BONUS | The Book Ryan Holiday Keeps Coming Back To

Ryan was recently a guest on Shilo Brooks’ podcast, Old School https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XntqZm1c-k, to talk about a book that’s meant a lot to him over the years, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/moviegoer?_pos=1&_sid=2baf282b5&_ss=r. They discuss why this quiet Southern novel, set in postwar New Orleans, remains so resonant and what it reveals about meaning, distraction, and the universal search for purpose. Catch the rest of the episode by checking out Old School with Shilo Brooks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XntqZm1c-k on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XntqZm1c-k, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/read-this-book-instead-of-the-catcher-in-the-rye/id1841566275?i=1000739654684, or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/08Zyf3FXojHLXx3yhUxEtt 📚 Grab a copy of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/moviegoer?_pos=1&_sid=2baf282b5&_ss=r at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/moviegoer?_pos=1&_sid=2baf282b5&_ss=r Make 2026 the year where you finally bring yourself closer to living your best life. No more waiting. Demand the best for yourself. The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ challenge begins January 1, 2026. Learn more and sign up today at dailystoic.com/challenge http://dailystoic.com/challenge. 👉 Get The Daily Stoic New Year New You https://join.dailystoic.com/nyny26/ & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life |dailystoic.com/life https://dailystoic.com/life/ 🎁 This holiday season, give the gift of Daily Stoic Premium | https://dailystoic.supercast.com/gifts/new 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, actually a bonus episode of the podcast. Maybe you know this, maybe you don't. I have a bookstore, right? I work at a bookstore. I'm recording this above a bookstore at this very moment, the Painted Porch here in Bastrop, Texas. And the reason I have a bookstore is I love books, and I've been recommending and raving about them since the first book I read and realized that other people didn't know about it. That's what I love to do. I go, have you heard about this book? It's incredible. Why doesn't everyone know about this? So that's what the Painted Porch is. And so if you notice, oftentimes, the last question I ask at the end of the podcast we do here at Daily Stoic, because I go, you want to go check out some

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  books? We go through the bookstore, the series like bookmarked. And I walk through the bookstore and I go, have you read this? Have you read this? Have you read this? And I give each guest a big stack of books. And one of the books I give very often is The Moviegoer. I've raved about it many, many times. I do it to customers. I do it to friends and family. The Moviegoer is one of my all-time favorite novels, and it's got some very Stoic themes in it. So I got asked to be on this podcast that the Free Press just re- Recently started called Old School, which is basically they take an interesting person and they just do a deep dive into one of their favorite books. So they asked me to be on, I was going to be in New York for the launch of Wisdom Takes Work, and they said, you know, what book do you want to read?

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  And I was like, let's do the moviegoer, man. So I grabbed a new one, I reread it for probably the, I don't know, the 10th time. And then I went to New York and I sat down with Shilo Brooks to talk about it. And I'm going to bring you a chunk of that today because there's some stoic themes here. Old School is a really cool podcast. As I said, it's just great books and the power of reading is some themes I'm really obviously passionate about. Shilo Brooks is actually the CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center here in Texas, and he's a professor of political science at SMU. You can catch the rest of the episode, I'll link to that in today's show notes, and also watch it on YouTube. But let's get into, let's get into the moviegoer here, which I also just talked about with Walter Isaacson, I'll be bringing you that episode if I haven't already.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  But in the meantime, let's nerd out about the moviegoer here. Ryan Holiday, welcome to Old School. Thanks for having me. So you are, if I'm not mistaken, the first bookstore owner that we have had on the show, and so I am very lucky to give you a platform. But let me ask you this about your bookstore. How do you go about selecting the books on the shelf in that store? What's your principle? When my wife and I opened the bookstore, we decided it would only be books that we had personally read and that we loved. So a bookstore of our size should have maybe 10,000 titles, and we have about 1,000.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  And so they're all face out, and they're all books that I get really, really excited about when people come in. And I, like, that's my favorite thing, is people come in the store and, and I just go like, here are like 20 books that I want, and I'm going from section to section of like my favorites in these various different categories. And so like, a lot of the books are not new. That's the weird part of publishing. Most bookstores are filled up with new books, and most new books come and then go. They don't have any staying power. And so I really like books that are old, that are maybe a little less well-known, but when you read them, you're like, how did I not know about this? That's like my, that's my dream. Well, you have come on the right podcast, my friend.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  You know, I get the question a lot, and I think you do too. How can I read more? You know, because people will say, well, you do this podcast, you read these books, you must read every one. And yes, I do. I'm curious, how do you answer that question when somebody says, how can I fit more reading into my life? Like, what do you tell them?

