This Work Must Continue

“Today is the 4th of July. It’s the celebration of the American Declaration of independence, which was signed on this date in 1776. There’s no question that document—inspired as it was by ideas from the Stoics—was an essential one. As we have talked about before, it asserted man’s inalienable rights and began a great experiment in human liberty and equality under the law that was, and continues to be, unparalleled in history. But it is important that today, and on all days, we do not mistake July 4th or the Declaration’s signing as the accomplishment we should be celebrating.” Ryan discusses the meaning of the 4th of July, and the work we all must do to make sure that its promised freedom is one day fulfilled for all of us. This episode is also brought to you by Felix Gray, maker of amazing blue light-filtering glasses. Felix Gray glasses help prevent the symptoms of too much blue light exposure, which can include blurry vision, dry eyes, sleeplessness, and more. Get your glasses today at http://felixgrayglasses.com/stoic and try them for 30 days, risk-free.***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 @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. A little bit different for today. I know normally, we do the long interview. Today, I wanted to do sort of a Fourth of July themed episode. And so I'm going to start by the Weekend entry that we have today. Normally, you wouldn't be getting a podcast meditation from us. These are typically just for the Daily Stoic Life members, which you can sign up for anytime you want. But I thought this one was important, and I thought the message is urgent and I think it's universal. It transcends just what we're celebrating here as far as the founding of the United States. And so I wanted to deliver that to you. So the email is titled, "This work must continue." Today is the Fourth of July.

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  It's the celebration of American independence, which was signed on this date in 1776. There's no question that the signing of that document, inspired as it was by the ideas of the Stoics, was an essential one. As we've talked about before, it asserted those inalienable rights and began a great experiment in human liberty and equality under the law, unparalleled in history. But it is important that today and on all days that we do not mistake July 4th and the signing of that declaration as the accomplishment to celebrate. As Theodore Roosevelt would say, that while in name, we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776, we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  until 1865, and words count for nothing, except insofar as they represent acts. The sad reality is that although America moved closer to the truth as it fought the Civil War, so that the government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth, as Lincoln said, and then it passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, for too many decades, those words were not followed by acts. America again moved closer to the truth with the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1957, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1965, and other legislation since, but still we remain as ever with work to be done.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  Epictetus said that it is impossible to be perfect, and of course, America is far from perfect, just as the Rome that enslaved Epictetus was not perfect. Still, he said, it is possible to be a person or a country striving toward perfection. We can continue to work, we can continue to fight, we can continue to struggle to get closer to making those beautiful words of Thomas Jefferson into acts. That's what philosophy is, that's what politics are supposed to be. It's about living, embodying, making the ideas we hold in common into real tangible policy. The Fourth of July is not a celebration of hot dogs and barbecue, it's a celebration

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  of process, of a continued passing of torches that should make it impossible for young men to be gunned down in the street by racists who do not fear being held accountable by the law. It's a celebration of a commitment to officers of a government who respect the rights of their people, because the people have allowed the government to exist, and recoil at the horror of a police officer kneeling on a begging man's neck until he dies in full view of the cameras. It's a celebration- ...of a country where our leaders call us to be better rather than indulge our worse instincts, where doing the right thing should always trump reelection concerns

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  and party lines. Recent events, and indeed decades of history, show us that there is much work to be done, that we have drifted from our philosophy and we have talked more than we have acted. Theodore Roosevelt was not wrong when he called that lion. So let today be a celebration of a recommitment, a rededication to truth, because work must continue if this great experiment first founded some 244 years ago today is to continue as it should. Hey, it's Ryan. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone. If you're like me, you spend a lot of time in front of screens, whether it's your phone, your computer, the television. And over time, the blue light exposure causes strain on your eyes, it hurts your eye health, and it makes it harder to concentrate or sleep. And that's why today's sponsor, Felix Gray Glasses are so great. They have over a dozen great styles, like the Turing, the Kepler, the Kelvin. They work great. Felix Gray Glasses filter out 90% of blue light in the most damaging nanometer spectrum, and they eliminate 99% of screen glare. You can also get regular or prescription lenses made for your glasses. So thanks to Felix Gray Glasses for sponsoring today's episode. Go

