It Was Ancient To The Ancients, Too | Ask DS

Stoicism was ancient to the ancients too. It’d been old for a long time. Ask DS: What are the Stoics teachings about “know thyself”? What are the main principles of Stoicism that people can apply when they struggle to achieve work life balance? Does Stoicism have the potential to be a social or political movement?+ More!🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members, or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  It was ancient to the ancients, too. Of course, it seems quite old to us. Seneca lived 20 centuries ago. Cato was born in the year 95 B.C. As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, "The dates and names and places feel so unfamiliar to us with the passage of time." Who can pronounce the name Chrysippus? Who remembers Athenodorus? Or Arius? From a perch here in the 21st century, not many. And yet, it's interesting to remember, as Marcus was pointing out, that Stoicism was ancient to the ancients, too. It's been old for a long time. Nearly 400 years separate Marcus Aurelius and Zeno. Seneca knew well

• 1:23Ryan Holiday?

  the works of Cleanthes, but about 230 years separated them, and 56 years separated Seneca from Marcus Aurelius. Some 10 emperors ruled between Seneca's boss Nero and Marcus, the philosopher-king. Between them were generations and generations of Stoics, reading, talking about, translating, and publishing those works. And there were generations of Stoics after, too. Montaigne, whose famous essays, you can grab a copy of The Painted Porch, I highly recommend, and I'm writing about him in the fourth book in the Virtue series now, which does not have a title yet. Anyways, Montaigne helped popularize and recontextualize the Stoics. That was in the 16th century.

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  George Long's famous translation of Meditations was published in 1862, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson did his American edition of Epictetus in 1865. These were modern editions of ancient texts that now feel ancient to us. In time, the same thing will happen to the Daily Stoic, which is now approaching its 10th birthday. The same thing will happen to this email and to the people reading it. Ancient Rome isn't some fixed period. In fact, it's more a process, a process like entropy that is acting on all things at all times. We're all in the process of becoming ancient. Everything new will someday become ancient.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  By the same token, everything ancient was itself at one point shiny and new.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast where I answer your questions. I'm going to bring you a couple of the questions that the folks at the Melbourne Town Hall asked me. What an incredible venue. As you know, I love like sort of old spaces, old venues. And these honestly, these places felt like churches. It couldn't have been a cooler place to talk about Stoicism. And for like, the first time I talked to an audience like that, it was just unreal. Like, if I never do another one in my life, I'll feel like I crossed some crazy thing off my bucket list. But I do get to do some more. So if you want to come see me in London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, or Toronto, grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour. In the meantime, here are some answers to your Stoic questions.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Ryan, your content's brought me a lot of peace. One of the questions that I had through learning more about the philosophy of the Stoics was the phrase "know yourself" or "know thyself." I wonder if you can maybe comment a little bit about that phrase and I guess the teachings from the Stoics when it comes to that?

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that comes from the Oracle of Delphi and is adopted by Socrates as his motto. Know thyself. Know what you don't know. Know your biases. Know your weaknesses. Know your strengths.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  Idea of some semblance of self-awareness to me is a key attribute in the pursuit of philosophy. If you don't ultimately take from this a sense of who you are, your values, your weaknesses, what are you doing? Why learn the names of all these philosophers? Why learn these quotes? Why learn these ideas if it doesn't, in the end, get you a little bit closer to understanding yourself and what you're capable of doing? That's kind of how I think about that.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  G'day, Ryan, up here. Got a queue happening up here. Question for you. There was an essay done in the 1940s by Albert Camus called "The Myth of Sisyphus", in which he finishes the essay saying, "One must imagine Sisyphus as happy", in that "the pursuit towards the heights should fill a man's heart". How much of a parallel between what Camus was talking about, which is absurdism, in which we kind of go from this sine wave between happiness to despair across our lifetime, has a parallel to Stoicism?

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think there's a fair amount of overlap. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy". He is detached from the outcome, the idea of ever achieving or fulfilling the thing, and he is simply doing it. And he is, on this other level, had to accept an unfair, even onerous fate, which, to me, I think, sort of encapsulates some fundamental element of what the Stoics have to do. Marx-Realist doesn't want to be emperor. We get the sense that it's not a thing he found particularly fulfilling or fun. In a sense, that's good.

• 6:27Ryan Holiday?

  The people who really want lots of power are usually the people you don't want to have or give lots of power to. So there was kind of an acceptance or resignation to the reality of, you know, the hand that life had played him. And then the converse of this is Epictetus, who, instead of being blessed with power and abundance and wealth of things Marcus Aurelius finds so troublesome, gets the opposite of all those things. And yet, he has to find a way to find freedom and fulfillment and peace inside that too. And to me, there's something about the two great Stoics being on total opposite ends of the social hierarchy.

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  One has extreme abundance, the other has extreme adversity and difficulty. And yet, they both come to the same fundamental understanding of life and meaning. That, to me, is the essence of what Stoic philosophy is.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Thanks, Ryan. Thank you so much for writing all the books, please. "Ego is the Enemy" changed my life in many ways. And when I get angry, my kids say to me, "Marcus Aurelius is watching you, so don't let him go." So I just want to ask you, like, work-life balance is a thing which is, like, everybody talks about that.

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  And people say that to stay happy, you need to have work-life balance.

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  But there are professions where sometimes it is hard to achieve on many days. What are the main principles of Stoicism which those people can apply when they can't achieve work-life balance to stay happy?

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Without that work-life balance, I think we burn ourselves out, we spin off the planet, we neglect our other responsibilities and obligations. It can be hard. I mean, Marcus Aurelius in "Meditations" is talking about how people who love what they do wear themselves down doing it. They forget to wash and eat and sleep. It's true, he says that, but he also says later, maybe correcting... For that overcorrection, he says, you know, don't be all about business. You know, he talks about finding stillness and peace. And clearly, relationships are really important to him. So I like the idea of balance. Maybe tension is another word, that these things are in tension or in opposition for each other. And you find, you know, maybe you go too far in one direction.

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta correct a little bit. You go too far in the other direction, you gotta correct a little bit. To me, it's a constant sort of recalibration, especially because it's not like your family is this stagnant thing, right? What your kids need when they're two is different than what they need when they're 20. You know, their school schedule is different, their emotional needs are different. So understanding that there's kind of seasons to these things. I keep, every time I feel like I figure out the perfect schedule, the perfect, you know, list of priorities, what they want from me changes. Or, you know, how bedtime goes changes, or they wake up sick, or then they have to change schools.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  So it is, to me, just a constant process of figuring it out, as opposed to having figured it out. There is no singular balance. You're just always adjusting and figuring out the scales to get closer to what, you know, you and they need in that moment.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  Maybe you will say that this question is some sort of contradictory to the nature of the Stoicism. But I'm wondering, do you think that the Stoicism has the capacity to become a social movement? Or even a sort of political movement?

• 10:08Ryan Holiday?

  Look, in the ancient world, Stoicism was kind of the civic religion of Rome. It was what the educated and sort of ruling classes ascribes to and understood and tried to live and act by. I think it's funny when... People talk about sort of the popularity of Stoicism now. I mean, most people have never even heard of it. Most people think of it as the kind of, you know, that lowercase stoic of that, you know, has no emotions. I think there's, we're still in the very early days of all the people that could benefit from it and could apply it. I think we'd be better if more people knew it and more people tried to apply it.

• 10:53Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, that's what I'm trying to do in my books. But mostly, I'm just trying to figure these things out for myself. And as I said, the books sort of come out as the other side of that. And what people take from them or use them, I'll leave to them.

• 11:13Ryan 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.