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  I tell them that reading is my job. Now, as an author, that's literally true, but even before I'd written my first book, I always thought of it that way. There's something strange about our insistence on learning things by trial and error. When books are effectively a way to have to not learn painful lessons by trial and error. And in fact, Stoic philosophy, which is the philosophy I write about, it comes from a story that sort of illustrates this very idea. As you know, the first Stoic philosopher is visiting the temple of Apollo, and the oracle tells him, you will begin to become wise when you have conversations with the dead.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  And it's not until he washes up in Athens in a shipwreck, he loses everything. And he passes a bookseller, so a little cart in the marketplace. And the bookseller is reading a story from Socrates. And he realizes that that's what conversations with the dead are, that books are a way to talk to people who are not alive anymore. And so I tend to think of reading as this like superpower, this way of talking to the dead, this way of like, you know, living multiple lives effectively. So I just take it very seriously. And I think it's funny, it's like, if you walked into someone's office and they were sitting at their computer, you would be like, oh, they're working. And you wouldn't ask too many questions. But if you came in and they had their feet on their desk and they were reading a book,

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  you'd be like, what are you doing? How do you get away with this?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:25Ryan Holiday?

  And the chances of you getting something substantive out of that book, I think are much higher than, you know, you actually accomplishing much with that email that you're responding to. So I just, I just consider it a big part of my. Job and life. And I've obviously built a job and a life where that's more true than maybe your average person.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  But. And you've got to make time for it, too. I mean, people think if you just say, I'm going to read more, it'll just kind of do itself. It doesn't do itself. You have to figure out a way, either it's this hour every day, or it's this many pages every day. Or there has to be some discipline to this thing. You can't just romanticize the whole thing.

• 6:59Ryan Holiday?

  Or people think there's a way to do it faster.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  So they, they, they want to not read for very much, but get a lot of reading done.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:07Ryan Holiday?

  And I think speed reading is a scam. I have not read any well-read person.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  That, that is actually a speed reader. And it's such, seems like such a strange thing to try to rush through also. Like, it's a, it's a delightful, important, edifying, even spiritual experience. I'm not trying to get it done in as little time as possible. I cherish that time. I, now, look, when you have kids, it's harder to make that time. And, and I, I always tell people, you go through sort of, sort of seasons with reading. And, and you, you try to find ways to squeeze it in, but you squeeze it in because it's important.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  So you said a minute ago that reading is in a way communing with the dead. I mean, this is part of it. So let's you and me commune with a dead man.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Uh, Walker Percy wrote a very interesting Southern Gothic novel called The Moviegoer. This novel has a storied history. Percy came out of nowhere. He published this thing in his 40s. He won the National Book Award. Nobody saw it coming. There were some amazing authors on the list that year when it won it. But we'll get to that. Tell me about you. When did you and where did you pick up The Moviegoer? And what effect did it have on you? How old were you? Where were you? Do you remember all that?

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  I was probably 23 or 24. I was living in New Orleans. I was working on my first book. And I don't remember exactly where I first heard the name Walker Percy. I may have heard of the Percy family. There's a, a great narrative nonfiction book called The Rising Tide about the flood of 1927, which is sort of very storied. Southern family was a part of, so it might have been there. I may have just seen it in a bookstore. But sometimes you you pick up a book and you just go, how did I not know about this? I I often read books and I think, why isn't this one of the things that I was assigned in school? This is what's like, this lights me up. This is exactly what I'm going through or experiencing. And it just it just hit me.

• 9:04Ryan Holiday?

  It's a very, it's an interesting novel, to say the least.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Can you summarize for people? This is gonna be hard, because this is not a novel with the traditional plot structure. We should tell people. But can you summarize for people what this thing is about? If they've never read it, what is this?

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's it's not an, I hope this doesn't sound like I'm not selling it. It's not an action-packed novel. It's a it's a novel about a pilgrimage, but it doesn't really go anywhere. It's about this internal search. He is a a young man who has done what everyone has told him his whole life. And he feels very empty. He feels stuck in this life. And he understands, he believes there is something more. There is some spiritual question he wants to answer. But I don't think he really even knows what that question is. And so he's on what he calls the search. And like most of us, it's it's a shockingly modern feeling novel.

