Each One Tells You This | Financial Freedom Won't Set You Free

Each yesterday is gone, dead. While there is a little grief, it also presents you an opportunity. a chance to begin afresh. 🗓️ The Daily Stoic Page-A-Day Desk Calendar reminds us of the chance to begin afresh with each new day. Pick up your own at store.dailystoic.com. 🎥 Watch the FULL video of Financial Freedom Won't Set You Free (These Stoic Tips Will) on YouTube!✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Each one tells you this: "You tear it off and throw it away. You get to the end and you grab another one. It sneaks up on you. It's almost Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I can't believe it's almost my birthday. December went by so fast." As we said before, the process of running through one of those tear-away-page-a-day calendars-- we have a Daily Stoic version, by the way, I have to do today's date-- that action, that tearing, it's perfunctory. You got it as a gift. You picked it up for a regular little dose of inspiration. You read the quote in the morning. You look at the picture. You laugh at the joke, but you're almost certainly missing the deeper message that comes along with the tearing. The first, which we talked about recently, is that "another day has passed,

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  a day you have died," as the Stoics said. But then there is also the message that Philip Larkin notes in his beautiful poem "The Trees," which notes the passing of the seasons and what it means. "The trees are coming into leaf," he said, like something almost being said. "The recent buds relax and spread. Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that we are born again and we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh in full-grown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say. Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

• 1:50Ryan Holiday?

  Each yesterday you tear off is gone and dead. There's something sad about that. While there's a little grief as you look at the next page, it also presents an opportunity, a chance to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. Unless you waste it, unless you let it pass by unaware, and then it too dies and the loss is written down in your rings of grain, never to return. That's something I think about every time I do the Daily Stoic Calendar. It's funny, sometimes I'll be gone for a week or I'll forget. And then there's just this huge, you're tearing off 10, 15 pages and you go, man, where did that time go? So anyways, the calendar's got a quote every day from the Daily Stoic. It's a nice little reminder. And then there is this sort of meta lesson that goes along with it.

• 2:32Ryan Holiday?

  You can grab that at store.dailystoic.com and I'll link to it in today's episode description. Check it out. You'd think that the more powerful you are, the more money you have, the more freedom that you would have. And conversely, it seems obvious that if you don't have money, if you don't have power, if you've been disenfranchised by the law, or by society, or by some terrible set of circumstances, that the converse would be true, that you don't have any freedom. But there is one person who refutes all this. His name is Epictetus.

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  He's a Greek slave in the Roman Empire who knows poverty and torture and exile, a life that's seemingly of darkness, powerlessness, and pain. And yet, he becomes, in his own lifetime, and now through the centuries, through his philosophy, one of the most powerful and one of the freest human beings who ever lived. Epictetus doesn't write anything down. He gives a series of lectures, some of which were actually attended by the Emperor of Rome, but those survive to us in the form of the Incoridion and his discourses. And then there's a more recent collection by Princeton University Press that summarizes some of his best work. And I first discovered Epictetus when I was 19 or 20 years old, in the same way that

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius would discover it 2,000 years earlier. Someone noticed I was going through something. I was asking for some reading recommendations and they said, "You gotta check out Epictetus. I think this would be of use to you." Marcus Rilius was lent a copy of Epictetus by his philosophy teacher, Risticus, whom he actually thanks in the opening of Meditations. It's pretty incredible, just the power of a book recommendation, right? He says all the things that he learned from his philosophy teacher, Risticus, and then he concludes and thanks him for introducing me to Epictetus's lectures and loaning me his own copy. And here are 10 really important ideas that I took from Epictetus about the most important human topic there is: freedom.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  "Our first task in life," Epictetus says. "The chief task of the philosopher is to separate matters into two categories: the stuff that's up to us and the stuff that's not up to us." He puts this in a lovely little Greek phrase, but basically he's saying that there's some things that are up to us and there's some things that are not up to us. And when we do this honest assessment of what's in our control and what's not in our control, we then have the ability to direct our resources towards what is in our control. Epictetus says this elsewhere. He says basically like, "A podium and a prison are each a place." He knows prison and then he also knows the podium, where he had a lot of power as a teacher when he became one of Rome's most famous philosophers. But he's basically saying that we all have a certain amount of freedom of choice within our situations. We have to know what this is.

