Susan Cain on Transforming Pain Into Beauty | This Is Our Most Dangerous Opponent

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to author Susan Cain about her new book “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole,” how melancholy can spark creativity and drive ambition, how to take heartbreak and mold something great out of it, and more. Susan Cain is the author of the bestsellers “Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverted Kids,” and “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can't Stop Talking,” which is in its eighth year on The New York Times bestseller list and was named the best book of 2012 by Fast Company. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Her viral TED Talk, "The power of introverts," has been viewed more than 30 million times, making it one of the most popular of all time. Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness: https://geni.us/dsviPAIThe Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts we have ever worn. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase. Kion Aminos is backed by over 20 years of clinical research, has the highest quality ingredients, no fillers or junk, undergoes rigorous quality testing, and tastes amazing with all-natural flavors. Go to getkion.com/dailystoic to save 20% on subscriptions and 10% on one-time purchases. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Susain Cain: Homepage, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  This is our most dangerous opponent. There are lots of things that oppose us in this life, starting with gravity. We are held down by so many things: other people, bad luck, bad odds, and God knows what else. We struggle to get ahead. We struggle to realize our potential. We run into so many obstacles. But what is the biggest obstacle, our most dangerous opponent? It's anger, our own and other people. Anger, as Seneca said, "is the ugliest and most savage of all emotions, because no plague has done more harm to humankind." Herakles, who the Stoics adored, explains that "it is hard to fight with anger.

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  For whatever it wants, it will pay the price, even at the cost of life itself." Anger is what makes people hate each other. Anger is why we hold on to that grudge, even though at this point, it's holding us back. Anger is why people act impulsively. Anger is why we had trouble sleeping last night. Anger is what makes villains hurt and harm. Anger is what makes our heart beat faster, what stresses us out, hurting and harming our own health. Anger cares about nothing but its own satisfaction, its own relief, and it's going to get it from you, from the world, as Herakles said, "even at the cost of your own life." You have to tame your temper. You have to get this under control.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  It's the most dangerous opponent and it'll kill you if you're not careful. As we say here at Daily Stoic, just because you don't have an anger problem doesn't mean anger's not a problem in your life. It's a problem in all our lives. The Stoics talk about this constantly, from Marcus Aurelius to Epictetus to Seneca. And that's why we made the Tame Your Temper course, which you can check out at dailystoic.com/temper. And if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, of course, you get all the courses for free. So check that out. Talk to you soon.

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I may have told this story before, but many years ago, I was living in New York. I was working on my first book and I got invited to this dinner party in Brooklyn, I think. I thought I was just going to dinner, but it turned out I was the guest at the dinner who had to give a talk about marketing and media and all that. And it turned out that this was like sort of a group of great writers and authors and thinkers who all knew each other and had known each other for many years in New York City. And I met a lot of people coming out of that. For instance, Ron Lieber, who's been on the podcast, his book Opposite of Spoiled,

• 3:29Ryan Holiday?

  I love, and I'm pretty sure I carry at the bookstore. In addition to Ron, I met the one and only Susan Cain, whose amazing book Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, was a monster bestseller. It's in its eighth year on the New York Times Bestseller List. Her viral TED Talk, The Power of Introverts, has been seen like 30 million times. It's one of the most popular of all time. And that book was super influential to me. I love it. I identify as an introvert. It answered a lot of questions for me. It explained some issues I had as a child as well.

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  Just one of the great sort of classic nonfiction books I carried at the painted porch. It's just absolutely fantastic. I'm a huge fan of Susan's work. And as it happened, she'd reached out a number of times to tell me about her love of Stoicism. And we connected over the Stoics and she's a fan of Seneca. And we've had this ongoing conversation over the years. And so when she told me she was writing a new book, I said, oh, my God, you have to come on the podcast. I'm dying to talk to you. I want to hear everything about it. And I didn't really know anything about the book until she sent it to me and I read it. And you know, you know that expression, you don't, you never know what people are going through and that everyone is going through something. I mean, I had, I had no idea how rough the last two years had been on Susan.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  She lost her brother and her father to COVID in 2020, which I can only imagine how devastating that was, particularly in those hard days when you weren't even able to properly do funerals or visit people in the hospital. It's always humbling and a little bit terrifying to just remember, as Seneca said, that fortune behaves as she pleases and that, that it doesn't matter how successful we are. It doesn't matter how secure we are. It doesn't matter how prepared we are. We're never truly prepared for the twists and turns of life. And everything can be going amazing and then the worst thing you can imagine can happen. And so it's both fitting and a bit haunting that she had been at work on this new book,

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. It's the power, if Quiet, The Power of Introverts was about the power of that sort of quiet, reflective inward life. This is the power of a more melancholic outlook and why our culture has been so relentlessly focused on positivity and excitement and passion and, and hopefulness. And that there's also something very powerful about reflection and meditation, about...

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  Coming to terms with getting up and close and personal with loss and sorrow, and how we harness those difficult emotions to create value in our own lives, which Susan had to do her whole life, but more directly these past two years. It's a beautiful book. There's a new TED Talk coming out about it as well.

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  I just had a wonderful time talking with Susan. I'm a huge fan of her work. I'm so excited to bring this one to you. You can check out her new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And if you're one of the 10 people who have not read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, I really suggest you do it. There's also a kid's version of the book called Quiet Power: The Secret Strength of Introverted Kids, which you can check out as well. And you can go to Susan's website at SusanKane.net and follow her on Twitter, @SusanKane, and follow her on Instagram, @SusanKaneAuthor, where she posts wonderful haunting quotes and photos. I'm a follower myself, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with Susan Cain.

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  I certainly enjoyed having it. And I don't wish you bittersweetness, but I do wish you the perspective and appreciation of that approach, because sometimes it's the only way. And we talk about a bunch of books I love in this book, one of which is Lincoln's Melancholy, which is a book I carry at the painted porch. If you haven't read, it's one of my favorite biographies of Lincoln, and I think is a wonderful companion to Bittersweet. All right, I'll just get to it now.

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  It sounded like 2020 was a hell of a year for you. I know it was hard for everyone, but it must have been devastating, more than bittersweet.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2020, yeah, 2020 and ever since, has been intense for everybody, and for me in particular. You know, in 2020, I lost first my brother and then my father from COVID. So, yes, that's been quite an experience.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Though, you know, you're probably mentioning that in the context of my having written a book about bittersweetness and a book that has the words sorrow and longing in its title. And yet, it's not the case that I started working on this book as a response to that. You know, like me being me, I have been working on this book for over five years. It's been a kind of five-year quest to grasp the power of the bittersweet and even melancholic way of being. And what I've learned is that the bittersweet tradition and art and literature and religion is centuries old and that we are creatures who are basically

• 8:56Speaker 01

  born to transform pain into beauty. That's who we are.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  I was, uh, this is what I was, I was thinking before I, before we got cut off before, is that there's something terrifying about the way that that happens, that the thing we're thinking about as artists can sort of manifest into reality. Like, I was writing Ego is the Enemy when American Imperial imploded, primarily driven by ego. But I'd already been working on the book, right? And so, and that's happened to me a couple of times where you're thinking about something, you have this sense that it's a topic that needs to be explored. And then reality brings you way more of that than you could possibly have wanted

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  or be equipped to deal with. And I have to imagine, yes, speaking of sorrow, that, that you had some experience with it, and then all of a sudden, you're drowning in it.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yes. And that's such an interesting point that you make about the bringing into being and then how do you react from it. But I guess I actually see it almost in the reverse. I think it's not so much that we bring it into being, but rather, we're writing what we are because we're sensing that something is coming and we don't even know that we're sensing it, you know? So-

• 10:17Speaker 01

  It's more that we were picking up on like, you know, very faintly perceptible tremors all around us.