• 10:03Ryan Holiday?

  When you go, OK, this is a novel written about the, written in the 60s in the South, about an old Southern family, you know? And yet it feels very much of the moment, because he's sort of medicating himself with busyness, with work, with the movies. That's why it's called The Moviegoer. Instead of, you know, zoning out on social media, he's just watching movies all the time. Not as many as you would think from the title. He only goes to a couple of movies. But He is trying to stave off the existential despair that he feels creeping in. And so it's, I think, a novel ultimately about, you know, the answer to that question,

• 10:48Ryan Holiday?

  what is the meaning of life or what is a good life? And it's a book very much influenced by Walker Percy's Catholicism, but also his Southern heritage. And then, more specifically, the Stoicism of his uncle, who is portrayed as his aunt in the book.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  For somebody who picks up this book expecting a traditional sort of like, there's a plot, there's some tension, there's some resolution.

• 11:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  That's not really going to happen. And so my sense is this, that the plotlessness of the novel is itself meant to contribute something nuanced to its sort of existentialist lost theme. In other words, the plot is itself that way.

• 11:44Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's supposed to feel very modern and accessible this way. He's not thrust in these crazy situations. It's not an action-packed novel. It is interesting, I mean, there's flashbacks. He's a Korean War veteran, but all that's kind of in the past. And now he's just in this kind of America in the 1950s and 60s in which everything is pretty good, but nothing is working, right? And I think that's sort of the thing. He has a good job, he makes good money. He's surrounded by women and dates and family, and yet he's terribly alone and sad. There's, I think it is very much intentional that.

• 12:25Ryan Holiday?

  Nothing really happens.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, a kind of mirror for life in a way of the, so people have.

• 12:32Ryan Holiday?

  That's why he likes the movies, by the way.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 12:33Ryan Holiday?

  The movies are the opposite of that.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  So people call this novel a diagnostic novel, meaning Percy himself may have used that term. I'm not sure that the novel is meant to diagnose some affliction.

• 12:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  So I wonder if we might not take a couple of the characters. In a way, it's a character study. It's a character study of the main character, Binks, and his step cousin named Kate. And we will get to them, but I wonder if we might start with Binks. He's a veteran. He, uh, he's a stockbroker in New Orleans. He's relatively well off. There's this beautiful introduction where he talks about he uses the right deodorant and his armpits don't smell. And he's got, you know, he's got all the fineries and pleasantries of modern life available to him at his fingertips. He can go see beautiful movies. He can buy wonderful meals. He doesn't smell bad. He uses the right toothpaste. I mean, whatever the case, teeth are pearly white, whatever the case may be. And so he is a kind of paragon of human life at the cusp of modernity, like with all of his conveniences.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And yet, with such wealth, with such good teeth, with such fresh smelling armpits, his life is relatively meaningless, at least it seems, something like that. He's on what you have called, and he calls this himself, uh, the search. He's looking for the search. So I wonder if we might not diagnose exactly what he suffers from. What is the search?

• 13:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the ultimate question. And I think the best novels, they don't beat you over the head with the answer. So I think it's a novel, I think it's worth saying about the search and not a novel that provides the answer. But there is something, you know, if we can understand what's happening here. This is the invention of sort of mass culture and mass consumerism. This is the America in the post-war boom. And so, all these problems that plagued the previous generations, mostly of scarcity, of danger, like, one of the, one of the themes I noticed rereading it, is like, how much death there is in the novel of children? Yeah.

• 14:37Ryan Holiday?

  Like, it's, it's just on the cusp of that sort of, some of the breakthroughs and just like, the comforts that we take for granted. But, but he's, he's in this seemingly modern world, and yet, having solved for those problems, it seems what's popping up is the problems that the previous generations didn't struggle so much with. Like, his aunt, or his great aunt, is, you know, obviously from another time, but she has really no doubt about any of these questions that she's on. Like, that duty, honor, responsibility, purpose, meaning.

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  The older characters in the book don't really seem to be conflicted about this at all. He says something about his uncle, like, "He's the only one, the only person I know," actually, I wrote it down. I was, I was very struck by this phrase. "Uncle Jules is the only man I know of whose victory in the world is total and unqualified. He has made a great deal of money, he has a great many friends, he's the Rex of Mardi Gras, he gives himself, he gives freely of himself and his money, he is an exemplary Catholic, but it is hard to know why he takes the trouble. For the world he lives in, the city of man, is so pleasant that the city of God must hold little in store for him. I see his world plainly through his eyes, and I see why he loves it and would keep it as it is."

