The Violence Of The Dog Days | Be Stingy With Time

As summer now passes into fall and all too quickly fall turns to winter, it is worth stopping and thinking for a second. Where did that time go? Not long ago you were watching fireworks and enjoying the light late into the evening. Now, suddenly, you’re in sweaters, looking at your lawn covered in leaves, wondering why it’s so dark and the evening news hasn’t even finished.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:39Ryan Holiday?

  The Violence of the Dog Days.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  As summer passes now into fall and all too quickly turns into winter, it is worth stopping and thinking for a second. Where did that time go? Not long ago, you were watching fireworks and enjoying the late light into the evening. And now, suddenly, you're in sweaters, looking at your lawn covered in leaves, wondering why it is so dark and the evening news hasn't even finished. We talked last year about Philip Larkin's beautiful poem about the changing of the seasons, how their circular renewal contains within them a kind of finality. "Summer is over. That summer is over forever. It's the violence of the dog days," as Bon Iver recently sang. Perhaps that's a good way to see it. Those hot summer afternoons

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  where you didn't want to go outside, where you didn't want to do anything, where instead, you waited for a drop in the temperature, a break in the humidity. You weren't killing time. Time was killing you. Seneca reminded himself that death was not a thing in the future, but something that is happening now. It's always happening. It's the ticking hand of the clock. It's the first snow of the year. It's the spring flowers. It's the summer rains. It is the fall harvest. It is the winter snow. This timeless reminder should sober us up to the time that we have left. It should jerk us from our passivity, from being mere observers of the passage of time and of our own lives. We must be present. We must be aware.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  We must live the time we have been given, this season and the next, and the next.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  Be Stingy with Time. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living", by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. One of the most common sayings we hear, and you might have said this yourself,

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  is that life is short. And it is, but as Seneca remarked, "It's pretty long if you know how to use it." And the first step to that is not giving so much of this time away to other people. Being miserly about our time is a powerful exercise, which can keep us from squandering the one truly non-renewable resource. What in your life consumes a lot of time for no good purpose? What amusements or desires consume our time without giving us a good return? As you review that list, make a commitment to doing something about it. Life is short, after all, and you don't have much to spare.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says, "Were all the geniuses of history to focus on a single theme that could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind? No person would give even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay. Yet we easily let others encroach on our lives. Worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person would hand out their money to a passerby, but how many of us hand out our lives? We're tight-fisted with our property and money, and yet we think too little of wasting time. The one thing we should all be the toughest misers about." That's Seneca on the shortness of life. It is not that we all have too short a time to live, Seneca says,

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it's given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well. But when it's poured down the drain of luxury and neglect, when it's employed to no good end, we're finally driven to see that it has passed by without us even recognizing its passing. And so it is. We don't receive short life. We make it so. Or as I've also heard it rendered by Seneca, it's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it. And this all comes from his wonderful essay on the shortness of life, which you should absolutely read. It's a very powerful essay.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  It's worth rereading a couple of times a year, to be quite frank. But I was thinking about this recently. I'd serve two good examples. Number one, I'm trying to get this television delivered. And anyone who's been trying to buy furniture or televisions or anything recently knows just how messed up the supply chains and logistics are. But anyways, it was supposed to come and then it didn't come. So I messaged the people and then then it was supposed to come the next day. So I messaged the people and then they were supposed to message. Then again, then I had to contact Amazon about it. And then they said they were going to do it and then, but I got passed. Anyways, I'm spending time after time after time. And then at some point, someone promised me a $200 credit on this TV,

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  which is, you know, I'm free $200, not bad. But it occurred to me that one had already objectively spent more than $200 of my time on this thing, like if what an hour of my time is worth. But also, if you just asked me, hey, would you spend $200 more on the TV and not have to go through this? I would have taken that option as well. I had to wrestle with how much energy am I going to spend trying to get this $200 credit that may or may not ever exist? The TV from these people may or may not ever be able to chase down. And so, of course, if someone stole $200 from me, I'd be very upset. Right? If they'd overcharged me $200 for this TV, I'd have been upset.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  But I'm willing to spend $200 of my time. To either get this credit or to get this TV, right? And that's what we do. We waste our time. We, we value money and property, as Seneca is saying. But time is this like thing that we assume we have an unlimited amount of because no one, I don't know, it's just crazy. And then I, I think about this with the bookstore, which I, I, I love and I'm so proud of. But people come by and they want to say hi, you know? And I think sometimes people think it's rude that I won't run downstairs to see everyone that's, that's here. And I can't do that, right? Because not only do I have work, but if I did that for every single person, I would never have time.

• 7:27Ryan Holiday?

  I'd use up all my time. I could spend almost the entire day doing that. And so when Seneca talks about being a miser, miser, if you're not familiar with that word, miser is like someone who's tight fisted with money. It's like a cheap person. But he's saying you have to be cheap with your time. You can't give it away. Yes, you should be kind and, and treat people well and not be rude about it and not be self-absorbed. But you have to be a bit of a miser with your time because you, you're going to have to hurt people's feelings or not give them everything they want. When you say no, you're going to have to say no sometimes. And that's not fun.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  But I always try to remind myself, who, when I'm saying no to one person, I am also saying yes to something else. And conversely, when I'm saying yes to some inquiry, I'm also saying no to someone or something else. Right? And that's just the struggle that we're on. And if you have kids, if you have a spouse, if you have work that's important, if you have potential you're trying to fulfill, if you're just trying to get better at yourself, it's going to mean being tight fisted with your time. It's going to mean saying no to people. That's just how it goes. That's just how it goes. And so I would urge everyone to take a minute, value, try to think about what an hour of your time is, is worth. Right?

• 8:53Ryan Holiday?

  Try to think about things that you can take off your plates and get that time back. But then think about what you are frivolously spending your time on. And if that's worth it, what are the rote tasks? The things that you do, the things that you go, ugh, you put off and you dread doing them. What are those things? Why are you still doing them? Do you need to be doing them? And at the end of your life, when you go, man, that flew by. I wish I had just one more day to do X. One more hour to do X. Right? Are you going to look back and be like, well, I am, I am glad that I spent X many hours doing this. Think about your commute. Right? How many hours you're going to spend doing that?

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  Think about how many hours you spend in meetings. Think about how many hours you spend on ridiculous trivialities. Right? I think what, what I like to point out with Senator's thing about neighbors is like, yeah, if your neighbor's encroached on your property, you would object. But if your neighbor came over and just wanted to gossip about nonsense, you would indulge that. Right? And that's not a good idea. You have to be miserly with your time. Not selfish, not cruel, not indifferent to other people's time, of course, but, but a bit miserly with your own time. And they sting you with it, as they said. And I'll cut this episode short, so I'm not taking up too much of your time, but you get the point.

• 10:25Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.