This is What It Means To Be Indifferent | Ask Daily Stoic

The Stoics spoke about being indifferent, disinterested. Have no interest in what makes no difference, Marcus Aurelius said. That’s the image of the Stoic. Unconcerned with what’s happening around them–no preferences, no emotion, good with whatever.📕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 the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  This is what it means to be indifferent. The Stoics spoke about being indifferent, disinterested. "Have no interest in what makes no difference," Marcus really said. That's the image of the Stoic, unconcerned with what's happening around them, no preferences, no emotion, good with whatever. And there is a time and a place for that. But as we saw in practice and detailed in Lives of the Stoics, in real life, the Stoics were still human beings. They had friends and dreams and loves and tastes. While Stoicism, the abstract philosophy, spoke of indifference to everything but virtue, in real life, the Stoics obviously preferred being comfortable to uncomfortable, liked to being disliked, rich than poor, healthy than sick. Seneca called this preferred indifference.

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  And he was strong enough to work with whatever life gave him. But if asked, of course, he had some preferences. It's like that wonderful line from Walt Whitman in his poem, "I sing the body electric," who himself enjoyed the Stoics. "All things please the soul," he wrote, "but these things please the soul well." So it can go for you. You don't have to make yourself into a joyless robot. You don't have to crush every hope or preference inside you. It's not realistic, anyway. The key is to be able to find the good in everything. Yes, but there are still some things better than others. Don't make yourself dependent on getting what you want. Don't beat yourself up for wanting what you want. Does that make sense?

• 2:28Ryan Holiday?

  Nathan, it looks like you're talking to us from quite a podcasting studio.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Yes, this is my COVID closet. The kid, the kid's got the home office and so I'm literally in a little closet here.

• 2:41Ryan Holiday?

  Nice.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  So yes, I think, thank you for, thank you for doing this. So when you referred to this as, you know, office hours, I was thinking back to my college days and I was that kid who would go and take advantage of office hours. I would talk to the professors like, you know, why did I get an A minus, not an A? I want to like dissect. And so I was thinking about that and, you know, the ideas of Stoicism, how do you measure it? I think that's really my question. You know, how do you know if you're being more courageous, if you're having more temperance, justice, wisdom and all the little dropdowns from that? Because it's, on one hand, it seems like, you know, if you'll just, you just kind of look at your life and say, oh, you're getting better at it. But, you know, I was reading something

• 3:24Speaker 01

  of yours recently that talked about like, look at this as practice and, you know, any, any practice, you know, sports, music, whatever, you usually have a lot of good feedback. But with the concepts of Stoicism, it's just, for me at least, a lot harder to know like, am I doing this right? Like, not that there's a right or wrong way necessarily, but do you know what I mean? Like, how do we know if we're on the right track?

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  No, it's tricky and I-

• 3:46Speaker 01

  And growing.

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  I can't tell if it's something important or if it's sort of something that's just a byproduct of how we've come to see education, that our first impulse is, you know, how do I score this? How do I measure it? You know, is that a result? Is that how education is supposed to be done? Or is that what happens when you have an educational system designed to teach at scale for an industrial society slash world, right?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  So I don't, I don't know what I would say that the best metric would be, although it probably loops back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, is it, is it visible in your actions? You know, are you losing your temper less? Are you kinder? Are you doing- You know, more things for other people are is is fear or anxiety less prevalent in your life? Now, are these things you can measure like on an Apple Watch? Probably not. Uh, but but maybe part of part of Stoicism is developing that sort of internal sense for, you know, what's working and what's not working. There's a there's a a letter that Seneca writes to Lucilius, where he says like, how do I know that I'm making progress?

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  And he says, because I'm becoming a friend to myself. Meaning that he's feels less shitty about himself. And he's less hard on himself and he's more aware of himself. Right? And and and more loving towards himself. So the other thing I would say is is just because the Stoics were sort of rigorous and there's this self-discipline and they were driven. I'm not sure also that that that that necessarily translates as a stoic needs to get an A and then is mad at themselves that they got an A minus, right? I think part of it is this idea of like, no, no, I I I feel better like not I feel better because I've abandoned all standards and I'm just resigned, but I feel better because like

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  I I'm I'm encouraging myself and I'm getting better, uh, you know, at who I know that I'm meant to be.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's good. Thank you.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  Awesome. Yeah. Um, let's do, uh, let's see here. Steven.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Hi, Ryan. How are you?

