This Is Why It's So Hard | Practice True Joy

“Everyone has trouble admitting they were wrong, including Marcus Aurelius. Yes, he writes glibly in Meditations about how he’s glad to be corrected, but why do you think he wrote that? Because it wasn’t natural. He was reminding himself...probably right after he caught himself failing to admit an error.”Ryan discusses why it’s dangerous to confuse what we do with who we are, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep. The new Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can add the Cover to any mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:36Ryan Holiday?

  This is why it's so hard. Everyone has trouble admitting they were wrong, including Marcus Aurelius. Yes, he writes glibly in Meditations how he's glad to be corrected. But why do you think he wrote that? Because it wasn't natural. He was reminding himself, probably right after he caught himself failing to admit an error. It's hard for us to admit we're wrong because of a little thing called cognitive dissonance. When we have a strong belief, when we are committed to an action or a cause, and are shown contrary information, we're challenged. Can we really accept that we were so stupid as to actually think that? That we wasted all that time, money, energy, over something that turned out to be silly?

• 1:18Ryan Holiday?

  Or worse, what if our beliefs or actions caused real harm to ourselves or others? COVID-19 has been a terrifying illustration of this. First, certain people discounted it completely. Next, they resisted lockdowns, or closures, or social distancing. Next, masks, then vaccines. In between, they believed conspiracy theories, behaved recklessly, and said horrible things. All the while, the death tolls rose, matched only by the piles and piles of clear evidence against all the claims of these people. You'd think that being repeatedly wrong would be humbling, that eventually they'd wake up and change. But think of what admitting they were wrong about any of this would imply.

• 2:00Ryan Holiday?

  The point is not to dunk on these misinformed people, but to empathize. We all find ourselves in such traps. We invest in something, or turn up our nose. At an opportunity, facts change or become clearer. Can we reevaluate? Or are we too stubborn and scared? We join an organization and believe in it. Once inside, as time passes, we get glimpses of its true nature or its impact. Can we leave? Can we stand up and say, this is not right? Or do we blind ourselves and become corrupted by it? It's hard to admit we're wrong because our identity gets tied up in stuff. Our ego gets involved. It separates us from our sense of right and wrong.

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  It makes us forget our true mission, as Marcus Aurelius said, which is to get to the truth. And this is very sad and often incredibly tragic.

• 2:55Ryan Holiday?

  Practice true joy. This is this week's meditation from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living. There is no audiobook of this journal, so the weekly podcast episode is the only way to hear this sort of weekly meditation that we do inside the journal. And it's always been weird for me. I don't know if I should call the journal that I wrote a book. It's 20,000 words. It's got writing in it. Is it a journal? Is it a book? In any case, here is today's meditation. The Stoics held joy to be one of the good passions worthy of practice in everyday life. But Stoic joy isn't about the delights of the senses or material pleasures.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  To Marcus Aurelius, joy was being kind to others. To Seneca, it was freedom from fear or suffering and death. Let's laugh with Democritus, as Seneca says, and engage in our proper human work with joy. So consider making your study of philosophy this week around the idea of where you might find joy and what good you might find to do with it. And here's Marcus Aurelius on Meditations. "Joy for human beings lies in proper human work, and proper human work consists in acts of kindness to other human beings, disdain for the stirring of the senses, and identifying trustworthy impressions, and contemplating the natural order in all that happens in keeping with it." Then we have Seneca in his Moral Letters.

• 4:22Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Trust me, real joy is a serious thing. Do you think that someone can, in the charming expression, blithely dismiss death with an easy disposition? Or swing open the door to poverty, keeping pleasures in check? Or meditate on the endurance of suffering? The one who is comfortable with turning these thoughts over is truly full of joy, but hardly cheerful. It's exactly such a joy that I would wish for you to possess, for it will never truly run dry once you've laid claim to its source." And finally, we have Seneca in On Tranquility of Mind. He says, "Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public. Democritus laughed. One saw the whole as a parade of miseries, the other of follies. And so we shall take a lighter view of things

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  and bear them with an easy spirit, for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it." There is this sense, right? That the Stoics are joyless, that the Stoics are humorlessness, that the Stoics don't appreciate existence, that they're just here beasts of burden, unfeeling, and ready to face death with barely a whimper. But I think there's, first off, too much humor in the Stoics, whether it's Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, or of course Chrysippus, who allegedly died laughing at some inside joke whose meaning barely even survives to us. I just don't think that the Stoics were without joy. You could look at Seneca's enormous parties.

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he famously has like 300 ivory tables as hypocrisy, or it could be an insight to a side of the Stoics that perhaps doesn't appear in their writing very much, but clearly was a big part of their existence, which was, you know, socializing and connecting and having fun with people. But I think what the Stoics, what Seneca most of all is trying to say here is that, is that joy is not hedonism, it's not just pure happiness and lightness. The joy comes from that place of resilience, from removing the unnecessary disturbances that cause misery. And probably define Stoic joy as the absence of misery that a lot

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  of people experience, whether it's fear, or anger, or jealousy, or anxiety. Instead of like, joy is drinking, joy is luxury, joy is parties. I think for the Stoics, it was, joy was the absence of the longing for those things, or anything that made you unhappy. But then, we have to add in Marcus Aurelius's wrinkle, which I think Marcus truly found, although he seems to be an introverted, quiet person who loved his books, he clearly found joy in being of service, helping people, of making the world better. And we have

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  to see that as a key part of our, of our role, you know. As, as an introvert myself, I do empathize with that expression, that hell is other people, that, that life is easier when you, you focus on your stuff. But this is also its own form of misery ultimately, because it makes you lonely, it deprives you of purpose, it deprives you of connection. The Stoics did celebrate joy, they did believe it was an important passion, an important part of life. They just would have disagreed with the Epicureans, who seemed to find joy in, in external things, external pleasures, external experiences. I think for the Stoics, joy was something deeper. It was a way of living, it was a way of thinking, it was

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  a, it was a deeper emanation of self-sufficiency, but also connection, a locking in on one's purpose, doing the work that one is put here to do. And Marcus Aurelius says, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." I think he's also talking about what gives him joy and what makes him happy. Happy in this life, and I hope you find the same thing. Seek out joy, certainly don't disdain joy, and certainly don't think that this philosophy is about not experiencing the joy. I wish you much happiness and joy. You deserve it. My life is better when I have it, and it's something that I actually actively have to work on, and so do you. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.