You’re Not There Now (That’s A Good Thing) | Stake Your Claim

It’s easy to look at history and despair. Humans have been terrible to each other–going back to Marcus Aurelius’s time all the way through today. In fact, sometimes it feels like that’s all we’ve ever been. The writer Mary Karr once asked a religious friend, “How can you believe in God, you know, when there was a Holocaust?” The friend had a reply that stopped her cold: “But you’re not in the Holocaust.”✉️ 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. 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.

• 0:39Ryan Holiday?

  You're not there now, and that's a good thing.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  It's easy to look at history in despair. Humans have been terrible to each other, going back all the way to Marcus Aurelius's time through today. In fact, sometimes it feels like that's all we've ever been.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  The writer Mary Car once asked her religious friend, "How can you believe in God?" You know, when there was a Holocaust. The friend had a reply that stopped her cold. "But you're not in the Holocaust." In his writings, Seneca talks about how we tend to worry ourselves into spirals of anxiety and despair. We look at what has happened and we extrapolate out what could happen. We suffer in our imaginations, he says, far more than we're actually suffering in reality right now. That's the lesson Carr took from that friend, especially as she tried to get sober. "Yes, we're worried about what's going to happen," she would later explain, "but we're not in a nuclear war right now. Our hair's not on fire. That doesn't mean I think that we should be passive and shouldn't take action, but I think there should be a reality check."

• 1:43Ryan Holiday?

  That was her point, especially to those who were consumed with dread because they follow politics too closely or because of some forecasted natural disaster that may not even materialize. You can't let that paralyze you or cripple you emotionally. "The potential of future suffering is not a reason to suffer now," the Stoics would say. On the contrary, it's a reason to be present now, to be good now, to love and live now.

• 2:09Ryan Holiday?

  That future may come, and you'll meet it. If there's something you can do to prevent it, do that. But hopelessness and despair and dread and anger, they do nothing for nobody, least of all you.

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  Stake your claim. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. We like to collect the sayings of great writers or of leaders we admire. And they often become montras for us on the path to life,

• 3:11Ryan Holiday?

  providing guidance and assurance. But as Seneca reminds us, truth hasn't been monopolized. We need to spend some time and effort each week formulating our own wisdom, staking our own claims based on our study, practice, and training. And that's what the Daily Stoic Journal and this podcast has always been about, reflecting on Stoic wisdom and adding our own to it. Seneca urged us to blaze our own trail and to take charge and stake our own claim. Well, let's do that. Let the pages in your own journal, your own writing, reflect the insights you've learned through your own experiences. Let the inspiration you've taken from the Stoics

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  help you create your own exercises, reminders, and perspectives. Then we have two quotes from Seneca and one from Marcus. The first from Seneca's Moral Letters. "It's disgraceful for an old person or one in sight of old age to only have the knowledge carried in their notebooks. Zeno said this. What do you say? Klianthe said that. What do you say? How long will you be compelled by claims of another? Take charge and stake your own claim. Something prosperity will carry in its notebook." That's Seneca Moral Letters 33:7. And then in 33:11, Seneca says, "Won't you be walking in your predecessor's footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  The ones who pioneered these paths aren't our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone. It hasn't been monopolized." And then Marcus Aurelius Meditations 3:5, he says, "Don't act grudgingly or selfishly or without due diligence, or be a contrarian. Don't overdress your thoughts in fine language. Don't be a person of too many words or too many deeds. Be cheerful, not wanting outside help or the relief that others might bring. A person needs to stand on their own, not be propped up." I mean, obviously, this is something I think a little bit about. As a writer, a popularizer of Stoicism, I rely quite a bit on the ideas from the Stoics. That is what the Daily Stoic is.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  And it's funny, I'll see comments from people, they'll say like, "Well, you're just quoting other people. What do you have to say?" But then, of course, when I say what I have to say, if I don't make enough nods to the Stoics, people go, "Well, who's this guy? You should just read the originals." And so it's a delicate line that I walk, but I think it's analogous to the line that we all walk, which is, smarter, wiser people came before us. And they said, they picked so much of the low hanging fruit. But we have to, I think, use kind of the Austin Kleon approach. A steal like an artist, take from here and there and there and there. And it's in the taking and the synthesis and the arrangement that we make something new.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  For instance, it's funny, now I watch people talk about the relationship between Stoicism and Amor Fati, but I know I'm the one that made that connection explicit and popular because it was something I was introduced to when I was a research assistant on Robert Greene's book with 50 Cent. And he talks about the idea of Amor Fati. And it struck me just how deeply connected that idea was with Stoicism. And it's something I integrated in my own books. And that became popular. Now, I see people going, "Hey, you know, the Stoics never really said, 'Amor Fati, that's from Nietzsche, not from the Stoics.'" I know, but I made the connection. And so the idea then of relying on these ancient ideas,

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  but not relying so much or too much, not being dependent on them using just the right amount. But also understanding you can't listen to this. I mean, I think it was Klianthis put together one of his books and he quotes so much from the play Medea that he said, this is Klianthis Medea. He included almost the entire book in all the quotations that he'd use. And I guess at some point, if I keep doing this, I'll have quoted from every single passage from Marcus Aurelius. But the arrangement that I do it in is different. The, the reading I have is different. And my interpretation might be different than your interpretation, which might be different than the interpretation that even I myself might have made a few years ago.

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  So we put our own spin on these things. We make them our own, right? And to not do that, to, to, to not do that is also a shame. I think it was Nastim Taleb, again, I'm quoting, but he says, most of the quotations you make should be of people you disagree with. Now, I would disagree with the idea of most, but the point is if all the quotes that you have, that you use, that you write down are just ones that you accept, that you agree with, you're probably not being critical enough. You're not challenging enough. And so I want to push you to do that too. You shouldn't agree with everything the Stoics say. You certainly shouldn't agree with everything that I say. You should be blazing your own path.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  And that's something I think about even as I'm doing marginalia in the sides of the books that I read is like, am I just unthinkingly agreeing with everything I said? Or I think it's better if it's, it's a, the reading process is a bit of an argument. And if you agree with everything that I say, that means probably you're not thinking enough for yourself. But also it means I'm probably not being courageous enough in what I say. I'm not pushing the envelope enough. I'm not being honest or vulnerable enough. So. You gotta be comfortable both quoting and carving your own path. You gotta be comfortable agreeing as well as disagreeing.

• 8:57Ryan Holiday?

  And it's in how all that shakes out that we have, we have our original voice. And Seneca does say that, again quoting, noting the irony. Seneca says something like, how do you prove that you really understood these masters? It's by putting their thoughts into your own words. And you see that illustrated in the Stoics, the sort of constant illusions or reframing or tightening of sort of Stoic mantras or ideas in one's own voice, one's own expression. And to me, that's partly what journaling is. I'm writing the ideas down, writing them down in my own voice, putting my own spin on them, staking my own claim, as Seneca says.

• 9:40Ryan Holiday?

  And as we wind up this year and we go into the new year, I hope you can put a stamp on this new year, you can stake out your own claim, claim your own original voice. And that's what Stoicism is about. And I'll talk to you soon.

• 10:06Ryan Holiday?

  That's my Memento Mori coin. I think about it all the time. I'm playing with it on my desk right now. It's something I carry always. It's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public. It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different Memento Mori reminders, of course. But if you want to get this one, which we make here in the US in a mint in Minnesota that's been in business since 1882, you can check it out in the Daily Stoics store. Or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, The Painted Porch on Main Street, where we sell them as well. It's a game changer. Hope you check it out.