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  I have so many questions, but I will start with actually something that Maria Vargas was talking about earlier with mentoring. And I just wanted to say that I did your uh, new year, new you challenge back in January and the Slack community there turned out for me to be a wonderful mentor. So if she wants mentorship, uh, you know, and it was all in that kind of informal relationship, uh, building kind of way, learning together. But that's a that's a great, I would highly recommend engaging in Slack community uh, for mentorship opportunities. And the question really is like, do you have any tips or advice of how we can really leverage that Slack community? For whatever this challenge is about to throw at us.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I do love the idea of accountability partners. So maybe you develop a goal or a practice or a thing you're going to work on and find someone. And I've seen people do this in the channel over the years as we've done them, the idea of like, okay, we're going to check in with each other once a week. Like I'm in, I've talked about this. I'm in a sort of a mastermind group with a bunch of authors and we meet one for about one weekend a year. We all go to a, we rent a house, we all get together and we just sort of check in with each other on, on what's working, what's not working. We sort of critique each other's work from afar. We solve problems for each other. But you know, the idea of having someone, you know, like in Alcoholics Anonymous, you have a sponsor, the idea of an accountability partner.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  So choosing someone, you kind of check in with each other, see how you're doing. I think that would be, that might be a way to do it as well.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Thank you. Yeah.

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  Um, let's do, what do we got here?

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  Let's do the other Ryan here, Ryan Seawald.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Can you hear me?

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  I can. Great name.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Uh, thanks. You too. And yeah, you're, uh, not very often someone in Texas is pronounced as my last name, right? I get Seawald usually. So thank you. Appreciate it.

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  All right.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  But my question for you was about something I saw in the reading today. Uh, you said, you can't control the disasters that life throws at you, uh, but how you respond to them with courage or cowardice or not at all is entirely up to you. And obviously in the case, I forgot exactly who, uh, it was talking about, but, uh, disaster struck them and they had to respond to it.

• 8:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  But what you do, like you make the mistake that causes the disaster and you have to like right the mistake and move forward because even at my young age, 22, I look back and I'm like, wow, like I did that wrong. Like I heard someone doing that. And I don't really know how to dig myself out of the hole that I've kind of put myself into.

• 8:55Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I would, I would argue that that's probably more the rule than the exception. I would, I would say most, most disasters are not visited upon us by the outside world. We, uh, we invite them in, right? Or, or we, we, we make them sort of, uh, unforced, as they say in sports. So most errors are unforced errors, not, you know, uh, done by the, by the brilliance of your opponent. So, you know, uh, we tell the story in today's, uh, email about Zeno and, and the shipwreck. Um, he washed up in Athens, he loses everything. Um, so we don't know enough details about this specific event. So I, I, we, we can't, you know, get too granular about it, but would it change anything if the shipwreck was his fault?

• 9:41Ryan Holiday?

  You know, if he had been drunk or, uh, you know, if, if he had, uh, rejected the advice, if they said, hey, no, there's a storm coming, don't go. And he said, oh, I can handle it. And then he lost everything. You know, it changes it in the sense that there might be a more specific lesson for him to learn. But the, the, the result, him losing everything and washing up in Athens and having to reimagine or rewrite the future of his life remains the same. So I think no matter what happens, whether it's our fault, uh, or not, this idea that you can't go backwards, you can't stay in the same spot. All you can do is move forward. This,

• 10:23Ryan Holiday?

  it's the same, it, it brings you back to the same point. So, um, I think we can go two ways. Sometimes we can be in denial about whether it's our fault. And as a result of that denial, you know, refused the, the opportunity to move forward. Then in other times, we're so consumed by the fact that it was our fault, that we were guilty. You know, that, that, that, uh, we made the mistake that we didn't have to, um, that we dwell on it and we beat ourselves up about it. And the result is also that we failed to move forward. So I, I think what we're really talking about is, how do you, how do you move forward? How do you focus on what you do next?

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Awesome. Thank you.

• 11:04Ryan Holiday?

  Jill, what have you got for us?

• 11:08Speaker 04

  So my question goes back probably a question discussing the idea of what somebody brought up Slack mentors. So I always feel torn. I'll go a little like Cal Newport, you know, get off everything. And it does feel very peaceful, but then especially in, you know, the time of a pandemic, then I start to think I'm living in my own world. Right. But also, you know, Stoicism is, you know, you should be out in the larger community.