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  to felixgrayglasses.com/stoic for the absolute best quality blue light filtering on the market. That's Felix Gray, F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y, glasses.com/stoic. And you can take better care of your eyes, feel better, work smarter. Shipping and returns are totally free at felixgrayglasses.com/stoic. I wanted to riff a little bit on the ideas in today's email because I think they're important. There's this idea that patriotism, whatever country you're in, is about supporting your government or about not criticizing

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  Where you're from, or the people in it. And I think this is a sort of nonsensical, right? I think that what America is, what any country's founding documents are, is an ideal, just in the way that Stoicism is an ideal. It's a set of principles and values put forth by people at their best. But then the actual government, the day-to-day, the history that has lived, is people often not at their best. There are moments of those people at their best, but there are many, many more moments of those people at their worst. So to me, to criticize those things, to say, as Theodore Roosevelt was saying, that as beautiful as the Declaration of Independence is, we lied, we made it a lie by how we acted

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  after, is not unpatriotic, it's in fact as patriotic as one can get. Because it's saying, I so believe that this is true, this is so important to me, I am willing to call bullshit where I see bullshit. And I think this applies to the Stoics as well. I mean, look, it is hard to judge historical figures by today's standards. And we've talked about this in various forms over the years in emails. It's hard even to compare the slavery of Roman times to the slavery of America. It's hard to compare the flaws of Marcus Aurelius to the flaws of you or I today. But just because it's hard doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, right? It doesn't mean we should do it flippantly or ignorantly, but we should look at it.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  It's worth holding Marcus Aurelius up, looking at the words that he wrote in Meditations, and say, how did you live up to this? And how did you fail to live up to this? And we can learn from both of these things. And that's actually something I've been working a lot on recently in this book we're doing called Lives of the Stoics. The Stoics have written beautiful things, and I have written about those beautiful things many times. I've talked a lot about what the Stoics said. But fundamentally, Stoicism is about what you do. And I think this is true in politics, in nations as well. What we promise in the Declaration of Independence, what we promise- In the Bill of Rights does not automatically grant or give those things.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  Those things have to be fought for and people have to be held accountable when they fail to deliver on those things. And so it's essential that we're able to study history, not to judge and dismiss, but study history to look unflinchingly at people who are not that dissimilar to us and decide how we ourselves can get and be better. You know, Lincoln's sort of fundamental guiding principle in the Civil War was, one, he came to conclude that slavery was evil. He said, slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. But he also believed he was circumscribed by the law. And so he was not able to simply by executive order, make the thing that he wanted to go

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  away, go away as quickly or as cleanly as he wanted. It was much more complicated than that. And he also understood the reality on the ground was much more complicated than that. Although slavery was simple, it was undeniably evil. It was complicated. He said, you know, look, if you tried to introduce slavery in the South today, they would not accept it. And he said, if slavery was legal in the North and someone tried to make it go away, the people of the North would not accept it. He said, these people who are doing this bad thing, who are not understanding this properly, he said, they are just what we would be in their position. And so when you look at the Stoics, when you look at the figures of history, you have to understand how similar they are to you.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  That what would you be like if you grew up in a country where slavery was always legal, where your parents did it, where you could literally be sentenced to jail or murdered by a mob if you tried to come out against it? These would be very real forces acting on a person that's preventing them from seeing what is morally and unequivocally true. So the question is not, how do we condemn these people for their failings? It is instead, how do we look at those failings and try to see where we are making similar failings in our own life? I saw a great sign in a protest that said, what do you think you would do in Nazi Germany? During segregation, during slavery.

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  And then it said underneath, it said, you'd be doing exactly what you're doing right now. And so it's easy to say, oh, in the past, there was this sort of moral fight. There was this, you know, these forces, there was sort of a conservative element. I don't mean that politically. There was an element that didn't want to change. And there were people who were pushing forward towards a change, trying to get people to open their minds to something. Now, the idea that that's not happening right now, that history is going to look at this moment and say, oh, you did everything right is preposterous, right? Like, we are faced with our own moral dilemmas. There are unconscionable evils happening in America, in every country in the world. And that, that people are often too busy, too distracted, too small minded to see, too scared to take up.

