Little is Needed for the Happy Life

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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, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  Little is needed for the happy life. Zeno came to Stoicism with nothing. He lost it all in a shipwreck and rebuilt his life. Klianthes, his first grade student, was not much better off making a living as a manual laborer in Athens. Epictetus would come from slavery, something quite worse than poverty. "He afterwards became free," Thomas Wentworth Higginson would write in his 1865 translation of Epictetus, which is a good translation, by the way, although I recommend the Penguin Edition or Robin Waterfield's recent translation. But Higginson says that Epictetus lived very frugally at Rome, teaching philosophy. Simplicus says that the whole furniture of his house consisted of a bed,

• 1:15Ryan Holiday?

  a cooking vessel, and an earthen lamp. And Lucian ridicules a man who bought the latter after his death in hopes to become a philosopher by using it. "It was this tradition, ironically, that would so prepare Marcus Aurelius for a life in an imperial palace. From boyhood, he had been training in the stoic and cynic model. By sleeping on a hard mattress and wearing rough clothes, he didn't want to be soft. He didn't want to be spoiled. By the time he assumed the purple cloak of the emperor, he was indifferent to the trappings of wealth and power. He could enjoy them without needing them or feeling entitled to them. In fact, he told the Roman Senate that, as far as he knew, he lived in the people's house, owned none of it, and that's why during the Antonine Plague,

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  he had no problem selling off jewels and furniture, even his wife's robes, to fund the government." "Very little is needed to make a happy life," Marcus Aurelius would write in Meditations. "It is all within yourself in your way of thinking." For Marcus, this was something he had to trust Epictetus and Zeno and Cleanthes on. He never had to experience poverty and loss like they did, but he faced his own challenges. Wealth and abundance could have easily skewed his compass or corrupted his soul. But reminded by their example and reinforced by his own practices, by the adversity and difficulty he schooled himself in, he could practice his own methods of detachment, and he found his own form of happiness and self-sufficiency. And so must we, whether we're born rich or poor.

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  The simpler our lives, the better. What we need is within us. Who we are has nothing to do with our stuff or what's in our bank account. And certainly, these material things are not the path to peace or happiness. And actually, these are some of the ideas we did this thing called The Wealthy Stoic, which is a Stoic sort of challenge course on the Stoic attitudes about money and finance and earnings and investing and all of that. And it's a play. The Wealthy Stoic is not necessarily the richest one. I would argue that Zeno and Cleanthes and Epictetus were rich because money had very little sway over them. But anyways, you can check that out. I'll link to it in today's show notes. Or you can sign up for Daily Stoic Life and get that course and all the Stoic courses for free at DailyStoicLife.com.