Beware This Thief Of Time | Ask DS

Not long ago we talked about the Stoic view on punctuality. It’s a pretty simple one: Being on time is important. It’s a matter of respect, not just for oneself, but also for others. So what do you think the Stoics would have thought of Oscar Wilde’s intriguing remark that “punctuality is the thief of time?”Perhaps they would have agreed.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan presents part 4 of an audio series in which he answers student questions at the Q&A portion of his Stoicism 101 seminar. The topics that he covers include writings by some of the less popular Stoics that you should read, why the Stoics persecuted Christianity, his ideas on using mental models to make decisions, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Beware this thief of time. Not long ago, we talked about the Stoic view of punctuality. It's a pretty simple one. Being on time is important. It's a matter of respect, not just for oneself, but also for others. So what do you think the Stoics would have thought of Oscar Wilde's intriguing remark that punctuality is the thief of time? Perhaps they would have agreed. While it's important to be on time so as not to take for granted other people's time, it's also important to recognize and defend against how easy it is to get consumed by meeting some arbitrary standard for its own sake, to lose the forest for the trees. The person who can't focus because they are anxious about an upcoming appointment, who is rushed and frenzied because they feel the need to get everywhere early,

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  feeling guilty because you were late and had to reschedule, cutting this thing short so you can start another? This is not what good self-discipline looks like. It's wasting time while purporting to care a lot about it. It's also worth asking, what is this thing that I am needing to be on time for anyway? One of Marcus Aurelius's most provocative questions to himself in meditations is, "Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?" We should be asking what the point is of all these appointments we're making. We should ask ourselves why we are so committed to being punctual for work things. Meanwhile, we constantly put off and delay our own self-development. Where is our time for ourselves, for stillness, for philosophy? Seneca notes how much time we waste in life.

• 2:15Ryan Holiday?

  It may well be that we are wasting much of that time and energy thinking about things as unfulfilling and unproductive as being on time.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  Being punctual is important, yes, but more critical is making time for the things that really matter and then being on time for those.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Hi, Ryan. Thank you.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  Hi. Yeah, of course.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I have more of a general question.

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  Is that because you're in outer space?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  I didn't have much choice in the background. I'm at work and there's a whole, there's a big mess behind me. So I know a lot of the ancient Stoics did not leave a lot of written material. So we focus a lot on the big three, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, because they left the most, whether it's written by them or their students. Are there any other Stoics that left reading material that we should perhaps, you know, learn more about, like as we, you know, proceed in Stoicism?

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  So this book was translated relatively recently and I enjoyed it. This is Musonius Rufus, who's Epictetus's teacher. And it's called "That One Should Disdain Hardships." It's basically like a set of notes from different talks. And like, so one of them is that women too should study philosophy. Should daughters receive the same education as sons? Which is more effective, theory or practice? That kings should also study philosophy. That exile is not an evil. He writes an essay that exile is not evil. And he's exiled four times on trumped up charges.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he says, he has one on what is the chief end of marriage? Is marriage a handicap for the pursuit of philosophy? Should every child that is born be raised on food, on clothing and shelter? He has one on whether you should cut your beard or not. It's really fascinating. James Stockdale did a number of short books, sort of inspired by Stoicism. So I would check that out. As far as the originals go, pretty much everything else is fragments.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  If you read Lives of the Stoics, which is my book, it gives you pretty much everything that there is from those people, unfortunately. Almost everything else is like a letter here or, you know, a quote here. The record is pretty sparse. The only thing I do hold up some hope on is that we have now begun to develop the technology where they can take some of the rolled up papyrus that was entombed in the ash at places like Pompeii, and they

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  can look, they can like x-ray inside it and read it. And so it may well be that in time, if the works haven't already been destroyed in various excavations, we may, over the next 50 years, discover or rediscover some of these lost works from the Stoics, which would, which would be pretty awesome.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, of course.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Good afternoon. First of all, I just want to say thanks to your book, Ego is the Enemy. It literally stopped me from, shall we say, talking back to a previous boss that I was working under.

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  All right.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Can it help me put some things in context at the time? Two questions. You had mentioned, I thought, in a recent email, that one of the downsides to the Stoics was their persecution of Christianity. I wasn't sure if you've been working with those in particular, or Stoics in general. Was there a particular reason for that? And I'm not, since I know about the Stoics, but I'm curious what the reasons were for that.

