This Is What Karma Looks Like

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:25Ryan Holiday?

  This is what karma looks like. There is a simple proposition at the heart of classical Christianity. If you are a good person and do good works on earth, when you die, you will enter the kingdom of heaven and know the full bounty of God's unending love. But if you are a bad person on earth and you sin without repenting, when you die, you'll end up in hell for all eternity. In many eastern religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, that duality is baked into the singular notion of karma. Good intentions and good deeds will be repaid in the next life with great kindness. Bad intent and bad deeds, or sin, will be repaid in the next life with great severity. The Stoics take a different approach.

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  They don't say that cheating, or lying, or murdering should be avoided out of fear of future punishments at the hands of God. Instead, they make a much more immediate and self-interested case. Seneca especially, who saw Caligula and Nero and other infamous Roman rulers up close, takes pains to point out that these people are not winning, nor are they getting off scot-free for their crimes. Actually, they are paying for it every single day. The Stoics would have liked the passage at the conclusion of the novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, by Bud Schulberg, which renders this verdict on the empty, broken life of an immoral Hollywood studio boss.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  He writes, "I had been waiting for justice suddenly to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him. Only I had expected something conclusive and fatal, and now I realize that what was coming to me..." was not a sudden payoff, but a process. A disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a plague, a cancer that was slowly eating him away. The symptoms developing and intensifying. Success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright young men, the newer, fresher Sammy Glicks, that would spring up to harass him, to threaten him, and finally overtake him.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics wouldn't say, "Don't sin, or you go to hell." The Stoics would say, "Don't sin, or your life will be hell." Not your next life, not your afterlife, but this life, right now, today.

• 2:50Ryan Holiday?

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