You Can Keep It To Yourself | Ask DS

One of the criticisms of the Stoics is that they left certain things unaddressed. Nowhere in Seneca’s writings, for instance, does he directly address Nero or criticize him by name. Even after he left Nero’s service, as the man spiraled out of control, Seneca stuck with the code that General Mattis would stick with centuries later–keeping their opinions about the administration they once served to themselves. Marcus Aurelius, most scholars deduce, was not a fan of Seneca’s actions while serving Nero–yet deduction is all we’re able to do, because nowhere does Marcus criticize Seneca. All we’re left with is a conspicuous absence in Meditations.---And in today's Ask DS, Ryan presents part two of his Q&A sessions with a team of doctors about his morning routine, how the study of history can be both grounding and elevating, his feelings about modern life and technology, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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. While 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  You can keep it to yourself. One of the criticisms of the Stoics is that they left certain things unaddressed. Nowhere in Seneca's writings, for instance, does he directly address Nero or criticize him by name. Even after he left Nero's service as the man spiraled out of control, Seneca stuck with the code that General Mattis would stick to centuries later, keeping one's opinions about the administration they served themselves. Marcus Aurelius, most scholars deduce, was not a fan of Seneca's actions while serving Nero. And yet, deduction is all we're able to do because nowhere does Marcus criticize Seneca. All we're left with is a conspicuous absence in meditations. Now, perhaps you disagree

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  and think Seneca should have been more vocal. Maybe Marcus was holding back, and he shouldn't have. But what if the Stoics were just practicing the boundaries, the restraint that we talked about here recently? Patty Davis, the writer, as well as the daughter of President Ronald Reagan, has come to appreciate this concept with the passage of time. In her earlier writings, she was unvarnished and revelatory, mostly about herself and her famous family. It helped the book sell, but did it help her long term? Years ago, she said, "Someone asked me what I would say to my younger self if I could. Without hesitating, I answered, 'That's easy.' I'd have said, 'Be quiet.'"

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  Not forever, but until I could stand back and look at things through a wider lens, until I understood that words have consequences and they last for a really long time. She was passing on this advice to Prince Harry, whose controversial memoir is not only breaking sales records, but centuries of royal tradition. But it's advice that we can appreciate too, even if we're not writers or royalty. We don't have to share every thought. We don't have to voice every frustration. We don't have to put every objection on the record. We can wait. We can look at things through a wider lens. We can let our silence speak volumes.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Josh Dines says, "I'm a big fan of your work. You started with a great vignette about the internal struggle to stay comfortable in bed versus getting out of bed and do what you were meant to do. As a follow-up, would you mind describing your morning routine that you use to set the tone for the day?"

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, obviously today's a bit unusual because I have this in the morning and then I'm flying out at night. But for me, my routine is I try to get up early. I've got two young kids, so I don't really have a choice in the matter to begin with. But I get up early. One of my rules is, yeah, no using the phone in the morning. Once it's light out, the kids and I, we live out in the country, so we go for a walk. We go outside. We, you know, watch the sun come up. We're active. I like starting the day with something active. Usually I'll journal in the morning. Sometimes I'll journal at night, but I like to do a little journaling. That's part of that sort of morning routine. And then my other rule is, I guess, I don't really eat breakfast. I'm more of a sort of an intermittent fasting person.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  So I like, I'm waking up, I've taken a break from the phone, I've taken a break from, you know, stuffing food in my mouth until like 10 or 11. And then my rule or my practice as a creative or a writer is that I do the hard thing first, which is usually writing. Like, what is the task that requires the most concentration, the most focus, that needs the most uninterrupted time? I don't leave that until three in the afternoon when I'm tired, frustrated, you know, a million things have happened. I do that stuff in the morning. I really like Cal Newport's

• 4:46Ryan Holiday?

  work, deep work, digital minimalism. But I think his point is that, you know, it's those moments of uninterrupted concentration, whether that's study, whether that's practice, whether that's the, you know, the act of, you know, your job itself. I think you do that in the morning. What I don't want to do is a bunch of phone calls, a bunch of administrative. I don't want to do the kind of soul sucking stuff, you know, first and then come to the task, which I think requires a certain amount of presence and reverence even. I don't want to do that when I'm fried.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's sometimes challenging with what we do because we're in a pretty early on going to the operating room, going to work. And I think routines certainly helps a lot.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Jose Rodriguez, one of our tournament surgeons here, says, I loved your book. And there's a, I'll add to his questions. First is, what is it about the study of history? What is it about the study of history that is both grounding and elevating?

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  And the follow up, the follow up, I'd just say, how did you get interested in this in this course of study?

