The Lie That Keeps You Feeling Behind Every Single Day | Oliver Burkeman

Most productivity advice promises that if you just find the right system, you’ll finally catch up. In today’s episode, Ryan sits down with Oliver Burkeman who explains why that feeling never arrives and why that is not a personal failure. They discuss the productivity lie that keeps so many people feeling behind every single day, how hustle culture quietly creates anxiety, and why the goal of getting “on top of everything” is impossible. Oliver explains why urgency often makes life worse, not better, how saying no is harder than it should be, and what actually changes when you stop trying to win time and start accepting your limits. Oliver Burkeman is the author of the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/four-thousand-weeks-time-management-for-mortals?_pos=1&_sid=83af33f48&_ss=r, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking https://www.amazon.com/Antidote-Happiness-People-Positive-Thinking/dp/0865478015, and Meditations for Mortals https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/meditations-for-mortals-four-weeks-to-embrace-your-limitations-and-make-time-for-what-counts?_pos=2&_sid=83af33f48&_ss=r. Follow Oliver on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/oliverburkeman_/?hl=en andX https://x.com/oliverburkeman @OliverBurkeman https://www.instagram.com/oliverburkeman_/?hl=en Grab signed copies of Meditations for Mortals https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/meditations-for-mortals-four-weeks-to-embrace-your-limitations-and-make-time-for-what-counts?_pos=2&_sid=83af33f48&_ss=r and Four Thousand Weeks https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/four-thousand-weeks-time-management-for-mortals?_pos=1&_sid=83af33f48&_ss=r by Oliver Burkeman at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=oliver+burkeman* 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://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 https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

• 0:52Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I sound a little bit different because I am sick. Our whole family's basically been sick since Christmas, off and on. I think we went through flu B, then strep. My oldest actually had strep twice, and then now through flu A. So it's a little, it's a little rough, but um, maybe, hopefully, this is not symbolic of the, of the year to come. But it is what it is, and we will get through it. I want to read you something real fast. "Imperfectionism is the outlook that understands this to be good news. It's not that facing finitude

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  isn't painful. That's why the quest for control is so alluring. Confronting your non-negotiable limitations means accepting that life entails tough choices and sacrifices, that regret is always a possibility, as is disappointing others, and that nothing you create in the world will ever measure up to the perfect standards in your head. But these truths are also the very things that liberate you to act and to experience resonance." That's a passage from Oliver Burkeman's latest book, Meditation for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. You might know his other big bestseller, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  I've actually known Oliver for a long time. I was trying to remember, we had lunch or dinner, was it in New York, LA? I don't remember. We met before, but he came out and did the podcast in person and it was lovely. It's been awesome to watch his books blow up. He was a columnist for many years at The Guardian. He had a weekly column called This Column Will Change Your Life. And he wrote a book before, 4,000 Weeks, called The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. And I think you're really gonna like this episode. I'm keeping the intro short today because I am running out of voice. So I'll let my conversation, which I recorded with Oliver not too long

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  ago, do most of the talking. And if you haven't read 4,000 Weeks or Meditations for Mortals, you should. We've got signed copies at The Painted Porch. You can follow Oliver on Instagram and on Twitter, at Oliver Burkeman.

• 3:24Ryan Holiday?

  I remember with The Antidote, which I have here.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Amazing. Oh, an old school edition.

• 3:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, we were trying to find, I was like, what does it look like? And so we went on Amazon to like, see the cover.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Been reissued since then.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  And then I figured, so when did this come out?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  2012.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  But I remember, and in your columns too, you were somewhat cynical slash skeptical of self-help. Like, I think you rightfully sort of were criticizing the excesses or the nonsense of it and the, you know, the manifestation side of it and the secret and whatever. And then it's been interesting with 4,000 Weeks, which became like a bona fide hit.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  You're now one of those guys.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  True. Yeah.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  And I wondered what that feels like for you.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I've definitely been on a journey from cynicism to sincerity. That is a real thing that happens as you get older, apparently. I'm learning. But it's curious because I don't think I pretend at any point in any of these books that I've sort of found the perfect solution to life and all you have to do is follow me. And I think that's also antithetical to the Philosophy that I'm exploring.

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Anyway, but yeah, there is a certain sense of that. And one, one thing you learn or one thing I've found is that like, I have a very strong British desire to be self-deprecating in response to anyone like investing any kind of.

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Authority in me.

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  Who me? Yeah.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  It's not actually that helpful for people to be like that. You don't want to become a cult leader.

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  But you also like taking on a little bit of that is actually quite, it's helpful for people.

• 4:54Ryan Holiday?

  You meet the people who are sort of true believers. And by true believers, I mean true believers in themselves. Like they're able to get up and just pontificate about how someone should live their life and what this should. And you go like, first off, they're just, they just stole all this stuff from other people. They just like their real skill here is their confident shamelessness, their ability to, to sort of act like they invented any of this, even though the.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  The Greeks invented it and the Romans invented it and the religious thinkers invented it. But they're just able to get up there and be like, this is me and of course you should follow me. And.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  Then there's the other part, and I've met a bunch of these people and, and I'm sure you have too, where there's sort of journalists who are writing skeptically.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  About like the, and then they wonder why people don't buy those books. Like, nobody cares enough about this space to read a book about the space and how the space isn't.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:48Ryan Holiday?

  A value, right?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Right, right, yeah.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  Like, I think about that when you read books and it's like, the paradox of this or whatever. And you're like, so you're just saying you haven't figured it out. Like, like, people don't read enough.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  To, to read a book that's like, it's complicated. So there's this kind of middle ground that's pretty rare of like, hey, I'm writing this for myself and I am as much a traveler on this road as you. But here's kind of what smarter people than me have said, and here's what's worked for me and maybe it'll work for you.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, totally. I, that's exactly, that's exactly it, right? There's, I've seen people say different things. One is like the idea of being, maybe it was you, the idea of being. Like one and a half steps ahead of the of the reader.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, that's a good, that wasn't me, but I like it.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Kind of writing for people who absolutely have just as much intellectual capacity and sensitivity to reach all these conclusions themselves, but I've been lucky enough to spend a lot of time on it.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And, you know.

• 6:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you're good at explaining.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Right, and I think I do have a, I think I do have a skill for synthesizing and explaining and things like that, so it's in that spirit that you're helping people. There's also a line that David Brooks quotes in one of his books, I should really say, who originated the quote, but that's where I found it, about how writers are like beggars telling other beggars where we have found bread.

