Are You In Touch With Your Future? | Wherever You Go, There Your Choice Is

As Gandhi sat with a reporter one hot afternoon, he began experiencing some stomach pains. An attendant brought him a mudpack to place on his abdomen. “This puts me in touch with my future,” he said with a smile. He was joking about his mortality, just as the Stoics and all wise philosophers have. The reporter was a bit surprised. You are so young, he said. And that’s when Gandhi reminded him, as Marcus Aurelius did in Meditations, that age didn’t matter. Death was the common lot of all people he said, “some in a hundred years, but all sooner or later will die.”In today's Daily Stoic Journal excerpt, Ryan examines the power of choice through the Epictetus quote: "A podium and prison is each a place, one high and the other low. But in each place your freedom of choice is to be maintained if you so wish."✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Are you in touch with your future? As Gandhi sat with a reporter one hot afternoon, he began experiencing some stomach pains. An attendant brought him a mud pack to place on his abdomen. "This puts me in touch with my future," he said with a smile. He was joking about his mortality, just as the Stoics and all wise philosophers have. The reporter who was sitting there with him was a bit surprised. "You are so young," he said. And that's when Gandhi reminded him, as Marcus Aurelius did in Meditations, that age didn't matter. "Death was the common lot of all people," he said. "Some in a hundred years, but all sooner or later will die."

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  In Meditations, Marcus spoke often of the emperors who preceded him. Where was Antoninus or Hadrian, Vespasian or Augustus? Where was Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar? They were all dead. Some lived long lives, some lived short ones, but eventually, they all went in the same ground next to their mule drivers and enemies alike. And so will we. Our future has us packed in mud or incinerated in a furnace. That is a fact. Youth, good genes, fame, plans, none of this changes. What has been ordained for us. It may delay it, but that's the best we can hope for. So let's face it and get in touch with it before it comes as a surprise.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  That's my Memento Mori coin. I think about it all the time. I'm playing with it on my desk right now. It's something I carry always. It's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public. It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different Memento Mori reminders, of course, but if you want to get this one, which we make here in the US in a mint in Minnesota, that's been in business since 1882, you can check it out in the Daily Stoic store, or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, The Painted Porch on Main Street, where we sell them as well. It's a game changer. Check it out.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Wherever you go, there your choices. This is the January 19th entry in The Daily Stoic. Our quote today is also from Epictetus, Discourses 2:6. He says, "A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in each place your freedom of choice is to be maintained if you so wish." The Stoics all held vastly different stations in life. Some were rich and some were born at the bottom of Rome's hierarchy. Others had it easy and others had it unimaginably hard. This is true for us as well. We all come to philosophy from different backgrounds, and even within our own lives, we experience bouts of good

• 3:29Speaker 01

  fortune and bad fortune. But in all circumstances, adversity or advantage, we really have just one thing we need to do: focus on what is in our control as opposed to what is not. Right now, we might be laid low with struggles, whereas just a few years ago, we might have lived high on the hog, and in just a few days, we might be doing so well that our success is actually a burden. One thing will stay constant: our freedom of choice, both in the big picture and the small. Ultimately, this is clarity. Whoever we are, wherever we are, what matters is our choices. What are they? How will we evaluate them? How will we make the most of them? Those are the questions that life asks us, regardless of our station. How will you answer?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  This is actually one of the quotes that Stockdale sort of leans on in his seven years in the Hanoi Hilton, right? That a podium and a prison is each a place, right? He experienced both. He's this high ranking military officer. He'd gone to great colleges. He, you know, lived a great life in America. And then all of a sudden, he's parachuting into a camp where he is viciously tortured and deprived day after day after day. And in some sense, many, many, many, many of his choices were taken from him, right? Do I go for a walk today or not? Do I eat this or that? Do I do this or that, right?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  So much of his life becomes circumscribed there in this tiny cell in this solitary confinement. And yet he retains always the choices of what kind of person he is going to try to be in those circumstances. Is he going to do his job? Is he going to stick with the philosophy that he believes in? You know, is he going to give up or not, right? He still has a lot of choices inside this world where so much choice has been stripped away. And that's really what, what the Stoics are saying. You, you become extremely wealthy, extremely powerful. You have more choices, but you also have the same choices, right? Everything is taken from you and you're in a, literally a pit in the ground.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  You're in a prison cell. All that power and wealth and all this stuff has been taken away. And yet, most of the same choices remain, right? The dichotomy of control is still more or less the same. And so, you know, Stoicism is then, even at its core, right? Epictetus and Marcus Realis, those two men occupy those two spheres, not theoretically, but in practice, actuality. Marcus Realis is all powerful. Epictetus is powerless. Podium, prison.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yet they both try to focus on what's in their control. They both try to be a good person. They both try to to make beautiful choices within the world that they are in. They both try to let reason rule those choices, let ethics, let virtue lead those choices. And that's the lesson for us today. That's the idea, that wherever we go, our choice follows us. We still have choices, right? We always have choices. Not as many of the choices as we are legally entitled to, that we deserve. It's fair, that's right, etc., that we want, whatever. We still have choices inside every single situation, right on down, how we feel about it, and how we respond to it. And that's what you should think about today.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  And I wish you all the best.