7 Things the Stoics Can Teach Us in 2020

On today's episode, Ryan discusses 7 lessons we can all learn from the Stoics that are especially pertinent to the trials of 2020. This episode is brought to you by Neuro. Neuro makes mints and gums that help you retain focus and clarity wherever you go. Made with a proprietary blend of caffeine, L-theanine, and other focus-building compounds, Neuro’s products are great for anyone who needs help focusing in these trying times. Try out Neuro’s gums and mints at getneuro.com—and use discount code STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order.***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.

• 0:04Ryan 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.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Man, when I recorded this episode back in October, you know, the pandemic had gone on for a really long time. And I was sort of exploring how Stoicism had helped me cope. I was going through the pages of the Daily Stoic calendar. I was, basically, I have the Daily Stoic calendar. It sits on my desk. I tear off a page every day. It's got an awesome quote. And I was just, I went back through and I wanted to see like, what had transpired over the last, I guess, at that point, seven, eight months? You know, sort of, how had I been waking up? What was the Stoic wisdom that was guiding me? And it was quite a surreal experience just to see some of these quotes from the Stoics.

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  You know, Marcus Aurelius writing during a pandemic, during a plague. And then how often, I think what's so awesome about the Stoics is, even though I've written this stuff a long time ago, even though they wrote a long time ago, and I arranged it, you know, several years ago in some cases, how serendipitous, how perfect. Some of the quotes or the ideas happen to be on the days they land them. It's like you're struggling with X and you know, you flip open a page of Marcus Aurelius and boom, that's exactly what you needed on that day. And so I found that to be true as I was going through. I think, I think I went from like March 7th, 8th, when the, when the pandemic lockdown started in Texas, that was when I stopped traveling.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  I know all the way to like, I think October 17th, that's when the episode you're going to listen to spans. What's also crazy about it is just how much has transpired in the month or so since, right? It's certainly hasn't gotten better. We are in the, you know, we are in the throes of, some people are calling it the third wave. It's really kind of just the first wave that never stopped, but is, it is as bad as it's ever been. Thousands of Americans are dying every single day. People are dying all over the world. What I want you to take from this episode is, is first off, how Stoicism helps one cope with something like a pandemic. But I also hope it makes you take the pandemic seriously, be smart.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  I hope people were smart about Thanksgiving. I hope you're going to be smart for the holidays. Looks like they're working on a vaccine, which is incredible, but we can't expect a magical solution. It's not going to be here right away. This is going to be with us for a while, so let's settle in. This is going to be a marathon on top of a marathon, on top of an ultra marathon, but we will get through this, we will survive. And Stoicism is there to guide us as always. So enjoy.

• 3:29Ryan Holiday?

  You can bind up my leg, Epictetus would say. Indeed, his leg really had been bound and broken, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  We'd like to think that the modern world is so different from the ancient, but is it? Marcus Aurelius's reign from 161 to 180 AD was defined by a pandemic which originated in the distant east and quickly overwhelmed Rome's institutions. Civil unrest, interminable wars in the provinces, personal health issues, cultural decadence, income inequality, and so much else. This was his daily existence. As he would observe in meditations, "People have always been people and life has always been life. The more things change, the more they stay the same." Yet Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics still found a way to be successful, happy, strong, productive, and good despite all these difficulties.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  In this, we must learn from them. The history of Stoic philosophy is filled with all sorts of unique characters, from unique backgrounds, from slaves to generals, lawyers to writers, daughters to doctors, and they thrived amidst both adversity and prosperity. After more than a decade now of writing and thinking about the Stoics, most recently with my book Lives of the Stoics, here are seven lessons we can take from the ancient world and apply in our modern times. It begins with finding a mentor. "Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; for we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters.

