This is What You Do With Your Freedom? | A Strong Soul Is Better Than Good Luck

People have, since Prometheus, developed technology that frees us from backbreaking drudgery and toil. And what do you do with this freedom, this incredible bounty? 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 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.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  This is what you do with your freedom? People fought for this, to set up this system of government, to secure these rights, to wrench us free from a controlling church or an oppressive culture. People fought against the elements, against biology itself, to give us this health, this life expectancy. People have since Prometheus developed technology that frees us from backbreaking drudgery and toil. And what do you do with this freedom, this incredible bounty? You spend it fiddling on your phone? You spend it obsessing over what other people have? You spend it gossiping about nonsense? You spend it being afraid or lazy,

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  failing to put yourself out there or be yourself? You take drugs? You drink too much? You spend it procrastinating, doing the same things you've always done? You spend it complaining, wishing that things were better? Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life, Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. This is not freedom. On the contrary, it's almost a form of willful slavery. You can do anything you want, and you choose to do this? Come on. This is not how you will want to have spent your inheritance. This is not what it was all for. You are capable of so much more than this, and you know it. People struggled, sacrificed, invented in dirt,

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  and died so you could have the choices they never had. Do something with it.

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  A strong soul is better than good luck. The rational soul is stronger than any kind of fortune, Seneca writes in Moral Letters 98. From its own share, it guides its affairs here or there, and is itself the cause of a happy or miserable life. Cato the Younger had enough money to dress in fine clothing, yet he often walked around Rome barefoot, indifferent to assumptions people made about him as he passed. He could have indulged in the finest food. He chose instead to eat simple fare. Whether it was raining or intensely hot, he went bareheaded by choice. Why not indulge in some easy relief? Because Cato was training his soul to be strong and resilient. Specifically, he was learning indifference, an attitude of let come what may,

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  that would serve him well in the trenches with the army, in the forum, in the senate, and in his life as a father and a statesman. His training prepared him for any conditions, any kind of luck. And if we undergo our own training and preparations, we might find ourselves similarly strengthened. Right? The Stoics undergo a hard winter training, to borrow Epictetus's phrase. And the point of that training, whether it's the physical training that Cato is doing, whether it's dressing awkwardly in your worst clothes, as Seneca was talking about, you're trying to cultivate an inner citadel, a strength, a fortitude, a sense of preparedness, so that you can, as Epictetus would later say, meet whatever situation happens and go,

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  ah, this is what I've trained for. I got this. I know I'm capable of withstanding this. We've talked a lot about physical training here. And that practice for me, the working out, getting up off the couch when I don't want to, jumping in the cold water when I don't want to, lifting the weights when I don't want to, running a little bit further when I'd rather be home, taking the longer way on the run than the shorter way, trying to speed up a little bit, trying to get up the hill faster, whatever it is. This is cultivating that strength, so that when things are difficult, you got it. You've trained for that. But it's, of course, not just the physical training. I think about my philosophical training and my maturity as a human.

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  I was like, this is going to be training for whatever else happens in life. Right? And also, this is precisely what I've studied history for, what I studied Stoicism for, what my wife and I have worked on together, what I've worked on in therapy, what I've worked on every place in my life. It was for something like this, and also the sense that this itself would be training for future adversity and difficulty. There's a Frederick Douglass quote, maybe it's not totally accurate. Some people doubt that he said it. He says, "It's easier to create strong children than repair broken men." And I think that's what Seneca is saying here about adversity.

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  And you think of the adversity that Seneca goes through in his life. He has tuberculosis young. He has to spend 10 years in convalescence as a child in Egypt, of all places. I talk about this in Lives of the Stoics. If you don't know Seneca's life story, it's pretty incredible. On the way back, his uncle is killed in a shipwreck. Seneca makes his legal debut. He's going places. And then he's exiled on these trumped up charges. He loses a child. He's called back, but he's called back. He's in Nero's court. Obviously, things are difficult working for Nero. You know, it's one thing after another for Seneca, up until the end, when he's forced to, you know, die by his own hand at Nero's demand. But Seneca had trained for this.

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  Even Tacitus, who's not a fan of Seneca's, goes like, it's very clear that in that difficult moment, it was something he'd thought about, worked on, prepared for. That's who you want to be. You want to be strong. You want to be able to bear what comes. It might be physical training, like running for a marathon. It might be something like, hey, I crank the shower cold. Or it's the reading you're doing, the conversations you're having, the community that you're building, the relationships that you're building, the exercises you're walking through in your mind. All of this is training you, preparing you, putting yourself in a position so you can succeed, whatever happens, so you can be strong enough in that moment and not need to be repaired afterwards. That's what we're doing here. That's, to me, kind of the mission of Daily Stoic.

• 6:18Ryan Holiday?

  That's the preparation my own philosophical practice is about. And I hope the training and work you're doing now sets you up to be served well in the future. Enjoy. Talk soon.