It Picks You Up. It Puts You Down. A Hundred Times A Day. | Cultivate Indifference

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  It picks you up, it puts you down 100 times a day. It's exhausting, isn't it? Getting this riled up, then getting this down about it, getting this worried, getting this stressed. For what? For the relief of something bad not happening? Getting this excited only to be subsequently disappointed? The passions, as the Stoics called them, are dangerous. They burn us up and burn us out. They pick us up, spin us around, chew us up, and spit us out, to paraphrase the Florence and the Machine song. Is this what we're here for? To be passions' slaves? To be the plaything of emotions and impulses? It can't be.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  We should instead, as Mark Schreliest writes in Meditations, to try to be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it. Let others get picked up and put down 100 times a day. Let the others get chewed up and spit out. Let us stand back a little, reflecting and pausing and reflecting, persisting and resisting, refusing to let our emotions drag us out to sea. That is our task. Not to feel nothing, but to be less pulled, less shaken, less owned by every passing wave. The passions will never cease, but we have agency to decide if they pull us up or pass us over.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  Cultivate indifference.

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  This comes to us from this week's meditation in the Daily Stoic Journal. "Some people spend their lives chasing good things: health, wealth, pleasure, achievement. Others try to avoid the bad things with equal energy: sickness, poverty, pain. And these look like two drastically different approaches, but in the end, they are the same. The Stoics continually reminded themselves that so many of the things we desire and avoid are beyond our control. Instead of chasing impossibilities, the Stoics trained to be equally prepared and equally suited to thrive in any condition. They trained to be indifferent. And this is a great power, and a cultivation of this skill is a very powerful exercise."

• 2:37Ryan Holiday?

  "Of all the things that are, some are good, others bad, and yet others indifferent. The good are virtues in all that share in them; the bad are vices in all that indulge them. The indifferent lie in between virtue and vice and include wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, and pain, Epictetus's Discourses. My reason choice is as indifferent to the reason choice of my neighbor and as to his breath and body. However much we've been made for cooperation, the ruling reason in each of us is a master of its own affair. If this weren't the case, the evil in someone else would become my harm, and God didn't mean for someone else to control my misfortune." Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, 856. "There are things in life which are advantageous and disadvantageous.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  Both are beyond our control." That's Seneca, Moral Letters, 92. This idea of good, bad, and then a sort of a third category is this interesting debate. I talk a little bit about this in Lives of the Stoics. You know, the early Stoics were much more cynical, and I mean, like, much closer to the cynics, the philosophical school, the idea that, like, there's good and bad, there's virtue and vice, and everything is one of those categories. And there's a lot of argument about this. I think it's the later Stoics, the more practical, pragmatic Stoics, that go...

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, sure, but there's also stuff in between. There is such a thing as gray area and it's impractical and unrealistic to assume that there's not. You know, Seneca talks about sort of preferred indifference. Like, is it better to be short or tall? I mean, it's not good or bad either way, but if you're short or tall is what it is. But if you had a choice, you'd probably pick tall, right? You'd probably pick rich over poor. It doesn't mean that it's virtuous to be rich, but if you had a choice, you'd choose it. So that's just like a sort of an interesting side Stoic debate. But this main thing is like, look, the Stoic is good either way. It's not that the Stoics love misfortune and the Stoics don't want success or ease or happiness or any of these things. It's no, the Stoics are ready for whatever life throws at them.

• 4:42Ryan Holiday?

  This sets them up to not be disappointed when life does throw adversity. And it also puts them in a position where they're not yearning for or craving something good or ease or luck or success. They're just cool with however it is. That's what Zen means, right? You're just philosophical about it. You're just chill about it. You've got an even keel. And so, so this idea of indifference is not like nihilism. It's actually this kind of resiliency, this ability to be good with whatever happens, with whatever life throws at you. Would I have loved for parts of my childhood to be different? Would I have loved to be a little bit taller? Would I have loved to be this or that? Yeah, sure, if I had a choice, but I didn't have a choice. So I adjust and I make do.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  You know, Seneca talks, and I think he's quoting from Chrysippus, or maybe it's Cleanthes, but he's saying like, look, a wise man wants stuff, but he doesn't need it, right? We make do with what it is. We play the hand we're dealt. But if you're asking us what cards we want, if as the cards are flipping over, is there one we would prefer? Probably. So indifference is this complicated, tricky thing in Stoicism, but I think at the end of the day, it's pretty commonsensical, right? You'd rather be tall, but you're cool being short? You'd rather have use of all your limbs? But if something happened, you'd keep going, right? You know, Seneca says you'd rather see, but if you lost your eye in battle, that wouldn't be the end of it for you. You'd adjust, you'd make do. And that's the power of Stoicism.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  We will respond, we'll endure, we'll survive, we'll make the best of everything. And in that, we're indifferent. But we're actually quite strong and confident because of that indifference. So think about that this week. If you want to journal about it in your Daily Stoic journal, great. Try to cultivate the strength of endurance.

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.