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, that's a good one, sure.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Which is also another really good idea here. It's like, there's a reason some of these things are eternal truths that crop up in eight different wisdom or spiritual traditions, and if you can sort of unpack them and find value in them and pass that on, you're just doing a bit more of that same, that same thing, I guess.

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  And I think, like, in the ancient world, it's not that the ideas were obvious enough, but they were new enough that the person coming up with them and writing them was often the same person.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  And in our world, which is where we have an abundance of information, actually, the rare skill is, not the rare skill, but a necessary skill slash trade is the ability to effectively communicate.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:52Ryan Holiday?

  And take things that do work and are of value, and make it clear that they do work and are of value to people who wouldn't ordinarily think that, right? And so that writing as a skill is maybe what you bring to the table. I think it's what I bring to the table. It's like, I didn't invent any of this stuff, but I'm pretty good at putting it in a context or a framework that is of use.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you very evidently are, and I think that that's, I think that that's probably true of me, too. I mean, the, the thing that I always, you come back to as a guiding light, is that it is ultimately like therapy for myself as well.

• 8:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  And if I'm ever sort of at a loss about what broad subject areas I should be focusing on, or even just things like what to write this newsletter about.

• 8:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  The question to come back to always is like, what's the thing that's really been bugging me these last few weeks, or that I feel like I had some kind of insight about? And I'm. Perpetually amazed at how many people then reply like saying like it's like it's like you're inside my head. Why did you come to this insight right now? And obviously that's there's a huge amount of like self-selection going on there in terms of who subscribes to things and who reads books, who reads specific books. But it's kind of interesting, right? As well that like there is such thing as the zeitgeist and there is such thing as like particular forms of suffering that seem to be very widespread at any given moment and ways through them that seem to help.

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  That's the weird thing about the Daily Stoic, because the Daily Stoic is attached to dates.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:25Ryan Holiday?

  And then the email too, obviously goes out every day. But people are like, how did you know? Or they're like, did you think about this? Because like what's happening in October is usually this. And it's like, I was literally thinking like, how many do I have left to get to 366? You know? And then I was like, this one's too similar to the one from three days ago. So let's just shuffle the deck a little bit more. And it's like horoscopes, but in a good way. People see what they need to see.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Right. And in forging that connection, they've done something real.

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  That's work too.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  For themselves, right? Right. It reminds me of one of the arguments I've seen about dream analysis in psychotherapy where there are, you know, there are people who believe that these are deep, important messages from the unconscious and people who believe that it's random synaptic firings that have no meaning. But actually, like, taking a dream as if it might have something to tell you and journaling about it is a great thing to do, utterly regardless of which one of those is true, right? Even if it is random, because your interpretations are certainly not going to be random.

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, even like literature, analysis of literature, right? Like, you could be right, you could be wrong. The important thing is that you sat down and thought about what this means.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  And, and just like, there's no, there's no answer to most of these like Zen paradoxes either, right? It's the thinking about them instead of letting your mind wander or think about 500 other things. That's actually the part of the enlightenment. Nobody actually knows what the sound of one hand clapping is.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Right. Those, those questions are designed to stop you short and make you actually be in reality and feel things and think. Things and right, yeah, that relates to a much wider sort of thing that I'm always coming back to in my work, I think, which is, which is right, that this isn't all leading up to a specific endpoint where you get to sit back and relax and say, I've done all the inner work now. And now for the remaining, whatever, how many years are left in my life, I can just be like plain sailing and not really have to engage. And you wouldn't want that anyway.

• 11:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I was, because I just did this book on wisdom and I was thinking, I was sort of saying wisdom is kind of like the horizon, like you think you're getting closer to it and it's always a little bit further away.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:33Ryan Holiday?

  And that struck me as true at first. And then I was thinking, but if I were to stand here and decide to walk towards the horizon and I walk for 30 minutes or an hour. Yeah, I didn't get any closer to the horizon, but if I look back, I'm further than where I was when I started. I've definitely covered.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And so the idea is not that, yeah, you arrive at, at any kind of enlightenment or wisdom or serenity. But you can certainly be better off than you were.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely.

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  Covered some ground. That's the idea.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, I completely agree.

• 12:06Ryan Holiday?

  I think sometimes people do think that because a book was published, you arrived somewhere as opposed to the book being just an encapsulation of part of that journey. And by the way, you can backtrack and.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:19Ryan Holiday?

  Get hopelessly lost and all of these other things.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was also evident. And I got, I had sort of contact with a few people after 4,000 weeks, really began to take off, offering to help me put together specific kinds of courses. And, and I have done a bit of things like that. And I am interested in the, the general domain, but, but with one or two of these people, there was an implication in what they were proposing that we worked on together. That you could offer people the big ticket version of this that would somehow include like.

• 12:48Ryan Holiday?

  The solution.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  The secret that I left out of the book. And it's like, no, that, that, that is all that I had at the point that I finished writing that.

• 12:55Ryan Holiday?

  Also, like you wrote a book about mortality. So this isn't like a, a simple, small question. Like this is literally the, I mean, Cicero said to philosophers is to learn how to die. So this is the whole point of it. Like this is the whole point of life that psychedelics are aimed at and therapy is aimed at and religion. Is aimed at and every philosopher who's ever lived has thought about. There's not like a six module course to figure it out.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:18Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that is a little bit of a difference. I do notice like people who read a lot of self-help and then people who don't. Is that sometimes self-help people think that books are answers.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:27Ryan Holiday?

  Whereas like people who maybe read literature and history and biography. Understand that a book is just a book. Like I have read an embarrassing amount of books about the Civil War. And every time I think I don't need to read anymore, I read another one and I go, I didn't even think about it. Like you realize like, oh, this isn't a thing that you have read about. It's a thing you are reading about.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:51Ryan Holiday?

  And, and if you want to take a course to learn more. Or to maybe go in deeper depths in some of the things, sure. But, but again, to the different kinds of people, like the guru and the cult leader can get up there and go, I have the answers. And a more intellectually honest person isn't able to go much further than like, here's some stuff I've been thinking about.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And this reminds me also of like this question of what is the role of techniques and methodologies and things? Because I think a lot about this because people really do want, and so do I, you know, like tricks and practices. To, to help deepen their understanding or their productivity or whatever it might be. And yet there's a whole wing of self-help that implies that the right collection of practices like is the answer. And if you can just get those ones and do those ones every day for the rest of your life, then everything's fine. It's incredibly clear to me that the thing firstly, that the thing that matters are the sort of the principles or the perspective shifts.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  And then there are like 10,000 techniques you could come up with that would embody those, those things. So if you're making the argument, as I do in the new book for a sort of less structured approach to organizing your time. So what does that mean in practice? Well, I can give you like 10 different options and you can come up with another 10 yourself. But the important thing is that, that the point I'm making. And then also that even the set of principles is going to evolve through your life, right? I mean, it's not going to be, or, or be appropriate for different people at different times in their lives. It's not going to be completely timeless truths. Although maybe you disagree because I feel like there is an. Element in the way that you write that perhaps you are getting down to the sort of handful of kind of claims about the meaningful, a meaningful life that really are universally

• 15:32Speaker 01

  and timelessly true as opposed to, you know, contingent.

