Will You Seize This Reminder? Or Let It Pass? | What Expensive Things Cost

During this season of spring cleaning, it’s worth pondering: How often do we organize not just our physical spaces, but our minds, routines, and assumptions?💡 Challenge yourself to spring forward and become the person you aspire to be. The Spring Forward Challenge starts March 20, 2025. Visit dailystoic.com/spring and sign up now!👉 Get The Spring Forward Challenge & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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 FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

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

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Spring is the most beautiful of the seasons. Suddenly, after a dreary winter, the colors come back, the birds are out, the days last longer, the breeze is light and the air is cool. But as Philip Larkin's bittersweet poem reminds us, beneath this turning of seasons is a kind of darkness. As the poem goes, "The trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said. The recent buds relax and spread. Their greenness is a kind of grief." The inherent message is about the passage of time. Each season brings new life, yes, but also marks the sensation of life. "It's a painful truth," the poem says, "that's written in the rings of a tree. Winter is dead and over, and all of us a little more so, too."

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  This notion serves as a gentle nudge, reminding us of the preciousness of every moment. It urges us not merely to exist, but to truly live, to seize each season and extract its full potential.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  Which is what we mean when we say here at Daily Stoic that it's time to spring forward. If you did our New Year, New You Challenge, you heard us talking about that back in December. Well, we've got a new one for you. It's called the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. This is the time of year where, you know, we're talking about spring cleaning. It's worth pondering, how often do we organize not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines, and our assumptions as well, reflect on the last week? How many of those seven days were efficient and as productive as they could have been? Or did you find yourself wasting time over complicating things and falling back on old habits? Or are you, like many others, still feeling the lingering effects of winter's inertia? Well, the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge is designed

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  to prompt introspection into those aspects of your life, to help you scrutinize your choices, your relationships, and your habits, and help propel you towards a life of fulfillment. As Marx really said, "This is what you deserve. You could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow." So the choice is yours. Are you going to let your New Year's resolutions fade into missed opportunities and continue with the status quo? Or could you invest 10 days into self-improvement, create some runway for some genuine lasting change? Challenge yourself with me and thousands of other Stoics all over the world to spring forward and become the person you aspire to be. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/spring.

• 3:19Ryan Holiday?

  I'll see you in there. We're going to do a bunch of awesome stuff, Q and A with me, some great lessons, all kinds of great thinking on how to spring forward, grab this next season, and get the most out of it. And I'd love to see you join us, dailystoic.com/spring. And you can also join Daily Stoic Life if you've been thinking about doing that and get this challenge and all the other challenges we're doing for the rest of the year, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff for free. And you can do that at dailystoiclife.com.

• 3:53Ryan Holiday?

  What expensive things cost? From the cynics, the Stoics learned the powerful practice of focusing on the true worth of things, that the cost of an item isn't simply what it's sold for, but what it costs the owner to own. So much of our desire for material goods comes at the great price of both anxiety and the loss of our serenity. And even when gained, these things often leave us more anxious and less serene. So today, spend some time reflecting on what the things you buy actually cost you and see if they are really worth what you have been paying. And that's from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, and we have some quotes from Seneca and Epictetus here.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  "So concerning the things we pursue and for what we vigorously exert ourselves, we owe this consideration: either there is nothing useful in them, or most aren't useful. Some of them are superfluous, while others aren't worth that much. But we don't discern this and see them as free when they cost us so dearly." That's Seneca's Moral Letters. Then we have Epictetus. "If a person gave your body away to some passerby, you'd be furious, yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along so that they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. Have you no shame?" Epictetus asks. And then we have Diogenes Laertus quoting Diogenes of Sinope. That's Diogenes the Cynic.

• 5:21Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "We sell things of great value for things of very little, and vice versa." You know, they say the best things in life are free, and that's not really true. But I would say that a lot of things are much more expensive than they appear. Right? So we chase these things. We want these things. We want a fancy car, and then we're worried about making sure nothing happens to that fancy car. I remember a few years ago, I put new floors in my house. And on the one hand, I hated the old floors, and it made the house look better, and they were easier to walk. Gone and improve my life. But then we had kids and now all of a sudden there's this part of me

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  that worries about the floors all the time, right? I don't want them to get scratched. I don't want water to sit on them. And so this thing that costs me money, it was not cheap to put new floors in the house. Didn't just cost what it cost. It cost all the anxiety. It costs the arguments between me and my wife about who's to blame for this scratch on the floor from the couch. You know, it costs goodwill between me and my kid. Because I'm like, hey, why did you spill, you know, that that part of you that just blurts out, you know, trying to protect things? And the truth is, it really doesn't matter. And I remember I was talking to a therapist about some version of this and she said, just write it off, like write it off in your head. You spent the money. It's gone.

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  You can't try to keep it all together, right? You can't try to keep it pristine. It's like the people who buy a toy and then they want it in mint condition. I mean, this is not just a violation of the law of entropy. It's a violation of the law of happiness. You will not be happy if this is how you're spending all your time trying to keep everything in one place, trying to keep them together. It's an illusion. It will not last. You cannot do it. You have to be able to let go. That's the old Zen saying that, you know, the cup is already broken. The cup is already broken. The Stoics knew that expensive things cost even more than their price tag. That's why there's the great story of Epictetus. He has this lamp. It's stolen.

• 7:30Ryan Holiday?

  And the next day he says, I'm gonna go get a cheaper lamp so I don't have to worry about it getting stolen ever again. And I don't have to be sad that it's missing ever again. So for the Stoics, remember the, it's not just what actually is valuable and isn't. You know, a lot of times we ascribe value to things that are superficial and meaningless and pointless. But also it's realizing that you are spending even more money than you think on things and you're spending, you're spending your happiness is really what you're spending on. So I want to leave you with that thought. It's not that you live in a pigsty. You don't care about anything. You should try to keep your things nice and not unnecessarily wear them down, but you Also cannot resist entropy. You cannot resist time. You cannot resist wear and tear.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  And if you do so, it comes at the expense. The most important thing, which is time, and the other most important thing, which is your happiness. And the other most important thing, which is the relationships, the people in your life. So you only have so much time to think or worry or spend time on things. Are you going to spend it trying to preserve your floors? You're not even going to live there forever. You're probably going to tear them out at some point anyway. No, focus on what matters.

• 8:42Ryan Holiday?

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