• 10:24Ryan Holiday?

  Or we're sensing something in ourselves that we know needs our attention. And that's why we're exploring it as writers. And then we're reminded in real life, how we have to actually put that work into practice.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly it. And I mean, these questions that I'm exploring in this particular book are definitely ones that I personally have been thinking about and dealing with my whole life and really like through the, you know, generations of my family history, I would say. But in addition to that, I also felt kind of mystified by the degree to which our culture was blind to these aspects of human experience. I like, you know, even to the point that I actually gave a TED Talk about bittersweetness in the summer of 2019. So it was the summer before COVID started.

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  It's actually, it's going to be released in a couple of weeks because Ted graciously held on to it until the book came out. But, but I'm mentioning this because when I gave that talk, I would say there were about half the people in the audience who were like, oh my gosh, yes, this is, you know, expressing this thing I've been always feeling and never really articulated. And then half of the people in the audience were like, why, why are we talking about this? This seems like really, you know, a downer. And I felt like that was a kind of not grappling with the nature of reality, which is very much about joy, but equally about sorrow and that those two poles are kind of forever paired.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  And it seemed to me mystifying, but also

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Just not good for our emotional, political, collective health to be denying that half of reality.

• 12:16Ryan Holiday?

  You talk in the book about that sort of cult of toxic positivity, which is probably a deliberate reaction against reality. Like, I think people are like, why are we talking about this? Probably for exactly what I was just saying. There's this fear that by thinking about it or working on it, we bring it into reality, right? Like, the idea of manifesting. So people don't think about the painful parts of life or the unpleasant parts of life because they do worry that they will be bringing it upon themselves, I think. So they go around in willful ignorance instead.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's also a real misapprehension that people have about what this state of being is. Because I actually first became kind of attracted to exploring this whole idea, but because of my love for minor key music and the experience that it gives me. Like, when I listen to music like that, minor key, sad, you know, like Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, like, has been my personal anthem, you know, for long before it became this crazy American Idol sensation. And when I hear that kind of music, yeah, you're feeling some sadness, but it's really not only that. You're also

• 13:38Speaker 01

  feeling a kind of joy and a kind of uplift and a sense of connection to all the other beings who feel the thing that the musician is expressing and that the musician has managed to transform pain into beauty in this way. So it's really, it's like this whole suite of the most sublime emotions of creativity and connection and love. And I was trying to figure out how that could be so, you know, like, how something that's so ostensibly sad actually seems to be leading to all the best, really goodies of being alive. And when I started following that path, like, that's really what sent me on this path. But when I started following it, you know, I found that people listen to the sad songs on their playlists.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Eight hundred times compared to the happy songs, which they listened to only like one hundred seventy five times.

• 14:29Ryan Holiday?

  I love that story in the book. I was, I remember this assignment in high school with some class and we had to like pick a song that meant something to us or represented us in some way and play it for the class. And I remember I picked an Alice in Chains song, the grunge band, but one of, they have this acoustic song called Nutshell, which is like a very, very sad, sort of dark, introspective song. And I, you know, you remember when you would do those things in class where you would pick something and then everyone else would present before you and then you realize that you have, you have made a very different choice than everyone in the class. And now you're just dreading when you, and so I remember listening to all the sort of very syrupy, very sweet, very fun songs that everyone

• 15:14Ryan Holiday?

  chose, just knowing like, oh, this is going to go so terribly. And then I played the song and, and I just remember all the blank faces of everyone in class going like, what's wrong with this person? But, but I, I totally agree. It's, I think it's tapping into a deeper place in one's awareness or one's sense of self. And people are often afraid to go there.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, I'm just curious, just to linger a little bit more on your high school experience. Did you, did you know, before all the other people got up ahead of you to speak?

• 15:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Didn't have any sense that it was going to be seen as overly dark in this culture of ours?

• 15:57Ryan Holiday?

  I think I knew it was a dark song, but I just assumed that everyone else also really liked dark songs. Like, do you know what I mean? Like, I think I assumed, obviously some people would do positive, but I didn't think I would be the only one, right? Like, I didn't think I would, I would have put myself out there to such a degree that I was, I was the only one who made this, this choice. It was like going to a costume contest and you're the only one that took it really seriously.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  I mean, and that's the thing. I don't think you were the only one. Everybody else was like, okay, I'm not, I'm not going to admit this.

• 16:33Ryan Holiday?

  Totally, totally. Um, no, and, and, uh, the idea, I mean, obviously this is sort of the idea of quiet, which is that this thing that you think is unusual or insufficiency is in fact a strength or an underrated part of the toolkit.

• 16:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's, that was sort of my take on it.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, a deeply underrated one and one that I, I find it really interesting to kind of follow a pathway and find that people have been talking about this and thinking about this for centuries, just the way they did with quiet too. You know, like introversion and extroversion had been noticed and pondered about, you know, from the dawn of recorded time. And, and the same thing is true with this bittersweet and melancholic way of being. It's, it's kind of always been with us. Um, you know, like you can look at the more modern examples and, um, you know, like think of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz and somewhere over the rainbow. What, what is that? That's, she's basically saying we, there's this other

• 17:41Speaker 01

  place and more perfect world and more beautiful world. It's over there. We're never going to get there, but there's something about the fact of reaching for it that, um, the, the reaching for it and the longing for it is the best part of our nature. Um, and you know, that's a modern version, but you can trace it all the way back. I mean, like in your sort of wheelhouse of ancient Greece, I mean, look at Odysseus where the whole poem starts with him weeping on a beach for his homeland. It's starting with homesickness and it's starting with a very frank weeping. And that's what sets the whole journey in

• 18:20Speaker 01

  motion. Um, and, and there's, there's the wording in ancient Greece, and I'm probably mispronouncing it. Maybe you know, but it's potos, P O T H O S, which basically was a way of expressing a longing for something that you dearly love and value, but which is forever unattainable. Um, and in our culture, we see that kind of emotion as being, uh, as being kind of passive and one that would kind of keep you stuck, but.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  But longing in that kind of tradition is really about momentum. You know, so like Alexander the Great was said to have been seized with Potos when he looked out at the kingdoms that he wanted to conquer. It was Potos that was driving him, that kind of longing, reaching. And you see this throughout the traditions.

