It Does Make Sense

It drives you nuts—the things some people believe and do and say. But here’s the thing: It does make sense. It makes sense to them.📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ 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 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.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  It does make sense. It seems baffling. It seems like it doesn't make any sense. It drives you nuts, the things some people believe and do and say. But here's the thing, it does make sense. It makes sense to them, because they're not as informed as you, because they haven't had the advantages you have, because they haven't been blessed with the philosophy the way you have. That's why they're superstitious. That's why they make the same mistakes over and over. That's why they can't see through various fears or biases. That's why they fall for demagogues. One of the insights in meditations is the idea of really putting yourself inside other people's thinking, getting inside their brain.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  What you'll find is that this isn't always a pretty experience. What you'll also tend to find is that it's a lot less baffling once you get in there, that there actually is a kind of logic. It's just that the logic is defined by different influences, by a different education. Often, the inability to do this very active empathy that you are in the middle of trying to practice. So, look, they can't imagine what it's like to be someone else. That's why they're racist or crueler, so certain about certain things. But you can. And this demands that you understand why they're acting this way, that you understand that even though the belief or the action might not be acceptable, it comes from a human place. It demands, as Marcus Aurelius lays out

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  in the first part of Book Two of Meditations, that you figure out how to both avoid being infected by this ugliness and still find a way to work with this fellow's human being. Because that's our job.