Don’t Say You’re One Of These | Stick With Just The Facts

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• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Don't say you're one of these. We study philosophy, we discuss philosophy, we admire philosophers, but what should we not do? Thomas Wentworth Higginson would write that according to Epictetus, "No man should ever profess to be a philosopher," but that each should leave his character to be inferred from his actions. Cato didn't write any works of philosophy, but he was widely admired as one of the greatest Stoics. Epictetus's lectures were recorded and published by one of his students, but it's the example of his life, rising from slavery and overcoming literal torture to become a great man worthy of teaching an emperor, that makes these works worth reading. Gregory Hayes, a translator of Epictetus, our favorite, we even published

• 1:29Speaker 00

  our own edition of his meditations, he'd point out that Marcus never explicitly calls himself a Stoic or a philosopher, but of course, he was unmistakably a Stoic, perhaps the most famous one who ever lived, not only due to the private thoughts he put down in meditations, but also how he comported himself as the emperor of Rome. And what of Higginson himself? This was a man who translated the discourses of Epictetus, sure, but he proved himself worthy of Stoicism with his fierce advocacy for abolition in the 19th century, by leading black troops in the American Civil War, by fighting for women's rights and labor rights, by discovering and helping publish a shy poet named Emily Dickinson, by calling for the rights of Russian serfs and religious equality.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  The point is, you don't need to call yourself a Stoic. You must act like a Stoic. Let other people worry about labels while you worry about the work. Look, if you want to learn more about Stoicism, if maybe this has just got forwarded to you and you're learning more about the philosophy, you can check out our Stoicism 101 course. I'll link to that in today's show notes. You can grab it at stuart.dailystoic.com.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Stick with just the facts. This is the August 9th entry in the Daily Stoic. 366 Meditations on Perseverance, Wisdom, and the Art of Living. You can grab a premium leather edition. You can grab signed editions at stuart.dailystoic.com. Our quote today is from Marcus Aurelius's 849. "Don't tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. It has been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you. This is the report. The report wasn't that you've been harmed. I see that my son is sick, but not that his life is at risk. So always stay within your first impressions. Don't add to them in your head.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  And this way, nothing can happen to you." At first, this can seem like kind of the opposite of everything you've ever been taught. Don't we cultivate our minds and our critical thinking skills precisely so that we don't accept things at face value? Yeah, most of the time, but sometimes this approach can be counterproductive. What a philosopher also has the ability to do, as Nietzsche put it, "is to stop courageously at the surface and to see things in plain, objective form. Nothing more, nothing less." "Yes, the Stoics are superficial," he said, "out of profundity." "Today, while other people are getting carried away, that's what you're going to practice, a kind of straightforward pragmatism,

• 4:10Speaker 00

  seeing things as their initial impressions make them." I wrote this back in 2015 before I had kids, and there's something about having kids that really forced me to practice this better, right? Especially where he says, and I don't think it's a coincidence, Marcus Aurelius is talking about this, right? Because what you're constantly inclined to do as a parent is extrapolate. What does this mean? What if they keep doing this? What's going to happen next? Right? And so he's saying, you know, "My son is sick." But not that his life is at risk. You can imagine for Marcus Rivas, who buries multiple children, what an anxious, worried mess this would have made him at the first sign of a cough, or a sniffle, or a fever. Is this it? Is this the big one?

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Right? We were probably like all like this during COVID. Why do I feel this way? The allergies suddenly mean you have COVID, and then you're gonna end up on a ventilator, right? The mind can run crazy because we can't just stick with things as they are. Part of us is extrapolating what they mean, how we're gonna respond to this, what it's gonna cost us. What the worst case scenario is psychologists call this catastrophizing? It's this tendency to not stick with things as they are. You know, your kid falls, right? They've fallen. And you currently don't know anything else. But you're like, oh, my God, they're just gonna be so hurt. They're gonna be upset. They're gonna cry. And then I'm gonna have to comfort them. And then people are gonna judge me. And then I gotta go. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Or your kid smacks their brother, and you go, if I don't nip

• 5:36Speaker 00

  this in the bud, if I don't teach them that this is wrong, they're gonna think it's okay to hit him. And then they're gonna do this. And then they're gonna do this. And then they're gonna do this. And then they're gonna end up living under a bridge somewhere. And I'm gonna be a failure as a parent. Everyone's gonna judge, right? It's this, this running part of our mind. This is, this is the part of the mind that Seneca was talking about when he said, we suffer more in imagination than in reality. That's not to say that things are never serious, right? That the sickness never results in serious sickness, that slander doesn't have consequences, and that you might not have to speak up or speak out about things. Of course, it's just saying that that will reveal itself in due time. Part of our proactiveness,

• 6:16Speaker 00

  our on top of it-ness, is actually at a disadvantage because it's jumping to conclusions, right? The additional information will reveal itself. Let's pause. Marcus Rivas tells us in another passage that we always have the ability to have no opinion. But maybe we could just say, like that famous Zen expression about wait and see, let's just wait and see a sec, right? Let's wait and see a sec. Let's stick with the facts for now. Stick with what we know for now. Leave things as they are. Stay courageously at the surface. Don't delve beneath just yet. Don't run it through your machine that spits out the most likely scenario

• 6:58Speaker 00

  just yet. Stay superficial out of profundity. Stay disciplined here. Get your mind in check. Get your assumptions in check. Don't let things race just yet. Calm down, think about it, look at it, wait and see, let it develop, and then go from there. And this isn't something I'm great at as a parent. It's something I'm struggling with, that I'm continuing to look at, that I'm continuing to work on, as must you. But I certainly catch myself when I'm not doing it, and I'm well aware of the consequences that it causes me. So that's today's message, and I'll talk to you all again soon.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke 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.