Will You Understand Or Be Understood? | Ask DS

There are very few people who feel completely understood. Starting from a young age, our parents didn’t fully get us. Or maybe it was our teachers. Maybe there is some part of us apparently beyond the reach of our spouse or our peers. This is painful. It’s lonely. It’s rough. Epictetus said that there were some things that were up to us and some things that were not.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions during a Q&A session at the end of the Stoicism 101 course. Topics covered include how we can get to the point of loving the obstacle, the overlap between Stoicism and Existentialism, and more.✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. While on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

• 0:45Ryan Holiday?

  Will you understand or be understood? There are very few people who feel completely understood. Starting from a young age, our parents didn't fully get us. Or maybe it was our teachers, or maybe there was some part of us apparently beyond the reach of our spouse or our peers. And this is painful, and it's lonely, and it's rough. Epictetus said that there were some things that were up to us and some things that were not. While we can do our absolute best, articulating how we feel, speaking up to be heard, going to therapy, asking for help, being patient, being vulnerable, in the end, being understood is never going to be fully up to us. It's just not. By definition, it depends on other people. And other people are flawed and busy and sometimes very selfish.

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  But if being understood is not in our control, there's something quite wonderful that is in our control: understanding. We can give what we didn't or haven't got, as we've written about over at Daily Dad. We can try to see people. We can try to really listen. Our own pain and our own loneliness has an upside. It taught us the value of being understood, how much it means, how even a little of it can go a long way. Instead of despairing, instead of turning inward because we haven't gotten all that we needed, what if we channeled that energy towards being a positive difference maker for others? Focus on what is up to you. Use this as a second chance. We can't always be understood, and certainly, we haven't been. But we can always strive to understand.

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're doing a Q and A today that's actually drawn from the Stoicism 101 course. I think it's one of the best courses we've done over at Daily Stoic. If you're looking to get introduced to Stoicism, you want to take your study of it to the next level, you want to go back to basics, or you want to build a really good foundation of what Stoicism is and how you can use it. That's what the course is about. I'll link to that in today's show notes. But this is drawing from one of the many Q and As we've done as part of the session. People got to come in and ask me a bunch of questions. We're talking about some of Marcus really says stuff about being tolerant with others and strict with yourself, that we can't hold people to standards that they never asked for, and how you sort of think

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  about your friend, how a Stoic thinks about their friend group, and how you try to be a positive influence. So that's where today's Q and A is coming from. It's just a selection, and I hope you join us in Stoicism 101. You can ask some of your own questions. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or just type in Stoicism 101 in the Daily Stoic store.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 3:30Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  I've been listening to your podcast every morning for the last couple of months.

• 3:34Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, amazing.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Amazing. Thank you so much for what you do. So I'm struggling with that two concepts. What you call the obstacle is the way. It's something that I can actually relate to and incorporate. So whatever it is, you make it part of your journey, or whatever

• 3:52Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  situation you're in. But then I heard you talking about the concept of a more fatty.

• 3:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  That's something that is actually new to me. I've never heard of that before. And I'm actually struggling with that. It's like, I can make the obstacle part of the way, but just get to the point to love the obstacle. It's really hard for me.

• 4:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, let me, there was something I just saw. Let me read this to you. Let me find it here. This is, I thought this was beautiful. I'm gonna, I'm gonna reference the, I'm gonna reference the Robin Waterfield translation we've been talking about. But let me find this here. This is Meditations 5:8. He says, "There are two reasons then why you should gladly accept whatever happens to you. First, because the experience happened to you, was prescribed for you, was the product of a web somehow woven just for you way back in time, out of the most ancient causes. Second, because for the directing principle of the universe, even what happens to each

• 4:56Ryan Holiday?

  of us as individuals plays a part in its advancement, perfection, and that by Zeus, its very preservation." So this is what Robin Waterfield says in his annotation. He says, "Because there is an unending chain of cause and effect since time began, what happens to you today has been ordained since the beginning of time." So I thought that was quite... So when we think about Amor Fati, it's not just like, "Hey, I'm gonna figure out a way to muddle through this and make the most of it." It's that, think of everything that led up to where you are right now. Thousands of years of history, you know, you've got the planets behind you. Think of the Big Bang creating, you know, even this moment.

• 5:39Ryan Holiday?

  Like, so billions and billions of years of seemingly unrelated events, we're actually working in beautiful concert with each other to bring about what has just happened. Even if that thing is tragic, or frustrating, or obnoxious, or unraveling something that you yourself had worked very hard on, right? So the Stoics did have this sense of like, that there was some sort of higher power guarding, guiding things along, which I think is helpful to understand it. But to me, the idea is, "Hey, something led up to this. I'm not sure I am even capable of comprehending all of it, so I'm gonna go with it." Right?

