It’s Easier To Be Angry Than Hurt | Why Not Try Something New?

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  It's easier to be angry than hurt. It was Seneca who said that anger outlasts hurt, meaning that we take something that happened to us and we make it worse by taking it personally, by lashing out, by returning wrong to wrong. Certainly, no one illustrated this more than his pupil Nero or Claudius, the emperor who exiled Seneca for some preposterously small slight. But it's not just that anger is worse, it's that anger is easy. It's easier to be angry than hurt. Being angry is active, it's aggressive, it's distracting. Hurt is acceptance, it's something you sit with, it's something you wish you didn't feel, but you do, it's something you wish that hadn't happened, but did. When Marcus really said that it wasn't manly to

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  get angry, perhaps this is what he was saying, that the childish thing is to yell about it and fight about it and reject the hurt that you feel. The adult thing is to try to understand it, to come to terms with it, to understand that, like all things, it will pass, and that if you're patient and have perspective, this will help. The responsible thing is to explore the roots of an emotion, to ask why you are feeling a particular way, why something was so triggering or painful, and try to deal with that. Unfortunately, the popular perception of Stoicism is about the suppression of emotion, that one should simply not feel anything, just stuff it down. No, when something happens, we must understand that we have a choice. Are we going to get angry, which is easy, even if it ultimately makes things worse? Or we're

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  going to feel hurt, and then from that hurt, heal and grow and learn? Which way will you take? The easy way or the hard way? And as usual, the Stoics have some of the smartest and most applicable exercises when it comes to anger. That's why we created Taming Your Temper, The 10 Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Anger. 10 days of challenges, exercises, video lessons, and bonus tools based on Stoic philosophy. Materials to help you deal with your anger in a constructive manner. We will give you the tools that you need, not just to manage your anger, but to leave it in the past so you can focus on what's important, living a virtuous and fulfilling life.

• 2:54Ryan Holiday?

  You can learn the wisdom of the great thinkers and leaders of history through this course: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Abraham Lincoln, even Mr. Rogers and many others. You'll be able to use our unique exercises to break free from the cage that anger has built around you and see the world and yourself in a new light. Each day, you'll be able to watch a new video from me as I explain the ideas behind the words and shed light on the path that you're on, but that I am also on, because again, we are all struggling to tame our temper, and we will all be better if we can get closer to that. Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. It will take time and effort, it won't be free, but by changing your perspective and

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable and life-changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper, The 10 Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger. You can click the link below, or you can just go to dailystoic.com/anger. Try the other handle. This is the June 14th entry in the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Remember, we've got the cool leather-bound edition in the Daily Stoic store. I'll share that. I'm holding... This isn't quite a first edition because it says bestseller on it, but this is pretty

• 4:21Ryan Holiday?

  early on. I wonder how long I've had this one? I wonder if it says here which edition it is? Now, it doesn't say what printing... But anyways, I want to get into today's entry because I really like it. This is from Epictetus in Coridion. "Every event has two handles, one by which it can be carried and one by which it can't." If your brother does you wrong, don't grab it by his wrongdoing, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other, that he is your brother, that you were raised together. And then you will have hold of the handle it carries. The famous journalist William Seabrook suffered from such debilitating alcoholism that in 1933, he committed himself to an insane asylum,

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  which was then the only place to get treatment for addiction. In his memoir, Asylum, by the way, this is an incredible little memoir he has. I first heard about it from Fitzgerald's The Crack Up, which was about his own struggle with alcoholism. And this was a book that was basically totally lost to print. And then it recently got brought back out. Like I had to buy an old expensive copy on Amazon. And then it started to become popular again. I can take some partial credit from having talked about it in the reading list over the years. So there's a new edition of it. We carry it in the painted porch. You should read it. It's a fascinating memoir because Seabrook was this great travel writer, like one of the great travel writers of his time, who sort of wrecked his career from alcoholism. Because there was no such thing as Alcoholics Anonymous. There were no treatments.

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  That's why he had to check himself into this insane asylum. But it's a beautiful, haunting, very sad memoir, but beautifully done. Anyways, in asylum, he tells the story of the struggle to turn his life around inside the facility. At first, he stuck to his addict way of thinking. And as a result, he was an outsider, constantly getting into trouble and rebelling against the staff. He made almost no progress and was on the verge of being asked to leave. Then one day, this very quote from Epictetus about everything having two handles occurred to him. "I took hold now by the other handle," he later related and carried on. "He actually began to have a good time there. He focused on his recovery with real enthusiasm. I suddenly found it wonderful, strange and beautiful to be sober," he said.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  "It was as if a veil or a scum or a film had been stripped from all things visual and auditory." It's an experience shared by many addicts when they finally stop doing things their way and finally open themselves up to perspectives and wisdoms and lessons of those who have gone before them. There's no promise that trying things this way will work, of grabbing the different handle. There's no promise that it will have these momentous results, but why continue lift by the handle that hasn't worked? One of my other favorite quotes from Marcus Aurelius, he talks about being like the animal fighter at the games, torn up and bloodied and near death, it's begging to go out and fight again. He was saying, this is like us. We're just trying to do things the same

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  way as we've always done them. And then that ties into that expression about how insanity is trying things the same way over and over again, expecting different results. We constantly pick things up by the old handle of taking them personally, of focusing what's not in our control, skepticism, cynicism, whatever it is, right? We all have this, these tendencies to look at things a certain way. Maybe that's why you're always fighting with your spouse about a certain issue, or your own parents about a certain issue, or maybe whenever you get stressed, this is the behavior that you engage in. That's what I think Seabrook was doing. The idea is, well, what if you tried it by a different handle? And I think, as I've talked about before, there's more than one handle. There's unlimited amount

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  of handles, stories, options, approaches, you can take the thing. So why do the one that you've always done? Why do the one especially if it doesn't work? Why not try something new? Look for the generous interpretation. Look for the one that gets you out of your comfort zone. Look for the one that challenges you. Look for the one that makes you open-minded, open-hearted. Look for the one that, that makes you try something that you're not inclined to do. Look for the one that makes you better. Look for the one that makes other people better. That's the idea. And I wish I could say that William Seabrook's story ended wonderfully as you read in Asylum and his later memoirs, you know, it doesn't. He wasn't sort of a

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  wrong place, wrong time. If he'd held out just a little bit longer, you know, he would have gotten some of the benefits of 12-step and other understandings that we subsequently have of addiction. But I think that he wrote the book is wonderful and it can help people and it's why I've raved about it for so long. And anyways, that's today's entry in The Daily Stoic. Thanks for listening slash reading. I'll talk to y'all soon.