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  When I talk to athletes, I usually try to remind them, "Look, you don't control what the coach does. You don't control what the media does. You don't control the weather. You don't control who the quarterback throws to. You don't control how your teammates behave. You don't control who made the rules. All you control is how you play, how you respond to these events." So that's kind of the essence of Epictetus's philosophy. And this seems like a really basic exercise, but we can imagine how essential it would be for someone who spends the first 30 years of their life literally enslaved. He has to figure out, "Okay, I don't control who my master is. I don't control what my master asks of me. I don't control that I was born this moment in time, in this place. I don't control any of it."

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  But I do control who I'm going to be inside of it. I control whether it makes me bitter and angry and mean. He probably realizes, look, I could lay down and die. I could try to escape. I could choose to be beaten to death. I could steal things. He has a certain amount of choices. And then he has things that he doesn't have choice over. And essentially Stoicism, Epictetus's philosophy, is this focusing, this zeroing in on the parts of the situation that are in our control. He says, look, some things in this world are up to us. And then he lists some of the stuff that is up to us. Our judgment, our motivations, our desires, our aversions. He says, the stuff that's in our own doing. And so this is what we want to focus on because like I, I sometimes tell people like,

• 6:55Ryan Holiday?

  look, you have a certain amount of energy points, right? Are you going to spend your energy points on things that have already happened? Things that may or may not happen? Are you going to focus them on what's in front of you right now? Are you going to focus them on wishing things were otherwise? Are you going to focus on accepting them and making them work? So basically, the, the first bit of freedom that we have to assert is our freedom to understand what is in our control and what isn't. And as the Serenity Prayer says, first, to have the wisdom to know the difference between these two things. And second, to have the courage then to seize the power or the control that is ours.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  If you wanted to inflict a horrendous torture on someone, if you wanted to completely imprison them in circumstances and in their own misery, here's a spell I would cast on them. I would say, from this moment forward, you have to have incredibly strong opinions about everything you see and hear and read. Because things are constantly happening. So the world is full of events, right? It's full of people doing insane things. And the more opinions we have about this, first off, the more miserable we're going to be. And second, like the less time we're going to have to focus on the things that are actually important to us, that we actually have input over. A lot of us are trapped by our need to have an opinion. About everything.

• 8:24Ryan Holiday?

  One of the things you have to realize when you accept that certain things are outside of your control is that your opinion about them, whether they're good or bad, fair or unfair, it ceases to be relevant because they simply are. Epictetus says that, look, it's not things that upset us, it's our judgment about things. So if we're trying to be free from being upset, from being miserable, from feeling like we've been mistreated, that this situation sucks, that everything's falling apart, well, one of the ways we do that is by just deciding not to have that opinion. And look, maybe at some point in Epictetus's life, he got to a point where he just didn't have opinions about stuff. He escaped the opinion trap.

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  I would say probably more realistically, he understood he was free not to verbalize this opinion. Marcus Aurelius, who was such a big fan of Epictetus, would talk about this. He was like, look, things are not asking to be judged by you. You don't have to have an opinion about this. You don't have to turn this into something. But he also talks about not complaining. He says, never be overheard complaining. And I think that's partly what Epictetus is saying here, which is like, have the initial opinion that you don't like this, that it sucks, that it should be otherwise, that it's so stupid that this or that happened, but then just going, yeah, I don't, I don't need to explore this. I don't need to articulate all the things I don't like about this. I don't need to pick at it. I'm just gonna practice the art of letting this go and not having strong opinions about it.

• 9:54Ryan Holiday?

  Because those opinions are really only inflicting upon me the negativity that I feel, and it's not changing the situation in any way. And so Epictetus is saying, look, a critical step on the path of freedom is just to have fewer opinions.