It’s Just Happening | Ask Daily Stoic

It feels terrible to hear that someone is breaking up with you. Or that your retirement portfolio has dropped significantly in recent months. To find out that the company you’ve invested your entire career in is laying you off. That your father doesn’t accept the person you love or how you live your life. We want it to be otherwise, so we’re disappointed. It hurts, so we take it personally. In Meg Mason’s novel Sorrow and Bliss (listen to our great podcast episode with Meg), Martha Friel's mother, who had always been unhappy and resentful, goes into recovery and stops drinking. With time, she comes to realize that she had been living life as if it was happening to her. The adversity. The losses. The frustrations. The disappointments. In actuality, none of this happened to her. It was just happening. It just was. In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions after a presentation about applying Stoic principles to modern life. His answers cover which books about or by Marcus Aurelius you should read, and the events in Ryan's life that brought him closer to Stoicism.✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow.

• 0:47Ryan Holiday?

  It's just happening. It feels terrible to hear that someone is breaking up with you, or that your retirement portfolio has dropped significantly in recent months. To find out that the company you've invested your entire career in is laying you off, that your father doesn't accept the person you love, or how you live your life. We want it to be otherwise, so we're disappointed. It hurts, so we take it personally. In Meg Mason's wonderful novel, Sorrow and Bliss, a great podcast episode with her, Martha's mother, who has always been unhappy and resentful, goes into recovery and stops drinking. With time, she comes to realize that

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  she had been living life as if it was happening to her. The adversity, the losses, the frustrations, the disappointments. In actuality, none of this happened to her. It was just happening, just was. This is what the Stoics want us to realize. Fortune is not out to get you. Life is not picking on you. This is just what's happening, period. It happens to involve you, but it does not revolve around you. The sooner we accept this, the less painful all of it will be, the less harmed we'll feel. And thus, as Marcus really writes in Meditations, "The less harmed we will be." What's happening in the world, what's happening in the economy, at work, inside

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  other people, we need to stop seeing the world through a lens, how it impacts us, because it doesn't have anything to do with us. It's happening as it always has and always will. It's driven by forces we can't comprehend, decisions and factors we don't control. All we can do is step back and observe. All we can do is accept what is. All we can do is decide not to be upset, hurt, offended, broken, or bitter.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  I have so many takeaways from your wonderful presentation. Thank you very, very much.

• 2:46Ryan Holiday?

  Appreciate it.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  One of the ones that I love the most, I think, is asking for help is refusing to not give up. I thought that was really profound. So, thank you so much. And I've really never thought about reading the history to learn how to handle today's challenges. I'm guilty of turning on the cable news and watching my internet. But you reference Marcus an awful lot. Could you spell his last name? And do you have any books or readings that you would recommend?

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  I very much do. This is like my favorite question to ask. So Marcus Aurelius, A-U-R-E-L-I-U-S. This is the old guy in the movie Gladiator that Joaquin Phoenix's character kills, if you need to remember. Marcus Aurelius is the emperor of Rome. He writes one book. This is Meditations, which he doesn't think would ever be published. It's a remarkable book because it is the private diary of a human being under enormous stress and difficulty, writing notes to himself about how to be better. He's writing it on the campaign trail. He's writing it in his tent on the front lines of the battle.

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  I prefer the Gregory Hayes translation here from Marcus Aurelius from the Modern Library. It's one of my favorites. There's a... Let me see if I have another edition of it. It's usually... The edition now is black. It has like a bird on it. Another edition I like, this is an annotated edition that came out this year. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, translated by Robin Waterfeld. Here, let me... I'll actually... I'm somewhat biased here. I have a bookstore. And I carry this one here. So I'll put it in the chat and you guys can send it around as a link.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  These are my two favorite translations here. The Gregory Hayes translation and the Robin Waterfield edition. Now, there's also a book that I enjoy quite a... Think like...

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  By a guy named Donald Robertson called "How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius", which I am linking to here. So if you guys could share that with everyone, that would be great. But those are my three favorite translations of... Or my three favorite books about Marcus Aurelius. I also have a book called "The Daily Stoic", which I do one page a day about Stoic philosophy, and an email about it, which you can sign up totally for free at dailystoic.com. The idea being that I think Stoicism is not just a thing you do one time, but it's an active daily practice. And so you should be returning to it always.

• 5:43Ryan Holiday?

