Daily Stoic Sundays: The Stoic Art of Not Caring

In today's Sunday Podcast, Ryan talks about how to apply Stoicism, and the difference between not caring at all and only caring about what's important. This episode is also brought to you by Raycon, maker of affordable earbuds with incredibly high-quality sound. Raycon earbuds are half the price of more-expensive competitors and sound just as good. With six hours of battery time, seamless Bluetooth pairing, and a great-fitting design, Raycon earbuds are perfect for working out, travel, conference calls, and more. Get 15% off your order when you purchase Raycon earbuds now, just visit buyraycon.com/stoic. ***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 @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of The Daily Stoic. You might have heard the interview I did not long ago with Mark Manson and sort of Mark's interesting concept of the subtle art of not giving a fuck. And then one of the first things I talked to Mark about was this sort of, we're not talking about giving no fucks, we're talking about giving no fucks about the things that don't matter. And so, there's a super viral video you can see out there about sort of the Stoic art of not caring. And I wanted to kind of respond to that in today's episode because I don't really think that's what Stoicism is about. Stoicism is not about not caring. It's about not caring about the things that don't matter.

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  As Marx really says, "It's about being indifferent to the things that make no difference." And so, how we apply Stoicism in the world, that it's beyond simply not caring, it's actually caring quite intensely about the things that matter, but getting to a place where you sort of have this inner citadel, this even keel that protects you from being brought too high or too low by external events. And there's some controversial examples in it. We talk about Rockefeller, not because Rockefeller was this great human being, although ultimately, in the end, his philanthropic endeavors have had an enormous positive impact on humanity. Especially right now in the pandemic, the Rockefeller Foundation has stepped up to fill the void of leadership, particularly egregious one here in the United States.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  But because Rockefeller was famous for his sort of poise and self-control and self-discipline, particularly in business matters. So like, again, I'm not endorsing Rockefeller any more than Seneca was endorsing Alexander the Great when he uses him as an example. So, so I hope you enjoy this video. Again, the, the purpose of this Stoic philosophy is not to make you emotionless, not to make you indifferent to the world, but only to be indifferent to the things that make no difference, to stop caring about the things that don't matter. And as, as Mark Manson says, it is a subtle art. So it's not a, it's requires some finesse. And I think I'll take this from today's episode and really like it.

• 3:02Ryan Holiday?

  I was only 19 years old when a single book altered the course of my life. I was then in the habit of asking people I admired a question, what is a book that changed your life? It's a simple question, but I wouldn't be watching this video if I hadn't asked it. What's a book that changed you, one that you'd recommend to your younger self? And so soon enough, I found Marcus Aurelius's Meditations in my hands. It was for me what the economist Tyler Cowen calls a quake book. It shook my entire worldview and a single passage in it changed everything. In fact, the passage has changed the lives of many

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  people in the 2,000 years since it was written. I've turned to it again and again, when I dropped out of school, when I had problems at work, problems in my relationships, problems with employees and just normal everyday life stuff. The passage goes like this, "Our actions may be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting." And then Marcus Aurelius concludes with some of the most powerful Words ever written, the impediment to action advances action, he says. What stands in the way becomes the way.

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius wrote that to himself likely on the battlefront as he led the Roman army against barbarian tribes. Or possibly in the palace under almost unimaginable pressure. What Marcus was reminding himself is the core tenet of Stoicism. It doesn't really matter what happens because in every situation, good or bad, we have incredible power. The power to choose how we respond. Stoicism as a philosophy is ultimately about action. An art that is designed to be practiced. And how does what stands in the way become the way? The story of John D Rockefeller is illustrated. Before John D Rockefeller became the richest person in modern history, he was just a kid.

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  Making 50 cents a day as a bookkeeper and aspiring investor. Two years into his first job, the panic of 1857 struck. And it hit just as Rockefeller was starting to make some headway in his career. The top investors who supposedly knew what they were doing, lost everything. His peers either complained about this violent economic disaster or left the business altogether. People were ruined, people were disillusioned. But Rockefeller didn't care. He didn't care that it was the greatest market depression in history. He didn't care about what everyone else was doing. He didn't care that people with more experience were telling him to find a new career. All he cared about was what was in his control.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  He could carefully observe the events that were unfolding. He could look for some, any opportunity to learn from this panic. He could consider it a baptism in the market. 20 years later, Rockefeller alone controlled 90% of the oil market. And he would say with gratitude how much he had benefited. From the difficulties and the apprenticeship he had in those difficulties. In those years when he decided to study and learn rather than turn tail and run.

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  So how can we cultivate this fortitude? How can we be like Rockefeller? The economy in historic decline, not bemoaning our fate, but embracing the historic opportunity. The answer the Stoics would say, as Marcus has written, is to stop caring about everything outside your control. It's not easy, but it's simple. It's a two-part mental shift. First, you have to see every situation rationally. You must not panic or make rash decisions. You must not take it personally. You must not exaggerate. You must not focus on what it means, what everyone else says it means. And then, like Rockefeller, you have to ask yourself, what do I have control over here?

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  What can I change or influence? Where is the opportunity to learn? Take a business decision that turned out to be a mistake. You could choose whether it was a complete failure or a hypothesis that turned out to be wrong. You could choose to be crushed by it. You could look at how enormous the cost of the failure has been. Or, like a good scientist, you could decide to learn from it, to use it for your next experiment. You could see it as data. You could see it like a writer and use it as material. What about that computer glitch that erased all your work? You choose whether it ruins your day, your week, your year, or whether it makes you twice as good, since you will now have to do it again, this time more prepared.

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  Perhaps you were injured recently and are stuck in bed recovering. You choose whether that's an excuse for killing time or an excuse to start the blog or the screenplay or the project you've been putting off. Maybe you've recently lost your job. You choose whether you spiral into sadness or into teaching yourself the skills to get the job you've always wanted. Someone insulted you. You choose whether you are going to be offended, whether you're going to respond, or whether you're going to let it go. Some call it a thick skin, or grit, or resilience, or perseverance, or resolve. Marcus Aurelius called it tranquility. "It's what comes when you stop caring," he said, "about what others say or think or..." When you stop caring about what you can't control,

• 8:43Ryan Holiday?

  what you can't change, when you stop caring, Marcus Aurelius said, about everything but what you do. This is the chief task in life, Marcus's favorite philosopher Epictetus says. It's to identify in separate matters so you can say clearly to yourself, what are externals not in your control? And where do you have choices you actually do control? Where then do I look for good and evil? Epictetus said, not in uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own. Or, as the Stoics say, it's about what's up to us and what's not up to us. Once we have organized our understanding of the world into this black and white bucket, what remains?

• 9:29Ryan Holiday?

  What was so central to Epictetus's survival as a slave is to focus on what is up to us, our attitudes, our emotions, our wants, our desires, our opinion about what happened to us, what we will learn from this, what we will do in response to this, how we will be made better because of this. Everything else, who cares? If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.