The Present Is All There Is | The Truly Educated Aren’t Quarrelsome

“There’s a constant internal tension within Meditations—between urgency and patience, contemplation and action, focusing in and zooming out. Marcus tells us to forget the future, on the one hand, then to contemplate infinite time on the other hand. At first glance, it can feel like there’s a dissonance there. A contradiction. But the purpose of these seemingly divergent exercises is the same: presence and the present.”Ryan explains why you have to embrace this moment, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. The new Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can add the Cover to any mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. Go to eightsleep.com/dailystoic to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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 Aurelius, 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.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  "The present is all there is." There's a constant internal tension within meditations between urgency and patience, contemplation and action, focusing in and zooming out. Marcus Aurelius tells us to forget the future, on the one hand, then, on another, to contemplate infinite time. At first glance, it can feel like there's some dissonance there, a contradiction even. But the purpose of these seemingly divergent exercises is the same: presence and the present. Frank McLean writes in his biography of Marcus Aurelius that Marcus plainly preaches that the present is all there is. It was a struggle for him, of course, just as it is a struggle for us, which is why Marcus reminds himself as we must at every

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  moment, not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you while you're alive and able. Be good. We are struggling with similar tensions right now. We have just been reminded of our mortality during the pandemic, yet we've been wasting days just waiting for things to get back to normal. We're confined, yet we're restless. We've never had so much time on our hands, yet we have no idea what to do with this time. And there's nothing new in that, Marcus would say. During wartime or a plague, as the emperor or a pauper in good health or old age, the present is the same for everyone. The loss is the same for everyone. So stay present in the present. It's all that there is.

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  The truly educated aren't quarrelsome. This is the June 24th entry of The Daily Stoic. 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. You can get a signed copy in the Daily Stoic store. You can get a leather bound edition in the Daily Stoic store as well. Or pick up audio, digital, physical, anywhere books are sold. Today's quote comes to us from Epictetus, Discourses 4:5. "The beautiful and good person neither fights with anyone nor as much as they are able permits others to fight. This is the meaning of getting an education, learning what is your own affair and what is not.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  If a person carries themselves so, where is there any room for fighting?" Socrates famously traveled around Athens approaching the people he disagreed with most and engaging them in long discussions. In these discussions, or whatever record we have of them, there are many examples of his conversation mates getting exasperated, upset, and aggravated by as many questions. Indeed, the people of Athens eventually got so upset, they sentenced Socrates to death. But Socrates never seemed to get upset himself. Even when talking about matters of life and death, he always kept his cool. He was much more interested in hearing what the other person had to say than making sure he was heard, as so much of us insist upon.

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  He was not worried about winning the argument. So the next time you face a political dispute or a personal disagreement, ask yourself, is there any reason to fight about this? Is arguing going to help with anything? Would an educated or wise person really be as quarrelsome as you might initially be inclined to be? Or would they take a breath, relax, and resist the temptation for conflict? Just think of what you could accomplish and how much better you would feel if you could conquer the need to fight and win every tiny little thing. You know, I think about this when I log on to Twitter, which I sort of have to do for work purposes from now, every now and then. And I watch the smartest journalists and public figures of our generation just...

• 4:24Ryan Holiday?

  Waste the day arguing with each other about nonsense, shouting into the void about this or that, always angry, always sarcastic, always mean. And accomplishing what? Accomplishing fucking nothing, right? The wiser you get, the less you should care about piddly things that don't matter, right? I feel one of the signs of getting older for me is that I find myself sucked into arguments less. I get upset less. I get in confrontations less because they don't matter. And actually, this is something I saw when I used to train in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. You know, it was the, the black belts who could just sit there calmly.

• 5:07Ryan Holiday?

  They didn't care. You could probably insult them and their mother and they would laugh it off because they know what they're capable of. They know what's true. They know what's right. And they don't feel the need to prove it to some idiot, right? And so I think what's, what Epictetus is saying is the wiser you get, the closer you get to mastery and self mastery, the, the less you should feel inclined to need to prove that to people, the less attracted you should be to, to, to talking. You know, Robert Greene says, always say less than necessary. I think that's a sign of, of wisdom and strength is that you can keep your mouth shut. You can let someone be wrong. If they're wrong, what do you care? And if you're right, being right is sufficient. You can say why you're right.

• 5:51Ryan Holiday?

  You can, you know, maybe explain your reasoning, but it doesn't weigh on your conscience if you don't manage to convince them and you don't stay up at night thinking of all the things you should have said. So let it go this week, right? Realize that social media is trying to draw you in. Remember as always that you can't reason a person out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. And if you talk wisdom to a fool, they're gonna call you foolish. So let it go, move on. Don't be quarrelsome. Focus on your own improvement. Focus on all that you have left to learn. I think that's really why Socrates wasn't very quarrelsome is that he was focused on, on what he didn't know.

• 6:33Ryan Holiday?

  And he wanted to learn even from the people he didn't particularly respect or admire. And that's where we're trying to get. That's the fruit of this philosophy we're studying on. So that's today's message. If you disagree, well, keep it to yourself because I don't care.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  That's of course, the idea of Alive Time, which we talk about in the Alive Time/Dead Time Challenge. Check that out at dailystoic.com/alive time. We've used it to raise thousands and thousands of dollars for COVID-19 relief to feed hungry people. We've provided hundreds of thousands of meals for people who are experiencing food scarcity. So check that out, dailystoic.com/alive.