This Is What They’re Going To Say | The Freedom of Contempt

Ryan talks about the power of Memento Mori, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal.🗓 Get your Memento Mori Life Calendar at https://dailystoic.com/mmcalendarSign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://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?

  Bienvenidos al podcast de Stoic Daily. Cada día nos traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, ilustrada con historias de la historia, eventos actuales y literatura para ayudarte a ser mejor en lo que haces. Y al principio de la semana intentamos hacer un profundísimo descubrimiento, estableciendo una especie de intención estoica para la semana, algo para meditar, algo para pensar, algo para dejarte con, para journalizar, lo que sea que te ocurra haciendo. Así que vamos a entrar.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  Esto es lo que van a decir. ¿Alguna vez pensaste en lo que la gente va a decir después de que mueras? Tal vez piensas en esto mucho. Tal vez es por eso que trabajas tan duro, por eso te persigues el éxito, porque quieres un legado. Bueno, la verdad es que no importa lo que logres o quién eres, la conversación va a ser principalmente así: ¿Escuchaste que alguien murió? No. Y luego dirán: ¿Cómo? Y luego les dirán, y eso será todo, porque así es como va. Siempre ha, siempre será. En las meditaciones, Marcus Aurelius menciona a todos los médicos que se aburrieron de sus labios sobre los cadáveres de los pacientes, eventualmente muriendo mismos. Menciona la pobreza de la fama posthumo. Menciona cómo Alexander el Grande y su conductor de muletas

• 1:23Ryan Holiday?

  murió y fueron enterrados, y cómo eso fue el final de eso. ¿Podría haber sabido Marcus que sus asesinatos serían robados y perdidos cuando Roma fue asesinada por los Visigoles en los años después de su muerte? No. Toda tu vida, toda tu lucha, la cosa más dolorosa que tú y tu familia experimentarán finalmente se reducirá a un trivio intercambio de conocimientos. Si te encuentras a salir de alguna manera inusual, accidente de la locura, sentado en el baño, lo que sea, incluso se podrían reír. ¿Qué puedes hacer con eso? Nada. El punto de esto es recordarte una virtud estoica crítica: la humildad. No eres inmortal, no eres especial. No estarás alrededor para relajarte tu legado.

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  No podrás aferrarte a tus esclavos o a tus posesiones. Así que déjalo ir. Sígueme presente, siendo bueno porque bueno es una buena manera de ser. Y esté preparado para lo que pasa a todos nosotros, los mejores y los peores de nosotros.

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  The language we use to describe things imputes value to those things. We often embellish our language with superlatives to help make our choices of what to buy, wear, eat, or drink seem much better than they really are. As Emperor Marcus Aurelius could have the finest Phalaranian wine at his table at any meal, but he preferred to remind himself that this was only grape juice. As emperor, he was the only Roman allowed to wear a purple cloak, but he took pains to point out that this cloak was like any other, just dyed with shellfish blood so as to produce a purple hue. This week, try to practice cutting your own luxuries and the things you yearn for down to size with a little contempt.

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  Describe them with the bluntest language you can and see how much their power over you diminishes. Just as when meat or other foods are set before us, we think this is a dead fish, or a dead bird, or a pig. Also, this fine wine is only the juice of a bunch of grapes. This purple-edged robe is just sheep's wool dyed in a bit of blood from a shellfish, or of sex, that is only the rubbing of private parts together followed by a spasmic discharge. In the same way, our impressions grab actual events and permeate them, so we see things as they really are. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 6:13. Keep a list before your mind of all those who burn with anger and resentment about

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  something, or even the most renowned for success, misfortune, evil deeds, or any special distinction, then ask yourself, how did it work out? Smoke and dust, the stuff of simple myth trying to be legend. That's Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 12:27. You know what wine and liquor taste like. It makes no difference whether 100 or 1,000 bottles pass through your bladder. You are nothing more than a filter. This is from the Daily Stoic Journal. The week's entry is titled "The Freedom of Contempt." I don't know, this is long been one of my favorite exercises in all of Stoicism. It's just brilliant, it's cynical, it's funny, it's really practical, too.

• 4:37Ryan Holiday?

  You know, Marcus really didn't have to live in a time of Madison Avenue advertising. He didn't live in a time of social media influencers. He didn't live in a time of propaganda and misinformation. There wasn't spinning and selling the way that there is now. And yet, even then, he had to practice, you know, just seeing through all the bullshit, seeing through to what things actually were, stripping them, as he says, "of the legend that encrust them." So when Epictetus talks about putting things to the test, this is what Marcus is doing. He says, "I'm not going to get distracted by my urges, by my immediate positive reaction to this, to the way my mouth is watering when I see X, or the way that my eyes get big when I see Y."

• 5:20Ryan Holiday?

  Says, "I'm going to really break down what I see here, and I'm going to describe it in the most unflinching, unvarnished, least sympathetic language possible, and I'm going to see what that reflection back to me does, how it changes my opinion of it." Right? Sometimes, you know, there's that expression about seeing how the sausage gets made. When you go and see the sausage gets made, or you see, you know, underneath things, they lose their power over you, and that's what this Stoic practice is really about, and it's so important. It's not that you'll never enjoy this or that ever again, it's just you want to enjoy

• 5:59Ryan Holiday?

  it with the deceit turned down a little bit, the legend, a little more thread there. And this is an active practice we have to go through. So as you walk out in a parking lot, and you, you know, you see a Lexus, remind yourself, "This is just a Toyota with fancier branding." Right? When you see a $300 pair of Nikes, remind yourself of the sweatshop that this was likely made in. When you hear someone talking about how they are a billionaire, remind yourself just how dumb a lot of billionaires have turned out to be, right? When you're intimidated by someone's fancy degree, again, remind yourself who else has graduated from that institution.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  Think of the corruption. Think of the evil ideas that have come out of that institution over the years. Again, this isn't to dismiss or demean the things entirely. It's just to counteract that impulse of jealousy, of envy, of lust, of fear. You know, there's that expression about if you see a beautiful woman, that somewhere, someone is sick of that person's shit. And that's true for everything, every person. And it'll take it down a peg and then help you see it a tad more rationally.

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you gonna let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in. That black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years,

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  but for every single dot that you filled in, that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.