Daily Stoic Sundays: The Daily Stoic, August 9

In today's episode, Ryan describes the new leather-bound edition of The Daily Stoic and reads today's entry. Get your copy of the limited leather-bound edition of The Daily Stoic: https://dailystoic.com/leather/***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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am speaking to you from a closet in my wife's childhood bedroom. We spent the last, I guess, four and a half months here in Texas locked down, and our kids were just sort of going out of their minds without any social interaction. So we made a quick trip out to California in an RV. So that's two adults, two kids under four, in a very small RV, never staying in hotels, never interacting with anyone because we're doing the socially-distanced thing. We're trying to be smart.

• 1:33Ryan Holiday?

  Driving through the southwest in July, it was hot as balls, as you can imagine. But it was also just a wonderful experience. We spent a lot of time together as family. We read, we talked, visited some cool places. We stopped in Tombstone, Arizona, which is always interesting. I've been there a couple of times. I think one of the things it reminded me of is just, you know, Marx realized talks about how little is needed for the happy life. This year, I was supposed to be, I had talks in Australia and I had talks in Europe. I had all this stuff planned. All that went out the window. And, you know, I'm not a big camping person. But it was, you know, like, look, we're in an RV as a family staying in a $25 a night RV

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  park, eating quesadillas made in the microwave. It was a much simpler life and it was wonderful. And one of the mornings, we stayed in an RV park in Blythe, California on the way out here. And my son woke up at like 5:00 AM. We went for a walk down to the river and we just spent like an hour like throwing rocks into the water, sitting there. You know, it was as pretty as being on a beach in Hawaii, as quiet, as wonderful. And, you know, it cost next to nothing. And these are the moments that the Stoics sort of talk about breathing in, really living, not taking for granted. And it should be empowering, right? Because you can lose

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  everything and you still have this, right? This is within everyone. I mean, there are people in this RV park who live there, right? So it is, you know, it's hardly the glamorous life and yet it's still wonderful and special. And we made it alive. We didn't kill each other or kill anyone. And it's been, it's been wonderful to see family a little bit, take a little bit of a break, recording a podcast in a closet. So got a great episode for you today. Talk soon. Today, I wanted to read an entry from the Daily Stoic and riff on it a bit. It's one of my

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  favorites. This is the August 9th entry, "Stick with just the facts. Don't tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. It's been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you. This is the report. The report wasn't that you've been harmed. I see that my son is sick, but not that his life is at risk. So always stay within your first impressions and don't add to them in your head. This way, nothing can happen to you." Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Eight, Forty-Nine.

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  So at first, this can seem kinda like the opposite of everything you've been taught. Don't we cultivate our minds and critical thinking skills precisely so we don't simply accept things at face value? Yes, most of the time, but sometimes this approach can be counterproductive. What a philosopher also has is the ability, as Nietzsche put it, to stop courageously at the surface, to see things in plain, objective form, nothing more, nothing less. Yes, Stoics were superficial, he said, "out of profundity." Today, while other people are getting carried away, that's what you're gonna practice,

• 4:51Ryan Holiday?

  a kind of straightforwardism, seeing things as their initial impressions make them. This idea of being profound and superficial at the same time, I think, is really interesting and important. It kinda reminds me, you know, a little bit of that, that famous Zen story about the man and the horse. Forget it exactly, but it's like a horse comes and everyone says, "You're so lucky," and he says, "We'll see." Then, then his son breaks his leg on the horse and everyone says, "You're so unlucky," and he says, "We'll see." And then, because he's hurt, then he can't get drafted in a war. It goes on and on. Basically, you keep saying, "We'll see." And I think what he's doing is sort of not rendering judgment. Remember, this Stoic idea from Epictetus is that it's not things that upset us, it's

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  our judgment about things. Events are objective, events are. Then we have opinions, and our opinions say, "This is a bad thing, this is a good thing, this is lucky, this is unlucky." What the Stoics wanna focus on is that it just is what it is, and they wanna sort of, they wanna leave it at that. "You've been fired," right? Not, "You've been fired, this is horrible, you'll never work again, you've been humiliated." You know, I even think about this, like, let's say you're in a relationship and there's sort of tension. Oftentimes, it's not the thing that's bothering you, right? It's the idea of, "What if this goes on forever?" Right? Like, "Am I gonna let someone talk to me this way? Are we never gonna do this again? You know, is it gonna always be this way?"

• 6:19Ryan Holiday?

