It Is What It Is | Count Your Blessings

“There are a lot of things that oppose us in this life. Starting with gravity, we are held down by so many things: other people, bad luck, unfavorable odds, and god knows what else. We struggle to get ahead. We struggle to realize our potential. We run into so many obstacles.”Ryan discusses you must face reality with boldness, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too.***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/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See 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 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.

• 0:35Ryan Holiday?

  It is what it is. The thing about most things we label as bad is that they aren't. They just are. A virus isn't evil. An economic depression isn't malicious. They are unfeeling indifferent inhuman events. Their impact on humans, unfortunately, is not so neutral. But the fact remains, they are things that just are. As Epictetus reminds us, it's our opinion about these events that is not neutral either. It is the mechanism that labels them as good or bad, horrible or unfair, tragic or historic. Is that supposed to be comfort to someone who has lost their job or someone they loved? No, no amount of semantics can explain away a death toll or mend a broken heart.

• 1:19Ryan Holiday?

  But let's go back to the idea of an economy for a second. People who actually work in the market are much less concerned with whether the market is good or bad. They know their job is to work with it as it is, no matter what it is, every single day. They know they have to adapt themselves to what is happening, make the most of it, struggle, and keep going. Perhaps this is how we must begin to think about the pandemic and the whole of life. We are up close and personal with it, expected to produce a return no matter the circumstances, which means we have to be accommodating and resilient, which means we have to be opportunistic, in the positive sense of that word. It means that we can't take anything personally or be deceived by expectations. We just have to keep going. We just have to take things as they are.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  Count your blessings. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living" by yours truly and my wonderful collaborator, Stephen Hanselman, who I also worked on the Daily Stoic with. This week's entry begins with the following meditation. "It's easy to complain about things missing in our lives and so much harder to appreciate what we already have. Seneca reminded us that everything we need to be happy is right in front of us, while the luxuries we might be missing could themselves come at a great cost, the cost of what we already have. Marcus agreed and reminded himself to count those blessings present in our lives and try to imagine what it would be like to not have them

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  and how much we'd miss them. So take a minute and list some of your blessings this week. Take a conscious note of what you are fortunate to have and enjoy so you can see clearly, as Epictetus put it, where they come from and feel a sense of gratitude for that." The first quote is from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 7:27. He says, "Don't set your mind on things you don't possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think about how much you would desire them if they weren't already yours. But watch yourself that you don't value these things to the point of being troubled that if you should lose them." That was a really helpful exercise for me about envy. You know, you can look at all the things that other people have that you'd want to have, but it gives you a whole nother perspective.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  If you take a minute and think about all the things that you have that other people would be jealous of. And it is funny how often we lust or crave things that other people not only don't like, but they would lust or crave for our life. And that should give you some sense that this is all crazy. This is all some freakish evolutionary drive that's made us miserable. Focus on what you have, be grateful for that instead of craving what you don't have. But of course, don't be so obsessed and grateful for the things you have that you would miss them if you lost them. This is from Seneca's Moral Letters. "The founder of the universe who assigned to us the laws of life provided that we should live well, but not in luxury. Everything needed for our well-being is right before us,

• 4:19Ryan Holiday?

  whereas what luxury requires is gathered by many miseries and anxieties. Let us use this gift of nature and count it among the greatest things." Seneca is a bit of a hypocrite here. He's a very, very rich man. Famously has something like 300 tables that he uses for entertaining. But the point is, he knew even richer people. And he knew people who were not as rich, but craved what he had. He said marble and gold are forms of slavery, that the people who live under them are slaves. He said that these things are one at the cost of life. And so when we're not counting our blessings, what we are doing is, by definition, is chasing other people's blessings, or more blessings, or other blessings. And this is preventing us from being satisfied with what we have right now in front of us.

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  And then we have a quote from Epictetus's Discourses 1:6. He says, "It is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen if you have two qualities: a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance, and a sense of gratitude. Without gratitude, what is the point of seeing? And without seeing, what is the object of gratitude?" And look, it's not just gratitude about possessions. It's not just focusing on material items. But it's also just grateful that you were born here, to these parents, to this or that. Grateful for your set of experiences because they made you who you were. And that it's impossible, for instance, to have had different parents, or be born to a different nationality, or to have had this or that,

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  and it not change the whole course of your life, right? You can't just pick and choose. You have no line-item veto over the things that happened to you in life. So in that sense, you have to be grateful for the whole of it, because all of it made you who you were. All of it shaped who you are and will become. And so this sense of gratitude for everything, for the stuff we have, as well as the stuff we haven't had, as well as the experiences we've had. And as the different experiences that were out of reach or didn't happen to us, or the things we thought we wanted, but we didn't get, right? Gratitude for all of it, gratitude for what it is, because it made you who you were, and it couldn't have been any differently. The Stoics would say, "This is what fate chose for you.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  This is how it worked out. There's no reason to feel anything but gratitude for this." And that's what amor fati is really about. I spent a lot of time journaling about this this week. I hope you do as well. Enjoy. Focus on gratitude. Enjoy what you have, instead of lusting over the things you don't have. Keep working on it. We'll talk to you soon.