Just Put It On My Tab | The Enemy of Happiness

Life was just one thing after another for Marcus Aurelius. The plague. The flooding. The wars. He did not meet with, “the good fortune he deserved,” one ancient historian noted, “as his whole reign was a series of troubles.”Anyone who has had a run of bad luck knows the feeling. It’s frustrating and annoying and sometimes deeply unfair, but there is also something freeing about it. Because after a certain point, you stop fighting and start accepting.---In todays Daily Stoic reading, Ryan explores how we can get out of the way of our own happiness by curbing our yearning.💪 Check out the Slay Your Stress Challenge to equip yourself with strategies, mantras and mindsets that you can fall back on to navigate the relentless ups and downs of life.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  "Just put it on my tab." "Life was just one thing after another for Marcus Aurelius, the plague, the flooding, the wars. He did not meet with the good fortune he deserved, one ancient historian noted, as his whole reign was a series of troubles. Anyone who has had a run of bad luck knows the feeling. It's frustrating and annoying and sometimes deeply unfair. But there's also something freeing about it, because after a certain point, you stop fighting and start accepting." We can imagine Marcus, after the 50th piece of bad news, just saying, "All right, put it on my tab." What was one more thing at that point? What did it even matter? He knew there was no use resenting, no use wishing it was otherwise, no escaping, no denying. Just had to add it to the list. He had to accept it was pouring, and he was in for a long, wet night.

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  He had to focus on a plan for what was to come next. "It would do us good to borrow this attitude, particularly lately. We've had our own plagues, civil unrest, wars, economic downturns, and on top of this, our own personal issues, perhaps a divorce, young children, trouble at work, an injury, or a diagnosis. While we should never accept injustice or give up hope, we do need to accept that it's time to buckle up. It's not going to be an easy ride. The bill is not going to be cheap. Somebody is going to have to pay it. And like Marcus Aurelius, in our own lives, that person is us." So tell him to put it on your tab. And start getting to work on it. And we just relaunched and redid the Daily Stoic Stress Challenge, Slay Your Stress. And I think this is kind of an idea there that applies.

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  If you are stressed out, if you're overwhelmed, I think you'll like this course. You can sign up now at dailystoic.com/stress. There's three hours of interviews from me and a bunch of other awesome stuff. I think it's one of the best things we've done here at Daily Stoic. We launched it a couple of years ago. We relaunched it in light of what's happening now with a bunch of new stuff, and it could not be more fitting or timely. So check it out, dailystoic.com/stress.

• 2:43Ryan Holiday?

  The Enemy of Happiness. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic. "It's quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for that which we don't have. Happiness has all that it wants and resembles the well-fed. There wouldn't be hunger or thirst." That's Epictetus's Discourses 324. "I'll be happy when I graduate," we tell ourselves. "I'll be happy when I get this promotion, when this diet pays off, when I have the money that my parents never had." "Conditional happiness is what psychologists call this kind of thinking. Like the horizon, you could walk for miles and miles and miles and never reach it.

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  You'll never get any closer." "Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario. As pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chances at happiness here and now." "So locate that yearning for more, for better, for someday, and see it for what it is, the enemy of your contentment. Choose it or your happiness. As Epictetus says, the two are not compatible."

• 4:04Ryan Holiday?

  That's a heavy one, I think. The idea that yearning is the enemy of happiness. Sometimes I'll talk to really successful people who have like a lot of money and be like, "What are you doing? Like, why don't you just relax?" Or whatever. And I always find it fascinating when you hear that they have a number. So maybe they have a million dollars, but their number is $10 million. Or maybe they have $10 million, or their number is $100 million. They've told themselves that when they get X, then they'll be okay, then they'll be good. But they never get there. There's, from a different Zeno, there's this Zeno's paradox.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  The idea of like, if you're like walking from here to the other side of the room, and you go halfway there, and then halfway there, and then halfway there, and then halfway there, you'll never actually arrive, right? Because it's always half, there's always more, there's always some half left of the distance. But I think that's kind of what yearning is. We tell ourselves, "Oh, when I get this, when I get this, when I get this." But we never get there, either because it's not actually something that a person can possess, or because we move the goalposts. Like, "Oh, all I want to do is win a championship." And then you do it, and then you're, "Oh, all I want to do is win back-to-back championships to prove it wasn't a fluke."

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  And it's like, "Oh, but now I want to win it on a different team to prove that it wasn't a fluke there either." Whatever it is, right? We move the goalposts. That's the tricky thing about yearning, is it never gets there. In, I think it's still "This is the key," but there's a quote I love from Stefan Zweig, the novelist. And he says, "In the history of conquerors, no conqueror has ever been surfated by conquests."

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  Alexander the Great said, "Aren't we gonna conquer the world together?" And his men said, "No, we wanna go home." And the truth was, he always would have found something new, something beyond it, always would have kept pushing. And the result of that was, he not only lost his life, but I think he lost a lot of happiness as well. So contentment, and I've read a study many years ago that said, like, young people associate happiness with accomplishment, older people with contentment. I think they've learned something along the way. It's a hard one lesson, I'm sure. But we can, even if we can't fully internalize it, or understand it, or accept it now, we

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  can try to approximate it, we can try to incorporate some of it, we can fake it till we make it, which is that we don't need anything. We can be happy now. That doesn't mean that we don't keep trying. Of course we keep trying. Of course we keep doing. But we try to do those things from a place of fullness, from a place of, "That'll be a nice extra," as opposed to a place of yearning, that I'll be happy if this, once this, after that. It doesn't happen, man. It's a myth. It's a shimmer, it's a mirage. You'll get there, and you will realize it was a figment of your imagination, or worse, your mind will fool you so much, you won't even realize you're there, it just feel like,

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  "Ah, I just gotta go a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further." And you never arrive, and the cost comes, your life and your happiness. But for people who don't wanna do things, this is not a particularly important or tricky subject. For those of us who are ambitious, those of us who are driven, those of us who are talented, it's something we really have to wrestle with. So I'm wishing you the best. You're enough as you are. Yearning is the enemy of your happiness. Remember that. And be safe, be well, everyone. We'll talk soon.