Why Aren’t You Virtue Signaling? | Not Good, Nor Bad

Ryan discusses the paradoxical nature of our cultures negative view of virtue signaling, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1000, the next 2000 to list a product get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to https://appsumo.com/ryanholiday to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://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?

  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 Aurelius, 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.

• 0:41Ryan Holiday?

  Why aren't you virtue signaling? It's become kind of a reactionary refrain, popular on social media and internet comment sections. We see someone talking about a social cause, we hear someone concerned about something going on in the world, we watch someone trying to do some good, and we pounce. Virtue signaling. We spit the words out like venom. We type them out on our keyboards with a little extra force. We shout them at their perpetrators as if it means something. Now, of course, virtue signaling does exist. It's true. In violation of the core Stoic practice of showing rather than telling, some people would rather talk about what a good man is like, instead of, you know, being one.

• 1:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yet, in a world filled with so much injustice and blatant shamelessness, this also seems like a rather silly thing to be upset about. Because isn't the one thing worse than virtue signaling? The outright rejection of virtue altogether? Now, certainly, Seneca could be accused of virtue signaling. He was a public figure and an admired Stoic, who wrote beautiful philosophical essays, but whose conduct often fell short of the principles explored in those very essays. Seneca was ambitious. He liked worldly things. He made pragmatic compromises. But again, isn't this better than the alternative? Isn't pragmatism preferable to pure evil? Does anyone really prefer Nero's approach?

• 2:06Ryan Holiday?

  Virtue signaling, we might say, is necessary but not sufficient for the virtuous life. We begin with a commitment to virtue, an earnest commitment to doing the right thing, to serving the common good, to philosophical ideals. Will we always be consistent with it? Always live up to our own standards? We can try, but almost certainly, we will fall short. We also have to understand that this is true for others. Virtue is hard. Stoicism is a tough prescription. Getting our heart in the right place is a good first step, and then with time, with practice, hopefully, we get better at it. Judging other people for falling short, for talking more than acting, then dismissing virtue

• 2:46Ryan Holiday?

  altogether as a result, equating it with phoniness or naivete because apparently signaling about virtue is worse than doing nothing at all? What does that accomplish? So, send your virtue signals. Just make sure you're actually backing them up, and leave others to their own struggle to do the same. Or better yet, help them back it up, rather than backing them into a corner for daring to wish out loud, "for a better world." Not good nor bad. Shout out to my wife Samantha. It is her birthday today. I'm recording this in advance. It's not technically today. Who knows what we'll be doing? I'm probably

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  going to take the day off, spend some time together. But, in the meantime, I'll give you the entry. "There is no evil in things changing, just as there is no good in persisting in a new state." Marcus Aurelius is 442. And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, "366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living," by yours truly and my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spent more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But, I hope you check it out.

• 4:13Ryan Holiday?

  We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But, let's get on with today's reading. Now, what I wanted to do there, just because I sometimes find value in checking the other translations, let's look at what Gregory Hayes has to say today. There is nothing bad in undergoing change. This is from the Gregory Hayes translation. Or good in emerging from it. So what does that mean exactly? When people say change is good, they're usually trying to reassure someone or themselves. Because instinctively, we view change as bad. Or at least, we're suspicious of it. But the Stoics want you to do away with those labels altogether. Change isn't good. Status quo isn't bad.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  They just are. They just are. Remember, events are objective. It's only our opinion that says something is good or bad. And thus, worth fighting against or fighting for. A better attitude to decide to make the most of everything. But to do that, you must first cease fighting. And I think I put this together. I was giving a talk in some industry. It was oil and gas, maybe several years ago. And that industry was particularly struggling or going through a hard time. And they wanted me to talk about that. And I said, is this a great time to be in your industry? Or a bad time? Is it a terrible time to be in this space? Or a wonderful time? And I said, you know what? Doesn't fucking matter. Because you're in it right now. Right?

• 5:42Ryan Holiday?

  These opinions, is it a bear market? Is it a bull market? Are we in the decline of America? Is it the collapse of the world order? Right? We speculate about these things. We want to put labels on them. We want to place them somewhere in a story. As if it matters. As if it changes what is, in fact, happening. It's not things that upset us, Epictetus says, but our judgment about things. So why don't we try to step back and just not label them at all? Remember, Marcus Verliss also says, we always have the power to have no opinion, to think nothing at all. To just simply let it be. And get to work either accepting it, coming to terms with it. Or working on changing it.

• 6:26Ryan Holiday?

  I don't want you to think that by not labeling things, we become apathetic. In fact, Saul Alinsky, who I love. And if you just got triggered by that name. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Saul Alinsky says that an organizer, an agent of change, has to accept the world as it is for what it is if they wish to change it. Right? So this idea of acceptance, not seeing it as evil, but also not seeing it as permanent, not seeing it as ordained, not seeing it as malicious, just seeing it as what it is, then allows you to allocate those resources towards what is in your control.

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  When Marx really says, why should we be angry at the world as if the world would notice? I think he's saying, the world doesn't care what labels you put on it. The market doesn't care that we call this a bear market and this a bull market. Doesn't know what any of those things is, what any of those things are. It is not sentient. The labels don't matter. Right? The names are nothing. They just, they don't affect what it is. What we do, how we respond, how we integrate it, the changes we make because of it. Now that has some impact.

• 7:50Ryan Holiday?

  So there is no evil in things changing, just as there is no good in persisting in a new state. Change isn't bad. It isn't to be afraid of. It's also not good, just is. Change is a fact of life. We must accept it. We must anticipate it. We must utilize it because that's all that we control.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoic.com/email. So check it out, dailystoic.com/email.