Under Unimaginable Stress, This Has Stood Up | Made For Working Together

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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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus really, and Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:50Ryan Holiday?

  Under unimaginable stress, this has stood up.

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  Everyone is stressed. According to annual stress surveys, stress levels have reached alarming rates. No surprise, of course they have. The pandemic, the economy, the political landscape, the climate, they're all very concerned. But put the macro events aside, there are still dogs getting sick in the middle of the night, kids getting sick in the middle of the night, neighbors arguing in the middle of the night, there are trips to visit a judgmental in-law, bosses with a penchant for chaos, long lines at the grocery store, unpleasant conversations, bills to pay, difficult decisions to make. Some people are out of work, others are overworked. Some people are dealing with awful roommates, others are struggling with the loss of a loved one. Some people can't get any sleep, others can't get the motivation to do anything but

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  sleep. It's so much. Almost every day, there's something new, new, but also timeless. Indeed, in the events of just the last few years, we have lived, like the Stoics, through the hallmarks of history. Plagues. Marcus really is lives through the deadliest plague in Rome's 900-year history. Political violence. Cato was there when the Roman Republic was in its death throes. Money trouble. Xeno lost everything in a shipwreck. Division and alienation. Seneca and Musonius Rufus and Epictetus were exiled and witnessed Nero's tyranny and insanity. The later Stoics, from George Washington to James Stockdale, experienced extreme success, adversity, chaos, and dysfunction.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  When all was lost, William Alexander Percy wrote of Stoicism, "It stands fast. Life is tough and it gets tougher." What did the Stoics do when this happened? They didn't stress, they didn't get scared. They turned to their philosophy and fell back on their training. Because, as Seneca said, "That's what it's there for, to offer counsel, advice, and perspective." The Stoics found confidence in their preparation. They knew that stressful situations are like a fire that forges gold. Even more, it's also how gold is tested, to know whether it's real or counterfeit. And they knew from the long history of this philosophy that it stands up well underneath unimaginable stress. That's really the question, like, how much time do you lose per day to stress and anxiety?

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics wanted to say, now multiply that by 365, now multiply it by the rest of your life. Imagine what you could do with those hours, those weeks, those months, those years. And with everything crazy in the world, we redesigned and are now relaunching our Daily Stoic Slay Your Stress Challenge. It's going to be a live course. I'm going to be doing live video sessions as part of it. Everyone's going to be going through it at the same time. It's going to start on July 26th. So I want you to join us. We've melded in some of the best insights from modern psychiatry and psychology. We've looked at characters from history and literature. We've put together what are a number of invaluable, actionable strategies that will help you manage your stress,

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  get perspective, stop sweating the small stuff, feel some peace, feel good about yourself, and of course, do what you need to do. And you can check that out, dailystoic.com/stress.

• 4:10Ryan Holiday?

  Made for working together. This is today's entry, July 21st. And the quote comes to us from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 812. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Whenever you have trouble getting up in the morning,

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  remind yourself that you have been made by nature for the purpose of working with others, whereas even unthinking animals share sleeping, and it's our own natural purpose that is more fitting and satisfying. If a dog spends all day in bed, your bed most likely, that's fine. It's just being a dog. It doesn't have anywhere to be, no other obligations other than being itself. But according to the Stoics, we have a higher obligation as humans, not to the gods, but to each other. What gets us out of bed each morning, even if we fight it like Marcus sometimes did, is to render works held in common. Civilization and country are great projects we build together and have been building together with our ancestors for millennia.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  We are made for cooperation with each other. So if you need an extra boost to get out of bed this morning, if you need something more than caffeine can offer, use this. People are depending on you. Your purpose is to help us render this great work together, and we're waiting, and we're excited for you to show up. Let's look at the Hayes translation of that real quick. Hayes says, as part of 812, "So when you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that you're defining characteristic. What defines a human being is to work with others. Even animals know how to sleep, and it's the characteristic activity that's the more natural one, more innate and more satisfying."

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  And then let's look at the great Robin Waterfield translation in his annotated edition, which I highly recommend and enjoy quite a bit. If you pull up 812, he says, "Whenever you find it difficult to wake up, remind yourself that doing socially useful work is proper to your constitution and your humanity, while sleeping is something you share with irrational animals as well. And anything that's proper to an individual's nature has a greater affinity to him and is second nature to him, and moreover, is more refreshing."

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  I love that. I think the idea socially useful work, right? So when the Stoics talk about politics, I don't think they always mean running for office. And when they talk about the common good, I don't think they necessarily always mean charity. They mean socially useful work. Are you contributing to society? Are you making the world a better place? There's a sign over on this track that I like to run on that was put up by Hollywood Henderson. I think I've said this story before, but he put up a sign that says, leave this place better than you found it. And I think that's a great rule for life. It's interesting, though, to me, and Marcus talks a lot about struggling to get out of bed in the morning. It's clearly a common theme.

• 7:35Ryan Holiday?

  And then he also talks a lot about working with difficult people. So maybe the difficult people are like, oh, I gotta go do this again. You know, he was an introvert. He preferred philosophy, preferred ideas to people necessarily. But he knew that it was inescapable, that, that, that as a human being, as a philosopher, as a leader, as a politician, his job was to work with these difficult people, to find a way to contribute, to find a way to make them better, to find a way to put them to productive or socially useful ends. And that's what we have to remember today. Obviously, you're up or you wouldn't be listening to this. But how are you going to provide socially useful work today?

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  How are you going to make do with difficult people? How are you going to put up with them? As Marcus really says, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that even the famous obstacle is the way passage is about that, is about dealing with the people who obstruct us and annoy us and frustrate us, and finding a way to make a positive contribution to the world in spite of, with, through, because of them, for them. That's what we're here for. That's the work that we're here for. That's our purpose. Animals can sleep around. You know, maybe some people aren't going to seize that potential, but that's their call. We're not going to reject the opportunity. We're going to take advantage of it.

• 9:01Ryan Holiday?

  We're going to make a positive contribution, a socially useful contribution, big or small.

• 9:07Ryan Holiday?

  You don't have to be Winston Churchill or Gandhi to make the world a little better, to leave this place a little better than you found it. Be nice to someone, write something, help someone, teach your kids something, pick up trash that you see by the side of the road, vote, right? Contribute to a cause, donate time, whatever it is. Do some socially useful work today, make a positive contribution, and realize that this is what you got out of bed for, this is what you were put here for, this is the work of a human being, the Stoics would say. So go to it, seize it, love it, appreciate it, fucking crush it, man. That's my message for today. I wish you all the best. Talk soon.

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pokile, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about, like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus

• 10:38Ryan Holiday?

  a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at dailystoiclife.com.