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I think what you take from history first and foremost is how nothing changes. People are people. We've been doing the exact same things for thousands of years, you know, reading Marcus realized at the outset of the pandemic, you go, oh, he wasn't just being figurative, he was being literal. Like he has this great line in Meditations where he says, and speaking, again, I thought he was being figurative until we had our own pandemic, but. He said, um, there's two types of plagues. He says, there's the one that destroys your life. And then he's like, there's the one that destroys your character. And I think we saw this during COVID, right? Obviously COVID was devastating and deadly. Uh, although for most people, it was, it was not, um, too bad, thankfully, gracefully.

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  Um, but then there was this other thing that a lot of people caught, which seems way worse than COVID, right? We're talking conspiratorial thinking, uh, selfishness, callousness, you know, sort of a rejection of science or, um, you know, logic or facts in any way. Um, I, I think what you learn when you study history, um, is you get, uh, a distilled look at human nature and the human experience, um, in a way that is not, um, biased by current events. Um, so I think, you know, reading, uh, reading or watching the news as it is breaking

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  is probably the worst way to actually understand the humans in front of you and what's happening and what's going on. And you'd be far better off turning to something a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago, cause it gives you a deeper understanding without the recency bias and without, you know, having, uh, you know, you, you, without being distracted by the names or places or whatever. I think it gives you a deeper understanding of it. And so, yeah, I've, I've always loved history. I've always loved biography. Um, and I think it's just, uh, you know, it's just sort of riveting and fascinating. And I think we all have a duty as professionals as well as, you know, citizens in a democracy to be informed.

• 8:12Ryan Holiday?

  I just think sometimes we assume that watching Fox or MSNBC or refreshing your Twitter feed is how one becomes an informed and educated person. And that's probably the worst possible way to do it.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  So, uh, Ian Kelly, uh, my, my same last name, not related. Um, she, she says wonderful talk. It challenges to connive these thoughts in stormy seas. Her favorite, for such small price. He chooses tranquility or Epictetus. As discussed, we all can improve judging in words of things.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, just a quick line from Epictetus. Epictetus says, "It's not things that upset us. It's our judgment about things." So I think part of the Stoic practice is the idea that events are objective. A virus doesn't care about you. The market, whether it's going up or down, doesn't care about you. And in fact, you know, there is no such thing as a bear market or a bull market. These are just words that we made up to describe things, right? The event, the world, life is objective, the Stoics would say. And then we upset ourselves by having opinions about whether this should or shouldn't be, whose fault it is, whether it's fair or unfair. Like, it just is. And I think the Stoic practice is sort of accepting that and then

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  finding the good in it or finding the good you can do through it.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  And yeah, it was time for one more, and then we'll

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  I think we have to wrap it up. Dr. Felice asked the question, with all of the importance of being present, what are your feelings about modern life and our enslavement by cell phone and other technologies? And how do we address this?

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a great line from Seneca. He's saying like, he's like, "Show me a person who isn't a slave." He's like, "Someone's a slave to their mistress. Someone's a slave to their ambition. Someone's a slave to their enormous estate." He says, "Which is ironic because it's tended by slaves," you know, back in in ancient Rome and Greece. His point was that, like, we should be alarmed by anything that exerts a certain amount of control or power over us, you know, this device being a great example of it. I recommended the book earlier, but, uh, wait, no, this is The World Without Email. The Cal Newport book, uh, where is it? Digital Minimalism is, it was definitely influential to me.

• 10:35Ryan Holiday?

  To me, the question I like to ask is, "Am I using the device or is the device using me?" And I try to create systems or structures where I get the value out of the thing as opposed to being the value. For the thing, right? They say like, if you're not paying for it, you're the product that's being sold. And realizing that, you know, that's mostly what these social networks do. So, you know, I try to create a system where I have some space from it, where I've, you know, limited the number of apps that are on it, where I, you know, limit the number of alerts that I have on it. And in trying to do that, I'm trying to create the space for the equanimity or the tranquility or the focus.

• 11:20Ryan Holiday?

  Because, you know, I'm just, I'm never, I'm never on social media and then afterwards think like, I'm so glad I did that. I'm normally like, why? How? Where did an hour go? How did I just lose an hour scrolling these videos? Right? And so I'm not perfect at it. I don't think any of us are. I think the smartest people in the world spent a lot of time trying to make us helplessly dependent on these things. But even understanding that, like, when you go into a casino, you know that it's rigged and it's designed to disorient and to ultimately extract from you. And I think even just having, having that understanding of the digital world,

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  your email inbox, your social media apps, the phone itself, it's designed to increase use time. And if you can have a more adversarial relationship with it, then you're at least operating from a position of awareness as opposed to enslavement.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  So Ryan, as we all experienced, this is an amazing talk and I really appreciate you taking the time. As the person that introduced me to stoicism, I'm gonna let Todd have the last word. So thank you very much. It was a really, really amazing opportunity to spend some time with you.

• 12:38Ryan Holiday?

  No, it was a total honor and I really appreciate it.