The Most Temporary and Illusory State | Anger is Bad Fuel

Ryan explains why you should remember the fragility of life, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. Try Surfshark risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/STOIC. Enter promo code STOIC for 83 % off and three extra months free! Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus really, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  "The Most Temporary and Illusory State." On April 14, 1912, William John Rogers sent a postcard from the Titanic to his friend James Day. "Dear friends," Rogers wrote, "just a line to show that I am alive and kicking and going grand. It's a treat." The next day, the Titanic sank. Rogers, a third-class passenger from Wales, went down with the ship. His body never identified. The astronomer and philosopher Carl Sagan kept a copy of this postcard on his bathroom mirror so that he could see it every morning when he shaved. "My wife and I display the postcard for a reason," he wrote. "We know that going grand can be the most temporary and illusory state."

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics believed this, too. Seneca had just begun his promising law career when a lung flare-up forced him into isolation for nearly a decade. Then, after he returned and successfully rebuilt his life, he was exiled to an island off the coast of Italy. Marcus had just returned home victoriously when the Antonine Plague broke out. Epictetus had just been made free. His school had just gained a following when he was driven into exile. "Moments are torn from us," Seneca wrote. "The whole future lies in uncertainty." "Fortune behaves as she pleases," he wrote. And we've talked about this a few times. Now, life comes at you fast. Doesn't rhyme, doesn't reason, doesn't care about your wants or needs. It just is.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  All we can do is accept the uncertainty of all of it and heed Seneca's command. Live immediately and be prepared.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  Anger is bad fuel. And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the Bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. There is no more stupefying thing than anger, nothing more bent on its own strength. If successful, none more arrogant;

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  if foiled, none more insane, since it is not driven back by weariness even in defeat. When fortune removes its adversary, it turns its teeth on itself. Seneca on Anger 3:1. As the Stoics have said many times, getting angry almost never solves anything, usually makes things worse. When we get upset, then the other person gets upset. Now everyone is upset, and the problem is no closer to being solved. Many successful people will try to tell you that anger is a powerful fuel in their lives. The desire to prove them all wrong or shove it in their faces has made many a millionaire and a celebrity. The anger at being called fat or stupid

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  has created fine physical specimens in brilliant minds. The anger at being rejected has motivated many to carve their own path. But this is short-sighted. Such stories ignore the pollution produced as a side effect and the wear and tear it puts on the engine. It ignores what happens when the initial anger wears out and how more and more must and how more and more fuel must be generated to keep the machine going, until eventually the only source left, as Seneca said, is anger at oneself. "Hate is too great a burden to bear," Martin Luther King Jr. warned his fellow civil rights leaders in 1967,

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  even though he had every reason to respond to hate with hate. And the same is true for anger. In fact, it's true for most extreme emotions. They are toxic fuel. There's plenty of it out in the world, no question, but it is rarely worth the costs to come along with it. What I've come to say, as I wrote this many years ago, but I talked about anger more as a fuel in my book Stillness is the Key. Anger is very powerful fuel, but it's very volatile fuel. And it might make the machine go quite fast, but it could also blow up and burn you and everyone around you.

• 5:18Ryan Holiday?

  And this is why, this is what Seneca was writing about in anger, in on anger. He saw this with Nero, certainly. And he tried to talk to Nero about this directly, where he said, like, look, other people can afford to be angry, can be afford to be led by their passions, but not you. Too much is at stake here. And I think that's an important way to think about this. Anger is dangerous fuel, and people are counting on you. There are people around you, there are innocent people around you, and you don't want to blow up all over them. I tell the story of Michael Jordan in Stillness is the Key.

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  And if you watch his Hall of Fame speech, you can see a guy who manufactured slights his whole career as a source of fuel, as a, as a source of propulsion. And there's no question, it made him great. But there's this moment in the speech where he calls out, like, the kid who took his spot, not even really took his spot, as I get into in the book, because it's more complicated than that, but the kid who got a spot on the varsity basketball team in high school in front of Jordan. And it's clear that Jordan has been hanging on to this for like 40 years. And he brings the guy to the talk, like, to the Hall of Fame thing, and he, he rubs

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  it in his face, like, look where I am now, the most accomplished person in the history of that game. And that's what he's doing. And I'm not saying he's a bad person. I'm saying it's sad. That's, that, that would be a hard way to live. You know, Seneca talks about how getting angry is like returning a bite to a dog or a kick to a mule. But that's what we do. The TV remote isn't cooperating. We smash it to pieces. That'll show the remote. But who are you really punishing, man? First off, the remote is an inanimate object. And now you have to go get a new remote. It just doesn't work. I just, there's almost no times that I've been glad afterwards

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  that I lost my temper. And my best work, when I think about it, it didn't come from a place of showing people up. Honestly, most of the things I regret came from, you know, wanting to prove people wrong or, you know, prove myself right or, or win. My best work came from a place of love, a place of deep interest, fascination. It was a puzzle, not a, not a problem to obliterate. Anger is bad fuel. Try to, I'm not saying it's not effective. I'm just saying it's, it's long-term. And, and I think the, the metaphor in this, in this chapter of, of the pollution is, is right.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  Even if it works for you, it's going to be bad for your kids. It's going to be bad for the people that you're competing against or with. It's going to be bad for the people that witness it. Ultimately, it will be bad for you. Anger is bad fuel. There's plenty of other things you can find to motivate you. Stoics said to be wary of the passions. Marx really said to be free of passion, but full of love. Think working from a place of love, fascination, commitment. That's a good passion. Anger, not so much. Anyways, that's today's message. Talk to y'all soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day.

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  Just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out.