• 15:36Ryan Holiday?

  I see like this with people who want to be writers all the time. They want to know like, what programs do you use? And, you know, like, what pen do you use? And, you know, like, a lot of it is just doing it. And the people who do it really well, do it very differently than the other people that do it very well. And there's, there really is not much more to it than doing it, you know? And so sometimes people can kind of get obsessed with the tactics and miss that it's largely the principles or the strategies. But yeah, like when people ask me about Stoicism, they're like, what are the five Stoic exercises? And it's like, there's a number of things that the Stoics seem to talk about a lot that we could sort of pull out as strategies. But mostly,

• 16:17Ryan Holiday?

  they went to classes, talked to people about things, read books and wrote books.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:24Ryan Holiday?

  Like, it's just a process of thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking. And like, even the, the other interesting thing is like, knowing the principles and knowing the principles are very different things.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:36Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like,

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 16:38Ryan Holiday?

  I've more or less known everything that the Stoics have said since I was 20 years old. But my relationship to them and my ability to sort of understand what they mean and get any sort of real relief or insight or direction from them has obviously evolved quite a bit. You know, it's the same thing. It's like, if you look at where I start, if you, if you look at where I am, it's not that impressive. If you look at where I am compared to where I started,

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:06Ryan Holiday?

  I've made some progress.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I, I say something similar because it's like, yeah, I was like an anxious wreck at like college. So the fact that I'm a little bit chilled out now ought to count for something.

• 17:29Ryan Holiday?

  So how many days a week do you think you wake up feeling like you're behind? Because you talk about that a lot.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, that's one of these these days things. So I think I feel this a lot less intensely than I did. And I think when I do wake up that way, I'm more likely to have the presence of mind to sort of see through that thought. Because a big part of what I'm trying to argue is there's something kind of, there's something mistaken about that idea, right? Not because you're actually really great and you can do all the things, but because precisely because you can't. So precisely that sort of feeling that there's a problem with you because you have not got your arms around infinity is a, that's not a sensible way to think about the relationship between a finite human and infinity. But to answer the question, no, I, you know, I think, I don't think I wake up feeling that way most mornings, but it definitely comes.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And what helps me in those kind of situations is, well, this, you know, I have this morning pages. That's the one thing that I've like religiously done for years now. And I've done it not because I've had great self-discipline, but because it so obviously improves the quality of my day that I, that I want to do it. And that will be the place where I will sort of metabolize that feeling if it's, if it's, if it's deep in me. I'm often fascinated by the fact that sometimes it seems you wake up early in the morning and that feels like the, the sort of wisest and calmest and most focused you'll ever be. And sometimes it's like whatever's happened in your sleep has like twisted you up in the wrong direction. And you start from a, a sort of earlier stage of your psychological evolution.

• 19:04Ryan Holiday?

  Would you ever wake up like, and you had a dream about like your spouse and you're just like angry, like, like, or they're angry with you? It's kind of like that, like clearly you, you got in some sort of emotional place or vibe that like you have to do some real work to get out of. Because the thing that you're upset about is not real.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:21Ryan Holiday?

  You know, you're like, you just did this horrible thing to me in my mind.

• 19:26Ryan Holiday?

  And I know it's not real, but I still, I woke up feel it.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31Ryan Holiday?

  While I was asleep, it was real and now I'm having the, and that there's probably a metaphor in there. It was just like, you're having the impression, the feeling that whatever, but it's not actually true.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:41Ryan Holiday?

  And so you made it up. So you have to kind of work yourself out of that. And I think you can do a, like a life version of that too. Like you wake up and you're like, everything's shit or I'm behind or like, you can wake up in an emotional place that is not based on anything you've had time to experience.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Yeah, no, absolutely. But it's real for you in a sense, and so it needs your attention. Yeah.

• 20:04Ryan Holiday?

  And you can, you can certainly make it real by how you treat people, right? So, so it's like, if you immediately pick a fight with your kids.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:12Ryan Holiday?

  Or you go straight to your inbox and you're, you decide to take this, that, or the other personally. Like the world will oblige you if that's how you want to feel today.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Right. Cause it's, it's all the overlay that you're putting on things, right? I mean, the back foot feeling is, is definitely something I write about a lot. But the other sort of side of that, it's the same point really is just, I used to have this sense, and I occasionally will fall back into it these days of time, sort of these kind of tranches of time that I'm sort of moving through in my life so that I'm, see if I can convey this properly. So like, I would be working and it would be my turn to do school pickup at 3:30. And then from 3:30 till like after dinner, that's, I'm going to be focusing on parenting.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  And as, as 3:30 approaches, it's like this thing is moving towards you through the day. It's like in some sort of like James Bond movie or something, right? The walls of the room are getting smaller and smaller. And I would get more and more sort of stressed about the time running out and resentful of this thing that I have to do. But also like most days, I really enjoy doing that thing.

• 21:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Certainly it's very, very high up in my values of what I want to give my life to. And it's just the fact of relating to time in this particular sort of finitude is a problem way that, that sort of defines that upcoming thing as, as a, as something to bemoan.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Because yeah, somewhere in the back of my mind, or in some like pre unverbal part of my unconscious, there is this assumption that it shouldn't be the case that trade offs are involved.

• 21:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yeah, you're just arguing with the reality that you can't do two things at the same time. Well, I think about that, and that's why I was saying like the key is just to say no to things. Because it's like, okay, so if I get resentful when there's like things in the calendar, but I also understand that like life is things you have to do. Did I eat up the patience that I have with that? Because I agreed to this call and this meeting and this thing that could have been an email. And then, so you know, I'm like, okay, this is my publisher, I gotta be nice, you know, or I gotta talk to the accountant about this thing, or you know, this person really wanted to just hop on the phone for three minutes, even though I, they've done this to me before and it's never three minutes and it never actually needed to happen. So I did all that and then 3:30 comes along and I gotta pick up my kid.

