How Well Do You Know These Backroads? | The Beauty of Choice

Meditations, you could say, is Marcus Aurelius exploring himself. That’s literally what the title means–the book isn’t for you and I, it’s “things to one’s self,” to himself. He’s exploring his fears, his desires, his flaws, his virtues. That’s the journey that philosophy took Marcus on. Since he was a young man until right before his death, he was exploring himself, trying to understand himself and his nature better. But what about you? How well do you know ‘the backroads of the self,’ as Marcus calls them in Book 4.---And in today's Daily Stoic excerpt reading, Ryan explores the idea that what you buy, consume, and wear is not what defines who you are. It's ours habits, choices, and actions that do.✉️ 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, including the Leather Cover Edition of the Daily Stoic Journal.📱 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.

• 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 in 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.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  How well do you know these back roads? Meditations, you could say, is Marcus Aurelius exploring himself? That's literally what the title of the book means. The book isn't for you and I. It's things to oneself, to himself. Marcus is exploring his fears, his desires, his flaws, his virtues. And that's the journey that philosophy took Marcus on. Since he was a young man, until right before his death, he was exploring himself, trying to understand himself and his nature better. But how about you? How well do you know the back roads of the self, as Marcus calls them in Book Four? You know every inch of the ride to work. You know this road or that city,

• 1:27Speaker 00

  you say, like, the back of your hand. But how well do you know yourself? Too many of us are total strangers to ourselves. We seek busyness. We seek external markers. We seek out others to understand us and demand that they hear what we're saying. Meanwhile, we ignore the voice inside us, the one that is whispering to us so many important lessons, the one that is shouting so many warnings. Well, meditation and journaling and long conversations, like the one between Seneca and Lucilius, or us via Seneca and his writings, this is how we get to know ourselves. This is the journey we have to go on, because no one can go on it for us. Because it won't matter where we go in life.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  We'll be lost if we don't find ourselves first.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  So in 2017, we did the Daily Stoic Journal, which is the idea of, you know, one question every day to meditate on that's built around the ideas in the Daily Stoic. And I got this cool journal recently from a friend that had this cool leather cover that slips on the journal. So you keep the cover, you slide a new journal in each year. And I do the Daily Stoic Journal every day. I've done, I think I'm on my sixth one or fifth one. I don't know the math, but every year I do it. And I was doing it just last night. And so we reached out to this really cool tannery in Red Wing, Minnesota, who just celebrated their 150 year anniversary in business, which

• 2:55Speaker 00

  is absolutely incredible. And we had them make an awesome cover for the Daily Stoic Journal. It says, "Make Time" on the front, which is often how I sign the journal. The idea is you've got to make time for philosophy, you've got to make time to get to know yourself. There's a cool quote from Seneca on the inside, one from Epictetus on the back. And there's a spot to hold your pen. And it's designed to fit the US edition. It'll fit the UK edition as well. Not quite as snug, but it fits for both. And if you haven't picked up the journal, you can get them as a package. I'll link to it in today's show notes, or you can just grab the cover to throw it on your edition of the Daily Stoic Journal. I think you'll really like it. I'm proud of this one. It's handcrafted here

• 3:38Speaker 00

  in the US. It sits snugly on the cover of my Daily Stoic Journal now. And I hope to have it for many, many, many years to come. I think you will too. Use it to get to know the backroads yourself. And keep journaling, everyone.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  The Beauty of Choice. This is the entry from March 17th in the Daily Stoic. "You are not your body and hairstyle, but your capacity for choosing well. If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be."

• 4:20Speaker 00

  It's that line in the movie Fight Club. You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. Obviously, our friend Epictetus never saw that movie or read the book. It's quite good. You should enjoy it. I know some people think it's a little weird or overrated, but we sell it on the painted portraits. It's a classic for a reason, I think, and not maybe exactly what you think it is. Anyways, but the consumerism of the 1990s existed in ancient Rome, too. It's always existed. And it's easy to confuse the image we present to the world for who we actually are, especially when media messaging deliberately blurs that distinction.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  You might look beautiful today, but if that was the result of vain obsession in the mirror this morning, the Stoics would ask, are you actually that beautiful? A body built from hard work is admirable. A body built to impress gym rats is not. And that's what the Stoics urge us to consider, not how things appear, but what effort, activity, and choices they are a result of. I don't know. This is just one of my, one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus. Every time we put it on Instagram, it does really well because it's, it is so simple. If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices, right? That beauty, of course, also exists in the superficial sense,

• 5:49Speaker 00

  but how often we find that behind that beauty is real ugliness, right? Selfishness or greed or vanity or vipidity or a focus on trivialities, right? Or, or, or worse, that perhaps beneath the beauty is really ugly choices, ugly habits and an ugly foundation, right? Whether we're talking, I don't know, about plastic surgery or unethical choices or, um, you know, a prioritization of the things that don't matter. So you can be pretty, you can look rich, but you're not pretty if you made ugly choices to get there.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  And you're not rich if you have a poverty of the things that really matter. And so I like this because to me, I think it boils back down to. What Epictetus talks about so much, that the things that matter are the things that we control. And that if we don't control it, it doesn't really matter. So what other people think you look like is something that you don't control. But you control how you look to yourself. You control your focus on the things that you have sway over. So today, when we think about the choices that we're gonna make, think maybe a little

• 7:16Speaker 00

  bit less about the results, or the externals, or how they're gonna be perceived by others. And think instead about what's going into them. Think about where it's coming from. Think about what you're doing. Think about why you're doing it. Focus on that. Right? Focus on doing the beautiful thing. Doing the work. Holding the standards. What you control, what's up to you. Because that's where beauty lies. And it's, you know, look, we don't control our genes. We don't control whether we're tall or short.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  We don't control, you know, so many of the features that people use to determine beauty or ugly these days. But we do control what's underneath that. Right? You know, they go, oh, that person's beautiful, but they have a bad personality, or they're ugly, but they have a great personality. You control the personality, right? Like, you can't necessarily make yourself that much prettier. But you can, you can change who you are. You can adjust your character. You can work on that. You can make yourself beautiful in that sense. And that's what we're talking about today. And I just urge you to go out and have a day defined by, by good choices. That's what I'm working on. Not perfect at it.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  I'm sure I already made some ugly choices today. But I'm, I'm gonna work on the rest of the day then, on making prettier choices. And I hope you do as well. [music]