Learn To Ask This of Your Actions | Is Stoicism Compatible With Christianity?

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Because of how Stoicism survives to us mostly in the form of scraps and fragments and letters, we don't exactly have a list of do's and don'ts. There are no Ten Commandments of Stoicism, no definitive book of what they believed or didn't. But in those scraps and fragments, we do get plenty. We know what Seneca tried to do every night as he closed the day. We know what Marcus tried to think about in the morning. We know what Epictetus and Musonius Rufus said we ought to avoid doing. And it's that latter category that's worth thinking about today. What habits did the Stoics say we ought to cease? What vices should we avoid? "Don't be overheard complaining, even to yourself." That's Marcus. "Don't put on airs about your self-improvement." That's Epictetus.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  "Don't overindulge in eating or drinking." Musonius. "Don't speak more than you listen." Zeno. "Don't avoid difficulty." Seneca. "Don't tie your identity to the clothes you wear, the things you own." Cato. "Don't conceal what you truly believe." That's Arius Didymus. "Don't go along to get along." That's Agrippinus. "Don't be all about business." Marcus. "Don't put off till tomorrow what can be finished today." Seneca. "Don't shun people you disagree with." Seneca. "Don't sleep the day away." Marcus. "Don't neglect your friendships." Seneca. "Don't waste time thinking you are going to live forever." That's all of them. We could list more, but really, the most important thing to the Stoics, as far as forming good habits and kicking bad ones goes,

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  it's awareness. Musonius Rufus believed that in too many circumstances, we do not deal with our affairs in accordance with correct assumptions, but rather, we follow thoughtless habit. And Marcus said that we should learn to ask of all actions, "Why are you doing that?" And he said, "You must start with your own." I really want to tell you about the Daily Stoic Habits Course that we have. It helps you do what the Stoics are talking about, which is how to avoid bad habits, how to form better new habits. I think it's one of the best things we've done. It's six weeks of habit formation, thinking about philosophy, applying it to your everyday life. These are habits I try to apply in my life that Marcus and Seneca and Epictetus and Musonius and all the Stoics we've talked about tried to apply in theirs.

• 2:29Ryan Holiday?

  It's great stuff, based on philosophy, psychology, research, history. And I think you're really going to get a lot out of it. You can check that out at dailystoic.com/habits. Or if you join Daily Stoic Life, which you can join at dailystoiclive.com, you get that course and all our other ones for free. So check both those out, Daily Stoic Life and Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I lived in California for the first, basically, what, 21 years of my life? I will say, I never thought I'd be looking forward to getting to San Francisco because it was warmer there, right? We did this long drive down the coast. We started in Seattle because I was doing a talk in Portland, and then one in San Francisco, and sort of winding down. And we spent all this time in the Redwoods and, you know, on the beaches of Oregon and up near Bremerton. And it was like freezing. It's warm there now, by the time you're listening to this. But it was, even though it was June, it was like freezing. Like, none of us were wearing shorts. We were re-wearing our sweatshirts every day, our down jackets. Like, it was freezing. And then we got to San Francisco and it was like, sun!

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  And that is, you know, not what San Francisco is known for. Like, it was warmer taking a ferry out to Alcatraz than it had been any of the previous, you know, six, seven days of the trip. But San Francisco was awesome. The talk went great. It was 1,000 people at the Tony Remby Theater. It was this beautiful, old, like, three-layer theater. It was lovely. I appreciate everyone that came out, including my parents came, my aunt came, some friends from high school and college came. It was just, it was lovely. And then I got to walk across the street to a diner with a friend I went to high school with, one of my best friends from high school, and then a college friend. And it was just like, it was like back in the old times, you know? We were further north than it was growing up.

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  But we were just, you know, we stayed up late, talked about things. Now we all have kids. It was awesome. Anyways, if you want to come see me on tour or ask me a question, you can. dailystoiclive.com. Grab the tickets. I'll be in Auckland in Australia. I'll be in Boston, Nashville, DC, Detroit, Minneapolis. I think there's a couple VIP tickets left. All the dates are there, dailystoiclive.com. But here's a couple of questions from San Francisco. Enjoy.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I just turned 20, and there are 100 different ways that people tell you to spend your 20s.

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  Uh huh.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  How do you suggest that myself and other young adults spend their energies at this age?

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, this is a great question. Okay, you're 20 years old, how should you spend your time? I would go towards whatever the things that would teach you the most. Like, when I was evaluating opportunities, you know, I could work here, I could try this, I want to take this job or that job, or, you know, do I want to sign up for this or that? I was thinking not, how much am I going to get paid? Or, what do my parents think? Or, you know, how does this compare to what my friends are doing? And I thought, how is this teaching me something that I don't know how to do? And I was really big on, like, getting paid to learn things, right? Like, oh, you're paying me to do this, but actually, I'm figuring out all these other things as part of that, right? Like, I got to be Robert Greene's research assistant.

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  So on the one hand, I was making enough money to pay for my apartment, but I was also learning how to do the thing that I wanted to do. And so you have the kind of the vague sense of where you want to end up, or maybe you don't. And so you have to be even cast a wider net. But the thing you want to be going towards is the things that are teaching you, right? That are introducing you to people, to new ideas, to new... Like, I just didn't even know all the things that I didn't know. And so I would take things that would just get me way outside my comfort zone, challenge me, and that, you know, I was confident I was going to learn something from doing. And that means being bad, that means being low on the totem pole, that means you're being misunderstood, people thinking you're wasting your time.