• 22:42Ryan Holiday?

  And now I'm like, what the fuck? Will anyone let me work, you know? And it's like,

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 22:46Ryan Holiday?

  I should be polite and accommodating and patient with the one thing that I like doing and actually matters and is, by the way, totally my responsibility, which is, you know, picking them up from school and having fun together.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:01Ryan Holiday?

  But before that,

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:03Ryan Holiday?

  I've used it up on a bunch of trivial shit. And so it's like, when I pull up my calendar and there's not much in it, I'm like, today is a great day, you know? And when it's, when it's, there's a bunch of things, I'm like, you know? And so part of it, I think, is just like the decisions you made beforehand.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:20Ryan Holiday?

  So you're not having to use like your zen mastery of your emotions to deal with this situation that was,

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:28Ryan Holiday?

  You voluntarily put yourself into.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Right. And I think what, yes, I mean, what that brings up for me when I think about that is like, first of all, I think like, isn't it crazy? Because we are both in a situation through great good fortune, where we really can decide to say no to lots of things that come in and it's not going to be calamitous and people are going to understand. And yet, maybe it's different for you, but the weird stuff from childhood of like, I've sort of got to be obedient to these different like,

• 23:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  And the way you can give like, basically, everybody in the world some sort of a strange quasi-parental authority over you, absolute disaster.

• 24:06Ryan Holiday?

  There's this really fascinating exchange that Seneca talks about where he tells a story about Alexander the Great. So Alexander the Great wants to conquer some territory and, you know, he's been so successful that the leaders of that country come together and they go, they call a meeting with him and they go like, "Look, if you don't attack us, we'll like, we'll give you this part," you know? And Seneca quotes Alexander going like, "I didn't come all the way across the world to take what the leftovers you're willing to give me." He's like, "I'm gonna take what I want and give you the leftovers." Now, obviously, this is brutal, horrendous idea, but Seneca is using it as a metaphor or analogy to go, "This is how we have to think about philosophy and self-improvement, etc.,"

• 24:48Ryan Holiday?

  "that you don't like, commit yourself to all these professional goals and all this, all these activities and all this stuff, and then you give the little bit left over to meditation, philosophy, reflection, quiet, stillness, whatever you want to call it." It's the other way around.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:05Ryan Holiday?

  That's the main thing.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:06Ryan Holiday?

  And then you can, if you have anything left over that you can spare, you can give it to this random phone call or whatever.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:13Ryan Holiday?

  And so he's basically just saying that we have it precisely backwards, that, and most people, myself included, have some dynamic, a version of this dynamic at home, which is like, you promise the bulk of your time to professional things and then you give your kids a little bit of leftover, "The office is closed today, I can hang out with you," or whatever. And then we go, "But I do this all for my family, my family's my number one priority."

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:35Ryan Holiday?

  And it's like, the calendar doesn't lie.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:37Ryan Holiday?

  It's the exact opposite.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Revealed preference.

• 25:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, I agree and I struggle with it all the time.

• 25:43Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. And that's, that's what really struck me is that like, I don't want to say no to something, even where I really don't want to do it. Like, I remember I was CC'd on some email once. Someone had asked someone I knew to do something and the guy just responded, "Hard pass." And I was like, "Wow."

• 26:03Ryan Holiday?

  I love it, you know, like if I could ever do that, I would be so proud of myself. But he was not just no, but just like not interested at all. But we, um, we find ourselves not wanting to be rude to these people.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:20Ryan Holiday?

  But you'll be really rude to a nine year old. They have no say, like, like the consequences for the nine year old is what they're going to think when they're a 39 year old.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:29Ryan Holiday?

  That's a long way away. So you're not thinking about that, you know? So you're like, yeah, sure. I'll do this thing.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I mean, I think I am better at saying no to things than I, than I used to be, but it doesn't get easy. And again, and again, I'm amazed by how okay people are with it in certain contexts. Cause in certain contexts, they were just having a go, see if you were interested.

• 26:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  I've even had a few contexts where, because of the stuff that I write about, where, where people sort of respond with relief. Cause it's like, if you'd just done this, then like, it might not have been living your philosophy.

• 27:01Ryan Holiday?

  And I think they were testing you, but they're like, they're like, actually Kissinger has this thing about, he was like, at, at, early on in your career, you're, um, you're worried that you're boring people and then you get to a place of power, influence, and they worry about boring you.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:17Ryan Holiday?

  And then like you get to a place, if you're lucky, or if you've talked about these things, where then you say no stuff and the people are like, I'm so proud of you.

• 27:26Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I wish that if you had seen the, the, the wringer that you just put me through, you would, you would not be so proud. And maybe you could have just not done this.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Done it in the first place. Yeah, right.

• 27:37Ryan Holiday?

  I had to talk to like six people to get them to confirm that I shouldn't do, you know, like.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the other thing that never seems to get easier is the complete impossibility of properly judging how long anything will take anyway. Right? So there are plenty of occasions where I say yes to things and I know all of this stuff about saying no. And I'm like, right, but I'm taking a sober decision. This is 20 minutes of my life. And of course, of course it isn't. Yeah.

• 28:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Right. Right. You agree. You think, oh, it's one hour talk, but you gotta fly there the night before. And then you gotta fly home. And so it's like, wait, I just, I just, that was a 36 hour commitment that I just did.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  There's a lot to be said. I mean, it's a well-known thing, but there's a lot to be said for that question, for asking yourself whether you would, whether you'd be looking forward to it or say yes to it if it was happening tomorrow or today, when you're dealing with things that are a year or two out. I find that is very good for surfacing like, oh. No, I can exactly imagine the mindset I'm gonna be in the night before this.

• 28:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  This thing, so maybe listen to that.

• 28:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's but it never it you can get better at it and you can you can create more barriers and rules and sort of systems, but it's always it's it's a difficult thing to do.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Right, and like, just to get a little bit sort of maybe overwrought about it, I think it's difficult ultimately because it is a tiny little bit of facing mortality, right? It's a tiny little bit of experiencing the awful truth of our limit.

• 29:02Ryan Holiday?

  But it is hard because you're like, okay, it's only an hour. And then you're like, but it's an hour, you know? And then if you thought about everything in that light, you'd be paralyzed also.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Sometimes people like I think people who haven't read Four Thousand Weeks, but who know the title and know what it what it refers to. So I'm talking about like, you know, drive time radio interviews who can't be expected to read any of the things that they're talking to people about.