• 19:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, because you would think that melancholy would be a kind of a resignation. That would be the dig against the Stoics, that it's sort of a hopelessness. But you're actually sort of describing it almost as a forlorn hopefulness.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, not just a hopefulness. I would say it's what puts into motion our desire to create, our creativity, our sense of connection and love is all set in motion by that state. Because it's like, you know, like if you think, why is it that if you look at something intensely beautiful, you might tear up at that moment? So why should beauty elicit a new tears? And really what's happening is that in that beauty, you're seeing that perfect and beautiful world that we all want to be part of. It's like whether we're atheists or believers, we all have this spiritual component in us that's reaching for that better place. And it's the desire to reach that place that makes us want to

• 20:14Speaker 01

  build a rocket to Mars in the first place or create a beautiful symphony. It's like, I need to get over there. It's a fundamental impulse that we have.

• 20:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that, I remember reading something about Ambrose Bierce. Do you know who that is, the cynic?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  You know, I know the name, but you'll have to tell me more.

• 20:33Ryan Holiday?

  He was sort of a contemporary of Mark Twain. He wrote The Devil's Dictionary. So he's sort of seen as this like cynical, nasty, negative guy. And that's how I perceived him. And then I was reading this book and they were talking about, one of his friends was saying, no, you don't understand. Cynicism has to first come from a place of idealism. Right? So he first had this vision for how the world should be. And his sadness and bitterness was a result of people not living up to it. Right? So it's not that he's like a nihilist. He thinks that everything sucks and everything's meaningless. His cynicism is rooted actually in that hopefulness. Right? And so I think maybe that's even the idea you're talking about where,

• 21:16Ryan Holiday?

  so if you see a beautiful painting and you're crying, you're sad about it. You're, you're, to be sad, you're having to first acknowledge the beauty or the potential beauty of the world that is not there in reality. So, so where, where people are seeing the negative, they're not, they're missing the fact that it's in contrast to something else first, some sort of hope or, or dream or somewhere over the rainboeness that you were saying.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that we do get to have glimpses of it here on this earth. And so, you know, it's not to say that we're ever going to be able to bring about on this earth, that place over the rainbow, but the fact of being able to attain glimpses of it and to actually bring them into being ourselves, that's the ultimate motivating impulse.

• 22:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, because even grief, right? Grief is only there because first there was love.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly. And, and not just that there was love, but that there's going to be love again. I mean, I, like, on a, on a personal level, I would say, one of the reasons that I'm probably drawn to this topic in the first place is that, you know, so I, I come from a family that's experienced generations of, of very profound losses. And then I had my own personal loss with my mom that I talk about in the book. And, and there's

• 22:51Speaker 01

  this kind of sense of like, that to be alive is to experience glimpses of Eden, right? But then to lose that, you know, and other people told me their own versions of these stories, you know, like maybe their family didn't accept them once they knew what their true sexuality was, or, you know, one person who's been exiled from the country of their birth for decades and needs to hear its music to fall asleep at night. And so it's this sense of like, wow, you know, I was kicked out of Eden, which of course was the fundamental story of Western culture. And okay, that all sounds, to, to come back to where we started, well, that sounds kind of hopeless. Oh my gosh, you know, so that's the human condition.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  But one of the things that you find is that

• 23:41Speaker 01

  If you think of grief in terms of you've lost that particular love, but you haven't lost love itself.

• 23:48Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  That love itself is a state that manifests in a thousand different forms and in a thousand different relationships. And if you can like honor that which you've lost at the same time, that you're open to experiencing love in its different forms, I think that's, it's one of the, it's one of the powers that we're not really taught.

• 24:14Ryan Holiday?

  I was thinking about that recently, too. It's like someone can take away something that you love, a person, a position, a place.

• 24:24Ryan Holiday?

  But the Stoics would also say they can't take away that you had it. Right? And so that I think that's also the grief is, is, is that it's gone, but that you, you have the memory of what it was and what it meant to you. And that, that's always there, which is both wonderful and terrible at the same time.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Right. And the wonderful is obvious, but you mean terrible because the, the knowledge that you'll never have it again could eat you up? Is that what you mean?

• 24:53Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and also terrible because you remember how great it was and now it's not there. Right? So it's sort of like if it, if grief was simply the disappearance of someone from your life, that would be sad, but also sort of solve its own problem. It's that you also have the memory and the longing for them. You, you have what, you have the memory of them, which every time you think about, makes you happy and then also sad at the same time.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that, um, I think one of the things that we need to do as people is accept that that is the state of being alive, number one. And you know, and this is my thing, that we're not really taught that, you know, like as kids, we're basically taught that, that life is when everything is going well and that when things don't go well and when we lose people or things or whatever, that's like the detour off the main road.

• 25:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  As opposed to being taught, the main road is both these things. The main road is the joys and the sorrows along the way.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And

• 26:02Speaker 01

  And again, just this idea that that which we've lost can actually manifest in other forms. And like, so I told you, I lost my father from COVID in 2020. We were quite close. And it was really my father who gave me my deep love of music. We used to listen to music together from the time I was really little. And the night he died, I listened to a lot of music. Some of the music that he had shown me, introduced me to, and just some music in general. And, you know, and I was listening to it at first because I was kind of hoping to find him there in the music. And I don't feel like I found him there,

• 26:45Speaker 01

  you know, I felt like he was still gone. And at the same time, I also felt like the music itself, in all its gloriousness, is a manifestation of love, just the way that my father was. So I don't mean to say that it's a substitute in any way, but it's just, it's a separate manifestation of it.

• 27:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, it's the, what you were just saying about the sort of detour, it makes me think of this expression that we've all heard a million times in the pandemic, which is like, I can't wait for things to go back to normal.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:23Ryan Holiday?

  As if this somehow is not normal, as if this hasn't been what's been happening for thousands of years. If we didn't go through this exact pandemic 100 years ago, and if tragedy wasn't also tragically normal.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny you say that, because when the pandemic first started happening, you know, and I have kids who at the time were like, what age would they have been? Sort of like late elementary school, early middle school. And so, you know, they couldn't do their normal sleepovers and all those kinds of things. And, and I remember talking to other moms about it, who were like, really worried about the impact of this on their kids. And, and I felt more like,

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Well, this is actually, like, if we presented to them correctly, I felt like, well, this is actually a really good life lesson that, you know, they actually, knock on wood, so far have had these amazing lives, but it's not always going to be amazing. But we're going to be able to take that and turn it into something okay, or even beautiful, if we pull it off right. But, but, but just to see that is like, okay, this is just part of the deal. And, and that's okay. This is something I keep finding in childrearing, that, that very often, when kids are upset about something, that so much of what is fueling their tears, is that they think the thing they're upset about wasn't supposed

• 28:56Speaker 01

  to have happened. And so they're like crying at the like, unfairness of it, at the like, how could this have happened? And I find that with my kids, if I say to them things like, well, you know, this is, this happens to everybody, like, life has these moments, it's going to pass, but this is part of life, it'll happen again, and then that'll pass. That's actually what calms them down, because it's kind of telling them that it's all normal. And that what they perceive is, is real, as opposed to being sold, the fact that there's, they think they're supposed to be living somewhere over the rainbow.

