This is How You Win the Day | Circumstances Have No Care For Our Feelings

We have a duty. Our nature—justice—demands something from us. It demands that we get up, get after it, and wear ourselves down doing it. 📘 Grab a copy ofThe Daily Stoic https://store.dailystoic.com/products/the-daily-stoic-signed-edition here:https://store.dailystoic.com/ https://store.dailystoic.com/products/the-daily-stoic-signed-edition 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 Watch the video episodes onThe Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos:https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast onInstagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en:https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store:https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  In April 1960, the writer Richard Whalen was trying to meet with Diane Nash and the Sit-in Students for a Time Magazine cover story. These young students had suddenly become the focus of an immense amount of attention, not just from the press, but from the police and politicians and the rest of civil rights leaders. How were these kids going to upend years of stymied racial progress? How could they possibly challenge a system in which the police and the courts and elected leaders in public opinion were all against them? Could they win? It seemed very unlikely. Richard Whalen was stunned to find that he had trouble asking these students questions because they were not particularly interested in meeting with him. They were too busy. They did not have the time, even though he represented

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  what was, at the time, one of the most important publications in the world. Finally, Diane and her team agreed they would see him at 6:00 a.m. before the morning strategy that started their day. Whalen could only marvel, 6:00 a.m.? The only time they can meet with me is 6:00 a.m.? They're going to win, aren't they? He said. Winners attack the day like that. It doesn't matter what their cause is. They win that discussion that Marcus Aurelius has with himself in meditation. It's the one we all must win when the alarm goes off. Yes, it is warmer under the covers, but we are not meant for that. We have a duty. Our nature, justice, demands something from us. It demands that we get up, that we get after it, that we wear ourselves doing it.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  It's what you must do if you want to win.

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  Circumstances have no care for our feelings. This is the February 23rd entry in the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Today's quote, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 738.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  You shouldn't give circumstances the power to rouse anger for they don't care at all. Actually, I like the the Hayes translation a lot, too. I've got it from memory. It's seared in my mind from my first reading, I think. He says, and why should we feel anger at the world?

• 2:33Ryan Holiday?

  As if the world would notice. A significant chunk of Marcus Aurelius's meditations is made up of short quotes and passages from other writers. This is because Marcus wasn't necessarily trying to produce an original work. Instead, he was practicing, reminding himself here and there of important lessons. And sometimes these lessons were things he had read. This particular quote is special because it comes from a play by Euripides, which, except for a handful of quoted fragments like this, is lost to us. From what we can gather about the play, the hero comes to doubt the existence of the gods. But in this line, he is saying, why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take these things personally?

• 3:17Ryan Holiday?

  After all, external events are not sentient beings. They cannot respond to our shouts and cries, and neither can the mostly indifferent gods. That's what Marcus was reminding himself of here. Circumstances are incapable of considering or caring about your feelings, your anxiety, your excitement. They don't care about your reaction. They are not people, so stop acting like getting worked up is having an impact on a given situation, because the situation doesn't care at all.

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  Couple of things jump out to me here. Number one, it's worth noting just how cool that is. There's a line in meditations from a play that if Marcus Aurelius had not written down, had not been such a fan, had not jotted it down in his diary, we would not have it. It would be totally lost to us. It's interesting to think of Marcus as this literary conservator, this this savior of ancient texts. But he is. We know about that line because he wrote it down, because it jumped out to him. He liked it. Maybe he didn't get it perfect. We can't compare it against the original. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? And then something else I found out about this, I was, I forget why it jumped out at me, but I thought,

• 4:35Ryan Holiday?

  who was Euripides to Marcus? Because I knew Euripides is a Greek.

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  Playwright and Marcus is Roman. Greece was the powerhouse. Then Rome's a planet. But I was like, you know, kind of all blurs together. Right. You know, B, C, A, D. That's all the ancient world. How far from? And it jumped out at me. So anyway, so I looked, you know, when does Euripides die? When does Marcus die? They're separated by centuries. Not like one or two, but like five or six. And in fact, I remember looking it up. Euripides was further from Marcus Aurelius than Shakespeare is from us. So first off, just the credibleness of like, how great work can last.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  So it's, it seems weird that, you know, we're reading Marcus 2000 years later, like how we got so good at preserving things. But even in the ancient world, they had ancient texts and history. And they marvel that, you know, great lines and quotes and, and that they preserved them for centuries. There's just so frigging cool. So Marcus is thinking of Euripides the way that we think of Shakespeare today. Although you do get the sense that it didn't seem so ancient from them because life maybe hadn't changed as much. Right? Like Euripides and Marcus obviously lived in very different worlds. And Euripides would have been, had his mind blown by Marcus's world. And Marcus would have thought he was living in the future.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Which he was, but, but I do think there'd be more culture shock. If you fast forward it to today or transported any of those two to today, I, I didn't actually see the whole movie, but the, the most recent Indiana Jones. You know, I think it's Archimedes. Sort of marveling at this airplane that Harrison Ford crashes. He somehow goes back in time. Literally, my only understanding of the movie is watching it on the screen next to me on an airplane. But that's what I understood was happening. Maybe I'm totally wrong. But anyways, the other big thing, the actual wisdom of the quote here is incredible. He's just right. You know, the pandemic was awful and frustrating, but it didn't care about us. The virus was indifferent to us. It didn't give a shit about us. It didn't give a shit about our plans.

• 6:51Ryan Holiday?

  It didn't give a shit about. People we loved, didn't give a shit about anything because it's not capable of doing that. And understanding that so much of the world is that way. I do love the idea Marcus realized later in Meditations talks about not treating inhumanity the way it treats human beings. So not letting the impersonal awful cruelty, overwhelmingness of the world make you into that kind of person. But it is understanding that being angry at objective events, being angry at the march of time, being angry at natural disasters, being angry at cancer, being angry at mortality,

• 7:32Ryan Holiday?

  being angry at these things that are frustrating, tragic and painful and all these things. It doesn't, doesn't change anything. And so why waste that extra energy? It's not making a difference. You can shout at the gods, but they will not be moved. And I think that's the lesson that Marcus is trying to pass on, or that Marcus noted from Euripides, preserved it all those centuries later. And then all these centuries later, still, here we are, talking about it. That's the power of a great quote. That's the power of writing things down. It's beautiful. I'll talk to you soon.

• 8:16Ryan 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.