavery less bad than the Romankind. You don't have to be a genius to see how stupid this logic was. First off, there was a freed slave named Phyllis Wheatley, who had produced

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  Beautiful poetry as good as any white poet of the era. Secondly, there's a pretty good reason why there wasn't a bunch of philosopher writers emerging from slavery. In Jefferson's time and beyond, it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write. It was slaves who taught the Stoics their philosophy in Rome and Athens 2,000 years ago, but in America slaves were forbidden not only from teaching, but from being educated. Thomas Jefferson's own beliefs, his own policies, created precisely the situation he then used to rationalize the abhorrent status quo. This should be a cautionary tale for us today. You consider yourself a pragmatic thinker, a political realist, a student of history, a writer of wrongs, a teller of truths.

• 5:15Ryan Holiday?

  The world is going to hell and you know how to fix it, but maybe you've become blind to the way your decisions, your actions, your beliefs are contributing, not to any sort of solution, but rather to the very thing you are bemoaning. Maybe you are the problem. You look at people who are not as successful as you, people who are struggling, people who have messed up and you wonder why they can't get it together. What you're deliberately not seeing is the boot that you have put on their necks. What you are ignoring is all the advantages you have been given. You are not special. They are not inferior. You just started this race we call life at different points on the track. And if you can't see that, then you are the problem.

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  Be stingy with time. One of the most common sayings we hear is that life is short, and it is, but as Seneca remarked, it's also plenty long if you know how to use it. The first step to that? Not giving so much of it away to other people. Being miserly about our time is a powerful exercise, which can keep us from squandering this non-renewable resource. What in your life consumes a lot of time for no good purpose? What amusements and desires consume our time without giving us any good return? As you review this list, make a commitment to do something about it. Life is short after all, and you don't have much time to spare.

• 6:44Ryan Holiday?

  Were all the geniuses of history to focus on a single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor could mean hell to pay. Yet we easily let others encroach on our lives. Worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but how many do each of us hand out our lives? We're tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing with which we should be the toughest of misers. That's Seneca on the shortness of life. It is not at all that we have too short a time to live,

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long, and it's given insufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well. But when it's poured down the drain of luxury and neglect, when it's employed to no good end, we're finally driven to see that it is passed by before we've even recognized it passing. And so it is. We don't receive a short life. We make it so. That's Seneca on the shortness of life. If you haven't read Seneca's on the shortness of life, it's really incredible. I read that when I was probably 20 years old, and it shaped a lot of my thinking. But I don't know about you. I think one of the great benefits of this pandemic is that it's kind of been a radical lifestyle experiment. Like, what does life look like with fewer meetings,

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  fewer trips, fewer, you know, commutes? You realize, oh, man, I was so, I thought I was productive, but in fact, I was wasting incredible amounts of time. You know, I think what's been weird for me is that I've been more productive, but my days are shorter. I get to work quickly because there's no commute, or there's less of a commute if I do go to my office. There's no phone calls. There's fewer emails. And, and I just get right into it. And I've been wrapping up a lot of my days like early in the afternoon. For most, almost every day in the summer, I was home by like 2 o'clock at the latest, in the pool with my kids. And just where did that time come from?

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  It's that I was wasting it before at meetings or coffee meetings, or I didn't need to be traveling as much as I did. And I thought I was telling myself I was, you know, efficient and that I was getting a good deal, you know, traveling to go to this thing or take advantage of this opportunity. But, but I was, I was spending something that actually I prefer to have, which is time, time at home, time to write, time with myself. And so I, I think if we can take from the last several months, a real insight into what our lives probably should look closer to, then some good will come out of this. Although it's so tempting, right? For the first few months, everyone was much stricter.

• 9:43Ryan Holiday?

  Everyone was much smarter. And so, and we were kind of all in the same boat, right? So, so nobody was asking, so it was easy to be more disciplined. But now, as the world opens up, whether it should be opening up or not is really not what we're talking about. But as people do feel more comfortable doing things that, you know, the, the risk profile on really hasn't changed. In fact, with the, the surge in caseloads for the fall, the idea that people are now putting on events or doing indoor dining, et cetera, is crazy to me. But the, the, the point is, like, I found, it was like, oh, man, how great is it? I haven't had a coffee meeting. I haven't, I haven't had to go do a lunch. I haven't had to do an in-person meeting in months and months and months. But it was really that I hadn't been, even been asked to do those things

• 10:27Ryan Holiday?

  that allowed me to be so disciplined. And so I think all of us, it's like, this is the experiment. This is the, the crash course, you know? But now, as, as the world sort of becomes normal, as things sort of settle into a, a status quo, then it's going to be, then it's going to be really important that you learn how to, how to protect and enforce these boundaries. As Seneca was saying, we're tight-fisted with property, with money. But then when people ask for our time, or they don't even ask for our time, when, when social media tries to grab at our time, for instance, we, we readily give it up. We just don't have the same defenses. We're not as strong as we should be in those areas.

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  But you know, you can always go earn more money. You could always buy more property. You can never get more time. Time, once it's gone through the hourglass, can't be put back, right? Seneca says that when time passes, we die. Death is not this thing in the future. He's saying death is now. Death is the 30 minutes you spent having the conversation you didn't want to have, but you were too polite to get up and leave. I would say one last thing. As disciplined as I try to be, right? I try to, you know, have a limited number of things in my calendar. I don't agree to do things I don't want to do. I don't agree to every podcast interview that comes my way, et cetera, et cetera. I also try to be super respectful of other people's time.

• 11:54Ryan Holiday?

  It can't just be that you're miserly with your time, just in the way that someone who's, you know, very tight-fisted with money, can't also then go expect money from other people, right? You can't, you can't be like, oh, I'm cheap, and then expect other people to pick up the tab. That's not how that works. So you can't be frugal with your own time in life, but then be a real jerk about what you impose on or demand of other people. Does that make sense? So this is a really important week. Let's be diligent with our time this week. Let's protect ourselves. Let's not give up the thing that we can never give back. It's really important. You've only been given this one life. Shepherd it wisely, protect it, and use that time to live. Use that time to be with your family. Do the work that you actually want to be doing

• 12:38Ryan Holiday?

  to have the existence that you want to have. And I'll cut this off here so as not to take up any more of your time, but I do appreciate all the time that you guys give us here at Daily Stoic. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps. And tell a friend.