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. So there's, I actually have a section on this in Lives of the Stoics. Let me find it, because it's worth reading. There's actually a fascinating novel called Blood of the Martyrs, which is by Naomi Murchison. She, she, it's a novel about Christians in Nero's court, which she was trying to sort of write, she was writing it as Nazi Germany is rising in Europe and sort of beginning their persecution. So it's a, it's a tricky thing. So obviously, put it this way, Rome Thought that the Christians were heretics and the Stoics at different junctures were

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  in charge of Rome. And so I more think about it as the Stoics did nothing to stop a persecution or a sort of a set of discriminatory practices that they could have done something about. But let me see here. So Junius Rusticus is Marcus's philosophy teacher who Marcus puts in charge basically of Rome. He's the mayor of Rome. And it's Junius Rusticus who adjudicates the trial of Justin Martyr, one of the most famous Christian martyrs. You can contrast this. Seneca's brother Gaio, who's mentioned in the Bible, adjudicates a case involving

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  St. Paul and lets him go free. So it's not as if the Stoics sort of are universally caught up in this, but there is, there is some, there is some unpleasantness here. So this is, this is what I say. "Justin had in fact studied under a Stoic teacher in Samaria, but left the school in favor of the burgeoning Christian faith. Many of Justin's writings would evoke similarities between the Stoics and the Christians, and he may have well been familiar with Junius Rusticus's own philosophical work. He quite reasonably expected a favorable ruling from his Stoic judge. As a devout Christian, he knew that a century before Seneca's brother had fairly judged and freed St. Paul in Corinth. But

• 8:29Ryan Holiday?

  this was Rome in a very different time, and Rusticus was not simply a pen and ink philosopher. His job was to protect the peace. These Christians refused to acknowledge the Roman gods, the supremacy of the Roman state, and this was to them crazy disruptive and dangerous. Wasn't Rusticus's job to enforce the laws to prevent these kinds of things from happening? And perhaps with Marcus away at the front and no one to check him, Rusticus was a little lost in the sway of his own power. In her 1939 novel about Christianity in ancient Rome, written as fascism was crushing religious minorities in Europe, Naomi Mitchetson has a Stoic philosopher attempt to explain this collision course between the Stoics and the Christians. The Christians were being persecuted, he says, because they were against the Roman

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  state. No Roman ever really bothered about a difference of gods. In religious matters, they were profoundly tolerant because their own gods were not..." Of the individual heart, but only a social invention, or had become so. And yet politically, they did and must persecute equally and equally must be attacked by all who had the courage. So the, the point is, there's this sort of Roman policy that the Stoics declined to question, that puts them on a collision course with a faith or a religion that questions almost all the essential tenants of, uh, of, of, of the, the, the Roman state. Does that make sense?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  No, that, that seems pretty fair as well, right? I, I understand why Rome persecuted the Christians. It's more of the Stoics were Roman, more than the Romans were Stoic. Is that fair to say?

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's fair to say, but we also, this idea of learning from the past. I don't have any problem saying, you know, Rusticus sits at, at the head of this trial of this guy who's basically being set up on bogus charges for being a heretic. And instead of letting him off or exiling him, or coming up with some, you know, symbolic punishment, he orders him to be scourged and, and beheaded. Right? So I, there were options and the, the Stoics don't take those options and that's to their eternal shame.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  And this is a quick second part of the question. Do you know of any writers who've written on the relationship like positively between Stoicism and Christianity?

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  I, I think you'd like this book, uh, The Blood of the Martyrs. Um, and then I do think there are some books out there. I've seen them. I just haven't, I just haven't read them. It was only sort of tangentially related to what I was talking about in Lives of the Stoics, but, uh, if you find something good, let us know.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Thanks, appreciate it.

• 11:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Let's do Shereen as the last question. No pressure.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  So I recently, um, listened to your podcast with Shane, Shane Parrish, um, Farnham Street blog.

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  So I started looking at his blog and so he has all these mental models and, you know, he has one article about how to make smart decisions without getting lucky. And so I just wanted to know if you have various mental models about various decisions that you make, various people that you reach out to?

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's a great question. Um, yeah, I don't know. I, I sort of go back and forth on the mental models things. When I, when I read them, I find them very interesting. I just don't know.

• 11:50Ryan Holiday?

  If people actually explicitly use them, you know, I don't know if Warren Buffett, when he's evaluating a stock, actually goes, let's divide by zero here, or you know, whatever the mental model is. It's sort of one of these things that that makes sense to me rationally, and then I wonder how they actually get applied. You know, someone's recommending that Shane has a good course on decision making. I would probably agree with that. I did talk about decision making in my interview with Annie Duke when I had her on the podcast. She's great, and she has a new book about this. So I might, I might start by that.