• 29:32Ryan Holiday?

  Well, normal, normal compared to what? I mean, you have, you have, it's sort of a throwaway moment in the book, but it really struck me, where you talk about your mom being called over to listen to Hitler give a speech on the radio. Like, is that normal? You know, is, is COVID normal or abnormal compared to that? Right? Like, if you think about what's happened in even the life of a 20 year old, right now, you think about what the last 20 years of history have meant to a person. A pandemic's not really that abnormal, right? Like, all, all, like, life is insane. And so if you have some sense

• 30:13Ryan Holiday?

  that it's supposed to be a certain way, that, that's, everything's always going to feel wrong. But if you can kind of step back and look at the surreality of it, it's suddenly, you're, you at least don't have the disappointed expectations, because you're like, this is, it just is what it is.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would agree with that completely. Like, I don't think anything that we're going through right now, or the moment that my mother was called over to the radio to hear Hitler, all of that, it's not abnormal at all. And at the same time, though, like, what I really want to emphasize is, you know, the joy and the beauty of love is also normal. So it's like, the more that we can hold both of those things together all at once, we're really good in this culture of being like either or. It's like, either it's all tragedy, or it's all this. And I don't think that's it at all. It's more like, it's all together at every moment.

• 31:11Ryan Holiday?

  Have you read An Unbearable Lightness of Being?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, a thousand years ago.

• 31:15Ryan Holiday?

  There's this moment in it, and I thought about it a lot during the pandemic, and he talks, you know, all this terrible stuff is happening in the book, and he's describing this cemetery, and he's talking about how even as the world is tearing itself apart, the cemetery is beautiful. It's got rolling hills, and it's quiet, and there's these old trees. And I think that's your, that's sort of the point. Even as your mom is being called over to listen to Hitler, who knows what other ordinary wonderful things happened that day? The love of her mom to her, or, you know, like, also, that was just one moment in an otherwise, you know, normal life, which there was wonderful, wonderful things.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a funny thing, you know. My grandfather, who was the one who called my mother over to the radio that day, you know, her father, and, and he, he came to this country on his own when he was seventeen, and left behind his entire family and village, and all, they were all killed. And it was something that he never got over, you know, even if you met him, you would have had no idea. He seems like very twinkly and vital on the surface, but, you know, even on his deathbed, he was, he was calling out for this family he had left behind. And, and at the same time, when my mother used

• 32:35Speaker 01

  to sometimes get anxious about this or that, he would say to her, oh, Mama La, you know, sometime, the way life is, you're like, you're walking through, it's like you're walking through a corridor, and the guns are pointed at you, but most of the time, they never go off. And that was his takeaway, even though the guns had gone off over and over and over again in his life. But so he was like very intensely aware of them, but also, you know, very much like living life deeply and fully as he passed through that.

• 33:13Ryan Holiday?

  Wow. Yeah, that's a

• 33:17Ryan Holiday?

  that's again, beautiful and tragic at the same time.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 33:25Ryan Holiday?

  I was, as I was thinking about, as I was reading about your relationship with your mother in the book, I was thinking about, like, I don't know about you, but I find when I read books, there's always like one little thing in them that sticks with me, even though it's not really what the book is about, but that thing sticks with me. And I think I told you this. The thing that struck me the most about Quiet was you had this, again, sort of a throwaway thing. You just mentioned the idea of parent-child fit.

• 33:52Ryan Holiday?

  And how, you know, like an introvert could be born to extroverted parents or vice versa. And just that, that it doesn't always line up. Like you don't, you're not always the child your parents want. And your parents aren't always what you need as a child. And I remember reading that and feeling so seen by it and helped by it because it very much describes my upbringing. And I wondered, then when I read about your mother, I wondered, was that, do you think that was part of what happened for you as well? That you guys just weren't a fit with each other or that you were fit at different times in your life? Because it seemed like the relationship changed over time.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  I think we were actually like a fantastic fit for each other. As I say, in my childhood, I really did have a kind of Garden of Eden kind of childhood. In no small part because of my mother, who was so incredibly warm and loving and supportive.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  And everything, you know, like. Exactly, the mother you would dream of having. And but my mother also had demons of her own because of life experiences that she had had. And and I think as I reached adolescence, she, because of her demons, she really could not handle my growing into an independent person with different opinions or ways of life and all of this. And for her, that, I mean, I think we all

• 35:30Speaker 01

  at some point in our lives, face what you could call a pain of separation. And for her, that pain of separation was so intense that she kind of turned on me.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  So I don't know that that was specific to me, maybe, other than that I have a sensitive temperament. So I probably took it harder than maybe, you know, someone with a thicker skin would have.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  But I don't know, you know, that was a

• 35:56Ryan Holiday?

  Did she go through the same thing with your brother, or was it different?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  That's interesting. My brother is 11 years older, so I don't think I know. But I know, I don't think she did.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  And I think it's because I was the youngest child. We had a really close relationship and I was the youngest. So I kind of represented the end of of that stage of her life of being such a warm and giving mother to a child, which she had so excelled at. So so so we had a like a real break. I can tell you the story now if you want.

• 36:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. So basically, like all through my childhood, I've always wanted to be a writer since the time I was four years old. And my mother and my grandfather had always really encouraged that.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  And so I started writing in diaries from the time I was pretty young and especially when I hit adolescence. And so all the troubles that I was having with my mother and all of our terrible, you know, emotional pains and and all of the Conflicted feelings I had of her, like the mix of love and hate that I started to have for her in my adolescence, I wrote it all down. And then I went to college, you know, and I tell this story in the book, I went to college and kept writing all of it. And my parents came to pick me up from school at the end of freshman year. And for some reason, they had to take my stuff home with them. And I was going to be staying on campus

• 37:29Speaker 01

  for a few more days. And so they took all my bags. And then like, at the last minute, I could still remember doing it. At the last minute, I take this stack of diaries, and I hand them to my mother and say, Oh, yeah, can you take these, too? And, you know, Freud would have a field day with that moment in time, because, because on a conscious level, I had no idea of what I was doing. I was just like, yeah, these are some things. And my mother's super trustworthy, and she would never read them. So here, take them. And I was so unaware of what I was doing that when I got home a few days later, and my mother wasn't speaking to me, I still wasn't sure what the reason was. I remember calling a friend and saying, Do you think she could have read my diaries? You know,

• 38:14Speaker 01

  and of course

• 38:15Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, so I write in the book for years after that moment, like we, we were still a mother and daughter, and still saw each other at holidays, and still said, I love you, and all of this. But it was never the same. And I, I felt emotionally motherless after that, to the point, for years, I couldn't, I couldn't really speak of my mother, like even to say, my mother grew up in Brooklyn. I couldn't say that without crying for years and years and years. And, and over these last five

• 38:55Speaker 01

  years, partly through writing this book, and partly because my mother now has Alzheimer's and has forgotten all our years of strife, and remembers only our fundamental relationship. It's like the mother of my childhood is back. And we're incredibly, I mean, she has a limited way of interacting now with the Alzheimer's, but her loving soul, sweetness, the warmth, everything is all back. So

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've had a real redemption. You could say love returned in another form. It's in the form of mediated through Alzheimer's, but it's very much there.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And then, but there is also something about the process of writing this book that really cleared me to the point, I'm not, I'm not struggling with tears as I tell you this story the way I would have been a few years ago.

