This Is A Tragedy | Be Stingy With Time

The great fortune of Marcus Aurelius' life, he says at one point in Meditations, is not just that he himself has never known serious want, it’s that he’s been lucky enough to be able to help so many people. Rather than give in to the materialism and selfishness of Cyber Monday, we’re teaming with Feeding America to contribute to something larger than ourselves. Help us reach our goal of feeding THREE MILLION people, every $1 donated is at least 10 meals. Donate at dailystoic.com/feedingIf you live outside the U. S., check out Action Against Hunger—the global humanitarian organization that fights against hunger across nearly 50 countries. Head here to donate.📕 Pick up a copy of On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It by Seneca at The Painted Porch📓 Grab a signed edition of The Daily Stoic Journal: 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on The Art of Living: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow 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.

• 0:02Ryan 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.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  This is a tragedy. We got together with family. We reminded ourselves what was important. We enjoyed the bounties of the earth. Perhaps when we took the rolls out of the oven, we noted, as Marcus Rilis does in Meditations, the way the bread cracks open on top, a nod to nature's inadvertence. We gave thanks. That's what we do on Thanksgiving. And then, the next day, millions of us disregarded all of our appreciation for the good things we've been given in life, food, and family, and friends, to lose ourselves in a frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. We traded in stillness and family time for fighting

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  over a spot in line to get a new flatscreen television. We should have instead followed the advice that Marcus Rilis often gave himself, to actively help others, to lend a hand, to do his part. The great fortune of this life, he says at one point in Meditations, is not just that he himself has never known serious one, but that he's always been lucky enough to help other people who needed it. The world held up its part of the deal, so he tried to do the same. That's why, for the fifth year in a row now, instead of doing a Cyber Monday sale or a Black Friday deal with Daily Stoic, we're inviting you to help someone else, rather than overindulge yourself. You got a day of fullness. You've been blessed. So let's now be a blessing.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Many people aren't feeling full at all right now. They're experiencing the exact opposite. They're hungry, they're food insecure. And this is a tragedy, but it's also an opportunity and an obligation. It's our duty to help others, to serve others, the Stoics would say, to demonstrate those virtues of courage and justice towards and for and through others. And that's why we've been doing these annual food drives for Daily Stoic. Every year, we kicked it off on Thursday. Last year, the Daily Stoic community came together with Feeding America and provided 2.1 million meals. We didn't quite get to our goal of 3 million, so we're doubling down. We're trying to do that again this year. And I'm going to personally put up the first 30,000 bucks, that's 300,000 meals right there, to try to get to this goal of 3 million.

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  Every dollar we raise provides 10 meals. We can't fix food insecurity and global hunger for everyone right now, not yet. But we can make a serious dent in a very big problem. And I'd love to invite you to help us, right? Even just put up a dollar, that's all you gotta put up. DailyStoic.com/Feeding, that's the link. You can see all the other Stoics who are contributing. I'm just so proud of this. It's one of my favorite things that's come out of Daily Stoic. And I hope you can participate. I'm just calling for everyone to be a good Stoic today. Prove that you don't just listen to it, don't just talk about this philosophy, but we live it. DailyStoic.com/Feeding, we're going to keep it open. Let's do something good today.

• 3:36Ryan Holiday?

  If you live outside the US, you can check out Action Against Hunger. It's a global humanitarian organization that fights against hunger across nearly 50 countries. And I'll link to that in today's show notes. Or you can just go to DailyStoic.com/Feeding, donate a dollar, donate 50 cents, just donate something. Every dollar you donate provides 10 meals. So let's do it, let's do it big, let's get after it.

• 4:06Ryan Holiday?

  Be stingy with time. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, by yours truly, Ryan Holiday. "One of the most common sayings we hear, and you might have said this yourself, 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?

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  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." 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, or 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?

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  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, "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 is passed by without us even recognizing its passing. And so it is. We don't receive a short life; we make it so."

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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, then I had to contact Amazon about it. And then they said they were going to do it and then, but I got passed.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  Anyways, I'm spending time after time after time. And then at some point, someone promised me a $200 credit on this TV, 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. And 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 deliver to chase down.

• 7:43Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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 think about this with the bookstore, which 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?

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  Because not only do I have work, but if I did that for every single person, I would never have time. 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're gonna have to hurt people's feelings or not give them everything they want. When you say no, you're gonna have to say no sometimes. And that's not fun.

• 9:12Ryan Holiday?

  But I always try to remind myself 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 gonna mean being tight-fisted with your time. It's gonna mean saying no to people. And 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?

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  Try to think about things that you can take off your plate so you can 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 gonna look back and be like, well, I am glad that I spent X many hours doing this? Think about your commute, right? How many hours you're gonna spend doing that? Think about how many hours you spend in meetings.

• 10:42Ryan Holiday?

  Think about how many hours you spend on. Ridiculous trivialities, right? I think what I like to point out with Seneca'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 a bit miserly with your own time. And be stingy 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.

• 11:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.