Are You Ready To Ration?

"It might have seemed crazy to read that, all those years ago, Seneca practiced a day of poverty each month. He fasted or he ate sparingly. He wore rags and slept on the ground. He got up close and personal with what it meant to have less, to remind himself of what life was like if many of his creature comforts disappeared."Ryan describes the relevance of this lesson, and what we can all do to instill it within ourselves, in today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Are you ready to ration? It might have seemed crazy to read that all those years ago Seneca practiced a day of poverty each month. He fasted, or he ate sparingly. He wore rags and slept on the ground. He got up close and personal with what it meant to have less, to remind himself of what life was like if many of his creature comforts disappeared. He called this philosophy. It can sound a little extreme out of practice, but this is how he practiced. Suddenly, though, it doesn't seem so crazy or extreme, does it? Not with large parts of the United States re-entering lockdowns, not with the dramatic increase in cases worldwide from Phoenix

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  and Houston to Rio and Mumbai, not with hospitals packed with COVID-19 patients that have to turn away new patients for lack of room. Seneca knew what he was doing. He had experienced exile. He had been driven from the very top of public life twice. He saw Rome ravaged by fire. He saw colonies destroyed by rebellions. He saw how easily our old baseline can start to look like a high watermark when fortune arrives with its sometimes characteristic random cruelty. Who knows where things will go over the next few months as we wrestle with this global pandemic? They will almost certainly get better in time, but not before

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  they get worse, possibly way, way, way worse. As we have continued to wrestle with COVID-19, many of us have had to figure out how to make do with less, possibly for a long time: less toilet paper, less trips, less nice meals in restaurants. Less money coming in, it hasn't been fun, but it was a taste of Seneca's practices. Rationing sounds crazy, it almost sounds punitive, but it's really just another word for self-control and for discipline. It's a good reminder that we should never get used to anything, that even though we prepare, even though we read and write these things, it's still easy to get caught off guard to assume we'll never have to go back to the old days. Well, here we are.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  Be ready, be good, don't be afraid. You knew this was coming. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. And if you don't get the Daily Stoic email, go to dailystoic.com/email.