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  You can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler." Seneca. Fittingly, the story of Stoicism begins with misfortune. On a merchant voyage, Xeno was shipwrecked. He lost almost everything. He washed up in Athens, where he walked into a bookstore and listened to the bookseller reading dialogues from Socrates. After the reading, Xeno asked the question that would change his life: "Where can I find a man like that? That is, where can I find my own Socrates? Where can I find someone to study under?" In that moment, Crates, a well-known Athenian philosopher, happened to be passing by. The bookseller simply extended his hand and pointed. You could say it was faded. The Stoics of later

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  Certainly would have, and according to the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertus, Zeno joked, "Now that I have suffered shipwreck, I'm on a good journey," or according to another account, he said, "You've done well, fortune, driving me thus to philosophy." Nearly all the ancient Stoics had a formative mentor, living or dead. Klianthis had Zeno, Cato had Sarpedon, Seneca had Attalus, Epictetus had Musonius Rufus, Marcus Aurelius had Rusticus, who turned him on to Epictetus. Chrysippus had Klianthis, Thrasia had Cato, and Tippeter had Diogenes, Panateus had Cradis, Postidonius had Panateus. The Stoics knew that life was hard and required help. "Only beasts can do it alone," Marcus said.

• 6:37Ryan Holiday?

  "We need guidance from those who are further ahead on the path. We cannot do without mentors." "We control what happens, we control how we respond. The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so I can say clearly to myself which externals are under my control and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to the uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own." That's Epictetus. Epictetus's most powerful insight as a teacher derives directly from his experience as a slave. Although all humans are introduced at some point to the laws of the universe, almost

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  from the moment he was born, Epictetus was reminded daily how little control he had even of his own person. He adopted this lesson into what he described as our chief task in life: to distinguish between what is up to us and what is not up to us. Once we have organized our understanding of the world into these black and white categories, what remains? What was so central to Epictetus's survival as a slave is to focus on what is up to us: our attitudes, our emotions, our wants, our desires, our opinions about what has happened to us. "These choices are our choice." "You can bind up my leg," Epictetus would say. Indeed, his leg really had been bound and broken, "But not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice."

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  "And that is your most effacious gift," Epictetus said, "the power to..." Control how you respond to control your reactions. And that is the key ingredient to freedom, whatever one's condition. We must be different. It never ceases to amaze me, Marcus Aurelius said. We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own. If you want to improve, Epictetus said, if you want to achieve wisdom, you have to be okay looking strange or even clueless from time to time. Epictetus tells us the story of the Stoic Agrippinus, who said that we are all threads in a garment. Most people were indistinguishable from each other, one thread among countless others.

• 8:42Ryan Holiday?

  Most people were happy conforming, being anonymous, handling their own tiny unsung role in the fabric. In a Roman empire that had given itself over fully to avarice and corruption, the strategy chosen by most Romans was to keep a low profile, to blend in, so one did not catch the attention of capricious or cruel rulers who held the power of life and death. But to Agrippinus, this kind of compromise was inconceivable. Despite what everyone else was doing, he refused to keep that low profile during Nero's reign, refused to conform or tamp down his independent thinking. Why do this, Agrippinus was asked? Why not be like the rest of us? I want to be red, he said, that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear beautiful. Be like the majority of people?

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  If I do that, how shall I any longer be red? Years later, the band Alice in Chains would sing the song Nutshell, which captured what Agrippinus carried in his heart. If I can't be my own, I'd feel better dead. Beautifully said. And a reminder to all of us today, embrace who you really are, embrace what makes you unique. Be red, be the small part that makes the rest bright. We desperately need you to do that. Value virtue, be wise and self-controlled, and share courage and justice, the art by which a human would become good. We must do that. Musonius Rufus. Courage, justice, temperance, wisdom. They are the most essential values in Stoicism.

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  If at some point in your life, Marcus Aurelius wrote, you should come ...across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, and courage? It must be an extraordinary thing indeed. That was almost 20 centuries ago. We have discovered a lot of things since then: automobiles, the internet, cures for diseases that were previously a death sentence. But if we found anything better than those virtues, than being brave, than doing what's right, than moderation and sobriety, than truth and understanding? No, we have not. So memorize those four virtues. Keep them close to your heart and hands always. Act on them. Live them. Tell everyone you meet about them. If you can't do good, at least do no harm. To do harm is to do harm to yourself. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice.

