There is Only One Thing To Do | Don’t Hide From Your Feelings

It would be wonderful if the Stoics promised you some sort of breakthrough. One that solved for the messy divorce or the unfortunate bankruptcy. One that helped you rehab from the car accident or magically deal with a pandemic that drags on for years (as Marcus knew well). One that soothes you as you sit up sleep-deprived with an infant. The Stoics do, actually, offer solutions for these kinds of struggles. They just don’t come as the kind of breakthrough or insight that you’re necessarily looking for.✉️ 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.

• 0:03Ryan 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.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  There is only one thing to do.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  It would be wonderful if the Stoics promised you some kind of breakthrough, one that solved for the messy divorce or the unfortunate bankruptcy, one that helped you rehab from the car accident or magically deal with the pandemic that drags on for years and years, as Marcus knew well, one that soothes you as you sit up sleep deprived with an infant. The Stoics do actually offer you solutions for these kinds of struggles. They just don't come as the kind of breakthrough or insight you're necessarily looking for. In 1929, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend Ernest Hemingway about being blocked on the novel that would become Tender is the Night. Hemingway gave him a great piece of advice,

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  words of timeless wisdom that Fitzgerald almost certainly didn't want to hear. "You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless," Hemingway told his friend. "There is only one thing to do with a novel, and that is to go straight on through to the end of the damn thing." Stoicism can't offer you much more than that because there's not much else to offer in the management of life's inevitable struggles. The way past our problems is through them. This is the best way out, as Robert Frost would later write. Indeed, it was endurance that Marcus drew upon in the Antonine Plague during those years on the front lines, during his health issues, through the grief and loss that was visited upon him over and over again.

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  It's how Seneca got through his exile and Epictetus through slavery. When things were worst and most helpless, they kept going. They did not quit. They went on straight through to the end, as Marcus himself would write, sprinting through to the finish line, unswerving. Fitzgerald found the finish line with his novel four years later, though with his wife Zelda's severe mental health issues and his own chronic alcoholism, one could hardly say the path was unswerving. Still, despite it all, Fitzgerald never quit. He continued to write. He continued to work in order to pay Zelda's medical bills in the vain hope that one day she would be cured. In short, he kept going, and so should you.

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  It's the only thing to do. Don't hide from your feelings. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic. 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 and also get a signed,

• 3:42Ryan Holiday?

  personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. And our quote today is from Seneca in his essay to Helvia, his mother. It's better to conquer grief, he says, than to deceive it. We've all lost people we're close to, a friend, a colleague, a parent, a grandparent. And while we were suffering from our grief, some well-meaning person did their best to take our mind off of it, or make us think about something else for a couple hours. However kind these gestures are misguided. The Stoics are stereotyped as suppressing their emotions, but their philosophy was actually intended to teach us to face, to process and deal with emotions immediately, instead of running from them.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  Tempting as it is to deceive yourself or hide from a powerful emotion like grief by telling yourself and other people that you're fine, awareness and understanding are better. Distraction might be pleasant in the short term, by going to the gladiatorial games, as a Roman might have done, but focusing is better in the long term. That means facing it now. Process and parse what you are feeling, remove your expectations, your entitlements, your sense of having been wrong. Find the positive in the situation, but also sit with your pain and accept it, remembering that it is a part of life. And that is how we conquer grief. I had Kate Bowler on the podcast last year, year before. I know it's been twice, but she has this book called Everything Happens for a Reason

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  and Other Lies I've Been Told. And the point, she finds out she has cancer and all these people come and go, oh, it happened for a reason. Everything happens for a reason. And her response was, I'd love to know the reason, right? She was rejecting these sort of platitudes that we give people when they are grieving, to try to take their mind off it. We distract them, we want to make them laugh. We say, oh, I've been through that too.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  There's no way out but through feeling, thinking, dealing with, you know, the Stoics. The Stoics knew grief. As Seneca was writing that essay to his mother, he was grieving himself. He'd lost a child. As I've been going back through Meditations, we have this leather bound edition and I'm rereading it like a fresh copy. And for whatever reason, I was just skipping through it and I found in all like in one sitting, I found all the different instances where Marcus was talking about like loss and children, which is extra haunting when you think about how many he lost, five, six? We don't know exactly, but almost more of his children did not survive to adulthood than did.

• 6:22Ryan Holiday?

  He buried five, six children, just the magnitude of that grief. And if we take Meditations, then as a much more personal book, a book of a man working through his grief, trying to conquer it, not deceive it, it's both very humanizing and haunting at the same time. Marcus isn't different than you and I. He's not this magical robot, but he was someone who put in the work to deal with, to think through, to talk about his emotions. I just, I hate this stereotype of the Stoics as being unfeeling. They were feeling, they just tried not to be overwhelmed,

• 7:03Ryan Holiday?

  overcome, paralyzed by those feelings. And part of the way they did it was by working on them. So, you know, this month in the Daily Stoic is about death and grief and mortality. And I think it's important for those of you who are grieving, for those of us who are grieving, who have lost someone or may lose someone, you know, it's okay to cry about that. There's a story about Marcus crying about the loss of one of his tutors. That's a human thing. If you're still crying about it, paralyzed by it a year later, probably get some help. You're probably torturing yourself. You're probably doing something that they, the person you are mourning, would not dream of wanting or cursing you with. So you gotta deal with it. You gotta face it.

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  Gotta process it. That's the only way out. There is no way out but through. That's today's message from the Daily Stoic, and I hope you guys are getting ready for the holidays. I hope you're thinking about your New Year's resolutions. We've got the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge coming up here very, very soon, so stay tuned for that. And happy holidays. We'll talk soon.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  That's my memento mori coin. I think about it all the time. I'm playing with it on my desk right now. It's something I carry always. It's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public. It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different memento mori reminders, of course, but if you want to get this one, which we make here in the US in a mint in Minnesota that's been in business since 1882, you can check it out in the Daily Stoic store, or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, The Painted Porch on Main Street, where we sell them as well. It's a game changer. Check it out.