Don’t Boo, Do This | How To Overcome Your Depression (Marcus Aurelius' Morning Motivation)

Go read up on the candidates. Check them for the virtues necessary in a leader. Understand no one will check every box, but pick the one you can best trust with the responsibilities of power and the common good. 🎥 Watch How To Overcome Your Depression (Marcus Aurelius' Morning Motivation) on the Daily Stoic YouTube Channel✉️ 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.

• 0:28Ryan Holiday?

  Don't boo, do this. They are frustrating and awful, in some cases absolutely vile. The situation is corrupt, the results unacceptable, you're upset, you have every right to be. We deserve better, our children deserve better, better politics, better government, better policy. In the last couple of election cycles, a curious thing has happened as former President Barack Obama laid out the very real and in many cases, nonpartisan frustrations that people have with their government these days. When he would do it, the crowd would start booing, not booing him, but booing the situation. Each time, he has replied by stopping

• 1:07Ryan Holiday?

  them. "Don't boo," he says, "vote." The Stoics have been involved in politics since the days of ancient Greece, and almost certainly as they observed this timeless tendency, people will complain, people will get angry, but you know what they can't be bothered to do? Their most basic civil obligation. They'll chatter about politics, they'll talk about how they'd like things to be, how they should be, but they won't vote. Today, roughly 50% of eligible Americans vote, just half. The task of the philosopher Epictetus said was to focus on what we control. We don't control much, but we do control whether we register

• 1:50Ryan Holiday?

  to vote and whether we bother to show up. Will our vote be decisive? Will the politicians listen? That's not up to us, really. And even if it was, it doesn't matter until after we vote. Don't boo, don't complain, be an adult. Go read up on the candidates, watch the debates tonight if you're in America, check them for the virtues necessary in a leader, examine their platform for bullshit and demagoguery, understand that no one will check every box, but pick the one that you can best trust with the responsibilities of power and the common good. Go do your job.

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  Vote.

• 2:34Ryan Holiday?

  The world is better for you being in it. You have so much to offer and give. Your duty asks a lot of you. If you're coming to Stoicism thinking that it's telling you that nothing matters and that people say, you're getting it wrong.

• 2:51Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius and the rest of the Stoics, who were not that dissimilar, are obviously depressed and dark, right? I say no. My argument is that if that's your perception of Stoicism, you are missing the whole philosophy. First off, let's just look at Marcus Aurelius's life. It was dark. This is a guy who buries multiple children. This is a guy who experiences a plague and war and health issues. It was one disaster after another. And yet Marcus Aurelius persevered through it. I'll give you my favorite passage in meditation. In book five, Marcus Aurelius says, "At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being.

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  What do I have to complain of if I'm going to go do what I was born for? The things I was brought into this world to do. I wasn't put here to huddle under the covers and be warm," he writes. "Don't you see the plants and the birds and the ants and the spiders all going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can?" He chides himself for not loving himself enough. He says, "You've got to love your nature too and what it demands of you." He says, "You have to help people." He clearly cherished the people around him. And what did he learn from them? He learned to take care of himself. He learned to enjoy the good things in life. He learned to be of service to others. And he learned, most of all, the importance and the power of love and kindness and compassion.

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  This is hardly the emotionless, dark, depressing philosophy that Stoicism is made out to be. In fact, it's the opposite of that in almost every way. Something like 80 times in meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about serving the common good. He's saying, "Stop thinking about your own problems. Stop thinking about what you're..." Going through. Stop focusing on yourself. He says, don't even be overheard complaining to yourself. Think about what your duty and your obligations to others are, which is one of the best ways to get out of your own head. And to stop obsessing about your problems, this sort of woe is me. One of the ways we get out of that. Is one, by taking the big picture view, but two, by focusing on someone else's problems.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  So much of our modern understanding of happiness is inseparable from pleasure, from things being the way we want them to be, going the way we want them to be. I think Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics would have seen happiness as something closer to how Aristotle saw it as a, as a human flourishing. As eliminating the things that cause unhappiness, right? Selfishness, irresponsibility, recklessness, ill-discipline. The Stoics understood, as Victor Frankl said, that happiness isn't something you pursue. It's something that ensues. So Marcus Aurelius was able to find happiness despite what was happening around him.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  Because he said, look, it's always there. It's inside you, right? It's there. You, he says, there's this bubble of goodness inside each of us that's bubbling up. Was it always wonderful and amazing? No, because life is not always wonderful and amazing. It's not always going to go the way that you want it to go. It just isn't. If we only saw what was awful, if we only saw the worst in people, if we were delusional and naive and we expected everything to be wonderful and amazing all the time. We're going to get our asses kicked. But if our glasses were negative, if our tint on everything was negative and terrible. Well, then things were going to be terrible and negative. Marcus Aurelius believed that our life was dyed by the color of our thoughts.