• 39:53Ryan Holiday?

  It, yeah, it's, it's almost out of a movie where like, everyone knows what's happening, but is powerless to stop themselves from doing the thing that they know will sever the relationship, both you and her. She must have known what was in the journals, right? Like, there's no, there's no reading of the journal that's going to improve the relationship. And yet she can't stop herself from doing it, just as you seem to be incapable of considering what handing them to her will mean.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, I think that when you get to a, it's almost like what you were saying at the very beginning of like anticipating something before it's actually happening because you're feeling the vibrations before it actually happens, you know? And so I think we both knew what the truth was. I think I unconsciously probably was like desperate to tell her the truth of my feelings. You know, things that I felt I couldn't express because I thought she couldn't really hear them.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  And she probably knew it too and needed, she knew on some level what the feelings were, whether she read it or not. I think, I think there's so much that we sense intuitively without even articulating it to ourselves.

• 41:08Ryan Holiday?

  But, and then the sweetness of her coming back is also to me, an indictment just of how, how much we get in our own way as far as like what, what, what, what actually matters? Do you know what I mean? Like with our own kids, with, with people, with work, like we know what's actually important. And we know that this other stuff is just clogging it up. And yet we can't, we can't. An illness has to come in like a wildfire and burn all that stuff away for it to get back down to the essence of what's actually important. And then what I forget exactly what the line is, but the, the, what, what she said to you is just so overwhelmingly sweet and kind.

• 41:52Ryan Holiday?

  And should it be hard to say, and yet it's like the hardest thing in the world for people to say.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's such a smart way of looking at it because I don't know if you've ever experienced anyone with Alzheimer's. It's the first time that I have closely. But what it really does, as I'm observing, is it kind of like, it burns away all your extraneous thought patterns. And so what remains, like, there are a few different conversations that I can have with, she has like, five or six different conversational lanes down which she can travel now. All the others are gone.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  And the main conversational lane down which she travels now is the one of love. It's like, she, she's so sweet. She's so loving. She, all she wants to do is express love. That's all she wants to do, really. And that's how I remember her. Like, that's, that's actually who she is.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Like, I feel like she, her essence has been returned. So I think it's exactly what you're saying. Okay, what about if before we get the Alzheimer's, we could clear away all the extraneous bullshit, you know, and just go down the, the lanes that really matter?

• 43:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, because none of it really matters. We just tell ourselves that it matters. All the, all the stuff, you know, about where Thanksgiving is going to be, and how could you have said this, or why did you do this, or, you know, we, we just let all that stuff get in the way.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I think it's partly because, you know, we're afraid, well, what if I tried to?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  It don't mean me, but you know, what if one tries to like, say, you know what? I'm sorry for everything that happened and let's start again. You're like afraid of how the other person will react. You're afraid that they won't say, yeah, let's start again. And I accept your apology. And instead, you know, a ton of bricks will come raining on your head or whatever. I think there's all kinds of fears that get in the way.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Which is where your stoicism code of courage would probably really come in handy.

• 43:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, isn't that the Brene Brown thing that basically the scariest thing in the world is not like rushing into battle. It's just being the slightest bit emotionally vulnerable.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 44:12Ryan Holiday?

  But that's the hardest, that's the hardest thing to do. And we don't do it, even though we know at the end of our life, that's all that we're going to care about. That's all that's going to matter is those relationships. And yet we don't want to, we don't want to lay this other stuff down because I don't know why, but we just don't.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I don't know, you know, my experience was an interesting one because as I say, during all the decades between adolescence and now, it's not like my mother and I didn't have a good relationship. Like we still saw each other. If you'd seen it from the outside, it probably would have looked pretty regular.

• 44:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  It was just, I knew that the core of it had been hollowed out. And as I say, I had a grief about it that I could not, I could not come to terms with until five years ago.

• 45:03Ryan Holiday?

  That grief is something I've been going through myself. The grief of that it wasn't what you thought it was, or that a person was different than how you thought they were. That like, I think we tend to only think of grief as being this thing that you feel when someone dies or something ends. But the, but the grief about, you know, how you, what you thought your childhood was, and now you see it from a different perspective, or who you thought you were, or what you thought was important, or whatever. The grieving, the grieving of someone who's still alive is not something we talk very much about.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, that is such an important point. Absolutely. There's actually a term for it that psychologists now have disenfranchised griefs. All the different griefs, as you're saying, that like. We we we might feel equally as intensely as the death of a beloved. But some they're just not given the same degree of acknowledgement. And then because because we feel that we don't have permission from the outside to express them. We also don't express them to ourselves either. You know, like the story I just told you, it took me.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  It took me a really long time to understand that it had been for me as profound as losing a mother at an early age, you know, through more conventional means. You don't think of it in those terms.

• 46:27Ryan Holiday?

  How has that shaped how you think about these things with your kids? Like, I think about this with my own parents. It's like, I think so much of what I'm trying to do is just not make some of the same mistakes. Not prize certain things that don't actually matter or get caught up in certain things that don't actually matter. But how have you thought about that sort of struggle you went through with your mother now that your kids are not exactly the same age, but at least approaching that same age?

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, you know, I'm happy to say I always had the sense that I wasn't going to repeat that mistake. And I think my kids would tell you that I haven't. And we don't have these kinds of issues. And I think part of it, you know, for reasons I won't go into here, I think my mother had certain you know, gaps and unresolved issues that that really got in the way. I also always felt that things would have been so much better if she had had a career.

• 47:31Ryan Holiday?

  Somewhere for that energy.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Somewhere for that energy to go. So from the time I was very young, like as soon as I became aware of these dynamics, I resolved to myself that I was always going to have a career. And I can't not just any career, but like something I cared about deeply.

• 47:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  And I really do feel that that has been huge because I don't know, you know, like now my my older son will often like want to spend all weekend with his friends or whatever. And I'm like, okay, you know, that's fine. Like, I love his company when he's around, but if he's not like, okay, I, you know, I have a thousand things to do. So.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  It's just a, an emotionally healthier setup, I think, for dealing with those kinds of small losses. I also think that because of having had this experience, this is something I've just thought about so intensely. I've just been aware that it's coming and I'm really interested in the different rituals that people around the world have used to deal with this. Like, there was one tribe I read about, and I wish I could remember which one it was. But anyway, it was a tribe where the ritual is that the women in this village, when they had a son, because it was only for sons, from, from the time their

• 48:51Speaker 01

  sons were babies, every year, the women were expected to give up something of great value to them, so that they could prepare themselves for the day that their sons would turn 13 and grow into men and leave their mother's side.