• 29:29Ryan Holiday?

  To be clear, I have read.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  I am not not including you.

• 29:32Ryan Holiday?

  Not only have I read it, I read it galley.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Certainly not including you in this. Like, and this, in a way, it's a fault of the titling, right? You you might assume that what followed from that is like, oh, my God, time is really short. We've got to think very, very self consciously about the limitations of time all the time and pack our lives with the most extraordinary and awe inspiring things we can. And I'm always at pains to be like, no, no, no, like, to the extent that I have gone through a perspective shift here and to the extent that I can take the reader on that shift, it's relaxing ultimately. It's like it's a relief because as long as you're thinking about that sort of, you know, exactly what am I doing with this hour of my life? Exactly what am I doing with that hour of my life? Even though you're doing it out of an understanding of the limits of your life, you're still doing it with that

• 30:19Speaker 01

  desire to somehow, you know, triumph over the finitude rather than kind of falling completely into it and saying like, you're so finite, such a large proportion of the things you're capable of thinking you might want to do, you're never going to get to do. It's so not a fair fight.

• 30:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  From the very beginning, that you get to kind of like, not fight that fight.

• 30:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, memento mori should both create a sense of urgency and make you slow down.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:44Ryan Holiday?

  Like, like the famous passage in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius is saying, you know, as you tuck your child in at night, say to yourself, like, they may not make it to the morning. He's not like, so get bedtime done, you know, fast. He's saying the exact opposite.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:57Ryan Holiday?

  He's saying just slow, slow it down. This is, the present is an eternity, right? And the idea might be that life is short, so you can't afford to rush. And what are you rushing towards? You're rushing towards death.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:11Ryan Holiday?

  So, yeah, slow, slow it down.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely.

• 31:14Ryan Holiday?

  It's not working if it's making you more anxious. Because that's a waste of time and energy and not in your control. Like, I think about that when, you know, you talk to people who are like, they have terminal cancer. And so the doctors tell them it's like six months to a year. Well, I, I just think about like, what are they thinking when the airplane lands? And then the, the pilot goes, sorry, folks, there's another plane at the gate. And we're gonna have to wait till they back in. You're just like, 40 fucking minutes.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 31:44Ryan Holiday?

  Like, is that what they're thinking? Or is it probably more of a, these are 40 minutes?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Right. And I mean, I, I feel like people have very different experiences of, of that being in that situation. Right? Some people sort of do go through the, the transformation and some people really don't. But if you do, I think, yeah, I, you can certainly, I can certainly imagine, I believe, a sense in which that's like, you know, that reality is as alive in the plane that's waiting for the, that is filled with aliveness and potential as any other bit of reality. It's a, you're there. It's not fake life compared to something else. It may be less pleasant in all sorts of ways than once you're out of the plane. But so, yeah.

• 32:22Ryan Holiday?

  The time doesn't start when you, I try to remind myself when I take my kids like on trips and stuff. I go like, this is part of the vacation too. It doesn't start when we arrive at the guided tour.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:32Ryan Holiday?

  Like the car ride to the airport, the time waiting at the airport, the time on the airplane. Like, this is all part of the trip. So enjoy that.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:42Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and don't make that miserable, or else you're putting a lot of pressure on the, the dinner reservation.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Totally, and I'd be interested to talk about that idea of urgency, actually, because I have a lot of trouble with the whole concept of urgency. And I've written newsletters in the past, like, basically, like, provocatively entitled against urgency or whatever. And I think, for me, it's because urgency has always connoted this kind of idea that, like, there are other people's agendas that I've got to serve and that things aren't okay until I've, until I've served them. And I always got really annoyed with that Eisenhower matrix, you know, urgent and important, because there's a category there which is urgent but not important. And I don't even know, like-

• 33:25Ryan Holiday?

  That's mostly shit from other people.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Right, but I don't even know what that is. How is it urgent, then, if it's not, if it's not important, right? It's like urgency should, but you're totally right, of course, that memento mori is, is there to bring, well, certainly a heightened awareness, maybe that's not quite the same as, as urgency. But when I see, like, self-help books that are based around the idea of cultivating a feeling of urgency in your life, I run a mile, because I do not, I want to live without what I think of as urgency.

• 33:53Ryan Holiday?

  You don't think there's anything to be said for, like, hustle? And I don't mean that, like, in the hustle porn sense, I just mean of, like, Seneca's thing about, you know, people, sort of, he says, "The one thing all fools have in common is they're always getting ready to start."

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:05Ryan Holiday?

  So that just the, like, "Hey, when are you gonna do this?"

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:08Ryan Holiday?

  You know, so I think there's, or your warm-up that you're going through is just a rationalized form of procrastination.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, totally. And I think maybe this is all just semantics, right? Because I, I have experienced and written about that sense of, like, okay, it's just time to plunge into this thing, it's time to stop readying. But for me, that has worked most effectively, and especially in the recent years, as a kind of letting go of something, right? Not as a kind of, like, clenching my muscles and, and like, but, but, but, but as a letting go of the things that were standing in the way of action.

• 34:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  So there's that line from a Zen teacher who I, oh, Koshia Uchiyama, who says, "Life unimpeded by anything manifests as pure activity."

• 34:58Speaker 01

  This idea that like, if you finally get rid of the blockages, it's just the doing.

• 35:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  And I think I spent a lot of my life trying to sort of force feelings of urgency, push myself over the motivational hump and all this stuff. And for me, anyway, that wasn't the way. The way has been to sort of see the inhibitions that are stopping me from just from, from doing the thing that I actually kind of, on some level, want to do already.

• 35:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, most, most of the time, the urgency is leading you astray. Like, people need to understand, like, speed reading is a scam. And even if it, even if it wasn't a scam, it's a stupid thing. It's like, do you know how much faster I could eat? You know, like, I could eat faster than I do.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:39Ryan Holiday?

  That's not what eating is about.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:41Ryan Holiday?

  You know, like, it's not how many calories can you shovel down your throat in how little time? You know, like, John Mulaney has this great joke about, like, the hot dog eating contest, and he's like, I never asked it to be fast. Like, what is, who introduced that? How quickly can you do it? But like, eating is a pleasurable activity.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:02Ryan Holiday?

