You Will Fight This Battle All Alone | What Expensive Things Cost

“It would be wonderful we were aligned on this. It would be nice if the world was your ally, that it was green lights all the way—for your diet, for your sobriety, for the path to virtue. But it isn’t.”Ryan discusses the individual battle that we all face, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. It tastes great and gets you the nutrients you need, whether you're working on the go, fueling an active lifestyle, or just maintaining your good health. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 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.

• 0:38Ryan Holiday?

  You will fight this battle all alone. It would be wonderful if we were all aligned on this. It would be wonderful if the world was your ally, that it was green lights all the way for your diet, for your sobriety, for your path to virtue. But it isn't. In fact, it's the opposite. There are temptations. There are those people that Marcus Aurelius talked about, the arrogant, the dishonest, the jealous, the mean, who you will face from the moment you arise in the morning till you go to bed at night. Worse still, what we know to be good in the long term is often punished in the short term, and what is bad in the long term is often rewarded in the short term. But isn't that what makes getting it right so beautiful? Cato's stand during the fall of the Republic

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  wouldn't be so powerful if everyone had been on his side. Marcus Aurelius wouldn't be so impressive if every king had been a philosopher, and if every philosopher was a king. No, it's that this is hard, that it's rare, that the world is not set up to encourage what we're trying to do that makes it special. We are fighting this battle all alone, against resistance, against the current, against the movement of the mob and the status quo. No matter, we will keep fighting. We will grow stronger for pushing against it. We will stand out because of it.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  What expensive things cost? From the cynics, the Stoics learned the powerful practice of focusing on the true worth of things, that the cost of an item isn't simply what it's sold for, but what it costs the owner to own. So much of our desire for material goods comes at the great price of both anxiety and the loss of our serenity. And even when gained, these things often leave us more anxious and less serene. So today, spend some time reflecting on what the things you buy actually cost you, and see if they are really worth what you have been paying. And that's from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. We have some quotes from Seneca and Epictetus here.

• 2:38Ryan Holiday?

  "So concerning the things we pursue and for what we vigorously exert ourselves, we owe this consideration: either there is nothing useful in them, or most aren't useful. Some of them are superfluous, while others aren't worth that much. But we don't discern this and see them as free, when they cost us so dearly." That's Seneca's moral letters. Then we have Epictetus. "If a person gave your body away to some passerby, you'd be furious; yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so that they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. Have you no shame?" Epictetus asks. And then we have Diogenes Laertus quoting Diogenes of Sinope. That's Diogenes the cynic.

• 3:22Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "We sell things of great value for things of very little, and vice versa." You know, they say the best things in life are free, and that's not really true, but I would say that a lot of things are much more expensive than they appear, right? So we chase these things, we want these things, we want a fancy car, and then we're worried about...

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  Making sure nothing happens to that fancy car. I remember a few years ago, I put new floors in my house. And on the one hand, I hated the old floors and it made the house look better. And they were easier to walk on and improve my life. But then we had kids and now all of a sudden, there's this part of me that worries about the floors all the time, right? I don't want them to get scratched. I don't want water to sit on them. The dog went to the bathroom. And so this thing that cost me money, it was not cheap to put new floors in the house. Didn't just cost what it cost. It cost all the anxiety. It cost the arguments between me and my wife about who's to blame for this scratch on the floor from the couch.

• 4:31Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it cost goodwill between me and my kid. Because I'm like, hey, why did you spell? You know, that part of you that just blurts out, you know, trying to protect things. And the truth is, it really doesn't matter. I remember I was, I was talking to a therapist about some version of this. And she said, just write it off, like write it off in your head. You spent the money, it's gone. You can't try to keep it all together, right? You can't try to keep it pristine. It's like the people who buy a toy and then they want it in mint condition. I mean, this is, this is not just a violation of the law of entropy. It's a violation of the law of happiness. You will not be happy if this is how you're spending all your time trying

• 5:14Ryan Holiday?

  to keep everything in one place, trying to keep them together. It's an illusion. It will not last. You cannot do it. You have to be able to let go. That's the old Zen saying that, you know, the cup is already broken. The cup is already broken. The Stoics knew that expensive things cost even more than their price tag. That's why there's the great story of Epictetus. He has this lamp, it's stolen. And the next day, he says, I'm gonna go get a cheaper lamp. So I don't have to worry about it getting stolen ever again. And I don't have to be sad that it's missing ever again. So for the Stoics, remember the, it's not just what actually is valuable and isn't. You know, a lot of times we ascribe value to things that are superficial and meaningless and pointless, but also

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  It's realizing that you are spending even more money than you think on things and you're spending, you're spending your happiness is really what you're spending on. So I want to leave you with that thought. It's not that you live in a pigsty, you don't care about anything. You should try to keep your things nice and not unnecessarily wear them down, but you also cannot resist entropy. You cannot resist time. You cannot resist wear and tear. And if you do so, it comes at the expense. The most important thing, which is time, and the other most important thing, which is your happiness, and the other most important thing, which is the relationships, the people in your life. So you only have so much time to think or worry or spend time on things. Are you going to spend it trying

• 6:40Ryan Holiday?

  to preserve your floors? You're not even going to live there forever. You're probably going to tear them out at some point anyway. No, focus on what matters. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference. And of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.