You Can’t Keep It From Happening | How To Get Through Life's Most Difficult Situations

When he was starting out in Hollywood, Judd Apatow began to have panic attacks. The stress of rewriting a script. Getting a film in on time. Managing all the moving pieces on a project. He felt the enormity of the pressure and like a lot of us, he took that to an irrational extreme. The Stoics would say panic, stress, and anxiety are feelings, and you can’t prevent them from happening. And if you try to suppress these emotions, like stuffing junk in your closet, it eventually comes exploding out. The bill inevitably comes due…and with interest attached. Today, Ryan explores how the Stoics approached getting through life's most difficult situations using the same principle that Friedrich Nietzsche developed as a formula for human greatness: Amor Fati - a love of fate.🎧 For a limited time, you can purchase The Daily Stoic ebook for only $1.99 on Kindle✉️ 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, including the Premium Leather Edition of the Daily Stoic Journal.📱 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  You can't keep it from happening.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  When he was starting out in Hollywood, Judd Apatow began to have panic attacks, the stress of rewriting a script, getting the film in on time, managing all the moving pieces on a project. He felt the enormity of the pressure, and like a lot of us, he took that to an irrational extreme. If this movie is bad, he would think it's all my fault. He would look around at the actors on set and think to himself, "I can take them all down if I don't make this scene historically great." And as he thought those kind of thoughts, his temperature would begin to rise, his heart would start pounding, and his surroundings would begin to feel like they were closing in on him. As Apatow experienced more and more panic attacks, he learned the right way and the wrong way to deal with them. As he says in his book, Sicker in the Head, "The secret was that

• 1:19Speaker 00

  you don't try to have a panic attack, because that makes it worse. You don't run away from it. You allow yourself to feel it, and you remind yourself that everything will all be fine, that nothing's going to happen." When you try to stop it, it's like taking a mirror and smashing it on the ground and stamping on the bits, and creating a thousand mirrors. The Stoics would say that panic and stress and anxiety are feelings, and you can't prevent them from happening. And if you try to suppress these emotions, like stuffing junk in your closet, it eventually comes exploding out. The bill inevitably comes due with interest attached.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Stoicism, as we have said, is not suppressing your emotions. It's not what a Stoic does. A Stoic learns to feel and deal with their emotions. As we've talked about, a Stoic seeks out help. As Apetow did, they go speak to a therapist. They notice patterns and understand how they go and where the off-ramps are. As Marcus Aurelius did, you can process stuff in your journal, whether it's panic attacks, or stress, or anxiety, or some destructive emotion. You can't keep it from happening with sheer will or discipline. But you can get better at responding when it happens. You can become a better friend to yourself, as Seneca told us. You can pick yourself back up off the floor and keep going, a little wiser, with a little more perspective than the last time.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  Acceptance is a word that we struggle with because it seems defeatist. It seems resigned. But the Stoics, Epictetus, say we have to learn how to practice the art of acquiescence. Accepting the things that happen to us is actually the first step in being able to respond to them, to turn them into something. There's a powerful Stoic concept called amor fati, which we're going to talk about in today's episode. So Thomas Edison is America's most successful inventor. He's sitting down for dinner with his family, and a man rushes in. The factory is on fire. And Edison shows up on the scene and he sees it. His life's work up in flames. His son is standing there, shell-shocked. And what does Edison say? Edison says, "Go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again."

• 3:23Ryan Holiday?

  And some people thought he lost his mind, but he actually goes on to repeat a line from a Kipling poem about triumph and disaster treating these two imposters just the same. What Edison is realizing, as a Stoic does, is that some things are just out of our control. We can't change them. No amount of whining or complaining or weeping is going to affect them, but we can control how we respond. And that's what Edison does. He tells a reporter the next day, "I've been through stuff like this before." He says, "It prevents an old man from getting bored." And he starts rebuilding. He actually takes a million-dollar loan from Henry Ford. In six weeks, it's partially back up and running. In six months, it's fully operational. And the third act of Edison's life is rebuilding after this disaster. And I want you to think about that as well.