  So it should take however long it takes. It shouldn't take longer than, than, I don't know, needs to imply some sort of judgment too. But it doesn't need to take five hours to have lunch, but it also shouldn't take six minutes.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:14Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and if you're enjoying the thing, why would you try to rush through it? Like, it, it's interesting that, that people who try to speed read, like, are they trying, yeah, are they trying to rush through food? Are they trying to rush through time with their children? Do you rush through sex? Like, a, a pleasurable activity is, is, is intended to be enjoyed and savored.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:34Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, and so oftentimes, the urgency is not just, and this is where the memento mori thing comes in, you're not just rushing through the activity. What is ultimately on the other side of the rushing? Like, what is the destination?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:47Ryan Holiday?

  The destination is you die and you don't do it anymore.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:50Ryan Holiday?

  So.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  So it's more of a.

• 36:52Ryan Holiday?

  You win.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Right, so it's an, right, so it's an awareness, I hadn't really thought about memento mori specifically in the, the ancient form of it in this context, but like, it's the awareness of death that, that. Gives the possibility of a more, a more fully present, more authentic experience. Right. And, uh, you know, Heidegger, just to veer off into another area that we really don't need to go, talks about being towards death, right? The context, the context that death creates for everything that we do, if we're sufficiently aware of the fact.

• 37:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And I think also, if you were to know you had six months or a year or 10 years, would you do a bunch of things faster? Is that the change you would make? Or would you probably just not do certain things and definitely do a bunch of things?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  And do whatever you did with a kind of openness to kind of really being there in the doing.

• 37:48Ryan Holiday?

  Because, because when the doctor tells you, you have, you know, six months or 10 years, even that is just a microcosm of the larger thing that everyone else is in. Like, you can still get hit by a bus. You can still get struck by lightning. You could still get murdered on a street corner.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:05Ryan Holiday?

  It could also turn out to be much worse than the diagnosis. Like, there is this tendency to go, this is what they said. It's what I'm promised. So I get what I paid for and it's never up to you.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Right. And like, where is the point between being given six months to live and being given like 50 years left to live? Which if I'm incredibly lucky, I might have, like, why is that? Fine. And this is like extraordinary.

• 38:28Ryan Holiday?

  It's always a terminal diagnosis.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. As a meditation teacher, friend of mine once said, everything is palliative care when you think about it.

• 38:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. Everything's palliative care and also everything is gender affirming care in some form or another too. As all these people spend their time getting angry at trans people.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  So many discussions we could, this direction that could often, yeah.

• 39:02Ryan Holiday?

  So do you regularly meditate? Is that like a part of your practice? Or do you think about you have a more expansive definition of what meditation is?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  I am definitely trying to tag on to the coattails of Marcus Aurelius here more than Buddha.

• 39:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, to himself.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  With the word meditation. Right. And I'm definitely, yeah, I, I, I do have a sort of sketchy, not particularly regular, disciplined, sitting practice, but, but I think that I can make the case that the morning pages that I write and certain other things that I do in my life are, I think they're sort of bona fide meditation in the sense that I mean the term, there's a tendency to call anything that you do my meditation, right? But I think there are lots of things that involve sort of stepping away from or objectifying narratives that are in your mind. And one of those is to sort of leave, be uninvolved with thoughts as they pass across your, uh, uh, mental radar in, in meditation or to focus or to keep returning to the breath

• 40:02Speaker 01

  when they, when they distract you. But so I think is, um, certain kinds of journaling, certain kinds of, uh, sort of therapeutic exercises and things like that. They have that same, that same shape of like, see these stories as not something that you're in and fully identified with, but as one of the things that you contain.

• 40:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't meditate, but I take a lot of walks, you know? And that's it for me.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And what are you doing on those walks? So you?

• 40:30Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I'm walking my dog and I'm looking around and, uh, I'm trying to be present and I'm trying to remind myself as I've been doing it lately, like this is pretty fucking wonderful, you know? The sun is going down and I'm walking my dog and I'm just like, I don't think Marcus Aurelius ever experienced this, you know? Like this is the best fucking thing of all time. And this is life. This is what it's all for. And, uh, I, I kind of try to do that. And, um, one of the things, so like I, I live on this ranch, so we have a decent spread of property. And then I'm usually walking on this dirt road that the house is on and, uh, you know, most of my neighbors are like, there's a trailer here, there's a little old house here. And I just go like,

• 41:16Ryan Holiday?

  We're just like on the same street. Like, the best part of this is not that I own this part. The best part is the free part that I'm doing. And then I go like, my neighbor has more property, isn't doing the walk and the neighbor with the less is it? You know, like this is just, I just try to kind of think about stuff like that. I just kind of run through my head like, what are the things I need to be reminded of? And then I, you know, I get back home and I try to hold on to that feeling until I get, you know, hit the nuts by my son or something and it immediately goes away. But, you know, you try, you try to get it to some kind of spiritual place of stillness or acceptance or gratitude or, you know, perspective.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:58Ryan Holiday?

  And then it's all very fleeting.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:01Ryan Holiday?

  And then you go back to it again.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I think there's, yeah, it resonates a lot with my own experiences. We live now in the North Yorkshire Moors in Northern England. And there's a sort of scale, it's not an American kind of scale to the landscape, but by UK standards, there's a scale to that landscape, but really, you know, I think it's very, very helpful to be, to feel relatively small within that landscape. There's something I find very, it's not even that I'm thinking logically, the thought like, oh, you know, the world is much bigger than my concerns. It's something much more physical and embodies just that sense of like, okay, I'm just going about my business here and I'm trying to do some good things in context of family, context of work, but, but there's this whole thing that's just like

• 42:45Speaker 01

  implacably carrying on, no matter what happens in politics and no matter what happens in in the world at large, this, this sort of landscape is just like there. And of course, actually it's changing radically through the centuries and everything, but, but it has that sense of something more permanent, which is an old Stoic meditation as well, isn't it? And I think that-

• 43:05Ryan Holiday?

  There is something about Europe though, where you're like, people have been walking on this exact road for 2000 years.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  And to your point about foot, dirt roads and footpaths, like a lot of the walking I'm, I'm doing is on public footpaths where like, I have an ancient historic right to walk through somebody else's farmyard because there's a public footpath there.

• 43:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  And they can't do anything about it.

• 43:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Even though occasionally you get the impression you, they might, they wish they could.

• 43:28Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And so there are all these kind of ways over the land and then like churches dating back to the- Fifth, sixth century and all this stuff where, yeah, that and that sense of people having been there for a very long time is powerful.

• 43:44Ryan Holiday?

  Sometimes.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  And lived and died and gone through all their shit.

• 43:46Ryan Holiday?

  They're not famous people, not, not people whose name echoes down.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 43:51Ryan Holiday?

