You Can't Get Even | The Freedom Of Contempt

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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.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  You can't get even. Seneca was exiled on trumped-up charges. The same thing happened to Reteilius Rufus. The same thing happened to Musonius Rufus, three separate times. These men, indeed, all the Stoics, came to know what it meant to be hurt, to be wronged, to have something taken from them. What about Epictetus? He was thrown into slavery. What about Marcus Aurelius, who buried half his children? No one deserves something like that. How do you get over it? How do you move on? You don't, really. In Lonesome Dove, Gus McCray consoles a man who just had his friend and stepson brutally murdered. "Son, this is a sad thing," McCray says. "Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good.

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  Don't be trying to give back pain for pain. You can't get even in business like this." "The plains were a dark and lawless place," he was saying. "The men who did this are evil in a way that you cannot possibly punish." That isn't what we want to hear. Of course, we want permission to rage and burn. We want to make people feel responsible for our pain. We want the world to feel our pain. Yet the Stoic texts are replete with timeless warnings against this. Marcus Aurelius quotes a lost line from a play by Euripides. "Why should we be angry at the world as if the world would notice?" Seneca, in his Essays on Anger and in Letters, compares revenge to returning a bite to a dog or a kick to a mule. The Stoics were accepting, in a way, the impotence of us fragile humans.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  Stuff happens to us, people do cruel things to each other. You can't get even in a world like that. You can't beat them at that game. There are too many of them, and they are worse than you can imagine. But you know what you can do? You can move on. How can you get revenge? The only way, Marcus Aurelius said, was to not be like that, to not let it ruin you, to not let it consume your life, to not let its inhumanity steal your humanity. Basically, the Stoics believed in this idea of sympathy, the radical idea that we're all interconnected and interdependent on each other. Life is short, Marcus Aurelius reminds us. The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good. And that's what this little sympathy medallion I have on my desk is a reminder of. It's got a picture of the blue marble earth from a distance.

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius talks about taking the 10,000-foot view. And it's about reminding how we were made to put up with each other, to do good for each other. And it's just a wonderful reminder that I think we need it more than ever. You can grab that at [email protected]. I'll link to it in today's show notes.

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  The Freedom of Contempt.

• 3:21Ryan 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 Phalarian 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.

• 4:04Ryan 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 something,

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  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 a hundred or a thousand 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 has 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.

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  You know, Marcus Aurelius 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."

• 6:15Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "I'm going to really break down what I see here. 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, the underneath things, they lose their power over you. And that's what the Stoic practice is really about. And it's so important. It's not that you, you don't want, you'll never enjoy this or that ever again. It's just you want to enjoy it with the deceit turned down a little bit.

• 6:58Ryan Holiday?

  The legend, a little more thread there. And, and this is an active practice we have to go through. So as you, 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, when you see a $300 pair of Nikes, remind yourself of the, 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. Think of the corruption.

• 7:40Ryan Holiday?

  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, that, 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.