This Never Makes Things Better | The View from Above

Ryan talks about the perils of anger, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal. The Stoics have some of the smartest and most applicable insights about getting your anger contained. For a high level introduction to some of those insights, check out this article: Anger Management: 8 Strategies Backed By Two Thousand Years of Practice. Or if you really want to get serious about conquering your anger, sign up for our course: Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Anger. 11 days of challenges, exercises, video lessons, and bonus tools based on Stoic philosophy and aimed at helping you deal with your anger in a constructive manner. Learn more here! Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee 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.

• 0:39Ryan Holiday?

  This never makes things better. You have a big presentation in front of a group of people, and you're nervous. You've got young kids, and you're anxious. You're running your own business, and you're worried. You're in a combat zone, and you're scared. These are all difficult things, no question, but it's important to realize that those nerves, the anxiety, the worry, the fear, they almost never make things better. They don't help you operate heavy machinery better. They don't help you remember your lines better. They don't get you anywhere faster. When the Stoics talked about not adding to your troubles, this is what they were referring to. What we're trying to do is hard enough. Life is a difficult balancing act on its own.

• 1:20Ryan Holiday?

  Adding in roiling, consuming, distracting, upsetting emotions, it doesn't help. Contrary to what you're telling yourself, anxiety is not making you a better parent. Hyper alertness is not making you a better soldier or a better speaker. It's flooding you with cortisol and wearing you down. It's weighing you down. It may well be making you worse, driving your kids crazy, eating up your practice time, destroying morale in your organization. Calm down. Focus on what you control. Push those extreme emotions away. Be present. Be relaxed. Do your best. That's all you can do, because that's all there is.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  The View From Above. And 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 co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  And so today's entry is about taking the view from above. "The way to escape petty concerns and the worries of daily existence requires taking some time and getting what the Stoics like to call the view from above. This was something Marcus Aurelius reminded himself to do regularly. He had learned from Herakles that everything in the world was constantly changing, and that remembering this can eliminate so many stresses and concerns. So this week, don't just look at what you're dealing with in your life up close. Try to see it from far away, too. Try to describe what another larger perspective would look like of your problems, of your worries, and of your obsessions." And Marcus Aurelius quotes here from Plato. He says, "How beautifully Plato put it.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  Whenever you want to talk about people, it's best to take a bird's-eye view and see everything all at once of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings and divorces, births and deaths, noisy courtrooms or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets, all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites." This is from Meditations 748. "Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them," Marcus also says in Meditations. "Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life." And then we have Herakles. He says, "The cosmic order, the same for everyone,

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  wasn't made by any god or human, but always was and always will be, an eternal fire kindled in measures and extinguished in measures." Look, it's easy when you're thinking about something, when you're dealing with something, when you're way deep in something. For it to feel like the most important thing in the world, for it to feel unprecedented, for it to feel overwhelmingly big. But when you zoom out, I know it's been a while for me, but when you're in an airplane and you look down and you see these enormous fields or these whole cities, or you even see the town, sometimes when I'm flying in Austin, I can see the road I drive to get to my house and I could see my tiny little house.

• 4:56Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it just shrinks everything down into its proper proportion, which is to say, it makes it really, really small. Because we are really, really small. We are ants. You know, you look at ants on an ant mound, fighting over, you know, little seeds and tiny things. And it's easy to think, oh, these silly little creatures. But that's us. We are them. We are tiny. And by taking this view from above, thinking of it with this perspective is really, really important. And it cuts you down to size. It's crazy to think, if you haven't seen the blue marble photo, it's actually, this is the icon on the back of our Sympathia medallion. It's crazy to think, no human was able to see

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  Earth from a distance until the 1970s. Right? The highest perspective we could get from it was from a mountain, you know, like 10,000 or 15,000 feet or whatever. It wasn't until relatively recently, like when your parents were kids, if you're my age, that we were even able to truly see our own planet from a distance. But Edgar Mitchell talks about this, one of the astronauts, he talks about this feeling you get in space when you see the Earth from a distance. And he talks about how immediately clarifying it is, how immediately you feel a deep connection, a profound connection to your fellow humans, how all your petty, silly concerns go away and all you want to do is help, to be of service, to be good,

• 6:25Ryan Holiday?

  to focus on what matters. And this is what Marcus is trying to do 2,000 years ago, when it was a dream that human beings would ever enter space. He's even then imagining himself along the stars. He's trying to wash away the dust of earthly life. He's trying to get perspective. Well, look, you have the benefit of doing that. You can get in an airplane. You can look at the satellite view on Google Maps. You can recall your memory of the heights that you've been to, looking down from the Empire State Building or that tower in Dubai, if you've ever been there. You have the ability to take Plato's view, literally and figuratively, in a way that the Stoics would have never imagined.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  And yet, here we are tweeting about nonsense, fighting over nonsense, acting like those silly ants that we think we're so much better than. Take Plato's view, get some perspective today. Also, look at history. Just think about Marcus Aurelius and what people were concerned about now. And 2,000 years distant, the perspective that it gives us and what people will be thinking about of this very moment, 2,000 years from now. This is so humbling and so important. You've got to do it. Check it out. Take Plato's view. And hopefully, you'll be calmer and wiser when I talk to you next week.

• 7:47Ryan 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.