• 49:09Ryan Holiday?

  So it was an ongoing thing as opposed to this abrupt, shattering thing?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's kind of like what I'm talking, yeah, it, it's kind of like reminding these mothers that this loss is part of life. And it's like a way of acclimating them to it from the beginning. And as you say, so that it's not, it's not abrupt. And it's kind of like what I'm talking about in general. Like, if we're always aware that, you know, even when your, your baby's three years old and, you know, beautiful, bouncy baby, you're simultaneously going to delight in that and also be aware that that is impermanent. And it's actually okay. There's something about accepting that that's okay and precious.

• 49:54Ryan Holiday?

  I think about that all the time, especially because it's part of this sort of Stoic thing that changed how I think about it. You know, Seneca says, and I know you quote him in the book, and I appreciate, I was very surprised to see myself in there, which was just very nice. But, you know, Seneca, Seneca says that, you know, it's wrong to think of death as something in the future that you're moving towards, that it's actually happening always, right? That you're dying, that we're dying every day. And so, that's changed how I've seen my kids growing up. So instead of being like,

• 50:30Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, I love every minute of what they are, but there's, to go to your point, there's a bittersweetness every time I notice like, wow, they are so cute right now. Or this is the sweet, this is the sweetest thing ever. I love this so much. Also realizing that not only will, will that literally never happen again, because we're always moving forward in time, but that like, my son at my, my, my youngest is about to turn three and it's like, he'll never be this age again, you know, that, that like, every benchmark is also moving away from what I love and who he was. And that, that, that's wonderful because he's getting older and we can do more things and there's more

• 51:14Ryan Holiday?

  possibilities, but he's also not going to let me put him down to bed that many more nights.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, and knowing that, I'm guessing that has a way of making you appreciate every single one of those moments where he lets you put him to bed, right?

• 51:34Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. Yeah. I mean, that's been the craziest part about the pandemic. We have, um, so my son was eight months old in March of 2020. So we have, you know, those little boards where you're like eight months old and you're supposed to take pictures every month. Well, like, because the world exploded, we just stopped doing that. So it's just there, just sits in the corner of his room. And it's like, it's like, you know, your watch broke or something. And so it's like this weird memorial of thinking like, now I have some sense of how long the pandemic is always because I can just do the math in my head. But, but what I think about the last two years is like, always like, we'll never have this much time again. Cause my, my oldest is about to start kindergarten

• 52:17Ryan Holiday?

  and then my youngest will probably send to daycare at the same time. So we, we had, because of what happened, we just had two years together that ordinarily they would have been. Go into stuff and we would have been, you know, at home by ourselves. We had just had so much more time than we otherwise would have. So that's wonderfully sweet, but it's also bitter because it's, it's so, it is abnormal. That's not how the rest of their life can be.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right, right. And then at the same time, as you say, like each, each new stage is going to hold some other delight.

• 52:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I'm excited for him to go to school. It's important that he goes to school, but I also don't want him to go.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. No, I totally understand that. Though I can tell you, you know, my, my kids now are 12 and 14 and I really do feel like it just gets better and better with every age. And I don't know, you know, and then there's the part of me, even as I'm saying that, I'm like, well, you know, there may come the day when they're really just fully grown, then you won't feel that way. But I don't really think so. I don't really think so. I think there's, I think there's a way to feel like, like the sorrow at the loss of, well, that which was will never be again. But like every stage can be great. And I

• 53:37Speaker 01

  mean, David Yaden, whose work I quote in my book, he's actually found that it's when people are in the transitional moments of life, and even the really difficult transitions, you know, like the divorces and even the end of life, that those tend to be the times when we experience the greatest sense of, of meaning and communion and awe. And, and I think that there's a lot to that.

• 54:07Ryan Holiday?

  Do you think it's because they're so uncertain and unfamiliar that we're actually forced to be present for them?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's something like that.

• 54:18Ryan Holiday?

  You're not on autopilot as you're going through a divorce because you're having to do so much, you know?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Having to do so much. And I think you're kind of like broken open in a certain way. And so you're just that much more like absorbing of everything that's coming to you next, which I, which isn't to say it's not like incredibly, you know, distressing as it's happening.

• 54:38Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  There's this other side to it.

• 54:41Ryan Holiday?

  Well, so to me, the wonderful part of quiet is that you're basically saying, hey, this thing that maybe you're insecure about, you know, your introversion is actually a superpower, that it gives you all these things. So if we take, I'm sure there's someone who's hearing the stuff we're talking about, about sort of the bittersweetness and going like, that sounds like a lot of work, or that sounds very painful. Wouldn't it be easier just to be oblivious to all of it, or to be so, so happy that you don't, you don't notice the bitter side of things? What do you think the superpower of, or the benefit to this bittersweetness is? Like, what is it, what does it give us?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  It gives, it opens us up to creativity, and to connection, and to love, those three things. And we actually found this, we did a preliminary bittersweet quiz, I say we, I did this with the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman.

• 55:42Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, I know Scott.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, isn't Scott awesome?

• 55:44Ryan Holiday?

  He's the best.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  He is the best. So he's been a friend for a really long time. And he was just kind of with me as I was writing this book. And I was like, hey, you want to do this quiz together? And David Yaden, too, who's also become a good friend, he's at Johns Hopkins, God bless you, studying psychedelics and so on. And anyway, we, we found that people who are in a bittersweet state of mind, because you could kind of come and go from that state of mind, but if you're in a bittersweet state of mind, you're more likely to also be in states of mind that predispose you to being creative, and also

• 56:27Speaker 01

  to experiencing states of like, meaning, awe, spirituality in general. I'm saying spirituality in both secular and religious terms.

• 56:36Ryan Holiday?

  Well, as I was reading your book, I was also, I'm sure you've read it, have you read Lincoln's Melancholy?

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I'm familiar with that book, yes.

• 56:44Ryan Holiday?

  I wonder if you think of Lincoln as this depressive guy, and yet also his melancholy is what makes him such a great leader in that he's connected and he has empathy and he's he's in it for the long, hard slog. I wondered if that was part of the superpower of it, too.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, that's such a huge part of it. Absolutely. You know, and I know nowadays, the way these words get tossed around like empathy and so on, like, it could almost make you roll your eyes after a little bit. But

• 57:17Speaker 01

  but there's a non-eye-rolling way to look at all this. And I actually, the the chapter where I talk about this, I quote from the poet Naomi Shihavni, who talks about how sorrow is the you can't know kindness without experiencing sorrow first.