• 11:41Ryan Holiday?

  And so one of the things when we, when we look at this progression of, say, the United States, and we see that it was, you know, what was laid out originally, and then where, where we got 100 years later, where we got 200 years later, where we are 250 years later, was a progress. And it required people to question, to challenge, to fight, to fail, to be unjustly persecuted. It required these Stoic elements. And, and like, even when we look back at the Stoics, right? There are moments where Marcus Aurelius failed. The persecution of the Christians is a great example. Junius Risticus, the philosopher who introduces Marcus to Stoicism, becomes basically the sort of mayor or governor of Rome and oversees the trial of Justin Martyr.

• 12:26Ryan Holiday?

  And Justin Martyr is, I think, utterly, is treated cruelly, flogged, beaten and killed. And it is a, a blight on the name of Risticus, and it's a blight on the name of Marcus Aurelius. Here, the Stoics, who had been so persecuted by previous emperors, in turn, were persecuting innocent, vulnerable people. And so in that sense, it's a failure. And we want to look at how did Marcus's ideology, how did his, you know, sort of inherent conservatism, keep him from questioning what was some, what was wrong? And that, that is a failure. Then you look at other things. Stoics did right, you know, they stood up to Nero, they fought against Julius Caesar. Musonius Rufus saw, despite what everyone else saw, that he saw that there was equality

• 13:11Ryan Holiday?

  of the sexes and that and that and that women could study philosophy just as well, if not better than men. And there were moments in Marcus Aurelius's life, you know, Marcus Aurelius found that the gladiatorial games were disgusting. He insists that the gladiators be given wooden swords so that no one could be hurt. And this is to take like the violence of the Colosseum was an accepted unquestioned fact of Roman life. And here he had the foresight and the courage and the compassion to challenge that. So in some ways he did it right and in other ways he did it wrong. And that's what we have to do today, politically, patriotically, we have to question, we have to say, is this right? Do I want to be complicit? Am I going to be on the right or the wrong side of history here?

• 13:54Ryan Holiday?

  And these are questions we have to always be asking and struggling with. And we study history, again, not for simplicity's sake, but because it is complex, because it is what it is. You know, this idea of my country, right or wrong, is nonsense, right? This is how, this violates a, you know, a core Stoic tenet of justice. You know, Marcus Aurelius says, and you can commit injustice by doing nothing. And that is unfortunately, a place that a lot of people are operating from. And and it's stunning to me to see some of the emails that we get, the responses we get, the comments on social media, how much people seem to think that Stoicism is merely

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  a philosophy about personal productivity and personal resilience and being successful in life and managing one's emotions. That's certainly part of it. And certainly when I was younger, that was the part that I gravitated towards. But you can't study this philosophy and not be struck by the fact that the real core principle, the real core message is one of justice, a commitment to the common good, of doing the right thing, just that you do the right thing. Marcus Aurelius said, the rest doesn't matter. And it's almost as if people have not only hardened their hearts, but they take great joy and satisfaction in expressing.

• 15:12Ryan Holiday?

  How heartless they are, how little they care, how quickly they can be mean, or indict, or attack, or belittle someone else's feelings, which is so strange. To me, that's almost like looking at America, the founding of this country, and taking from the heroics of the founders, the struggles of these early years, the people who have fought and died for it, and think that it's all about capitalism, that it's all about allowing someone to be successful, that it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those are core ideas that go to the very beginning. It is not merely a means of wealth creation. Wealth creation, as it happens, as I believe, is a way to secure and protect those things.

• 15:57Ryan Holiday?