• 16:05Ryan Holiday?

  So, like, the older characters in the book are, do not have this existential uncertainty, or dread, or need to search. And, and that's kind of the alienation. It's not just that he feels it, and the younger characters feel it. But the older characters can't seem to understand why the younger characters feel it. And in many ways, it's baffling because they're like, "We just, you know, defeated fascism, you have everything you could ever want, what do you mean, this isn't enough for you?" Yeah. And so, I, again, this is why I think... The novel holds up so well is that this is, there's something both timeless and very

• 16:44Ryan Holiday?

  timely about that kind of inflection point and cultural divide.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  You know, and it's funny you mention this because you talk about his uncle and it seems like the main character is not satisfied by, on the search, by things that ordinary men might find satisfying on their search. The thing that sticks out in my head is women and love. He goes through a variety of his secretaries who he treats, you know, he's like the Lindas and the, you know, they're all, they're sort of these objects, they're interchangeable, they look the same, they are the same, they're just for, sort of for him. And in the book, he's got this woman named Sharon, who, again, they're sort of these like anonymous names with faces, you can kind of picture any woman. And yet, even those things, you know, these trysts or, you know, they're not fulfilling to him. There's

• 17:35Speaker 01

  this other woman on the horizon, Kate, who is, who we'll get to in a moment, who's interesting, but who has a certain kind of mental affliction. Those things which would constitute a good life for the previous generation, an income, a wife, a family. For him, they're sort of shopping items or something, you know, he sort of puts them in the car, tries them out, takes them out, you know, they're not, they're not, they don't provide permanent satisfaction in a way.

• 18:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think his, he's trying to, as the, as one philosopher said, like distract himself with pleasure to compensate for an absence of meaning. And there's something kind of Don Draper-esque about him. He's very good at his job, but is mostly obsessed with the woman sitting at the desk outside of his, his office.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Temporarily obsessed, like it too will pass.

• 18:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. And, and, I mean, he talks about this in the novel, that he, he is, he is interested in them only up until a point. And then when he gets what he wants, it immediately ceases his interest, ceases to interest him, and then he has to replace them with the next secretary.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Right, right. I mean, this, this word, so we've talked about the search, and now we've discussed how unfulfilling that is. There's another word that comes up in that context, or another phrase that comes up in that context, that I think captures this phenomenon that I wanted to ask you about. He uses this word when he talks about the kind of melees of modern life. He calls it modern life's everydairness.

• 19:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  This is a word, if people have ever read Martin Heidegger's Being in Time, Heidegger talks about das ein, which is man, I mean, it's not necessarily man, but man and his everydairness, that for most of us, most of the time, our being and the meaning of our being is not a question for us. And so, we remain kind of chatty in our everydairness, like, what did you do last night, the kind of, the chatter about the TV shows, the kind of, he calls it idle talk, right? And that this is part of our everydairness and that we, so, most people are not themselves plunged into the kind of existential crisis that would expose this everydairness for the superficiality that it is. This guy sees it and he identifies it. And I'm going to read this passage to you where he uses that word, everydairness.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  He says this, "When I awake, I awake in the grip of everydairness. Everydairness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydairness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now, nothing breaks it but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydairness broken, when I lay bleeding in a ditch." Now, that's pretty powerful.

• 20:15Ryan Holiday?

  We credit Camus as being a sort of novelist and philosopher, that these are like philosophically driven novels. And I don't think Walker Percy gets fully enough credit for having done something very similar. Heidegger's probably a subtext there. Kierkegaard is a subtext in his, in his writing that very explicitly is the epigraph. And then, and then the Stoics are in there too. He was a profoundly philosophical thinker, also a religious thinker. And so, these, I do think this is a novel that's worthy of being up there, like with The Plague or The Stranger, because that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to teach philosophy through the novel.

• 20:57Ryan Holiday?

