Ask Daily Stoic: The Stoic Response to Getting Your House Burgled, and more

In each of the Ask Daily Stoic Q&A episodes, Ryan will answer questions from fans about Stoicism. You can also find these videos on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. See 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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. Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. Thanks. You guys send in your questions to [email protected]. You're pressing questions about Stoicism, about Marcus Aurelius, about Seneca, about me, about reading, whatever it is. You ask the questions. I do my best to answer. We put it up on the podcast on Saturdays and then on the YouTube channel

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  as well. Got some cool questions for you. Send them in at [email protected]. We've got more for next week. Chris's question is how the Stoics talk about ignoring praise and jeers of doing what's right, but how would a Stoic respond to someone who ignores the praise or jeers, but they're doing it to do the wrong thing? Isn't this a way to sort of be unethical? I think that's a great question. You know, I think at the core of Stoicism is the belief in virtue, the idea of doing the right thing. That's hard to define. I feel like if there's a failing in the Stoics, there is no Stoic Ten Commandments,

• 1:32Ryan Holiday?

  where it's like very clear what the Stoics think you should and shouldn't do. It's almost just sort of expected that we're to know what virtue is. But there is an argument to be made that what Stoicism could do is just make you a better sociopath, like by removing your fears, your worries, caring what other people think. It's just making you worse. And obviously, that's not what the Stoics intended. There are certainly people, you know, we see people in the pickup community, or you know, there have been not good people in history, and there are not good people now, who are reading these sort of ideas, and they're not using it to be better. But I think this is where the reading in Stoicism

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  really becomes important, because when you truly read Marcus Aurelius, he's not just saying, you know, ignore the praise and jeers. So you can do whatever you want, the way that a previous emperor like Nero or Tiberius acted. He's saying, don't listen to them so you can, you know, do what's good for the, like, all of Rome. So he's like, don't care about appearances, so that way you're not, you know, distracted or tempted by money. You know, he's like, don't care about impressing people, so you don't need to be, you know, like fooling around with beautiful women. He's, he's trying to use this to get him closer to his moral code, to, to be closer to living in accordance with nature, as the Stoics say.

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  He, he's trying to use this idea of, of pushing aside the crowd, the mob, as they called it in Rome, so he could focus on what he knew was true, what he knew was good, what he believed was ethical, what, you know, as he says, what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee, what's bad for the bee is bad for the hive. The, the, in, he, he's, he's thinking fundamentally about the common good, about serving the common good, about being of service, about helping people. And so he's not using that to, to be more selfish. He's, he's actually trying to, to, to not be distracted or misled by the very human impulse of wanting sort of short-term approval, wanting to, you know, impress other people,

• 3:44Ryan Holiday?

  wanting status, or money, or fame, or legacy, or recognition, or credit. You know, he, and he says like, don't think about people's cheers or jeers, just do the right thing. You know, he's saying like, do the right thing because it's the right thing, whether it's helping somebody, saying, help someone because you want to do it because they need it. He says, don't think about the third thing, which is getting credit for it. So fundamentally, to me, what that idea of ignoring praise and criticism is, is about just not caring about credit, not caring about recognition, but instead focusing all that energy on doing the right thing for the right reasons.

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  So Milt emailed in, he said, "I know you went to Budapest recently and you visited some Stoic sites, like what did you see, what did you like there?" So I was in, I gave a talk in Bucharest, which was really cool, I'd never been to Romania, and then, believe it or not, my Romanian publisher, they're called Seneca Publishing, they have a Stoicism-themed cafe called the Seneca Anti Cafe in Bucharest, which I thought was amazing and really cool, definitely check it out. And then, so I went from Bucharest to Budapest, where I gave a TEDx talk, and it occurred to me, as I've never really been to Budapest, I've been so fried, I was on book tour, I was like, "Isn't there like a Marcus Aurelius Budapest

