You Don’t Have To Do This To Yourself | Looking Out For Each Other

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  You don't have to do this to yourself. There is so much to worry about. There is so much to be stressed about. There is so much to consider, so much you have to figure out. Or so you think. But do you actually? Like, do you have to be anxious and alarmed and miserable and hopeless? Or is that a choice? We've touched on this in a few Daily Stoic emails and episodes over the years. First, that often our worries, that part of us that catastrophizes, is a bad use of our creativity. As Marcus Aurelius reminds himself, "We don't have to imagine everything that could or might happen, torturing ourselves with terrifying potential outcomes."

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  Our anxiety medallion is actually a great tool for this. That's why I carry it with me. And second, although the Stoics did believe in the idea that we needed to look inward, they didn't say anything about that interior life being tumultuous and turbulent. Too many of us, as we've said recently, live in our heads and, as a result, live in a bad neighborhood. We can be present, we can be happy, we can be confident, we can be positive. We can do this even though the world feels and indeed looks like it is falling apart. What we have in front of us is enough to focus on. We don't need to extrapolate. We can cross the next bridge when we come to it. We don't need to beat ourselves up. Fortune will take care of that for us.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  For now, let's just be here. Let's do what we can. Let's stay good and stay hopeful. Let's not be sucked in or corrupted by the cruelty and darkness around us. Let's focus on the things within our control, make a difference where we can. Let's do the right thing right now and let that be enough.

• 2:57Ryan Holiday?

  Looking out for each other. This is the October 6th entry in the Daily Stoic. "It is in keeping with nature to show our friends affection and to celebrate their advancement as if it was our own. For if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us." Seneca's Moral Letters, 109. Watching other people succeed is one of the toughest things to do, especially when we are not doing well ourselves. In our hunter-gatherer minds, we suspect that life is a zero-sum game, that for someone to have more means that we might end up with less. But like all parts of philosophy, empathy and selflessness are a matter of practice.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  As Seneca observed, "It's possible to learn to rejoice in all their successes and be moved by their very failure." This is what a virtuous person does. They teach themselves to actively cheer for other people, even in cases where it might have come at their own expense, to put aside jealousy and possessiveness. You can do that, too. I was actually just talking to someone I work with. We were talking about the sort of pettiness of writers' groups. And I said, "They're all kind of frenemies, right? They see it as a zero-sum game." And I said, "There's a joke I heard about academia that the reason the nyes are so sharp is because the pi is so small." If you think of the pi as finite, if you think about life as zero-sum...

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  It inherently makes everyone your enemy. Right. It means you're having to get what's yours, which means you're having to get it from them or get it before them. As opposed to seeing it how it actually is, how the Stoics want us to see it, which is a collective, a whole, an infinite game. I've had to do work, especially as a competitive person, to understand that the success of another writer has nothing to do with me. It doesn't come at my expense. It helps me. More people reading is good, right? More people talking about Stoicism is good. I'm sure there are people that see my, the success of my books as being somehow limiting to them or unfair or undeserved.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  Meanwhile, they're benefiting from the rising tide that's lifting all the boats. Right? You gotta think about how you look at it, but you have to practice this. Robert Greene, in his book, The Laws of Human Nature, he talks about the difference between schadenfreude, like wishing bad things on other people and mittenfreud. Probably pronouncing these horribly wrong. This is also a day we broke out in The Daily Laws, which I was lucky enough to work on. If you haven't read, you should. We carried the pain of porch. Anyways, there's another awesome daily book out there. Like, I remember Robert going, is that gonna be a problem with your book? And I was like, no, this is amazing. More people reading something every day is good for the world and probably good for the category, too. Anyways, there's also a section of this in The Daily Laws.

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  But mittenfreud is the active wishing of success or goodwill towards people. I heard love once defined as, as willing the good of the other, like wanting good for the other, wishing them happiness, wishing them success. As an author, wishing you the biggest first week sales you could possibly have. I want that for you. It doesn't come at my expense. And even if it did, who am I to root against you? I'm gonna do my best. I'm gonna put out my best work. I'm gonna go into this already knowing that I'm playing with house money, that I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and expectations, that I've written something I'm proud of, that I think deserves to be read,

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  that I have faith in the long term will do what it needs to do. So there's no pettiness in me. There's no need for you to do poorly.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  I just, I just wish everyone success. Are there moments where I get caught in a, with a pang of jealousy where I might say something that, you know, if I played it back to myself later, I'd be like, ew, that's not a good look. Of course, this is something you have to work on. It's like ego. In fact, it's rooted in ego. So it's something you have to constantly sweep away and push away. But it gets you to a place where you are happier and you are better. It's not just by wishing other people good, you're making them happy. Theodore Roosevelt is right. Comparison is the thief of joy. Joseph Epstein is right when he said that, that of all the deadly sins, envy is the only one that's no fun. Living that way sucks. It punishes you most of all.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  Meanwhile, not being petty, not wanting to hold other people back, being happy, generally celebrating all the things that are good things that are happening to other people and not seeing them as somehow bad for you. Well, this is a much happier and much more wonderful way to live, and I wish that for you.

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything, I just wanted to say thank you.