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Question is, well, is the internet a community in that sense? So I guess my question to you is mainly, you know, what role does the internet play in this, in this grand scheme?

• 11:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'm glad you asked it. So I'm interviewing Cal again for the podcast on Thursday, maybe. So I will ask him this, I will ask him this very question, but I agree. I think it's been tricky in the pandemic because on the one hand, a lot of important social interaction or community has, you know, been, if not impossible, then severely constrained. And then that can draw you towards these online tools, this connectedness, which is good. But then it's also at your fingertips and it can be overwhelming. So I think there's a, there's a tension between it.

• 12:32Ryan Holiday?

  I like something like this where it's sort of like a two week thing and it's, it's, there's some boundaries around it. Generally, I try to limit the access points that sort of random people have into my life. At the same time, I like to have really open channels with the people who are important to me or who I do get things out of. So does that make sense? So maybe that's the balance. It's like, it's, it's sort of closed off generally, but then you are also, you know, call, text, email me, you know, show up at my house. If, you know, anything happens that's important to your group of people who are sort of in that circle.

• 13:15Ryan Holiday?

  So maybe I think it's sort of about finding the balance between those two extremes.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's helpful. Thanks. Yeah, I think so. That's what I was feeling like, okay, I cut people off because we do depend on these tools. So, thank you.

• 13:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Monica.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  Hello, everyone. I was going back to the whole, how do you kind of measure? There's no measure. But really, personal story in like a moment for me where I realized that the practice was working for me. Me and my family, my kids were exposed to COVID during this time. And I normally probably would have gotten upset in how I felt like the information wasn't handled properly to, you know, to relate to us what we were exposed to. But then I thought to myself, you know what? It happened. What can I do now going forward? There's no need to dwell on, you know, the past and what happened and, you know, and going back and forth about that. And then I just

• 14:18Speaker 05

  sat there for like a few minutes and I was like, wow, that this is, this is a different response than you normally would have given. And I was, that was my way of kind of measuring where I was at with this, being in control of, you know, your emotions about what's happening to you in the world right now. So I just wanted to share that.

• 14:37Ryan Holiday?

  I'm, I'm very glad you did because it brings up a couple of things. So your point here about experiencing it being exposed to COVID, I would say maybe the way we really measure stoicism, whether we're making progress, it's less in the day to day and more, where does it come? How does it come up in moments of crisis or, you know, moments of pressure or stress? Because that's really what it, where it matters the most, right? If you're incredibly calm with, with the day to day nonsense, great. But can you be calm and controlled when a whole bunch of things are being thrown at you and your family is counting on you? So I think we really want to measure ourselves in these important moments. And Monica, I had a similar experience. We ended

• 15:22Ryan Holiday?

  up having to take my youngest son for, to the doctor for his sort of routine checkup. And, and the next day, he woke up with a Being very sick. And so it was sort of this alarming thing where we we knew we were in a bubble. And then all of a sudden that bubble gets burst. And so anyways, there's this window. We went to get the test. This is when tests were not super common. And so, you know, there was like three days between the test and the result. And I remember sort of trying to think of Stoicism there where it's like,

• 15:54Ryan Holiday?

  if you've ever heard the example of Schrodinger's cat, it's like this cat in a box and you can't see in the box. And so is the cat alive or dead? That I was thinking of that because it's like, we either have it or we don't have it. Right? And the only thing that's that's uncertain is when the news will be delivered. And I remember thinking, and I don't think I did a particularly great job. So it was a is sort of an example that I had to work on it more. But it was like, am I going to waste the next three days being anxious about something that's already decided? Right? So the question is, is the news going to change the behavior in any way? Is it going to undo what's happened in any way? No. So

• 16:36Ryan Holiday?

  really, the question is, how am I going to spend the next three days? Am I going to spend it biting my nails? Am I going to spend it, you know, miserable? Am I not going to play with my kids? Am I not going to get my work done? Like, how am I going to use this time? So that was a great example of that was a great example of it for me. And I'm really glad you shared this. And the third thing I would say in response to what you're saying is they don't all, this doesn't all have to be questions for me. If people want to share, if people want to share examples or their own experiences with the ideas, that can be just as valuable and I can learn as much from from you guys as the other way around.

• 17:24Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, 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. Version of the Sto, 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 a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and this is the best part, all

• 18:09Ryan Holiday?

  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.