  Random, nameless, faceless. There's a Taylor Swift song where she says the who's who of who's that? And you go like, even like, a bunch of them probably were famous.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:03Ryan Holiday?

  And then, and there's a, there's a line in Meditations where Marcus Trulius is like, listing just like famous people that are to him, not that famous anymore.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:13Ryan Holiday?

  And then to us, it's like, there's 15 names, like two of them.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Who are you talking about?

• 44:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And you go, oh, right. That, he's trying to remind himself that like, I mean, if the movie Gladiator hadn't come out, how many people would even know his name?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:25Ryan Holiday?

  Like there, there is just the way in which all these people and names and things and full lives and not full lives just kind of um, fade into the rhythm of history and time and perspective. And you're part of that.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Right. And that it's really strange that that is so therapeutic and relaxing and good for, at least for many people. Maybe, I think there may be people who, who consider that to be a sort of world historic insult to their specialness. I don't know, but to me, that's what I need.

• 44:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Take some of the pressure off.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely.

• 45:02Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't mean that everything you're doing is meaningless. It just means like, whatever it is, is enough, I think.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I like, I like that. It's helpful in the context of anxiety about world events as well, right? There's this sense of, it's very, very easy to feel like the whole of history was leading up till now, and now everything is on a knife edge. And if it all goes in the wrong direction, then, then that's, that's it for humanity. And, you know, there is a sector of the AI doomer crowd that wants to persuade us of that very claim, but putting that aside, there's something very important about the fact that like, far worse has arisen and been gone through. It doesn't mean that it's not real suffering and real pain and real injustice in the moment that it's happening, but it's. It's useful to to have that in the back of your mind.

• 45:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a story you tell in the book where this guy's out for a walk and he bumps into one of his friends who's like weeping in the park. And he goes, you know, what's wrong? And he was like, they fired on a mob in Crimea or something.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:58Ryan Holiday?

  And you go, the timelessness of that, of just being made miserable by a thing that happened thousands of miles away. And the timelessness of the of the tension between it happened to human beings and therefore it's significant and my problem and it matters. And I should care about it and it would say something bad about me if I didn't care. And at the same time, if it's causing me to weep in a park, I'm probably flattering myself about its relationality to me and the contributive value of those tears. Like what I'm not doing is doing anything about it. I'm just feeling miserable.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that's right. I think the actual person in that anecdote, who is the philosopher Simone Weil, was a very extraordinary person. And I think she was sort of almost like a kind of tuning fork for all human suffering. It was almost like her role in history to be one of those people who doesn't put up that boundary. The reason it's so educational for me, that anecdote is because it's like, I know I I know I couldn't do that at all. Like, I know I'm not functioning well if that's how I get about the world at large. And it's obviously, you know, vastly more to the point now that we're so easily informed about the whole of the world's suffering. If we want to be, or if the algorithms want us to be.

• 47:13Ryan Holiday?

  Something is happening shitty somewhere at every moment.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Right. In the same way that there's, you know, the the worst opinions are being expressed by people on any side of anything. And you will find them and then it will enrage you that that's what people are like. Yeah.

• 47:27Ryan Holiday?

  If you want to be miserable, the internet can help you with that.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  It certainly can. Yeah, right.

• 47:35Ryan Holiday?

  And it's not to say that you should be, you know, ignoring it at the same time. You don't need to seek it out and you don't need to mainline it from the second you wake up in the morning.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Right. And you don't need to feel bad about apportioning your attention. And this is one of the points I'm really trying to drive home in that section is like this whole idea that we had. For a long span of modern history, right, that be a good citizen means sort of pushing yourself to give more attention to the wider world outside your your home than you might otherwise naturally do. And now in a sort of an attention economy, this is the opposite of the of the situation that we face. So what you need to be able to do now is to actually be willing to say, this particular problem over there is totally real. And it's totally awful. And I totally wish that it were, um, things were made better. But it's not going to be my fight because this one is, and I've got to choose, got to pick my.

• 48:27Ryan Holiday?

  I've got a man on it. It's just not me.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  I've got a man on it. Yeah, right. I gotta pick my battles. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this circles around the sort of most classic, in my understanding, Stoic notion of just the the question of the sphere of the sphere that you can control and the sphere that you can't control. Although I've always had a bit of trouble with the Stoic version of that because it seems like there's a lot of claims made, at least in some iterations of it, about how much control you can exert over your own emotions.

• 48:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I mean, there's also some stuff that's kind of in the middle.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 49:00Ryan Holiday?

  And then there's also, what if you have clinical depression or what if you have a brain injury?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 49:06Ryan Holiday?

  It does change things. But what's interesting to me is Stoicism is mostly famous for those circles. But the most interesting sort of illustration of circles in Stoic philosophy comes from this guy named Heracles. Who said that, you know, you have this central circle, which is you. This is how we're born. We're born selfish, self-interest, et cetera. And then you have these concentric circles around you. And those are your family, your friends, your neighbors, your fellow citizens. You know, fellow human beings, people who haven't been born. And it gets bigger and bigger and that although people think of Stoic philosophy as this selfish philosophy, it's actually, he says, the work of it is about drawing those outer rings inward. So it's this kind of tension between only focusing on things that are in your control.

• 49:50Ryan Holiday?

  But then also making sure that you're not utterly indifferent to everyone else.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:55Ryan Holiday?

  And I think the problem is with your point about this attention economy. We have told ourselves a lie that knowing about stuff and feeling. Bad about it is helpful.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Automatically.

• 50:08Ryan Holiday?

  To them and us.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:10Ryan Holiday?

  And so we have confused emoting about problems with being involved in the solution to said problem.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:18Ryan Holiday?

  So like, it'd be better if you said, I'm not going to think about it, but I am setting up this recurring donation.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 50:24Ryan Holiday?

  Or something, right? Like, I'm not going to give it my day to day unhappiness. But I am going to apportion a percentage of my earnings towards addressing it. Or I'm going to run for office, or I'm, I'm going to, here's, here's my contribution to society. Or here's my contribution to things greater than myself. That's what I do. That's how I know I'm not making the world the worst place.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:49Ryan Holiday?

  But I'm not going to go to bed weeping every night and wake up weeping every night and tell myself I'm a good person because I'm so emotionally raw.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Right, right. And that sense of like pseudo-action, that emotion is action, or that it's hugely encouraged by the basic form of like social media interaction, right? The idea that like.

• 51:08Ryan Holiday?

