Your Heart Shouldn’t Be Getting Harder As You Go | The Source of Your Anxiety

Ryan explains why you should hold tight to your values, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://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 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 Aurelius, 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.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  Your heart shouldn't be getting harder as you go. The old joke, which dates back to the 1870s, is that if you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart; but if you're still a liberal when you're older, you have no brain. Now, we can put any partisan beliefs aside and see how this is at least partly true. When you're young, it's easy to believe in the inherent goodness of the world because you haven't actually experienced any of it yet. You are naive. It's easy to think that everything should be very simple and always fair in that phase of your life. But as you get older, you start to realize that the world is more complicated, and in

• 1:19Ryan Holiday?

  fact, that there is a lot of wisdom and necessity in the mass morium, the way of your elders. A settling into a kind of conservatism as you age and experience life is reasonable and probably smart. However, it should be obvious that that remark is also totally and completely wrong. Yes, it's easy to believe in ideals when you are young, and yes, it's harder to maintain that idealism when you get older, but that is sort of the point. Life isn't about getting more selfish and colder as you go. What kind of life would that even be? What the Stoics would say is that time will steadily reveal to you that there is such

• 2:00Ryan Holiday?

  a thing as evil, that equality of opportunity will never result in quality of outcome, except a catastrophic cost to all. But if... If you watch carefully, you should also see something else that time steadily reveals, how much we all have in common, how connected we all are, how being kind and generous to others is the most rewarding thing you can do. Life exposes to us the truth of Marcus's line that what injures the hive injures the bee, that what goes around comes around, that while we can't let our hearts bleed for everything and every person outside of our control, allowing our hearts to harden is equally wrong.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  The point is to have a head and a heart always, to be an idealist when it's easy, but to stick to those ideals even when you see how painfully short reality measures up compared to them. Being lucky enough to continue to live on this planet should not be accompanied by cynicism and coldness.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  The source of your anxiety, 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. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestsellers. 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. "When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn't wanting something outside of their own control, why would they

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  be stricken by anxiety?" That's Epictetus's Discourses 213. "The anxious father worried about his children, what does he want? A world that is always safe. A frenzied traveler, what does she want? For the weather to hold and for the traffic to part so she can make her flight. A nervous investor that the market will turn around and the investment will pay off." All of these scenarios hold the same thing in common. As Epictetus says, it's wanting something outside your control. Getting worked up, getting excited, nervously pacing. These intense, pained, anxious moments show us at our most futile and servile. Staring at the clock, at the ticker, at the next checkout lane over.

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  It's as if we all belong to a religious cult that believes the gods of fate will only give us what we want if we sacrifice our peace of mind. Today, when you find yourself getting anxious, ask yourself, why are my insides twisted into knots? Am I in control here or is it my anxiety? And most importantly, is my anxiety doing me any good? I don't know about you, but the pandemic certainly brought that home, right? Like the immensity of our powerlessness over the situation. Yeah, get your vaccine. Yeah, wear a mask, be safe, whatever. You control some tiny things, but you don't control what's happening on the other side of the planet.

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  You don't control what your local government is doing, what your federal government is doing, countries coming together. You don't control any of it. And we've just watched time after time as they've messed up, fallen short. And those consequences came back to us. And there's this great term that's come out of the pandemic. I'm sure it existed before, the idea of doom scrolling, right? You pull up your phone, you're anxious, you don't like where the world's going, and you just mainline crappy news. And it's just, it's a way of feeding that anxiety, of course. But it's not, of course, it's also not doing anything about the situation. I talked about this on Rich Roll's podcast when I was there to talk about Courage is Calling. I was explaining that, you know, one of the things the pandemic did by taking so many

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  things away, right? Like I traveled less, had less meetings, I had less going on, especially early on in the pandemic, less so now as we've sort of adjusted. But early, early on, it was like all the things that I used to think I would get anxious about, like flying, as I'm talking about, as I'm talking about the anxious father, the frenzied traveler, the nervous investor.

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  That was me, just a, just a little inside baseball. Of course, I'm always writing about myself. But, but as those things went away, what I was, I noticed the anxiety was still there. Like, I didn't have anywhere to go, there's nothing to do, we're just supposed to sit around, like, you know, and, and I still felt this anxiety. Because the anxiety was never about the thing. The anxiety is within me, it's within all of us. There was a great, I don't know if you follow Tank Sinatra, but he's like, one of the sort of biggest meme accounts on Instagram, he's hilarious. We, we did, we, we posted one of his messages on Daily Dad, which you should follow if you're not, but, but it's this fictional conversation with his son, and he said, "Do

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  you understand why daddy worries about you?" He's saying to his son, and his son says, "Because you are a generally nervous person?" "Yes, exactly." Right? The anxiety, the Stoic said, "It's not from the outside situation, it's from us. We're the source of the anxiety." Yeah, sure, it's better to miss the flight than not make the flight. But like, feeling crappy about it for weeks, or feeling crappy about it for that 45 frantic minutes, it's not making you go any faster. You're sitting in the cab, you're just, "Oh my God, is this gonna happen? Is this gonna happen?" That's not making the car move faster, that's not making the traffic get out of your way. A friend of mine has this sort of doomsday scenario that this, this negative news article is coming out about, about him and, and his company.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  It's largely undeserved, and, and I actually think a lot of his catastrophizing about it is exaggerated. But the point is, it's gonna come sometime in the next month or so, it might even be out by the time you're listening to this. But he is sort of handing himself over to torturing himself about it every day until that happens. He's just a nervous wreck about it. I feel terrible for him, I've tried to, to sort of pull him out of it, but he's kind of just given himself over to that anxiety, and it's, he's, as Seneca would say, "suffering before his time." He's suffering more than necessary. But that's really what that anxiety is. It's this like ritual, this pattern, this, I don't know, dance we do that we hope is gonna alleviate the thing we don't want to happen, or the thing we do want to happen,

• 8:30Ryan Holiday?

  or the bullet we hope to dodge, or whatever it is. But it's really just torturing ourselves, torturing ourselves in advance. It really has nothing to do with the thing at all, right? It's because, as Tank was saying, we're just generally nervous people. Or as Marcus was saying, because the anxiety is within us. It's who we are. So I think today's message is just a reminder about anxiety. The source of the anxiety is not the external situations. It's not the other person's fault. Nobody's making you anxious. You're the source of your anxiety. And at the root of your anxiety is a focus on an outcome that will happen or it won't. Right? That your actions will work or they won't.

• 9:13Ryan Holiday?

  But the torturing, the hand wringing, the stress, the nervous phone calls, the frantically checking your phone over and over and over and over and over again, the not being able to concentrate, the lashing out, whatever the symptoms, however they manifest for you, that's not going to address it. And I'm not saying this glibly. I'm saying this again as someone who knows where you're coming from, who experiences that anxiety myself. It sucks. It's no fun. And the irony is some of the things that I find myself most anxious about, I end up bringing about through my anxiety. I really want something to go well, like, I don't know, like a family trip

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  or, you know, a date with my wife or something. I want it to go well. And then because of the anxiety, because of the stress, the pressure, the expectations, right? You know how this goes. Not the way you want it to go. So just a reminder of where the source of your anxiety is. Work on it. It's not making you happier. It's not making the world better. And let's discard it, as Marcus says.

• 10:23Ryan Holiday?

  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. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out.