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  That's the idea, that you'll never see something like this again. You can at least enjoy the absurdity, the surreal beauty of it. And then you can say, "This prevents me from getting bored. Now I'm going to get back to work and I'm going to turn this into something." You have two options. You can want things to turn out a certain way, or you could welcome them the way they happen, Epictetus says. He says, "You could want them to turn out as you want them to, or you could decide that you want them to turn out how they've turned out." And so this is essentially the discipline. For the Stoics, this is the discipline of assent. Are you going to wish things are a certain way? Are you going to accept them as they are? That doesn't mean you accept the injustices of the world, per se.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  But it means, if it's raining, you're happy that it's raining. If it's cloudy, you're happy that it's cloudy. If it's sunny and hot, you're happy that it's sunny and hot. If you're born short, you're happy that you're short. If you're tall, you're happy that you're born tall. You accept things as they are, you make the most of it. This is what the idea of a mor fati is. Accept things, be happy that things are the way that they are, that you were given what you've been given, and then get to work using it. That's what Stoicism is about. So the Stoics were really big on acceptance. And acceptance is a scary word to ambitious people, because we didn't get where we are by accepting the status quo or by resigning ourselves to things. But to the Stoics, this acceptance of external events,

• 5:31Ryan Holiday?

  of things that are outside of our control, was the first step in moving forward and using them in some way. And so there's a Latin phrase that the Stoics were fond of, and it's "amor fati." And it translates to "a love of fate." Not just acceptance, but an embracing of those circumstances, whatever they may be. And so for Marcus Aurelius, he said that what you throw in front of a fire is fuel for the fire. And that's the image that they thought about for good and bad events. When we look back on the bad things that have happened to us in life, with enough time, with enough distance, we come to accept them, maybe even feel grateful for them. We know that without those things, with the breakup, or the failure,

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  or the embarrassing mistake, or the accident, we wouldn't be where we are now. But in that moment, that was the furthest thought from our mind. We were fighting it, we were resenting it, we were wishing it was otherwise. If later you're going to feel good about it, if later you're going to give yourself that gift, why delay it? Why not give it to yourself now? Practice the art of acquiescence. Don't resent it, don't fight it. Accept it for what it is. And understand, even if you can't see it in this very moment, in the end... You will come to see this as a positive. You will come to see it as good. You will come to see it as a thing that made you who you are and how it couldn't have been anything different.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  It's been a rough year, like just a rough year for everyone. But Marcus Aurelius, at the end of his life, he was, as he was facing death even, the scariest thing that a human can face, he said, "Remind yourself of all the things that you've been through and what you've had to endure." He was trying to buck himself up to go, "Of course you can get through this. Think of all the things that you've gotten through in your life." And that's what you have to think about with what you're going through today, big and small. You've been through things like this before. You can get through this. You've gotten through worse. And when you know that, it helps you. When Edison's factory burns down, he says, "I've been through things like this before." He's like, "It's gonna prevent me from getting bored. I'm gonna use this." And that's what a Stoic does.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  They use their past experiences to inspire and motivate them and give them confidence for whatever it is that they're having to face right now.

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  Morfati coin.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:44Ryan Holiday?

  Which is the idea that, it's also in Nietzsche's phrase, of sort of loving everything that happens to you, not resenting it, not fighting against it, not carrying around a grudge or a burden, but sort of embracing it and finding the good in it.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:01Ryan Holiday?

  Where does that fit in with our human nature?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Well, it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position is when something bad happens, "Why me?", you know? To feel sort of a grievance. A lot of what I'm talking about in this book is overcoming some of these natural elements in human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose, another way. And a morfati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's like, for Nietzsche, it was, "This is life. Life involves pain. Life involves adversity.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  You're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. Your friends and family members, they're gonna die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. You're gonna have failure in life. People are gonna hurt you." But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that, means to not love life itself.

• 9:09Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, you've gone through some adversity in your own life recently.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:13Ryan Holiday?

  It's easy to talk about amor fati,

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  Especially when you're talking about, "Oh, I'm gonna love that my plane is delayed," or, you know, that my... "There's some trouble with the printer in my book," or something. How have you tried to practice amor fati recovering from a stroke?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Well, you know what that's like. You were writing a book about Stoicism and obstacles, the way, and then you got robbed, and you had all these things happen.

• 9:35Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  And you were being tested. Well, I had a stroke, and it's like the ultimate test for me. I've never had to go through something like this because I'm somebody who's very physically active and independent. And suddenly, I can't use the left side of my body, and I'm completely dependent. And the initial reaction is the natural reaction. "Oh, man, damn, why this had to happen? This is so unfair. Why me?" You know? "If only I could just keep swimming and doing my life the way it was. I'm so upset." And I talk in the book, your natural reactions, you don't have to fight them. You have to go take the next step, which is, the next day after you've gone through this, is to analyze your own emotions

• 10:19Speaker 02

  and why you're feeling that way. So I've had to go through that process, and it's actually been extremely powerful for me. I have to retrain my body. Every day, I have to learn how to use my fingers again, like a baby. And I'm learning how the mind works. I'm learning about patience and frustration, about my own limits. And I can't necessarily say, "I love my stroke." I think that would be false of me to say something like that. I don't love that this happened, but I've accepted it, and I've discovered how it can make me a better and stronger person.

• 10:53Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.