  Because they're monetizing your attention.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Right, right. Putting something out there, sharing something, liking it, resharing it, whatever is, feels like an action. And it is an action within the space of the, the platform. But yeah, there's no reason to believe that is an action that affects, necessarily affects the issue that you're so upset about.

• 51:25Ryan Holiday?

  And it is negatively affecting you or your other responsibilities.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, while in subtle ways, just polarizing everybody all to hell. So.

• 51:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah. I do think, talking about strategies though, like I, I think this idea of waking up on the back foot is a very common, like very real problem. I'm curious if you have any changes you've made to address that.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  I don't want to get too sales pitchy here, but part of something that was really important for me in the new book was to sort of create a book that, to whatever extent a book can do this, could like be an active ingredient in this way, right? So that if you do decide to read one short chapter a day for a month, which is my strong suggestion in the, in the, in the introduction. If, if someone decides to do that, I think I'm. Sharing like versions of this perspective shift that might sort of take a root in you somewhere and affect how you live through the next 24 hours in some small way. And I'm not going to claim that I read my own book over and over again, that would be weird. But, but, but I do do a similar thing with, um, with the reading that I choose to do first

• 52:28Speaker 01

  thing, first thing in the morning. I think the morning pages that I mentioned really helped me out a lot with that. And then, you know, in general, not so much to do with waking up on the back foot, but just that feeling of, of being on the back foot. All my sort of productivity and writing process as well has been on a long-term evolution or shift, I don't know, from, from being very sort of programmed and scheduled to being more and more sort of intuition based. And this is where the Zen stuff has been so important to me. The more that you can feel that, and I'm not perfect at this, but the more that you can feel in any moment that you're just choosing to do one thing, it's the only thing in the world, you're focusing on that until you've finished it, and that then you'll do another thing.

• 53:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  And that that's all you ever possibly could do, and all life is, that's what causes that back foot feeling to sort of to lift, right?

• 53:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Because literally all you can ever do is pick a thing and address yourself to it for a while, and then address, pick another thing and address yourself to that. And, and even people who are following incredibly rigid time boxing systems for their day are still actually doing that because they're still choosing in every moment to stick with the system that they set up. So once you can sort of feel your way into that sense that that's all you ever have to do, the next thing, or the next most necessary thing, as Carl Jung calls it, then it's almost, on some level, that's just incompatible with feeling like you're on the back foot. Because then it's like, yes, there are three different deadlines I was supposed to meet today, and here I'm addressing myself to one of them. What more do you want?

• 54:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I try to say to myself, like, either like, this is all I have to be doing, or like, this is enough, not, and I try to push back against that feeling of like, but I have these 15 things, or that I have, I have this looming thing coming up. It's like, this is the thing that I'm doing.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:19Ryan Holiday?

  That's the thing that I'm doing.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  And I think something to beware of here, I've found, I totally resonate with that, is this, how many productivity approaches and people's natural attempts to organize their lists and all the rest of it, lead to this systematic practice of constantly reminding yourself of all the other things that you've got to do, right?

• 54:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  So the idea of visible lists and plans that just like endlessly reinforce to you all the things that you're failing to do in the moment that you may well be doing something really important.

• 54:48Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And meaningful.

• 54:49Ryan Holiday?

  You don't like to do lists.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  I've gone back and forth, but yeah, no, I don't not, I don't like trying to, I don't like to do lists as things to, to try to sort of control time via.

• 55:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Right? I think I'm not going to claim that I don't keep any reminder list of the things that, things that I've committed to and things that I need to not forget. But I try more and more to make the decisions about what I will do in any given moment in a more intuitive way, and then check back with that list to make sure that I'm not letting too many things fall off the radar. And then there are certain patterns that emerge, right? So it's definitely the case that writing works much better in the, for me, in the early hours of the day.

• 55:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Than that you try to suddenly begin at 2:45 in the afternoon.

• 55:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that doesn't work.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Right. But once upon a time, because I knew that, I would then create these very strict plans for when I was going to start and all this stuff. And it would ultimately for me be, it would backfire. It ultimately became that like my life was spent, well, I was going to say serving this rule, but actually it'd be failing to serve this rule and then feeling bad about it.

• 55:53Ryan Holiday?

  The routine becomes this ritual and then not doing the ritual becomes sacrilegious.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:58Ryan Holiday?

  Instead of just being like, hey, more often than not, I try to get my writing done in the morning.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And when people, when you sort of shift into this somewhat more intuitive thing, the fear that comes up is that like, if you just go with what you feel like, you'll just waste all your, all your time. And there's maybe is a sort of stage on the journey where that, where that has to happen. But when you get sort of deeper into that and you're really. Feeling what it is that feels like it needs doing in a given moment, then it just becomes quite natural to want the thing you will want to do at eight o'clock in the morning or nine o'clock in the morning is, is the stuff that works best then. You do need to control your calendar so that you haven't got five meetings planned between eight AM and midday, right?

• 56:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  But once that space is cleared, I find it more and more effective to, to navigate by that sense of what feels like it needs doing right now.

• 56:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, because the reward for success or self-awareness or whatever, like knowing when you're best should not, again, be some form of anxiety or this prison that you have designed for yourself. And like, I think especially if you're someone who is driven or a little bit compulsive, then you, you're like, all of a sudden, you're like, I gotta flip this light switch 15 times before I go on the, like, you're just doing the work equivalent of that.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:18Ryan Holiday?

  And, and you feel bad if you don't do it. And the reward I've noticed is like, the reward is not feeling great.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:25Ryan Holiday?

  The reward is just relief from the tension I ratcheted up.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:29Ryan Holiday?

  And, and that's not a good way to, thing to build your life around.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  And the crazy part, I'm not going to say this happens often, but the crazy part of it is that actually sometimes you do have it in you to do some writing, starting at two 45 in the afternoon, right?

• 57:41Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. If you haven't made it in your head that it's impossible to do it then.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 57:45Ryan Holiday?

  You're stealing from yourself the ability to be spontaneous or flexible.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. So I have principles or sort of rules of thumb.

• 57:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Writing works best in the mornings. It's really good if I can touch into the, the real writing and ideas every, every day or, you know, five or six days a week. But they're not, yeah, once they become rules that I'm, that I am sort of the indentured servant of, that's when it all goes wrong.

• 58:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. The rule of serving you or you serving the system you've made.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Right, right. It's all in the Bible. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, says Jesus Christ.

• 58:22Ryan Holiday?

  There we go.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:23Ryan Holiday?

  You want to check out some books?

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 58:25Ryan Holiday?

  Let's do it.

• 58:28Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.