Face What’s In Front of You First

“It’s a tempting cognitive bias but ultimately a paralyzing one. Worse, it is often complicit in very preventable evil.”Ryan discusses why you need to concentrate on the present moment, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***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 Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  Face what's in front of you first. It's a tempting cognitive bias, but ultimately a paralyzing one. Worse, it is often complicit in very preventable evil. We've talked before about what-about-ism. But lately, we've seen a new strain of this moral false equivalency dubbed preemptive what-about-ism by pundits. And actually, it's not even new. We can imagine Seneca doing it. "Yeah, sure, Nero is really bad," he told himself. "Yes, it's bad that he killed his brother and his mother and utterly neglects the business of state. But if I leave, what about the evils of the next emperor?" So Seneca stayed rationalizing his service to a deranged tyrant with the uncertain,

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  unprovable assertion that the alternative might be worse. We can see how tempting this logic is, but how cowardly it turned out to be. Seneca was declining to face the problem that was actually in front of him by focusing on a potential problem that may or may not have occurred in the future. He was also missing the point. It's true that Nero's successor theoretically could have been worse, but that didn't change the fact that Nero was really, really bad right then. And can we really accept Seneca's feigned care about this future problem when he was neglecting the present one? We are seeing this play out right now. There are radical extremists on both sides of the political spectrum in the United States.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  There are dishonest politicians on both sides, people who have fallen down on the job. And yet, whenever leaders are given a chance to do things about this, they talk themselves out of it by focusing on imaginary boogeymen of what the other side might do in response. Voters have been going ...of this too. "Yeah, sure, I don't like the craziness on my side," they said. "But what about my exaggerated fears of what will happen down the line if I express even the slightest weakness in purging these bad actors?" "No, you gotta do what's right," Marcus Aurelius said. "The rest doesn't matter. You gotta focus on the ethical concern in front of you right now, not the next one, or the one after that, or the one totally in your head. You gotta deal with this, and you gotta deal with it right."

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, so check it out at dailystoic.com/email.