We Are All Unreliable Narrators | Revenge Is A Dish Best Not Served

All day long, we tell ourselves stories. When something goes wrong—“this is my fault.” We blame ourselves even though the reality might be that we had little control over the situation. When someone is rude—“they don’t like me.” We take other people's actions or behaviors personally even though the reality might be that they are going through a tough time. We walk into a meeting—“they’re all judging me.” We think everyone is thinking about us when the reality is that everyone is thinking about themselves.--And in today's excerpt from The Daily Stoic, Ryan explains how to respond in moments of conflict without adding insult on top of injury, while educating ourselves on the difference between justice and revenge.✉️ 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 the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  "We are all unreliable narrators. All day, we tell ourselves stories. When something goes wrong, we say, 'This is my fault.' We blame ourselves, even though the reality might be that we had little control over the situation. When someone is rude, we say, 'They don't like me.' We take other people's actions or behaviors personally, even though the reality might be that they're going through a tough time. We walk into a meeting, we think they're all judging me. We think everyone is thinking about us, when the reality is that everyone is thinking about themselves." This is what a lot of us don't realize. The psychotherapist and writer Laurie Gottlieb said in a recent episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, "Every single one of us is an unreliable narrator," she said.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  As she told me in the interview, "Remember Epictetus's line about putting every impression to the test? Well, that includes your own stories, your own beliefs about yourself, your own comfortable patterns and instincts. Think of his famous observation that every situation has two handles or two interpretations. We decide which one to grab, we decide which story to tell ourselves. What will it be, the right one or the wrong one? When something goes wrong, you can find a better story to tell yourself other than 'It's your fault.' When someone is rude, you can tell yourself a better story other than 'They don't like me.' And when you walk into a meeting, you can find a better story to tell yourself than 'Everyone is judging me.'" You just need to be aware enough of the fact that

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  everyone is an unreliable narrator, and know that you have the power to tell yourself better stories.

• 2:28Ryan Holiday?

  Revenge is a dish best not served. This is from today's entry, October 13th, from The Daily Stoic. "The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that." Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 6:6. "How much better to heal than to seek revenge from injury? Vengeance wastes a lot of time and exposes you to many more injuries than the first that sparked it. Anger always outlasts hurt. Best to take the opposite course. Would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog?" That's Seneca's On Anger 3:72. And then today's entry from The Daily Stoic says, "Let's say that someone has treated you rudely.

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  Let's say that someone got promoted ahead of you because they took credit for your work or did something dishonest. It's natural to think, oh, that's how the world works, or one day it will be my turn to be like that. Or more common, I'll get them for this." Except those are the worst possible responses to bad behavior. As Marcus and Seneca both wrote, the proper response, indeed the best revenge, is to exact no revenge at all. If someone treats you rudely and you respond with rudeness, you have not done anything but proved to them that they were justified in their actions. If you meet other people's dishonesty with dishonesty of your own, guess what? You're proving them right. Now everyone else is also a liar. Instead, today, let's seek to be better than the things that disappoint or hurt us.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Let's try to be the example that we'd like to see others follow. It's awful to be a cheat, to be selfish, to feel the need to inflict pain on our fellow human beings. Meanwhile, living morally and well is quite nice." It is funny, though, because I wrote this book, Conspiracy, about Peter Thiel and his sort of epic quest for revenge. And I'm fascinated by the sort of brilliant, diabolical, some would say driven by justice response that he takes against a media outlet that had not just rudely, and I think wrongly, outed him as gay, but it also bullied and picked on a number of people. And while I do discuss revenge at great length in that book, it wasn't until I was

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  actually finishing up the book that...

• 4:43Ryan Holiday?

  That expression, revenge is a dish best served cold, that I actually got what it was saying. There's a funny joke in 30 Rock where he goes, revenge is a dish best served cold, like pizza. And he goes, really? Cold pizza is better than hot pizza? Now, why? So what is it saying? No, almost no dish is better cold than hot, except for maybe, I guess, dessert. But even the best desserts are hot, if you think about it. I think the expression, the emphasis there is on the serving. The dish is best served cold, because when you grab the hot dish, it burns you, right? And that is what Stoics were warning against when they talk about revenge. That it often does evil to you, it changes you, it warps you.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  And I think you could even make an argument that this is the trajectory that Peter Thiel is on, right? From his sort of secretive, contrarian bet on destroying Gawker. This leads him to Trump. This leads him and some of his people to ultimately rent for office on despicable platforms. It makes him a sort of hated villain. I don't know if he would do it again in retrospect. I don't. The counterfactual is fascinating to me. You know, Nietzsche said that, you know, beware that he who fights monsters, meaning that you become like the monster. You could argue even America after 9/11. There's some sort of irony as we go to get our revenge, to get back at the people who do this.

• 6:09Ryan Holiday?

  Now we're a nation with domestic terrorism and religious fundamentalism. And we squander trillions of dollars in the Middle East that makes us quite vulnerable and quite hypocritical when it comes to much more pressing and ominous and evil enemies. So revenge is something that we have to push away, for the most part. Seneca does make an interesting distinction between getting justice. Says if someone kills your father, right? You should get justice, not revenge. I think that's important. Obviously, I'm thinking about justice as I'm writing this new book. But we have to make sure that as we are responding to treatment,

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  that we don't become like the thing that so mistreated us. That we don't add insult on top of injury, that we don't add self-inflicted injury on top of the injury. And that's today's message from the Daily Stoic.