It's All Normal | The Beauty of Choice

Ryan talks about how the challenges we face in the modern era are no different than what the ancient Stoics faced, about how everything we do for others comes back to us, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day.🎓 Sign up for Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy For Your Actual Life - https://dailystoic.com/101For a limited time, UCAN is offering you 30% off on your first order when you use code STOIC at checkout Just go to UCAN. CO/STOICSign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:06Ryan 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.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  It's all normal. Certainly, the last few years have not felt normal. One cannot turn on the TV or scroll social media and not be struck by the images and the tone of it all. Walking through an airport and seeing people in masks, it doesn't feel normal. But of course, it is. Walking through an airport and seeing people in masks does not feel normal. The enormity of the death toll, the changes we have had to make as a society, none of it seems normal. But of course, it is. Because as the Stoics knew, abnormal is the most normal thing there is. Look at Marcus Aurelius's reign. It had floods and invasions and a plague. Look at Seneca's life. It had political violence, sickness,

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  deranged leaders, corruption, tragedy. Look at Stockdale's life: world wars, civil unrests, impeachments, prison camps, government cover-ups. Michael Dell, who you can listen to on the Daily Stoic Podcast, recently talked about how we'll never be post-COVID, because so many of the things that COVID brought into the public view were, of course, always there and always will be. Life has always required making trade-offs. Life has always placed certain restrictions on people. Life has always included people who face the problem and people who run from it, people who prioritize their own well-being, and people who look out for the common good. Life, as Seneca would say, has always been in the habit of shattering, as Dell writes, "our cherished way of life."

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  There is no normal, except change and disruption and loss and uncertainty. That is life. Get used to it. Prepare for it. Train for it. As the Stoic said, endure it. Thrive in it or thrive despite it. Make the most of it. That's all we can do. The beauty of choice. And I'm reading to you today from 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 bestsellers.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  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. You are not your body and hairstyle, but your capacity for choosing well. If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be. It's that line in the movie Fight Club. You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. Obviously, our friend Epictetus never saw that movie or read the book. It's quite good. You should enjoy it. I know some people think it's a little weird or overrated, but we sell it on the painted portraits. It's a classic for a reason, I think, and not maybe exactly what you think it is. Anyways.

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  But the consumerism of the 1990s existed in ancient Rome too. It's always existed. And it's easy to confuse the image we present to the world for who we actually are, especially when media messaging deliberately blurs that distinction. You might look beautiful today, but if that was the result of vain obsession in the mirror this morning, the Stoics would ask, are you actually that beautiful? A body built from hard work is admirable. A body built to impress gym rats is not. And that's what the Stoics urge us to consider, not how things appear, but what effort, activity, and choices they are a result of.

• 4:30Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know, this is just one of my, one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus. Every time we put it on Instagram, it does really well because it's, it is so simple. If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices, right? That beauty, of course, also exists in the superficial sense. But how often we find that behind that beauty is real ugliness, right? Selfishness, or greed, or vanity, or vapidity, or focus on trivialities, right? Or, or, or worse, that perhaps beneath the beauty is really ugly choices, ugly habits, and ugly foundation, right? Whether we're talking, I don't know, about plastic surgery, or unethical choices,

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  or, you know, a prioritization of the things that don't matter. So you can be pretty, you can look rich, but you're not pretty if you made ugly choices to get there, and you're not rich if you have a poverty of the things that really matter. And so I like this because to me, I think it boils back down to what Epictetus talks about so much, that the things that matter are the things that we control. And that if we don't control it, it doesn't really matter. So what other people think you look like is something that you don't control. But you control how you look to yourself.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  You control your focus on the things that you have sway over. So today, when we think about the choices that we're gonna make, think maybe a little bit less about the results, or the externals, or how they're gonna be perceived by others. And think instead about what's going into them. Think about where it's coming from. Think about what you're doing. Think about why you're doing it, and focus on that. Right. Focus on doing the beautiful thing. Doing the work, holding the standards. What you control, what's up to you. Because that's where beauty lies. And it's, you know, look, we don't control our genes.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  We don't control whether we're tall or short. We don't control, you know, so many of the features that people use to determine beauty or ugly these days. But we do control what's underneath that. Right. You know, they go, oh, that person's beautiful, but they have a bad personality, or they're ugly, but they have a great personality. You control the personality, right? Like, you can't necessarily make yourself that much prettier. But you can, you can change who you are. You can adjust your character. You can work on that. You can make yourself beautiful in that sense. And that's what we're talking about today. And I just urge you to go out and have a day defined by good choices. That's what I'm working on. Not perfect at it.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  I'm sure I already made some ugly choices today. But I'm going to work on the rest of the day then, on making prettier choices. And I hope you do as well. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.