  I think in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius cites the philosopher or the poet Heracles, who said that "we never step in the same river twice", and the idea being that we perceive things differently when we come back to them. So when I say that Stoicism is something we should read about, I mean not just once, but ideally again and again to come back to in moments of difficulty or crisis, because you'll find that, I think, as you do when you read the Bible, that there seems to be a way that this timeless work surfaces exactly what you need at exactly the moment you need it, even though it, of course, has no idea who you are or what you're going through.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  My pleasure.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Oh, hello, Ryan. Chirine Brown here. I'm sitting next to the person who's weird.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  God, I see ya.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Well, thank you so much for being here today. It's been really um informational and it seems a lot of the things that you're sharing with Stoicism um seems to mark our lives quite uh closely. Uh there are a couple of comments that you made, I think, that would suit a lot of folks here in this room. And those were um the ivory shoulders because the support that we provide to our other halves as military members is those who are around them that carry as much of the weight as those who are in the role. I think we feel that a lot.

• 7:10Ryan Holiday?

  With a lot less credit as well.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  That's so true. Um the other half of it was uh and I don't know how much of this pertains to many of us because the longer we're in this, the more we realize the responsibilities that come with this particular role. And when you mentioned that Marcus Aurelius wept um realizing that he was chosen to be in this role, he recognized the responsibility associated. I don't know that our other halves wept, but perhaps their um other halves might have wept. And realizing the role they were about to step in to. So my question for you really is um with Stoicism, as it parallels so much of our

• 7:54Speaker 02

  lives associated with the military, how in your world has Stoicism, was there an event or circumstance that kind of arose that brought you closer to what Stoicism is? Um how did you become so involved and how is it relevant to your life?

• 8:12Ryan Holiday?

  Well, thank, thank you very much. Yeah, it it's funny um to go to the idea of of the difference between the reception of the of the person and the spouse. I remember when I uh when I sold one of my books a few years ago, my editor called me to congratulate me on the deal and she called my wife to apologize. It was great news for me, but it meant an enormous amount of sacrifice and uh

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  Unpleasantness for her, which I'm sure all of you can relate to. You're quite proud and excited about the promotion or the new posting, but you also know all the back end details and compromises and sacrifices and problems that come along with that. And one of the things I've tried to do as I've written about the Stoics, there's a book I did a few years ago called Lives of the Stoics, which tried to look at who the Stoics actually were as people, because they weren't just philosophers, they had to apply this practice.

• 9:17Ryan Holiday?

  It is unfortunate because of the way that history has gone and sexism and patriarchy and all these things. History was primarily, as primarily focused on the contributions or the achievements of men. There are a few exceptions. There's one explicitly Stoic female from the ancient world, Portia Cato, who's the daughter of Cato. And women were allowed to study Stoicism. Musonius Rufus, one of the early teachers of Stoicism, says, you know, virtue doesn't care about gender. But it strikes me that as history celebrates,

• 10:00Ryan Holiday?

  let's say, the response of one Stoic to the news that he has been exiled or that his fortune has been confiscated by the government or that he's forced to go out and fight on the battlefield. All these achievements that the literature focuses on of the Stoics obscures the greater Stoic act of the people that they left behind, the family who supported them, the family who had to pack up all the belongings, the family who had less choice, who weren't being rewarded. There's a story I love from Robert Caro, the biographer of Lyndon Johnson.

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  He and his wife wrote this, worked on this epic series about Lyndon Johnson. Of course, his name is on the cover and her name is in the acknowledgements. But in one of the scenes, he's talking, he's exploring the Texas Hill country of Lyndon Johnson's childhood. And... As he comes to understand the enormous difficulty of the lives of these women out there without electricity, without running water, worried for their safety, often home alone for days on end, he says, "We hear a lot about the gunfights and cowboys of the Old West, but we don't talk very much about a woman fetching water from the well

• 11:26Ryan Holiday?

  while recovering from a perineal tear." Right? And so when I think about who's actually been the Stoic throughout history, it's not just the person charging into battle or leading the empire. It's, as you said, it's the person behind the scenes, the person who's who's got the ivory shoulders that the person with the ivory shoulders is leaning on or crying into. And so I very much, again, acknowledge and celebrate your enormous contributions to not just our armed forces, but the safety of the world upon which those armed forces are tasked with defending. For me, Stoicism was something I came to as a young man in college.

• 12:11Ryan Holiday?

  I was at a conference like this and I asked for a recommendation about a book recommendation and I came to Marcus Aurelius that way. And it's been, you know, my sort of bible over these last decade and a half. It's been what I've tried to base my life on. It's been what I've tried to live up to and now it's, you know, my immense pleasure to be able to write about it and bring it to an audience that, again, probably doesn't think that philosophy is accessible or practical to them, but in my view is exactly who should be, you know, integrating these principles into what they do.