Is The World Going Through Hell? | Marks Of The Good Life

“It’s tough to be alive now,” the actor Timothée Chalamet recently said. “I think societal collapse is in the air — it smells like it.”It’s one of those lines that got picked up by dozens of media outlets. Because those outlets know it’s one of those headlines people can’t resist clicking on. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey once put it, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.”✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://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, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  "Is the world going to hell?"

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  "It's tough to be alive now," an actor recently said. "I think societal collapse is in the air. It smells like it." It's one of those lines that gets picked up by dozens of media outlets because those outlets know it's one of those headlines that people can't resist clicking on. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey once put it, "For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell." Perhaps you're one of those people. Perhaps you are alarmed about the state of the world. Perhaps you're horrified at the risks and dangers that lurk about. Pandemics, political chaos, riots, people at each other's throats, unprecedented events. Perhaps you're getting a strong whiff of societal collapse. Certainly, the Stoics knew that smell.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  How could they not? The fall of the Republic, Nero, the Antonine Plague. And yet, they kept going. They did not despair. It's not that they were naive optimists. It's that they knew their job always remained the same. Focus on what you control. Do your best. Live with virtue. "Real optimists bear in mind constantly," Marcus Aurelius wrote, "that all of this has happened before and will happen again. The same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging." Remember, this is just what it means to live through history. It can be scary, it can be confusing, and weird, and smelly. The Spanish Flu, the Depression, Watergate Years, the Six-Day War, the 1973 oil embargo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 2008 financial crisis.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  Living through history has always had at least a faint smell of collapse. It's strange to think that we can find optimism in this, but we can't. Because when we face challenges with proper Stoicism, with courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom, the odds of a good outcome are in our favor.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to today's Entry from the Daily Stoic. Today is October 20th, and you can read this in the Daily Stoic.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  "Marks of the Good Life. You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere, not in logic, not in wealth, or fame, or any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. How is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil, indeed, in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage, freedom, and nothing evil except that which destroys these things." Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 8:1. Then the entry reads, "What is the meaning of life?

• 3:43Ryan Holiday?

  Why was I born?" Most of us struggle with these questions, sometimes when we're young, sometimes not, until we're older. Rarely do we find much in the way of directions, but that's simply because we miss the point. As Viktor Frankl points out in Man's Search for Meaning, it's not our question to ask. Instead, it is we who are being asked the question. It's our lives that are the answer. No amount of traveling, or reading, or clever sages can tell you what you want to know. Instead, it is you who must find the answer in your actions, in living the good life by embodying the self-evident principles of justice, self-control, courage, and freedom, and abstaining from evil."

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  There's probably nothing that Marcus talks about in meditations more than the virtues. Deeply earnest about them too. I think cynicism is this kind of idea that nothing matters, but there's a self fulfilling prophecy to that. Conversely, when you take the virtues as important, as significant, and you try to live by them, and you follow them, and you try to live up to them, I think you create meaning, as Viktor Frankl was saying. The decision to say, hey, this is who I am. This is what's important to me. This is what I think I was put here to do. This is what I know I'm capable of being. That elevates us, right? That's why I've been writing this series on the four virtues. I just did Courage. The Temperance version just came out. Discipline is Destiny, The Power of Self-Control,

• 5:06Ryan Holiday?

  which you can grab anywhere books are sold. And thank you to everyone who supported the book. Now I'm tackling justice in my writings. And yeah, you just read about people who experienced so much adversity, so much difficulty, so much pain, who never gave up, who never quit, who never said, eh, nothing matters, never said fuck it, who stuck with that sense of decency and goodness because they felt like there was meaning in that. To me, that's what Stoicism is all about. That's the journey that we're on. That's the journey that I'm trying to be on in this series. And that's what I try to talk about here at Daily Stoic.

• 5:45Ryan Holiday?

  Like, I don't know what put us here, right? I'll leave that question to a much wiser person. But I know that we are here. And so how do we make that meaningful? It's not by doing whatever we want. It's not by chasing our pleasure. It's not by avoiding pain or risk. It's by standing up, stepping forward, doing what we can, trying to leave this place a little bit better than we found it. So I try to do my writing. So I try to talk about here. That's what I know so many of you try to do. And whatever it is that you do professionally, it's what I try to do as a parent. It's what I try to do as a spouse. Marcus says that life is what our thoughts make it. And deciding to think that virtue

• 6:27Ryan Holiday?

  is important, is important. You could argue it's the most important thing. And...

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  This idea of the good life, right? Cardos, which is where the phrase cardinal virtues comes from, it's about hinge. That means hinge or pivot, pivot point. I think, put aside the marks of good life. The good life pivots on this, pivots on virtue, pivots on those four key ideas that Marcus was talking about. And I hope you're hanging your hat, your life, your sense of meaning and value as a person on those four things too. And I hope it served you as it served me. I appreciate all the support of the new book, everyone. It's been awesome to see how it's doing and I've loved hearing from all of you. If you haven't read Discipline is Destiny, you can grab that anywhere books are sold. You can listen to it in audio too.

• 7:18Ryan Holiday?

  But what I'd really prefer is that you just do your best today to live by those ideas.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. It will take time and effort, it won't be free, but by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable and life-changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper: The 10-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger. You can just go to dailystoic.com/anger.