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  But you know why you're doing all that. And it goes to that virtue we're talking about of wisdom, right? Like, you're being prepared for some future moment or opportunity that you can't quite conceive of yet, but what are the broad base of skills and knowledge that you want to accumulate along the way? That's kind of what my North Star was. Good luck.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Hello?

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Great stuff, fairly early to this, and really intrigued by it. I'm curious to, when I try to describe my enthusiasm for Stoicism, the Daily Stoic, I find people kind of get kind of blurry-eyed when I tell them about it. And they're like, "What are you talking about?" I'm like, "No, it's not controversial. It's actually, it's just really good stuff, and you should try it."

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  You can imagine when I tried to tell my publisher after writing a marketing book, what I wanted to do next. So I get it.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  And then to take it a step further, I have a couple of relationships with my family members who are deeply religious. And I highly respect them for that. And I believe they view this perhaps as controversial. And I believe it is additive.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  And so I'm wondering if you could maybe speak to those two things as I look to communicate this great thing you have going.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I grew up Catholic, and Stoicism and Christianity share the same cardinal virtues, courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. So I do think they are additive or complementary. You know, there's nothing in Stoicism that is atheistic. And in fact, they believe in all the gods, as says Romans. Let's say there were some disagreements between the Stoics and the Christians in ancient Rome. And then later, when Christianity supplants philosophy, there's some, you know, the shoes on the other foot. So there's a long back and forth between the two. But ultimately, I think the pursuit of the good life is a philosophical pursuit as well as a religious pursuit.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  I think one of the things Stoicism is uniquely... Designed around is like, it doesn't matter if people get it or not. And if you really need them to understand, there, I think there's a Stoic lesson in that, right? We don't control what other people think. We don't, we don't get if they, if they appreciate it. And that's not really what we should be focused on. If it works for us, if it's making us better, if we're learning, if it's interesting to us, that's all great. And that's, that's kind of how I think about it. Hello.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Hi. The Odyssey as a movie is coming out. And it's the Classics Book Club, which I'm part of. Why do you think it's a good time to read that book? And what does it mean to you?

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. So The Odyssey is the sort of foundational myth, I think, of, of the Greeks, then the Romans, then all the way down to us. We were listening to the Emily Wilson translation in audiobook on, on the drive here in exchange for iPad time for my children. It's a story that, that is so complex and so long that, like, I think all great works, you, you take different things out of it each time, right? You know, right as we're listening to in the car, you, you were like, oh, wow. Like, so much of the beginning is not about Odysseus at all. It's about his son, Telemachus, who's, you know, a young man trying to find his way in the world.

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  And as my kids have gotten older, I think about, oh, like, this is, there's this coming of age part of it. And we did a Daily Stoic email pointing out just the way Emily Wilson renders, you know, the moodiness of Telemachus as a teenager, just how like thousands of years ago, you know, she's nailing this thing that's exactly like the teenager that I'm sure many of you have here. The first thing that struck, you know, my kids about The Odyssey when we started reading it several years ago, was like, they just loved the story of Polyphemus in the cave and, you know, that he tells him his man is, that his name is No Man. So he says, "No man has stabbed out my eye." And there, "nobody has stabbed my eye."

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  And, and, and just like, I just love the idea that 2,500 years later, this joke still lands, right? So something incredibly powerful about The Odyssey in, in that sense as well. You know, all of our stories in the years since have, you know, taken in some way from, from The Odyssey. There, there are obviously other great epics. The Bhagavad Gita is one, Gilgamesh is another, right? They're all sort of map the hero's journey, and I think we should read all of them. But I do think, if you're philosophically inclined, it's, it's hard to beat The Odyssey. And, you know, Stoics talk about how we, we don't step in the same river twice. You take something new out of it each time. Odysseus is heroic, and then in another reading, he's tragic. In another reading, he's monstrous.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  And, and you can see it from all these different angles and take something new each time. That's what I think great literature and art does.

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  And she mentions, we have this quarterly Classics Book Club with, with The Painted Porch, which you're all welcome to do. We did middle march for the first book. And then we're doing The Odyssey, and then we're still arguing about what the third book's gonna be.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  Putting your, your Daily Dad and Daily Stoic hat on, what, what can we learn from Commodus? Like, is Marcus Aurelius responsible? What can you take away?

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  People ask me all the time, if I could ask Marcus Aurelius one question, what would I ask? I feel like you have to ask, what happened with Commodus? He's crazy. He's even worse than Joaquin Phoenix for Trasitive in Gladiator. How does that happen? How does such a great man have such a shitty kid? Look, it's endlessly fascinating to debate. I, I think you can make one argument, Marcus Aurelius has 12 kids. I think six of them die before reaching their teenage years. Just unfathomable loss and pain. Like, if you were to go like, hey, what happened to this person? And you're like, oh, well, six of their siblings died before them. You'd be like, oh, that explains a lot. So, but, but I don't think it's good for your dad to be king. I don't, like, powerful people tend not to have super well-adjusted children. It's a tragedy.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, Marcus Aurelius is gone for like, all of his reign. I, I think, I think that would do a number on anyone. You know, Marcus Aurelius is chosen to be emperor. He has great teachers who he listens to. And he, you know, eases his way into the business. He has a 20-year apprenticeship under Antoninus before he takes power. Commodus is thrust into power at, what, 18 or 19? I mean, if that had happened to me, I probably would have been real bad, too. I don't know how many people are, are equipped at that age to be the most powerful person in the world. Even if you were, had a perfect upbringing, you know, the majority of the time, it goes badly, as we see with the British royal family, for instance.

• 13:30Ryan Holiday?

  Historically, Commodus is the rule and not the exception. It's just Marcus Aurelius was the exception to the rule. And so we wonder why lightning didn't strike twice.