• 57:35Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  It is what gives us empathy, the ability to know what that is. And there's actually an evolutionary reason for this. Like Darwin was wondering about this 150 years ago. He was like, so Darwin was this incredibly melancholic character. He was very gentle, melancholic. He was like, his father wanted him to be a doctor, but he was horrified by the sight of blood. So, you know, he went off to the Galapagos. And and he was both simultaneously sort of horrified by the ability of humans and other animals to be as cruel as we can be. But he also thought that the sympathetic instinct in mammals and in humans was actually our strongest instinct.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  And that it came from the fact that mammals have to care for their crying children, the way that they do, or their defenseless children. And you could say, well, that helps, that instinct of ours to respond to the cries of our infants. Maybe that's really just limited to the infants themselves and not to other people's babies or not to, you know, grownups. But that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to be that that instinct radiates outward from there. And I think actually, the great challenge for our species over the next century is going to be to figure out how to extend that instinct ever wider. But we seem to be built for it. So like the psychologist

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Dacher Keltner has done all kinds of amazing studies looking at this stuff. So just one example, we have, all of us, a vagus nerve, which is the biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies. And it's an incredibly fundamental system, you know, like it governs our digestion and our breathing and sex drive and everything. And also, your vagus nerve, when you see another being in distress, your vagus nerve responds. So it makes you respond as if it's your own distress and you want to like, you want to alleviate it. And that's kind of amazing, if you think about it, because it's telling us that this capacity to respond to the sorrow of other beings is, it's that fundamental, as much as, as our ability

• 59:49Speaker 01

  to breathe. But you can only do that if you've been opened up to what sorrow actually is and not closed yourself down from it, the way we're taught to do.

• 1:00:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so it's almost like the sorrow that we experience or the pain that we experience, you could see it as like, it's like invitation to a club, because now you know a little bit more about other people, or, or what, what humans have always gone through. It's,

• 1:00:23Ryan Holiday?

  there's the Eschelus line about how we, we suffer into wisdom, you know, that the pain of, that, I think Robert Kennedy quoted this when he gave that extemporaneous speech about Martin Luther King's assassination. He's, he's talking to this crowd that's about to turn into a violent mob. And he's like, I know what you're feeling. My brother was just killed the exact same way. Right? And, and so that, that the, the loss and the, the pain of what we go through would be awful if it wasn't also helping us.

• 1:00:58Ryan Holiday?

  Connect with other people in a way that isn't possible through essentially any other, any other way.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And at the same time, we also have to make an active choice to do it because

• 1:01:11Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  You know, if you look around, it's like you see people who have experienced some terrible sorrows and, and some of them will go in the direction of not acknowledging that and not trying to transform it into something better and more beautiful, but instead taking out those sorrows in other people. So, you know, like they've been abused and then they abuse in turn, or whatever it is. I, I think that

• 1:01:35Ryan Holiday?

  It can harden you instead of open you.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So I, I think when we, um, when we meet those crossroads in our lives, like when the real, the real difficulties come to us, I think we really had, those are really crossroads moments where we really have a choice, you know, are, are we going to get hardened? Are we going to take them out on others? Or are we going to actively look for a way to transform it into something else? That's really the key question.

• 1:02:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah. The Stoics talk about Marcus Verliss as a strong stomach digests what it eats and a fire turns everything that is thrown into it into flame and brightness. Um, but as I've thought about it, that's not, that's not totally true, right? Like a, a weak fire gets put out by what you throw on top of it. Right? Like if you ever started a fire and you, you get too excited or you, you know, you put too much wood, it just, you, you, you put out the fire. So you need some, you need something in you that's strong enough to consume

• 1:02:36Ryan Holiday?

  and to consume it into fuel. It's a, as you said, it's a, it's a choice or it's a skill.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  It's a skill. I, I really like that to say that it's a skill and, and to give ourselves a break if we don't acquire that skill right away. Um, so like I'm thinking of the, the life story that I talk about in the book or the childhood story, let's say of Maya Angelou, um, who, you know, had, had been through A childhood of really just unspeakable pain. Sure. Her, her, her parents had sent her and her older brother away to distant relatives with, with signs pinned on their chests that said, "To whom it may concern." And she was raped when she was, I think it was eight years old, maybe nine.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Terrible racism of the era. So all of that. And especially after she had been raped and she told people about it, the man who had raped her was killed by others who were so angry at what he had done. And so she started to feel that the very act of speaking could cause someone to die. So she stopped speaking, like literally for five years. She did not talk to anybody except her brother, not one word. And, and like her story could have ended there or with something close to that, or she could have grown up to take out those abuses on, on other people. But, but instead

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  what happened is she met a woman named Bertha Flowers, who took her under her wing and who saw how much she loved to read. And she introduced her to A Tale of Two Cities, the book. But she also like spoke the words of the book out loud. And for the young Maya, she heard those words as a kind of music that she wanted to, like she was reaching for it, that longing thing. And that's what started her writing and then speaking and like, and she starts writing, you know, memoirs and poetry and, and all of it. And, and to me, like, like

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  another amazing detail of her story is that a whole generation later, there's another little girl who reads the book that she wrote, I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  And another woman reads it thinking, oh, I was exactly this little girl too. Like, I was also raped when I was little. I also grew up in this kind of an environment in the South. And that little girl was Oprah Winfrey.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  And she saw herself in that exact story. And in the way that Maya Angelou had taken the trouble to transform her story into something beautiful and of use. And that's what I think. It's not like we all have to be writing, you know, these amazing life altering memoirs. That's not the point at all, at all, at all. It's just like, what could you do to take whatever heartbreak you happen to be having and sculpt it into something else? The very act of the sculpting.

• 1:05:45Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, and that's Lincoln. Lincoln doesn't write anything, but his painful life and his terrible childhood and then the loss of his own child. It makes him exactly who the country needs in this time of grief and strife and death and the mighty scourge of war, as he calls it.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Ryan Holiday?

  You can take what you've gone through and then be either what you need or someone else needs as a result of that. If you choose, you could also go inward as a result of what you experienced. And as you said, become hardened or awful or selfish or, you know, part of the problem.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's also important to say, there's also a kind of wastation. Like, you know, you could go inward and not take it out on anyone else, but sort of not be ready to come out of, come out the other side.

• 1:06:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  And it takes a while to come out the other side. And that's okay, too.

• 1:06:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And I've got to imagine for you, 2020 isn't, you don't just flip a switch and you go, oh, this was.

• 1:06:51Ryan Holiday?

  This is wonderful because it wasn't wonderful. It was painful and terrible. And so I imagine that that's sort of the journey that you're on now. The book I'm sure helped, but I'm sure you're on it still.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, you know, I think I'll be on it for the rest of my life as we all are with everything that comes our way.

• 1:07:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And that's, that's the, that's the other, other side of the rainbow of it also.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's just like you can kind of keep getting closer. I mean, I literally remember like when I first started writing this book and I decided I was gonna write the whole story of what happened with my mother. I remember sitting and having lunch with Gretchen Rubin, also an author. And I remember saying to Gretchen, okay, I'm writing this story. You know, and the day is gonna come where I'm gonna have to do book publicity and someone might ask me about it and what the heck am I gonna do? Because I might really just start crying, you know, on national radio or something. And notwithstanding what I'm saying about, well, tears are okay. I didn't really want that to happen.

