All You Can Do Is This | Ask DS

Life is unpredictable. Events are uncertain. What can go wrong will. Nice guys sometimes finish last, bad things happen to good people. So much is outside our control. These realities are all well-known to a Stoic. As Seneca said, fortune behaves as she pleases. So why did they try then? Why did they work hard on stuff when it might not work out? Why did they invest and sacrifice?---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions as part of the Daily Stoic Stoicism 101 course, addressing topics which include how to manage our own expectations of other people, why it is important not to thrust your own standards onto other people, and when it is helpful and healthy to remove people from your life.📚 Check out the 14-day Stoicism 101: Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life course at The Daily Stoic Store.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  All we can do is this. Life is unpredictable. Events are uncertain. What can go wrong will. Nice guys sometimes finish last. Bad things happen to good people. So much is outside of our control. These realities are well-known to a Stoic. As Seneca said, "Fortune behaves as she pleases." So why did they try then? Why did they work hard on stuff when it might not work out? Why did they invest and sacrifice? Why did they form relationships and attachments, set goals, or make plans, especially when success and rewards were so uncertain? Because, to quote a line from the famous play about Cato, one that was often quoted in the uncertain days of the American Revolution by Washington and Adams, "We cannot ensure success, but we can deserve it."

• 1:30Speaker 01

  The former is outside of our control. The latter is not. Deserving success is up to us. Getting it, not necessarily so. The Stoics aimed high. They did their best. They tried to be good people. They tried to be virtuous. Was this always appreciated or rewarded? No. Did it always pay off? Yes, because it's the best way to live.

• 2:07Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're doing a Q and A today that's actually drawn from the Stoicism 101 course. I think it's one of the best courses we've done over at Daily Stoic. If you're looking to get introduced to Stoicism, you want to take your study of it to the next level. You want to go back to basics, or you want to build a really good foundation of what Stoicism is and how you can use it. That's what the course is about. I'll link to that in today's show notes, but this is drawing from one of the many Q and As we've done as part of the session. People got to come in and ask me a bunch of questions. That's where today's Q and A is coming from. It's just a selection. And I hope you join us in Stoicism 101. You can ask some of your own questions. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or just type in Stoicism 101 in the Daily Stoic store.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Hi. How are you? Good. Um, first of all, I am not a student of Roman philosophy or. Okay. But I fell into listening to some of your podcasts and some guests, you were a guest on a couple of podcasts that I was listening to. And the Stoicism, I guess I had unintentionally been practicing it for a long time. Okay. I did a stint in the military and some of the things that, um, you know, the being prepared, you know, pre-planning.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  And Amor fati kind of led in to my life, you know, instinctually, I guess, or. Sure. Led into it. For example, I was prepared to have a lot of noises, you know, unintentionally on this Zoom call. Uh huh. So I was already prepared for it, just in case that was going to be shaken. But, um, recently I've been having some kind of like, how would.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Your stoicism system kind of deal with people making,

• 4:13Speaker 03

  like judging people with their, with my own value system and how to, how to manage.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  I guess I don't really have high expectations for other people, but trying to, trying to deal with, you know, whether it's, you know, people you used to work with that, you know, when a crisis happens, you tend to see the true nature of people.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  We just kind of set that up and I'm trying to.

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  Now it's.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Some of that.

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  It's a great question. I mean, I think the last year is going to be hard to put,

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  to put some, to put some of this stuff back in the box, right? We've sort of seen how people that we know, whether it's politically or sort of medically, we now know like, oh, hey, I thought me and this person were on the same page and it turns out, you know, they're fucking nuts, like not just nuts, but like also awful, right? So I, I think it is tough, you know, social media unfortunately gives you a glimpse into, into people's lives that maybe it'd be, we talked about being deliberately deaf earlier. It's hard to be deliberately deaf when people are, are screaming this stuff into your, into your feed.

• 5:30Ryan Holiday?

  So it is tough. I, I like Mark Cereles's line about sort of be tolerant with others, strict with yourself, right? So you have your standards, but the operative word there is your standards, right? Like they're your standards and it's not fair to hold other people to a set of standards that they never, they never asked for, right? They, they, they never, they never said, here's the standard that I hold themselves up to. So they're not being a hypocrite, right? But, but it's, it's tough. I just try to remind myself like, look, I am falling short.

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  In enough ways myself that I've got more than, more than I could possibly deal with like here than, than to go around trying to, to, you know, monitor other people.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  So, and it's, and it's not, um, like, I totally agree with that. I, I've really enjoyed finding you for, first of all.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  And, and that's something that I think I've always, um, believed in, you know, like my, my standards are not necessarily realistic for anyone else but myself, but I'm just like, man, when people really fall short of anything close to the same value system that you have. And this, I guess, is going back to, um, you know, Seneca, working with, working with Nero, you know?

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  No, you get. Point like, Jesus, you know?

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  You get the sense reading Marcus Aurelius that he has very low expectations for other people. And yet he's constantly disappointed, right? Which I think is sort of just a fact of human life that like you, you, you're not expecting anything of these people. And still they manage to go, they manage to surprise you, right? So, so yeah, I think realizing that, you know, one, that's a vice. Realizing two, that's a recipe for, uh, misery. And that, um, it's inherently unfair, but that's what, that's what you signed up for. You know, right? Uh, you, you signed up for it. So all you can do is try to carry your load and maybe try to carry other people's load if you're strong enough.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  But you can't go around resenting people for not carrying the same load as you.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  So have you, on a personal level, found that there are people that you just kind of phased out?

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. Yeah, definitely. And I think if you're not like, I, I'm not saying that you're, you're sort of too good for people. But if your social group or your sort of friends are not growing, um, that's probably a sign that you're not growing. You know what I mean? If you're not progressing, that's probably, uh, you know, that, that's probably going to be reflected in the company that you keep.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  I think that was a really helpful way to explain it.

• 8:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Thank you. That's why you're a writer.

• 8:34Ryan Holiday?

  I forget which Stoic writer was saying this, but you know, the Stoics have like sort of what's up to us and then what's not up to us, right? But they were saying that's actually probably a little bit simple because there's also stuff in the middle, which is things that we have influence over. And I think this is true for people, friends, family members, right? You can't make anyone do anything. You can't make people love you. You can't make people change. You can't force them to want anything that they don't want from themselves or for themselves. But you can, you can try to help, right? You can lead a horse to water. You can't make them drink, but you can lead a horse to water.

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that's to me, if you're trying to look most charitably at Seneca and his association with Nero, that's, that's what you see. Seneca is trying over and over again. This guy has power for reasons that Seneca had no influence over, that Seneca outside of assassination cannot change. How can he try to be of service to not just Nero, but to Rome as much as possible within the constraints of his own ethics? And when I had H.R. McMaster on the podcast, he was saying the same thing. He was like, look, I'm inherently an apolitical person. He's like, I don't even vote.

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  I, you know, I didn't like Donald Trump, but I felt like I had national security expertise. And insofar as I could provide that expertise, that was my job. I couldn't force anyone to listen. So I, I, I thought that was an interesting way to think about it. You could push back and you could say McMaster should have done X, Y, and Z. You should, you could push back and say, but Seneca could have done something about Nero. But, uh, you know, I, I, I at least understand the logic there of like, I don't control this either way, but I'm going to try to have a positive influence.