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  It degrades you. Marcus Aurelius. Shakespeare, the great observer of the Stoics, said that the good we do in life is easily forgotten, but the evil we do lives on and on. No Stoic philosopher illustrates this principle more than Diotymus. Sometime around the turn of the first century B.C., he committed what can only be described as an unjustifiable crime. He forged dozens and dozens of letters that framed the rival philosopher Epicurus as a sinful, glutton, and depraved maniac. It was an act of despicable philosophical slander, and Diotymus was quickly brought up on charges. For a school that prides logic and truth as much as virtuous behavior, his actions are inexcusable.

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca, who writes about all sorts of philosophers, never mentions this incident, but he should have, and he should have condemned it. But it was, in the end, Diotymus's sole contribution to Stoicism. A cautionary tale. Musonius Rufus best captured the prevailing lesson of this man's life when he said, "If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures. If you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures." Compromise is key. No one can implicate me in ugliness, or can I feel angry at my relative or hate him? We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural.

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him, these are obstructions. Marcus Aurelius Cato, one of the most vaunted and towering Stoics, built a reputation and a career out of his refusal to give an inch in the face of pressure. He refused political compromise in every form, to the point that people turned his name into an aphorism. “What do you expect of us? We can’t all be Catos.” But Cato’s inflexibility did not always best serve the public good. When Pompey, one of Rome’s great generals and political forces, returned to Rome from his foreign conquests, he felt out potential alliances with Cato. The two had tangled in the past, and so when Pompey proposed a marriage alliance either

• 13:01Ryan Holiday?

  with Cato’s niece or daughter, Cato dismissed it and dismissed it rudely. “Go and tell Pompey,” he instructed the go-between, “that Cato is not to be captured by the way of women’s apartments.” This was a missed opportunity. As Plutarch would later note, “If Cato had been willing to compromise, he could have saved Rome. Instead, by refusing this overture, he drove Pompey into the hands of his enemy. Pompey would marry Julius Caesar’s daughter, the two men would soon overturn centuries of constitutional precedent. For Cato to compromise, to play politics with the bedrock laws of his nation at stake, would have been moral capitulation. But this all-or-nothing strategy ended in crushing defeat.

• 13:45Ryan Holiday?

  Few did more to rage against the Republic’s fall than Cato, and yet, in this one instance, few did more than Cato to bring it to pass.” Memento Mori. Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person hands out their money to passerbys, but how do many of us hand out our lives? Were tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing which we should be the toughest of misers? Seneca. Born with a chronic illness that loomed large throughout his life, Seneca was constantly thinking about and writing about that final act of life, death. “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life,” he said.

• 14:30Ryan Holiday?

  “Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.” "The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time." "Most interestingly, he quibbled with the idea that death was something that lay ahead of us in the uncertain future." "That is our big mistake," Seneca wrote, "to think that we look forward toward death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death." That was Seneca's great insight, that we are dying every day, and no day once dead can be revived. "So we should listen to the command that Marcus Aurelius gave himself." "Concentrate every minute like a Roman," he wrote, "on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, and with justice, and on freeing

• 15:14Ryan Holiday?

  yourself from all other distractions." "The key to this kind of concentration: do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life." That's the power of memento mori, of meditating on your mortality. It isn't about being morbid or making you scared, it's about giving you power. It's to inspire, to motivate, to clarify, to concentrate like a Roman on the only thing that matters: what's in front of you, because it may well be the last thing you see in your life. The Stoics were philosophers, but more than that, they were doers. And they didn't have room for big words or big ideas, just stuff that made you better right here, right now. As Marcus Aurelius said, "Justice, honesty, self-control, and courage: don't make room

• 15:56Ryan Holiday?

  for anything but this, for anything that might lead you astray, tempt you off the road, and leave you unable to devote yourself completely to achieving the goodness that is uniquely yours."

• 16:12Ryan Holiday?

  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.