  And yeah, this everydairness, I thought the most striking passage in the book where he deals with the everydairness is he's having this kind of trivial conversation with someone that he bumps into in the street. And he keeps saying to himself, like, this is death. You are dead. Just the, just the total emptiness of existence for most people. And yet, there's also a part of him that kind of admires or even envies the people who are not aware. Of the philosophical implications and weight that he is carrying. Like, I think at some level, he would like to be able to talk about the sports scores or, you know, water cooler stuff. And he can't. He's just sort of paralyzed by this sense that

• 21:42Ryan Holiday?

  life should be more meaningful, that this isn't what it's all about, that none of it's as exciting as, you know, fighting the Chinese in Korea.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the only time in his life when he felt the energy and vitality of a true meaning and purpose is when his life is on the line in the war. So he comes back home and begins to participate in that liberty which the war was for. In other words, which he won. And it seems as though he's disillusioned by its cheapness in a certain way. And so that's sort of, it seems to me, what the search is for, is a way out of that world, which he thought was worth fighting for, but which he was never more vital in than when he was fighting for it. The payoff is not as vital as the struggle.

• 22:29Ryan Holiday?

  I think one of the scarring things about Korea is that unlike World War II, we sent these guys over there to do this horrible, awful thing in one of the most horrible, awful places in the world. Like, he's talking about, you know, basically Korea in the winter there. And why we were there wasn't fully explained, right? Like, it wasn't a popular war. It wasn't so much a forgotten war as it just was a poorly explained war, right? Truman calls it a police action and everyone's kind of maintaining this fiction that we're there for this certain reason. I mean, we're in Korea fighting the Chinese. It's a strange kind of disorienting experience.

• 23:12Ryan Holiday?

  I do wonder if it's less clear cut than what you're saying, that he like, went over there for this part of this great crusade and then came home. I think it's more like he was a cog in this big machine and then came home and was sort of like, I don't, I don't really get this either. And the masculinity aspect is interesting, though, because he is chasing women. So that's kind of your, you know. Maybe a traditional masculine thing that you might go, oh, this is where he's finding purpose and meaning. He's not living, he is very much living in a patriarchal society. So the men are not neutered in the sense that we might say that they are today. And yet, he actually doesn't like most of the masculine activities. Like, he doesn't

• 23:55Ryan Holiday?

  like hunting. He and his father both don't like fishing. So I think there's something too about him being kind of this thoughtful, philosophically inclined person in, you know, what you might call sort of Eisenhower, early Kennedys America, where that isn't necessarily the dominant cultural currency. Do you know what? He's like out of play. And New Orleans is an interesting place in that it's, it's, it's got this kind of writerly artistic tradition, and yet it's a party capital, and it always was that. I mean, this is all happening during Mardi Gras. That's like one of the subtext of the book. And yet, it's, it's also kind of this conservative, traditional place. And so I just think it's

• 24:37Ryan Holiday?

  like, nothing is lining up. And he just doesn't know where he fits and what it's all for.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Let's bring in to this situation and complicate it with this woman, Kate, because then we can talk about him more fruitfully. So she is his sort of step cousin. She has had a very difficult life. If I'm not mistaken, Kate was engaged to be married, and she was in a car crash in which her husband died in the car wreck. She's now engaged again to some guy, Walter or something like, is that his name? Who she's not, no one's really impressed with. But the defining feature of Kate is that she too suffers from some kind of emptiness. And she too has what would be sort of called an existential crisis, although hers manifests itself in a kind of debilitating mental illness, such that

• 25:28Speaker 01

  she's often given to taking pills and being on the brink of suicide. And she has very high highs in which she's this sort of charming, extraordinary spirit, and then very low lows. And Binks, the main character who we've been talking about, can often see those things come And he has a kind of barometer for her mood and these sorts of things. Now, toward the end of the novel, interestingly, they kind of get together. I mean, they get, and that's, that's a real surprise. But I want to talk about her character and what in particular she suffers from. Um, that's different from or the same as him, because it seems like she's got her own malaise. And it's not the same as his, but it's still there. And I just wonder if that doesn't bring out another dimension of the everydayness and that kind of cheapness of modern life.

• 26:13Ryan Holiday?

  Well, what they both have in common is that they're sort of letting their parents down. It's like, the world is your oyster. We have sent you to college. We have provided for you. You can do anything you want. You're beautiful. You were, belong to all the right clubs. We've, we've, we've now set you up effectively on your second arranged marriage. You know, or society marriage. Like, why isn't this working for you? And, um, I get the sense that for the previous generations, it was this kind of like, suck it up. What do you mean you don't like this? What do you mean you don't like this person? Uh, like, the, the, Kate sort of talks about how the greatest moment of her life was this car accident.