• 1:07:56Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  And it, and then I talked to someone else who also became a character in this book. And he said to me, you know, talk to me when you're done writing the book because you might find that that problem has resolved. And at the time he said that, I really did think that was one of those, you know, kind of woo woo things that people say that aren't really true. But there is, I do think there's something about that act of, of a concrete transformation that helps us to come to terms with, with the things that are, you know, kind of our animating pains, let's say.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  You know, I like what I say is whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering.

• 1:08:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Well, I think people miss that about Stoicism, that Stoicism is somehow like stuffing this stuff down, or like just deciding, I'm not going to feel it. I think what you're talking about is the way you're supposed to do it, which is if it takes five years, or it takes 50 years, you have to process it and deal with it. And that's how you get to a place where it doesn't bring you to tears. There's no, there's no like,

• 1:09:11Ryan Holiday?

  it's not about force, it's about actually dealing with it. You're not just like deferring it, or pretending it's not there. You have to, you have to get up close and personal with it, which I imagine that's what the book was, is your first real, real dealing with it.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think there's also something about transforming it in some kind of way into, you know, into love. When I first started researching this book, you will be tickled to know, one of the first things, because you know, I kind of like, walk around the world whenever I have a new topic, like just absorbing everything through that lens. So one of the first things that I did is I went to a conference on Stoicism.

• 1:09:54Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicon, or what'd you go to?

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  I'm trying to remember. It was in New York. It was a big one. It must have been Stoicon. And the theme of that year was Stoicism and love. And I felt kind of like, I didn't really know what animated that decision to make that the conference theme, but I had the sense it must come from the feeling people have that Stoicism doesn't deal with love, even though love is the most important, not just the most important thing we experience, but the most important destination. And I think that there is a way of practicing Stoicism, though I am no expert, that takes you there.

• 1:10:37Ryan Holiday?

  There's a, there's a line in, in meditations, he's, he's thank, he's thanking

• 1:10:44Ryan Holiday?

  someone at the beginning of it. I'm trying to find, oh.

• 1:10:49Ryan Holiday?

  This is, this is what Marcus learns from Sextus. Kindness, gravity without errors. Says to investigate and analyze with understanding and logic, the principles we ought to live by. And then he says, not to display anger or other emotions, to be free of passion, yet full of love. Which is to be the paradox of it. How do, how are you free of passion, yet full of love? But, but love is such a transformatively different emotion than all the other emotions. I think it's somehow, I think they're saying that it's somehow different and much more okay.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe it means free of the fiery passions. Like there are other kinds of passions too.

• 1:11:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think it's like to be free of anger or lust or resentment or jealousy or fear. But love, love is a calming, open, vulnerable, accepting emotion that I think is, is just different than all the others.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right. I mean, it's interesting what, what philosophical tradition we end up being drawn to and why. So like, you know, from reading this book, I, I actually became really interested in Sufism as I was kind of going down this path and

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  and I think the reason for it is that at the heart of Sufism, as I understand it, what it really is, is about kind of the, the experience of longing. But what you're really longing for is love, not, not in the sense of, oh, I want the perfect partner. Although I guess that's too, you know, it's bigger than that. But it's the idea that the act of longing is what takes you there. And, and the great Sufi teacher, Llewellyn von Lee, whom I met through this process. He talks about how longing is a kind of

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Is the feminine expression of love because it's saying, you know, fill me up. I'm like, I'm the cup waiting to be filled up is the way that he puts it. And that that because the feminine aspect has been so undervalued in our culture. We don't pay attention to the power in it. We devalue that power. But but that was an expression that I just instinctively found incredibly empowering. And it kind of it answered a lot of questions for me. Can I redo something?

• 1:13:22Ryan Holiday?

  Please, please.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so there's this one famous Sufi poem called Love Dogs. It's by the 12th century poet Jalaluddin Rumi, who's actually, I think now the bestselling poet in the US, which is kind of interesting. I'm pulling this down off my wall. Hold on one sec. So so this is a poem that's about a man who is praying to Allah. And then a cynical guy comes along and says, what are you praying for? You know, did you ever get an answer back? And he thinks to himself, no, you know, I never did get an answer. So maybe this whole thing isn't worth it. And he falls asleep.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  And while he's sleeping, the figure of Khider, who's the guide of souls, comes to him and asks him, why did you stop praying? And he says, well, I never got an answer back. And the response of Khider in this poem to the problem of not getting the answer back, he says, this longing you express is the return message. The grief you cry out from draws you toward union. Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  And, you know, those lines to me, it's like I wrote a whole book or you could read this. That's to me, that sets it off.

• 1:14:41Ryan Holiday?

  No, I to- I totally agree. And I feel like one of the things that I've found as I've gotten older, particularly the last two years, you go back to these poets or philosophers or religious teachers. And I think before you think of them as just thinkers about big ideas or whatever, and then you read, you know, you read Marcus Aurelius during the plague, who was writing during the plague, or, or whomever, and you realize, oh, these were also human beings who experienced the exact thing, right? Like, like analyzing Marcus Aurelius, you know, knowing that he'd lost, you know, several children before adulthood. And then you go, oh, he's, he's clearly grieving in this moment and writing to himself something about grief or loss or pain. And that, that

• 1:15:26Ryan Holiday?

  these philosophers weren't just thinking about these things abstractly, but their real human experiences, pain and loss and fear and all of that was informing what they were writing. It just gives a whole other layer. Like, understanding that Lincoln was also a grieving father helps you understand what he was saying in the second inaugural address or whatever.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that's what I think, I mean, coming to music where we were talking about all the way at the beginning, I feel like that's why music speaks to us the way that it does, because it tells us without words that the musician who's expressing these things has been in that place, him or herself. And then they're taking the trouble to transform it into this, into something glorious. But they're kind of reminding you.

• 1:16:18Ryan Holiday?

  That's what drives, that's what drives me insane about music is that, that the person is able to, in three notes, get to a place that would take 500 pages of writing. You know what I mean? It's so frustrating. It's, it's both magical and so frustrating. It's, it's, it's not fair.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, I don't even think to try. Like, I think of all the media, music is by far and away the highest, and there, nothing else can come close. Like, to me, it, it just touches the source.

• 1:16:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, or that, that, that poem in, in three lines could be, you know, a book that took six years of your life. You're just like, it's not, it's not fair. It's, how can they distill it down and at the same time make it so evocative that it could touch in the way that it touches?

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, to me, it's just, it's the most glorious thing.

• 1:17:14Ryan Holiday?

  It's magical.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:18Ryan Holiday?

  Well, this is, uh, this has been amazing, and I loved the book. Uh, I love, I love both of them. They're both, both must reads, and you're amazing, and I'm so glad we got to talk.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. Yeah, I love talking to you so much. We should be doing this more often.

• 1:17:34Ryan Holiday?

  We should.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  We end up talking on the phone like every two years about this or that, but, um, we should do it more regularly.

• 1:17:40Ryan Holiday?

  I'll, I'll take you up on that for sure.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much for having me on this podcast.

• 1:17:45Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. 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.