  Like, this idea of being worried... About precedent is, I think, the cause of so much anxiety and worry. I mean, I know it is for me. And so what the Stoics are trying to say is just leave the impression as it is. Stay here in the present moment. You know, you don't need to reflect on, is this part of some larger pattern in the past? Is this the beginning of a pattern going forward? No, it is what it is. Let's stay there, right? And that's what Marcus Aurelius is talking about. And that's one of, I think, the most important Stoic ideas. Don't tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. Okay, this is Marcus. It's been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you, right?

• 7:04Ryan Holiday?

  Even the badly has a little bit of judgment, right? So he's not trying to be inhuman about it. He's saying, okay, they said this thing about me. Did you don't have to extrapolate out from that, that your reputation is ruined? That if you don't stop this, everyone will think you're a fool? That this is going to be just like it was in high school for you, right? And again, your son has a, I think, when he's talking about your kid being sick. I think this is one a lot of us can relate to because what kids do is they trigger all our anxieties. Our, all are catastrophizing. What if this happens and this happens and this happens? And then all of a sudden, we're existing in this dystopian future fantasy world where nothing is ever the same and everything is broken.

• 7:48Ryan Holiday?

  The absolute worst thing in the world is going to happen. No, let's just stop and be here in the present. And I think this ties into that Viktor Frankl idea of like sort of in between the stimulus and the response. And I think what Marcus is talking about there is being in that space as long as you can. And Marcus talks about this a bunch of different times in meditations. And it's really important, you know, he talks about, he says, you know, it's possible. I think about this one all the time. He says, you know, it's possible to have no opinion. He says, you don't have to have an opinion about this. He's like, these things are not asking to be judged by you. They just are. The weather is the weather. The pandemic is the pandemic.

• 8:33Ryan Holiday?

  Donald Trump is Donald Trump, for better or worse. Your obnoxious neighbor is your obnoxious neighbor. Your parents are your parents. You don't need to judge it. You don't need to have an opinion about it, but you do have to deal with it. You do have to. Respond to it, you do have to accommodate it, you do have to forgive it, you do have to set up boundaries, you do have to say, I'm not going to deal with this person anymore. But what you don't have to do is that catastrophizing, that cycle, that loop, that sort of miserable place that, that we all seem to, to, to go to for no real reason, honestly. And so I think this is one of the most important lessons in Stoicism. And, and, and let's go to this

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  point from Nietzsche where he's talking about being superficial out of profundity. You know, I think when you do think about some of the, the best quotes from the Buddhists or from the Stoics, there is a superficiality to them. Like, they're very simple. I, I say that in obstacle, I, it's simple, not easy. They're superficial, but that doesn't mean they're not profoundly deep, that there isn't a lifetime of exploration in that idea. I mean, it's easy to say, okay, I accept this. But what does that mean? What does that look like? How do you, how do you live it? That's, that is quite hard. So just because something is simple, doesn't mean that it's not deep, and that doesn't mean you can't wrestle with it, and it doesn't mean you're stupid. So for the Stoics, I think if, if we could give

• 9:58Ryan Holiday?

  you a prescription today, something to think about, let's focus on this idea of just accepting things as they are. And, you know, obviously, no one should be flying right now, but, but a, a great way to do that would be, you know, a great example of this is like, your flight is delayed. It is delayed, right? There's a, a construction and traffic is down to one lane. It is what it is. No one did this to you. You're not being deprived of anything. It's not actually that bad. It just is what it is. So let's accept it. Let's deal with it. And then let's go on with our lives. Cause we, what we don't need to do is be angry and bitter. And we can just leave things as they are and go about our lives.

• 10:45Ryan Holiday?

  And so it's awesome to give you this entry from The Daily Stoic. Obviously, I think it's some of the best writing I've ever done. I'm really proud of it. It's crazy to think this book is four years old now. Sold over a million copies in 20 languages. And so we're excited also to announce that we've got this leather-bound edition. We did this limited run, just a few thousand copies, just to see if people would like it. And it's for sale now in the Daily Stoic store. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/leather. It's got a premium leather cover. It's got an inset, a Four Virtues logo from Daily Stoic. It's got a really cool ribbon. It's got gilt edges on the pages, some cool new graphics in it. It comes in a box. It's great for a gift, but also if you've beat the hell out of your edition over the years,

• 11:30Ryan Holiday?

  this is a great replacement, sort of a forever perennial replacement. Check that out, dailystoic.com/leather. Keep reading. Stay superficial in a good way, and I'll talk to you soon.