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's part one. The other thing with this idea of... So there's another part in meditations where Marcus says, "Look, a fire consumes what you throw in front of it." He says, "But a small fire," like if you had a small flame and you just threw a log on top of it, it would put the fire out, right? It would squash it. But if it was a strong fire, it would turn that into fuel, right? So that to me, the obstacle is the way, or I'm just going to accept this. That's kind of like small fire, right? But a more fati is like this big fire. This is like, it doesn't matter what this is, I'm going to turn this into something that's great. Does that make sense?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Makes sense. Thank you.

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  There's another one about that recent Mark Manson article that I think you've read.

• 7:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  About how he's not a stoic and the overlap between stoicism and existentialism.

• 7:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so I thought Mark's piece was good. He's a friend of mine. I love his stuff. I know we've had him on the podcast, and I think we did a text interview or two before. So I love Mark. It's totally fine that we would disagree about some stuff. When I look at the existentialists versus the stoics, to me, the pretty simple test is like, who did more for humanity, right? When I look at some of these modern schools, I see them as having some interesting questions, right? I think Camus is fascinating and poses some good questions. But to me, the sort of, the deciding sort of vote for the stoics is that these were like real people who did things in the real world.

• 8:10Ryan Holiday?

  And if everyone was an existentialist, I'm not sure where that would leave us. Yeah, someone made the distinction here between pen and ink philosophers and practicing philosophers, and I think that's well said.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  Hey Ryan.

• 8:23Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  Question about routine and breaking out of it. This is something I kind of experienced last year not having like going from kind of having an opportunity outside of the pandemic pre-lockdown to break routines. I'm very like routine and habit focused. So I was wondering, and I don't know, I'm trying to think of like stoic references to this about, you know, being able to seek out new things and kind of, you know, break out of your comfort zone, even if you're, you know, you're very consistent and all that. So.

• 8:59Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. I think one of the problems with routine is that it can sort of become almost like dogma. It can, it can make you very rigid and it can almost be like a form of OCD. You're like, this is the way I do things. This is how I prevent the world from collapsing. And then, you know, if I don't do this thing by seven o'clock, like the whole world will end, which is obviously if the whole, the, the point of routine is that it should make you more productive and more resilient, not more fragile and more sort of dependent. So two, two things that have been helpful for me. One, having kids was great because it just sort of blows your life apart.

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  And, you know, the idea that you're in control of the day sort of gets shattered very quickly. And one of the things that came out of that for me was the idea of like routines plural versus routine. So like when I, and I guess I'd already figured this out, but it's like, when I travel, I have a different routine than I do at home. At home, I sort of know how the day is likely to begin or end, so I can sort of organize things accordingly. When I'm traveling, you know, usually you don't. So it's like, I, I know I have to say like run in the morning because I probably won't get time to do that in the afternoon. So, so I like the idea of having different routines that I sort of default to depending on how things go.

• 10:25Ryan Holiday?

  Right? So it's like, if your routine is like, hey, this is what I do in the morning and it's weather dependent, obviously you have to have another routine if you wake up and it's snowing. So I think the idea of thinking about routines plural has been good. The other thing I might think about is just like, I remember I was reading about an NFL kicker who sort of.

• 10:46Ryan Holiday?

  He was not only not superstitious, he was actively on guard from preventing superstitions from happening. So it's like, if he wore a pair of socks and he had like a couple good games in a row, he would like get rid of those socks. So he didn't, so those didn't become his lucky socks, right? And so I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes I try to think like, okay, what do I normally do as part of my routine? And now I'm gonna do it deliberately the other way. So I don't become addicted to only having it my way. Like, I remember like, like, for instance, like before I write, or like give a talk, like, I like to like, sort of start the day like showering and shaving, because like,

• 11:31Ryan Holiday?

  I just feel fresher that way. But what if the plane arrives, you know, what if I'm on a red eye flight and I have to go straight to the thing, right? Well, I won't have the opportunity to do that. So when that happens, I go, I'm practicing the opposite of the routine, just to prove to myself that the routine doesn't actually matter. There is no superpower in, you know, touching, flipping the light switch on and off three times before I go in the room. That's just something in my head. You know what I mean?

• 12:05Speaker 05

  No, that totally makes sense.

• 12:06Ryan Holiday?

  But great question.