  And I don't think, certainly there is no evidence that people in the USSR were experiencing superior amounts of life, liberty, or happiness. In fact, it was the exact opposite. So what I'm not saying is that capitalism isn't important. And just as I'm not saying that productivity and personal resilience aren't important benefits of Stoicism, but at the core of it was this kind of political engagement, this commitment to what is right, this commitment to serving the common good, this commitment to continuing this experiment. Marcus talks about how Sextus, the philosopher, teaches him, rulers who taught him the importance through the examples of Cato and Helyidius

• 16:39Ryan Holiday?

  and other Stoics, teaches him the importance of equality under the law, fairness, and justice, and free speech, he says. It teaches him the importance of rulers who respect the rights of their people. And that remains as essential as ever. And it remains our duty as citizens, not just to believe in, but to insist on the government exists because we allow it to exist. It didn't give us these rights. We asserted that we had the rights, and then we set up governments to protect and preserve those rights. And so it's not about your political party. It's not about my country, good or bad. It's not about patriotism. It's about insisting on what's right.

• 17:24Ryan Holiday?

  And everything else Marcus Aurelius would say doesn't matter. And that's what I believe. And so you might, you might wonder why, you know, I talk about politics sometimes in these emails, why sometimes I express my opinions. It would be easier for me, it'd be better for my business, I'm sure, if I took no political stances, if I never said anything that offended people or upset them, if I was always positive, if I was always cheerleading. But that's, I can't do that in good conscience. And that's not what this philosophy is about. We quoted Pericles in a recent email that one person's disengagement is only tenable by someone else's increased engagement. And so when people check out, when you don't want to watch, you know, a video because it's uncomfortable,

• 18:09Ryan Holiday?

  when you, when you don't want to, you know, don't want to be political, you don't want to take a stand, when you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, you're putting a further burden on someone else. When you don't care about others, that means other people have to care more. And if we could all come together, if we could all hold these truths in concert together, if we could stand up for them, if we could fight for them, if it could really mean what we say, if we could remember, as, as Roosevelt said, that words that are not translated to action are worthless. This Stoicism that you're studying, these, these four virtues we talk about, the things we've hit in these themes over and over and over again, are worthless if we don't apply them to the things that matter, which is who you vote for, which is how you run your business, how you run your household,

• 18:53Ryan Holiday?

  how you treat other people, the things that you say on social media, you know, what, what you're willing to allow to be done in your name. If you don't stand up for those things, if you don't insist on them, this, the work stops. And we stop getting better and we get further from what the founders and, and what the wisest philosophers in history wanted us to do. I think that's, to me, that's what's so impressive. It's both impressive and sad, but also beautiful. And Thomas Jefferson, he wrote words that he personally could not have been further from upholding. But in writing them down, he was holding us accountable. Right?

• 19:35Ryan Holiday?

  He put in forth a mechanism by which, a set of principles or processes by which inexorably we would get closer. And that's what's happening now, still to this day. That's what I am trying to do in my writing. I think even further back, that's what the Stoics were doing for us. Rome could not have been, you compare the freedoms of Rome to the freedoms of the early United States and, and, and America is light years ahead. But it was from the principles and the ideas that the Romans first expressed, that the, the Americans were able to, to, to sort of stand on those shoulders. And today, are we continuing to stand on those shoulders? Are we moving things forward? That's what the Fourth of July has to be celebrating.

• 20:17Ryan Holiday?

  That's what should be, you know, getting us to look in the mirror, to evaluate, to question, to look at our own failings, to look at where we're falling short, to ask, as I was saying, from that, that protest sign, what do you think you'd have done at these moments in history? Well, what you're doing now is a good indication of that. And if you're doing nothing, if you're putting your head in the sand, if you're trying to explain it away, if you're engaging in what about-ism, well, I don't think that says much about what you'd have done at these other, more dire moments in history. So that's it for me. Thank you guys for listening. We'll have a regular episode set for you tomorrow and stay tuned. Keep doing the work. You gotta care about other people. You gotta read.

• 21:00Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta embody the philosophy, not just talk about it. Remember, that's Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. Waste no more time arguing what a good man or a good country should be. We have to be one. And finally, as always, I will conclude, please wear a mask. Doesn't matter if it's uncomfortable. Doesn't matter if you're healthy. We're doing this for other people. We're trying to flatten the curve, keep things safe. If you had cancer, if your mother or father had cancer, if you were immunocompromised or knew someone who was, you would want other people to do that for you. And that's why we should do it for them. So be safe, be well. Talk to you soon. If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.