History is One Damned Thing After Another | Do Not Be Deceived By Fortune

By the time Marcus Aurelius took over as emperor, he had not had an easy life. He had lost his father at age three. He had lost a beloved tutor. His lifepath was upended by Hadrian’s selection. He had 14 children during his 30-year marriage to Faustina. And then of course, in order to ascend to the purple, he had to lose his mentor Hadrian and his beloved stepfather Antoninus.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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 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.

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  "History is one damned thing after another. By the time Marcus Aurelius took over as emperor, he had not had an easy life. He had lost his father at age three, he'd lost a beloved tutor, his life path was upended by Hadrian's selection. He had 14 children during his 30-year marriage to his wife, Faustina. And then, of course, in order to ascend to the purple, he had to lose his beloved Hadrian. What came next? We've talked about before: a plague, floods, an invasion, a coup, a civil war. He didn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved, one ancient historian reflected. But you might also say he met with exactly what he ought to have expected.

• 1:33Ryan Holiday?

  The financial writer Morgan Housel, whose wonderful book, The Psychology of Money, we recommend, and who was on the podcast recently, once described history as 'one damned thing after another.' And what is history made up of? Life. Life is one damned thing after another. Your parents get divorced, you fall and break your leg, you move across the country for a job that doesn't work out, one of your kids has ADHD, the economy crashes, your neighbor is a jerk, you have high blood pressure, you find out you're allergic to dairy. It's one thing after another, after another." The Stoics say that we must first be mentally and emotionally prepared for this. If this parade of events surprises you, it's your fault because history already predicted it. The second is that we must train for it physically. Marcus was strong, even though

• 2:17Ryan Holiday?

  he was often sick. Could Epictetus have endured the one thing after another that was Roman slavery, torture, exile, deprivation, if he had not been tough as hell? Cleopatra, his training as a boxer would have been crucial to surviving poverty, as well as the squabbles of the philosophical life. What about you? Are you ready? Are you prepared? Have you trained? Because as insane as the last couple of years have been, one thing is certain. The years to come will be one, two, three, four damned things after another, on and on, until the end.

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  Do not be deceived by fortune. This is the September 8th entry in The Daily Stoic, and I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, 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 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. And our quote today comes to us from Seneca

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  in his Letter on Consolation to Helvia. That's his mother. It's a beautiful essay. You can read it on The Shortness of Life, one of my favorite little collections of Seneca's writings. But we'll get to the quote now. He says, "No one is crushed by fortune unless they are first deceived by her. Those who aren't pompous in good times don't have their bubbles burst with change. Against either circumstance, the stable person keeps their rational soul invincible, for it's precisely in the good times that they prove their strength against adversity." In 41 AD, Seneca was exiled from Rome to Corsica. For what exactly, we're not sure, but the rumors were that he had an affair with the sister of the emperor. Shortly thereafter,

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  he sent a letter to his mother, seeking to reassure her And comfort her in her grief, her grief being that she missed her son. But in many ways, he must have been speaking to himself as well, scolding himself a little for this unexpected twist he was taking pretty hard. He had managed to achieve some measure of political and social success. Maybe he chased some pleasures of the flesh, but now he and his family were dealing with the consequences, as we all must bear for our behavior and the risks we take. How would he respond? How would he deal with it? What the very least, his instincts were to comfort his mother instead of simply bemoaning his suffering. Though some other letters show that Seneca begged and lobbied for his return to Rome

• 5:04Ryan Holiday?

  and to power, a request that was eventually granted, he does seem to have borne the pain and disgrace of exile fairly well. The philosophy that he'd long studied prepared him for this kind of adversity and gave him the determination and patience he needed to wait it out. When he found his fortune restored as he returned to power, philosophy prevented him from taking it for granted or becoming dependent on it. This was good because fortune had another turn in store for him. When the new emperor turned his wrath on Seneca, philosophy found him ready and prepared once again. It's a tension, right? Seneca says, "We suffer more in imagination than in reality. You don't want to just be thinking of all the terrible things that could happen. You don't want to be biting your nails in anticipation of this or that."

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  And yet, if you are naive, if you trust in fortune, you are setting yourself up for pain. He says, "Never forget of fortune's habits of behaving exactly as she pleases." Yes, you know, as we become successful, we get things, we start to go, "This is how it should be. I earned this. I made this. It's mine." And maybe a lot of that is true. You're not the ultimate decider. Something can take that from you. Unfairness can take it from you. Injustice can take it from you. Tragedy can take it from you. The emperor can take it from you. So if you are deceived by fortune, that this is yours now, that this is the new normal, that this is stable, you have bought into an illusion and that you can be disabused of that illusion at any moment.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  How painful will that disillusion be? My favorite line is in Invisible Man. It says, "How does it feel to be free of illusion?" It's painful and empty. We build our lives around these illusions, around the sense that this is how it should be, all is right in the world. You are begging for life to visit some humility upon you. So you have to be careful. Have to be aware. We have to practice. We have to prepare. We have to train. We can't take any of it for granted. None of it is nearly as stable as it appears. That's what Seneca realized, not just at this exile, but early on his life, when tuberculosis sent him to Egypt to convalesce. Nero turned out to be insane. That's what life does.

• 7:19Ryan Holiday?

  It reminds us. It doesn't go the way we want it. And I think it's problematic how often we say things like, this is unprecedented. This is not normal. This has never happened. This has always happened. This is always how it's going to be. Normal is crazy. Normal is chaos. Normal is sudden reversal. I was just reading Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money, and he has this line in there. Unexpected things happen all the time, or things that have never happened before happen all the time. That's the wisdom of what Seneca is trying to say there. That's what we prepare for, train in this philosophy for, is to be ready for precisely those kind of events. So when things go wrong, we can be the person. Imagine, again, and if you haven't read On the Shortness of Life,

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  pick up the copy there in The Painted Porch, if you could, I'll link to it in today's episode. Right? There's something sweet about the fact that Seneca is the one exiled, but he's writing the consolation to his mother. It's not his mother saying, you got this kiddo. It'll be all right. He's saying, Mom, I'm OK. It's going to be all right. He's comforting the people who are grieving and missing him. That's what this discipline of philosophy can be. That's what Seneca practiced for. And that's what we're working towards. I'll leave that here today. And then just remember, if you want to preorder the new book Discipline is Destiny, which has plenty of Seneca in it, you can do that at dailystoic.com/preorder.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  Got a bunch of awesome bonuses in there, including some bonus chapters. And we've even got some signed copies. I'll sign your copy if you pick up that order at dailystoic.com/preorder. Really proud of this new book. Self-control, that's what Seneca was embodying there in his stoic, lowercase stoic, handling of the terrible injustice dealt to him. And I hope to give you some of that strength too. Dailystoic.com/preorder for Discipline is Destiny.

• 9:19Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in,

• 10:03Ryan Holiday?

  that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.