The Earth Is A Boneyard (But Pretty in Sunlight) | Protect Your Own Good

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  The earth is a boneyard, but pretty in sunlight. Something like 117 billion human beings have ever lived. It's a little dark, but indisputably true that the vast majority of them are now dead, and that the people alive today will one day join them. What of all of the animals that preceded them by millions of years? One generation patheth away, and the other generation cometh. In Larry McMurtry's epic novel, Lonesome Dove, Augustus Mcgrave stares out at the wide expanse of the Texas plains and ponders what has come and gone and been buried eon after eon. "Why, think of all the buffalo that have died on these plains," he says, "buffalo and other critters too, and the Indians have been here forever. Their bones are down here in the earth. I'm told that over in

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  the old country, you can't dig six feet without uncovering skulls and leg bones and such. People have been living there since the beginning, and their bones have kind of filled up the ground. It's interesting to think about," he says, "all the bones in the ground." In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius makes a similar series of observations. He thinks about all the emperors who have come before him, listing not just their names, but the names of luminaries and power brokers who filled their courts. "Where are they now?" he asks. "What's left of them?" In another passage, he points out that the same thing happened to both Alexander the Great and his mule driver, and they're now both buried in the same ground.

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  This is life. This is what history and the passage of time does and always will do. People probably thought that Marcus Aurelius was a bit of a downer. Macgrae's observation is a bit macabre. But there is also something beautiful, even reassuring about it. "The earth is mostly just a boneyard," he says, completing his rumination, "but pretty in sunlight." Life is tragic. The human condition is fatal. The earth is insatiable. But it's still pretty in sunlight, isn't it?

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  Protect your own good. Musonius Rufus, one of Epictetus's teachers, taught that human beings are all born with an innate goodness, or as he put it, "with an inclination to virtue." It's our choices that decide whether that goodness comes out or not. We're not bad people, essentially, though we might sometimes do bad things. The purpose of Stoicism, then, is to remind us of that goodness and to help us work hard to protect it. So spend some time this week writing about the choices you can make, the actions you can take to do just that. And this is from the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living," which I use myself every morning. I love the little prompts.

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  Here is Epictetus's Discourses, who, as you know, Epictetus was Musonius Rufus's student. "Protect your own good in all that you do, and as concerns everything else, take what is given as far as you can make reasoned use of it. If you don't, you'll be unlucky, prone to failure, hindered, and stymied." That's Discourses 4:3. And then Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Marcus, then influenced by Epictetus, so Musonius, teaches Stoicism to Epictetus, whose writings then survive and make their way to Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius, as it happens, is introduced to Stoicism through Junius Rusticus, who loans him his copy of Epictetus. "Dig deep within yourself," Marcus writes in Meditation 759.

• 4:11Ryan Holiday?

  "For there is a fountain of goodness ever ready to flow." You will keep digging. I guess what the Stoics are doing here is really pushing back on this notion of original sin, that we're toxic, broken, horrible people, that human nature is something to be feared. You know, there is a darkness in us, but there's also incredible good. And I think the Stoics are talking about what side of you are you gonna nurture? What side is gonna come out? What side are you gonna look for? What side are you gonna reveal? And Musonius and Epictetus and Marcus are all tested in incredible ways. Musonius is exiled three times, perhaps four. Epictetus, you know, experiences the incredible injustice of slavery. Marcus Aurelius is given absolute power.

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  And as they say, power reveals. But I think also adversity reveals. And in both Musonius and Epictetus's case, adversity revealed a goodness, an unbreakable goodness, a commitment, a tenacity, a perseverance, an unswerving belief in these principles that we're talking about now. And in Marcus Aurelius, you know, he wasn't challenged the same way, although life did challenge him with loss and grief and pain and sickness. But it also challenged him with a great bounty of good fortune. And that too tested his character. It tested whether there really was goodness inside of him and what side of him he was going to reveal.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  So as you go out into the world this week, think about who you really are underneath. Think about what kind of character you've been cultivating. And let's show people who we are and who we can be and what we actually believe. As Marcus says, let's not waste time arguing what a good man should be. Let's be one. Let's be the best we can for ourselves, for our family, for our world. And I'll talk to you soon.

• 6:10Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you gonna let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall and... Every single week, that bubble is filled in. That black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in,

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  that you really lived that week. You made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.