If You Want A Reason To Live | Expect To Change Your Opinions

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  If you want a reason to live, the world can break you down, and certainly it can break your illusions. You get tired, you get cynical, you despair. And it's in these moments you might wonder why you ought to bother carrying on. Seneca asked himself this question as he was trapped in desolate exile. Marcus Aurelius asked himself this after burying another one of his children. Epictetus must have asked himself this nearly every morning of the first 30 years of his life, which he spent as a slave. What do we draw on in our crises of fate? Fortitude, sure. Stoicism is all about that. But what about finding something encouraging

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  in the ordinary beauty of the world around you? It is this that Marcus Aurelius is doing in meditations, where he marvels at the way bread breaks open in the oven, the way an olive ripens and falls to the ground, the flecks of foam on a boar's mouth. In the midst of ugliness, in the midst of evil, in the midst of despair, these bright spots are always there. As we said a while back, Seneca spent a lot of time bemoaning Corsica, where he was exiled, totally missing the beauty and grandeur that drew 3 million tourists to that island just last year. We've talked about how as terrible and deprived as Epictetus's life was, the magnificence of golden hour was always in his reach.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  And so too, apparently, were the ideas from the Stoics, which made their way to him and brightened his life. Good exists everywhere. We need only to look for it. Beauty surrounds us, waiting to be noticed. And for every reason to despair, there are countless moments of wonder, ready to reveal themselves to those who keep their eyes and their hearts open.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  Expect to change your opinions. This is the April 7 entry in the Daily Stoic. You can grab a premium leather edition. You can have signed editions at store.dailystoic.com. There are two things that must be rooted out in human beings. Epictetus says in Discourses 3:14, arrogant opinion and mistrust. Arrogant opinion expects that there is nothing further needed, and mistrust assumes that, under the torrent of circumstances, there can be no happiness. How often do we begin some projects certainly know exactly how it will go? How often do we meet people and think we know exactly who and what they are?

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  And how often are these assumptions proved to be completely and utterly wrong? And this is why we must fight our biases and preconceptions, because they are a liability. Ask yourself always, what haven't I considered? Why is this thing the way that it is? Am I part of the problem here or the solution? Could I be wrong here? Be doubly careful to honor what you do not know, and then set it against the knowledge that you actually have. And remember, if there is one core teaching at the heart of this philosophy, it's that we're not as smart and wise as we'd like to think we are. And then if we ever do want to become wise, it comes from questioning and from humility, not, as many would like to think, from certainty, from mistrust, and from arrogance.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  Of course, this is the idea of ego is the enemy. Epictetus says, you cannot learn that which you think you already know. And this is the irony, the tragedy of most stupidity is that the stupid are too conceited, too dumb to know how dumb and stupid they are, right? The ignorance often also hides from us the extent of our ignorance. This is called the Dunning Kruger effect. It's a primary strain in our politics, our cultural life these days. It's not just a disinterest in ideas or what's going on in the world, but it's a sense that one already knows all these things, that one knows better

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  and thus is superior. There's a great book that I recommend that carried in the bookstore, and I had him on the podcast a while back by Tom Nichols called The Death of Expertise, right? The sense that we know better than the people who have spent their entire lives studying and exploring these things. I even see this with ego as the enemy, right? People go, ah, but isn't ego a good thing? I talked about that at length in the book and they go, oh, I haven't read it. And it's interesting. Oh, so nice that you have a strong opinion about the book that you have not bothered to read. Right? That's it in a nutshell, right? What gets in the way? And I think Xeno said this, that conceit is the impediment to knowledge, right?

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  That our sense of what we know, our preconceptions, our suspicions, our cynicism, right? This isn't just from ignorance, can also come from a sort of a jadedness or a sense of superiority. It could come from that other place too. But the point is, we get in our own way and we close ourselves off, right? And, and this prevents us from learning, prevents us from having our minds changed, prevents us from understanding new things. It's a toxic force in the world today. It's just a toxic, terrible force. It holds us back. But let's go back a while, right? Let's go back to Socrates, this hero of the Stoics. Socrates is considered wise, but what is the source of Socrates's wisdom?

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  Diogenes Laertus says it's that he is aware of his own ignorance. Now whether Socrates really says this himself, you know, that quote comes later. It doesn't really matter. Think about what the Socratic method is. It's Socrates asking questions. It's almost exasperating, listening to Socrates never coming out and taking a position or making an assertion, just it's all questions. But that's who Socrates was. He was trying to learn, trying to ask, trying to get to truth. He wasn't trying to prove that he was smarter than anyone else.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  He was trying to really articulate how elusive and complicated that the truth actually is. Think about what the scientific method is. It's a hypothesis. But then the next thing you do after the hypothesis is try to disprove the hypothesis. Try to get the information that points one way or another. The hypothesis isn't a conclusion. It's not a certainty. It's a sense, here's what I think, based on my knowledge, based on past information, based on what's intuitive. But then I'm going to go do the work. I'm going to get the evidence. I'm going to, I'm going to poke holes in this. You know, we talked about, they talk about this idea of a confirmation bias, that when

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  you think things are a certain way, or when you're looking for something, when you have a preconceived notion, you tend to only find the things that confirm that preconceived notion. But the opposite of that is true. It means you don't see all the things out there that would make you see it differently, that would make you think differently, that would open your mind to this or that or the other. So remember, the Stoic comes to knowledge from a place of humility, from a place of questioning. Our forefather is Socrates in this regard. It's humility. You cannot learn that, what you think you already know. Focus on what you don't know. Focus on learning. Focus on getting better. If you think you know everything, in one sense, you're right because you have made

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  yourself incapable of learning anything new. So expect to change your opinions. Keep your mind open. Focus on all you have yet to learn as opposed to all the things you think you already know.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.