• 26:55Ryan Holiday?

  Because not only did it, uh, sort of extricate her from this marriage she didn't want to be a part of. But life seemed real and exciting for the first time. I think she is struggling in this moment with a similar existential uncertainty to Binks. But then there's obviously questions of gender and societal role. Like, she can't go have a career necessarily, not as a sort of society woman from New Orleans. And yeah, you're right. It manifests itself much more clearly as mental illness or depression. It's more diagnosable. Or perhaps the argument is that it, they are more inclined to medicate it. You know, she, she talks about her therapist and her doctors a lot. And it seems like her parents are kind of.

• 27:39Ryan Holiday?

  They're worried about her, but like, if they could have lobotomized her to make it go away, they probably would have.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and it, you know, it's interesting you say that because that she came to life after that car crash, because I noticed this about the structure of the book, and I'm not sure what to make of it. He himself is involved in a car crash.

• 27:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And she is involved in a car crash. And she says, "When I, when I got in the car crash with my first husband and it killed him, everyone around me thought that it would, it's the thing that made me sad. But in fact, it's the thing that, that gave me life," which I think people don't expect, and the reader doesn't expect. Then he later, with Sharon, his secretary, who's from Alabama, who's just another sort of faceless woman, he's involved in his MG. I mean, this is like the perfect car for the kind of meaningless soul. I mean, not, I don't want to get too down on the MG. But at any rate, he's out there in his MG and it crashes, and he has a car crash and he hurts his shoulder. And, you know, I wondered about whether these parallel car crashes are meant to tell me something as a reader, but I wasn't sure what it was. Do you have any thought on that?

• 28:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and it's obviously kind of a plot device. It's like shaking them out of their sort of stupor. You do get the sense that life is just extremely boring, and these are, in some ways, the most interesting things that have ever happened to them.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that seems right to me. I mean, let me ask you about this, because this goes along with the boredom and the, and the search for meaning. So if they're in this situation, that contemporary, modern liberalism, with all of its sophistication, its freedom, its wealth, its opportunity, has failed to provide them with meaning for life, such that they can live very comfortably but with no purpose. That seems to be at least part of what's going on here. Wrapped around this whole novel is a religious subtext with Catholicism, Ash Wednesday, Mardi Gras. So you've got this, you know, this kind of purposelessness

• 29:36Speaker 01

  of contemporary liberalism, with all of its comforts and no meaning.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Taking play, the story takes place on Ash Wednesday and at Mardi Gras, and he talks about his relatives being good Catholics and these sorts of things. So how do you interpret that part of what Percy is saying? It's almost like he's saying, I mean, is he saying that the spiritual remedy lies in, you know, rigorous religion? Or what's he doing with religion?

• 29:59Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the interesting thing is that Walker Percy is both a Catholic and a Stoic, explicitly a practitioner and follower and admirer of both. And yet, the character Binks in the novel finds both Stoicism and Catholicism to be like woefully insufficient. And his aunt is like trying to talk to him about this all the time. She, he comes home one day and there's a note in the door and she's scribbled down a quote from Marcus Aurelius that she want. But it just, it doesn't land for him. And so what's interesting is that, um, yes, there is this sort of emptiness, but it's not as if everyone around him is, uh, you know,

• 30:42Ryan Holiday?

  materialistic and superficial and shallow. Like the, the, his aunt and his uncle are deeply spiritual, religious people, who I bet if you asked them, had a sense of, of meaning and purpose. And as I was saying earlier, didn't seem to, to wonder why they were here, or what this all meant, or what they were supposed to do. Like the famous passage, which is her sort of riffing on, um,

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:08Ryan Holiday?

  On Stoicism.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Share a passage with us. You want to share one with us and read it?

• 31:17Ryan Holiday?

  She says, "I don't, I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder, spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is the secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe, and I believe it with every fiber of my being." A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated, but a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man. So there's like exactly the prescription for purpose and masculinity and duty and honor and all this stuff, but it's not landing with him. And what I think is interesting is not only is it not landing with him,

• 32:02Ryan Holiday?

  but we know that the author is sympathetic to that very idea personally in his actual life. And yet, we see in the novel, the character sort of wrestling with the inadequacy of it, or you get the sense that he's hearing it. It's just he's not able to fully buy into it.

• 32:31Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.