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  So part of this core exercise of Stoicism, understanding that you have different handles that you can grab things on, as Epictetus said. Allows you to see the good in a situation versus the bad in a situation, right? It allows you to see what you can do here. It allows you to see what you get to do here. And in many ways, this is probably why Marcus Aurelius is writing meditations to begin with. He's trying to cope with the fact that things aren't easy. Things aren't going the way that he wanted them to be, that that life is tough, that suffering is inevitable, but the degree to which he suffers and what he suffers over, that's a choice he has. And so the Stoic practice of journaling, right? We should understand that that Marcus is turning to the pages in meditations for help

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  so that he doesn't give in to the darkness, so that he keeps going, so that he can see a different lens. Stoicism was, in the ancient world, an exercise, a practice. It's not just this thing you knew about that you learned in class. It was a thing you were engaging in. If your version of Stoicism is you stuff it all down, you pretend it doesn't exist, you tell yourself you're invulnerable and invincible. When life does overwhelm you, you're going to feel that very deeply. And by the way, Marcus Aurelius wasn't afraid to ask for help either. That's one of my favorite passages in meditations. He says, "You're like a soldier storming a wall. So what if you have to reach up and ask a comrade for help?"

• 7:46Ryan Holiday?

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• 8:29Ryan Holiday?

  Don't be afraid to ask for help. So what if you need help? Marcus Aurelius needed it too. I've needed it. I'm sure you might as well. That's betterhelp.com/dailystoic. So let's go to that somewhat controversial example that sometimes people hold up as proof that the Stoics were dark and depressive. Marcus Aurelius opens meditations. He says, "When you awake in the morning, tell yourself that the people I deal with today will be meddling and ungrateful and arrogant and dishonest." And jealous and surly. So yeah, on the one hand, it feels like Marcus is just listing how life sucks. And I think we've all woken up and just thought, is this what I'm gonna have to deal with today? But Marcus isn't saying like, don't get out of bed because people suck. No, he's saying, look, this is how people are gonna be. So first off,

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  let's not be surprised by it. But Marcus is trying to remind himself why. He says, look, they don't know any better. He says, I can't let them implicate me in their ugliness. I can't let them drag me down. And he said, I can't forget why I'm here, why they're here. We're all meant to work together. We're all doing this together. And he's trying to work himself up and through this. So again, what seems like a dark passage in Meditations is actually a pretty cheerful one. But most of all, Marcus Aurelius drew on Stoicism to get through all this difficulty. He said, it's disgraceful for the soul to give up when the body is still going strong. Actually, Stoicism is this empowering philosophy. It's

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  a joyful philosophy. It's an encouraging philosophy. It's a philosophy that believes in your agency and your worth and your meaning. And it believes that you can make a difference. Maybe I'll leave you with this quote at the back of Meditations, because I think, to me, it describes Marcus Aurelius's realistic view of why he was here and what a good life was. He said, concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being. Remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it without hesitation and speak the truth as you see it, but with kindness, with humility, without hypocrisy.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  Every day, totally free, we send out the Daily Stoic email. It's the largest community of Stoics ever assembled in human history. And just one Stoic idea, one ancient lesson to chew on every single day. I'd love to have you join us. If you like our videos, I think you'll like the email. It's also a podcast version of it, too. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.