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  connection?" And I, and it was like, "Oh yeah, he spent like years of his life there." I think it's a quincum, I'm terrible at pronouncing these words, but there was a Roman military camp outside Budapest on the Danube River, and that's where Marcus Aurelius spent like several months, they think he actually wrote a large chunk of meditations there. And so you could walk the streets of this Roman town, and it's just incredible. You can, there is a public bath, like from a thermal underground spring that you can visit, it was closed when I was there, so I had to go to a different one that was only dating back to the 1600s. But you can take a steam bath in a hot spring that is the

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  same water that Marcus Aurelius may have used 2,000 years ago. I just thought that was absolutely incredible. I know you're not supposed to, but I picked up a rock while I was there, and I keep it on my desk now. But it's, it's just amazing, there's a small museum there, there's Roman ruins, you just, you don't think of the Roman Empire stretching as far as Hungary, you don't think you would see, you know, ruins of a Roman aqueduct, you know, next to a freeway in Budapest, but you can. And so I do think when we're traveling, the idea of seeking out some of these sites and walking through them and just imagining what was here, imagining our connection to the people that were here,

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  realizing that people are gonna walk through the ruins of our cities 2,000 years from now and experience a similar thing, is a very Stoic, it's a very meditative practice, it's very soothing and sort of rejuvenating, but also humbling at the same time. So it was really awesome, and I'm glad I got to do it. Rob wrote in with some not fun news. He said his house got broken into and he wanted to know about overcoming something like that. How do you bounce back from that? You don't feel good about it. So first off, I would say, sorry, like I've been there in 2013. I just bought my first house and I also bought an engagement ring for my wife, which I did not tell her about. And I put it in a safe in our downstairs closet and

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  we went out of town. And there were some Airbnb renters in our house and we got a call from them that while they were out, someone had broken into the house. They'd stolen everything. They'd trashed our couches. They'd torn things off the wall. They'd broken windows and they were in it long enough that they busted open the safe and stole the engagement ring that I was planning to propose to my wife with. So that was, you know, let's just say that was not fun. And, and that was not how I was planning to tell my wife that that's what we were doing. So the truth is, this is to say like shit happens. Life is rough. And I think one of the things I took from that was like, it's

• 7:58Ryan Holiday?

  easy to get feel really soft, feel really protected, get kind of in a bubble of your own experience and just expect the life to be kind and amazing and everything you want. I think one of the things you realize from reading Marcus Aurelius is like, this guy had everything and life was still hard. I mean, to go, to go to your, your point about getting broken into, there's a story from Epictetus about a thief breaking into his house and stealing a lamp. And what he takes from that, and I think this is the second thing, he goes like, look, you can only lose what you have. He says, tomorrow, I'm going to go out and buy a cheaper lamp and that way I'm not going to be as paranoid about it. So that was one of the things I took from the experience was like, not only had

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  I gotten a little soft, a little vulnerable, I wasn't careful, but I also set myself up to be too attached to material items. And so I wanted to learn from the experience, be a little less attached, be a little less in my bubble. And then, you know, it ended up being like, this is a story that my wife and I have. It's an experience, actually, our wedding announcement, we got selected, it was in the New York Times. And we got to tell that story, and that wouldn't have happened had we had just like, an ordinary getting engaged experience. And so, like, how could you use this? That's what the obstacle is, the way, the impediment to action advances action. As Marcus really says, "Everything that happens presents us an opportunity to practice a different virtue." That's what we want to do.

• 9:24Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I'd urge you to think about. I'm really sorry that this happened. I wish everyone was nice. I wish we could leave our doors unlocked, but that's not the reality we live in. And that's unfortunate. But you'll be more successful toughening yourself up than you will hoping that nothing bad ever happens. So at the very least, if you come out of this a little stronger, a little wiser, a little more careful, and a little more aware that our possessions are ephemeral and can be taken from us, I think you'll be better. So that's another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. Thanks, thanks to our sponsors, thank you for listening, thank you for watching. Subscribe to the Daily Stoic Podcast, subscribe to the Daily Stoic email. That's at dailystoic.com. Thanks, talk soon.