You Gotta Start Sometime | What Young Men Get Wrong About Stoicism

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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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta start sometime. You could wait for the perfect moment. You could wait for things to get clear. You could wait, as we've all been saying for years now, for things to go back to normal. Or you could get started. You could stop being the fool, the one that Seneca talks about, the one who was always getting ready. You could start demanding, as Epictetus instructed, the best for yourself. You could stop lying. "It's the biggest lie in the world," he said in a Daily Stoic video. Stop telling yourself, "I'll do it in the morning." Do it now. Get started. Begun is half-done. Do it now. Tempest fugit, memento mori. You can't know when you're gonna get another chance. The time that passes, the

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  opportunities you pass on, they are as good as dead. You are a little bit more dead. So don't do it later. Do it now. Today.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  Look, there's a reason that Stoicism is particularly attractive to young men. I totally get it, because I was once one of those young men. And there's no one who will give them the guidance that they desperately need and crave. There's no one that says, "Hey, here's how you live a good and meaningful life, but also a challenging life. Here's how you do what you were put here to do. And by the way, you were put here to do something. You're not worthless. You're not a piece of shit. Society is not discarding you. You have value. You can make a positive difference." And in fact, society needs you and it needs you to do those things. When I got Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, when this book landed on the

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  table of my college apartment, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I described it as a quake book, a book that shook everything that I thought I knew about the world. And here you have like this guy that I'd heard about in movies or in the History Channel, the most powerful man in the world. Was writing notes to himself about how to be a badass, how to be great. And that's what Stoicism was for me and what it opened up in me. And I think what I got the most out of Stoicism early was all the things that it could do for me. Right? How to master my emotions, how to push myself physically, how to put up with people's obnoxiousness and hypocrisy and bullshit.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  And by the way, there was a lot of that in Marcus's time, but there's a ton of it in our time. I don't think it should surprise us then, though, that grifters and demagogues would step in to fill this space. What you see people doing, whether it's Andrew Tate or whoever, is they pervert the ideas in Stoicism. They take some of these core ideas and they mix it with notions of masculinity, other cultural traditions. When you're speaking to people who feel misunderstood or even mistreated, it's easy to direct them towards a kind of a resentment. It can even be channeled into what you might call kind of a modern day know nothing-ism or what you might call anti-woke-ism.

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  That's like a reaction against extremes or misguided, even well-meaning cultural forces. What these young men and then the grifters who are taking advantage of them. What they're missing about Stoicism is this place that society has always gotten Stoicism wrong. There's a huge difference between lowercase Stoicism and uppercase Stoicism. Lowercase Stoicism is all the stereotypes of Stoicism. Has no emotion, invulnerable, repressed. That's not what Stoicism is. The Stoics weren't emotionless. There is a part of Stoicism that's about being less emotional, particularly destructive emotions.

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  So the Stoics were not repressed, emotionless robots. And if you think that's what Stoicism is going to help you do, you're doing it wrong. Like, I think about someone like Andrew Tate. If he thinks Stoicism is just a way to not have to feel hu- Human emotions about the women that he's exploiting, that he is taking advantage of, and I would say victimizing. Like, that's not what fucking Stoicism is at all. And in fact, I think one of the best quotes from Marx to us, he says, "The point of life is good character and acts for the common good." So if you think that this sort of emotionless Stoic is getting to a place where you can just do whatever you want and not have to care about the consequences of those actions on other people, again, you're getting it extremely wrong.

• 5:10Ryan Holiday?

  When I think of Stoicism as this self-help philosophy that seems to be about indifference to other people, or it seems to be a toolkit for being, you know, simply better at business negotiations, or being a get-rich-quick scheme, or Stoicism as a prosperity gospel, or Stoicism as a way to turn away from what's happening in the world. And this is emphatically, the last part, is emphatically what the Stoics were not doing. Seneca would say the difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics was the Epicureans retreated into the garden to pursue individual self-development and self-fulfillment. And he said, "They only got involved in politics and public life if they had to."

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  And he said, "The Stoics, on the other hand, got involved in politics and public life unless something prevented them." So every once in a while, I'll say something political in one of these videos, or I'll talk about some social issue in our time, and people go, "What do you think Seneca would think about you talking about politics on The Daily Stoic?" And I go, "He'd probably not be surprised, given that his day job was as one of the most powerful politicians in Rome." One of the things I talk about in the afterword of Right Thing right now is that, like, I get it. I get where this sort of initial infatuation, understanding this entry point to Stoicism is, because I had the same way. I could not have written a book about the Stoic virtue of justice early on in my pursuit and understanding of the philosophy.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  But the thing about Stoicism is that as you study it, it is working on you. You can't escape the fact that Marcus Rilis talks about the common good like 80 times in Meditations. He talks about doing the right thing. He talks about justice dozens of other times. And all these really important ideas over and over and over again. For a guy that had unlimited power, he never lost his compassion and his empathy and his love for his fellow human beings. He saw himself as a true cosmopolitan, a person of the world, not just a member of a race and tribe, only caring about people who were related to him, or looked like him, or lived in his country. He tried to have this broader sense. In fact, that's what the Stoics said, that

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  there were these circles, right? There's the circle of us, the circle of our family, circle of people who live near us, people who live in the same country as us, or the same city as us. And then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it ultimately includes all living things. The purpose of Stoic philosophy, the irrational purpose, was to pull these outer rings inward, to really care about other people and to try to make the world better for them, sometimes especially even at the cost of one's own interests. This is the kind of Stoicism that we have to be focused on. Life is short. We have to be good, and we should try to do good. We should love and be loved, should do the right thing because it's the right thing.

• 8:09Ryan Holiday?

  And we should resist that hardness of heart that can so easily come from a philosophy that is so focused on being in command of oneself and mastering one's emotions. Every day, totally free, we send out the Daily Stoic email. It's the largest community of Stoics ever assembled in human history. And just one Stoic idea, one ancient lesson to chew on every single day. I'd love to have you join us. If you like our videos, I think you'll like the email. It's also a podcast version of it, too. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.