It All Fades Away | Check Your Privilege, right?

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  It all fades away.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  When Marcus Aurelius came to the throne in 161 A.D., he had been preceded by 15 emperors. Each of these emperors and eras had their great men and women: consuls, generals, power brokers, merchants, artists. And Marcus took pains in meditations to note that despite all their fame and influence and immense accomplishments, most of them were forgotten, even though it had only been few generations. Their great names were unfamiliar, even unpronounceable. Their statues had crumbled. Their wealth had disappeared. "Sic transit Gloria mundi." He noticed this as a way of humbling himself, of trying not to be stained by his position, as so many other Caesars had. And this is partly why

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus was such a good emperor. He knew it wasn't about him. He knew that he wasn't special. The comedian and director Judd Apatow notes another philosophical benefit from this exercise. "There's this feeling that you get when you get older," he writes in Sicker in the Head, "where you realize, like, kids don't remember mash. They don't remember cheers or family ties. And pretty soon, they won't remember friends. You feel everything is going off a cliff in a very Buddhist way. Whether you like it or not, you start feeling the texture of the nature of everything disappearing, and they are only really alive in this moment."

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus was anticipating that few of us would remember the names of the other five good emperors. He was anticipating how he'd be forgotten by history, considered a minor philosopher in academia, remembered if at all because he was killed at the beginning of a Hollywood movie like Gladiator. He was reminding himself not just of the unpredictability of posthumous fame, but its other worthlessness. What mattered instead, the present, what he was doing in this moment, whether he was being good and just and true to himself. Because that's the only thing he controlled, because it was good unto itself, whether anyone remembered or not.

• 3:03Ryan Holiday?

  Check your privilege.

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  This is the July 28 entry in the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the bestseller list. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. Today's quote comes to us from Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus. "Some people are sharp and others are dull. Some are raised in a better environment, others in worse.

• 3:51Ryan Holiday?

  The latter having inferior brains, having inferior habits and nurture, will require more by the way of proof and careful instruction to master these teachings and to be formed by them, in the same way that bodies in a bad state must be given a great deal of care when perfect health is sought." At the end of a frustrating exchange, you might find yourself thinking, oh, this person is such an idiot. We're asking, why can't they just do things right? But not everyone has had the advantages that you've had. That's not to say that your life has been easy. You've just had a head start over some people. And that's why it is our duty to understand and be patient with others. Philosophy is a spiritual formation, care of the soul.

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  Some need more care than others, just as some have a better metabolism and were born taller than others. The more forgiving and tolerant you can be of others, the more you can be aware of your various privileges and advantages, the more helpful and patient you will be. And again, I think it's worth pointing out here that Epictetus was taught by Musonius Rufus. So Musonius Rufus is this teacher. He's known as the Roman Socrates. He's great and wise and brilliant. And he teaches the best and the brightest of Rome, most of which would be rich, powerful, privileged people. And it somehow he makes room in his classroom for Epictetus, who clearly was brilliant, but would have had a number of disadvantages. You think about where Epictetus came from.

• 5:19Ryan Holiday?

  He walks with a limp because of the years in slavery, because of the torture he underwent. You think about the deprivation, the struggle. But Musonius Rufus finds not just a way to reach Epictetus, but make him great. He's patient with him. He encourages him. And this isn't the only evidence we have of Musonius Rufus sort of understanding his own privilege and being generous and open minded. Musonius Rufus also famously says that women should be taught philosophy, which was a remarkably progressive thing at that time. So I know like when people hear check your privilege, this was a less loaded term I used as the title of this section when I wrote the book in 2015 and it came out in 2016. I get people have an instinctive reaction. Oh, it's woke or whatever.

• 6:03Ryan Holiday?

  But the truth is, we are all privileged in some form or another. And how do I know this? Because you are listening to this on a podcast, which means you have a smartphone. Maybe you're driving in a car. It means you're commuting to a job in a city. That has public transportation. And there are literally billions of people for whom that is not just not true, but almost incomprehensibly luxurious and wonderful to them. They could not even conceive of doing some of the things that you take for granted. And then even in the context of like, let's say you had a super hard life. And I tried to make that caveat in the thing. Maybe you're tall, maybe you're beautiful, maybe your parents actually loved you as a child.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  Right? Maybe you haven't been horribly abused, or maybe you were horribly abused, but not as horribly as other people have. But we all have privileges in our life. We all have advantages, right? We all have things that give us a leg up in the world. And that's not to say that the other things haven't happened. It's one, to be grateful for those things and to be patient with people that don't have those things. Right? And to try to sprinkle the advantages we have, to share it, to spread the wealth, to lift others up and to be patient and forgiving and understanding with the people who have not been blessed the way that we have. To be like Musonius Rufus, to be able to say,

• 7:31Ryan Holiday?

  Musonius Rufus was powerful and important and had access to the best and the brightest. And his greatest legacy was this former slave that he helped. And through helping that former slave, he helped not just that person, not just improve their life, but had an immediate impact then through Marcus Aurelius and through you and I today. We would not be listening to this were it not for the generosity and patience and understanding of Musonius Rufus, two Epictetus. And I think that's a wonderful thing to emulate and to pay forward.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic. Life, it's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you've talked about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts, and this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at DailyStoicLife.com.