It’s A Brilliant Flash | Ask Daily Stoic

We come into existence—by some impossible, unbelievable set of circumstances—and then come out of it. Why? How? No one can say for certain. 🎙️ Listen to Ryan's episode on the Soul Boom Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stnG5IGZc4k on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-stoics-guide-to-spirituality-w-ryan-holiday/id1736322125?i=1000724944697 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1byccF97dMPGoZkCgKyanB 🎥 Watch Ryan’s episode on the Soul Boom Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@SoulBoom with Rainn Wilson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stnG5IGZc4k 🎙️ Listen to Rainn Wilson's episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast | Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rainn-wilson-on-stoicisms-role-in-the-spiritual-revolution/id1430315931?i=1000625346070, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/15yi7g1TtcBK8PLXYbsSru, & YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNTMNUwJoD0 📚 Grab a copy of Soul Boom: Why We Need A Spiritual Revolution https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/soul-boom-why-we-need-a-spiritual-revolution?_pos=1&_sid=72b2dc303&_ss=rby Rainn Wilson at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ You can follow Rainn on Instagram @rainnwilson https://www.instagram.com/rainnwilson/?hl=en and Twitter @rainnwilson https://twitter.com/rainnwilson?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and on soulboom.com https://www.soulboom.com/. Subscribe to Rainn's Substack: https://newsletter.soulboom.com/ 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content coming soon: dailystoic.com/premium http://dailystoic.com/premium 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://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, and Facebook 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.

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  It's a brilliant flash. Marcus Aurelius was born, and just a few decades later, he was gone. Cato, Rome's great defender, went down in defeat. Seneca, for all his power and fame, could not escape Nero's nihilism. For generations, his important plays, which he so labored over, had their authorship attributed to someone else. How many schoolchildren today know who Cicero was or care that Musonius Rufus once had a reputation that rivaled Socrates? And these are the bold-faced names, the who's who of who's that, as we've said. But what about all the forgotten Stoics,

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  who out-out-brief candle had ordinary, basic lives that barely registered? This is sad and tragic. It's also beautiful. We come into existence by some impossible, unbelievable set of circumstances, and then come out of it. Why? How? No one can say for certain. But certainly, we are here for a period. Isn't that quite wonderful? In Adam Lindsay Gordon's haunting poem Doubtful Dreams, he captures something close to the Stoic's bittersweet sense of the human condition. "For the great things of earth are small things; the longest life is a span; and there is an end to all things, a season to every man, whose glory is dust and ashes,

• 2:20Ryan Holiday?

  whose spirit is but a spark, that out from the darkness flashes and flickers out in the dark." Here we are. Let's do something with it. Let's not let it go to waste. Let's make a brilliant spark in the dark.

• 2:49Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in June, I was in LA. I was doing a talk and then my wife had a little family reunion. And towards the end of the trip, we drove out to Malibu area and I did Rain Wilson's podcast, Soul Boom. And the reason I interrupted the trip, it was not because I'm always working, but because my oldest son has become obsessed with The Office. We don't let him watch whole episodes, just little clips. In fact, it started because he was in an improv class at school. And I showed him the Michael Scott scene where Michael Scott is taking improv classes. And he just turns everything into like, "Freeze, FBI, I've got a gun." My son thought it was the funniest thing. So we started watching clips.

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  And then he found out about Dwight and he thought Dwight was hilarious. And then when Rain Wilson, who I've known for a while, he came on the Daily Stoic Podcast a couple of years ago. And then he came on again when he had this new book out, Soul Boom. When he asked, I said, "Oh, this is a great chance. I'll introduce you to Dwight." And both my youngest, who also got to watch some of the clips, thought this was the absolute coolest thing in the world. And then afterwards, Rain sent them a very nice video, you know, like a cameo thing. Like he's like, "I'll record a video for your kids. Let me send this to them." So he's an absolutely sweet person and a really deep philosophical person. And I think he's building something awesome at Soul Boom. He actually has said that Daily Stoic is sort of his model for that. So what I asked after we did the episode, we ran an excerpt of the book on the podcast.

• 4:15Ryan Holiday?

  And then I'm going to run a chunk of him asking questions from me for today's Q and A, because I thought he asked some really good questions. It was a great chat. If you don't know who Rain Wilson is, I don't know what's wrong with you. If you don't know what The Office is, I really don't know what's wrong with you, but you can follow Rain on Instagram at Rain Wilson. That's Rain with two N's. On Twitter, at Rain Wilson, two N's. And you can grab a copy of Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution at The Painted Porch. And you can check out my interview on the Soul Boom Podcast and post of Rain's episodes on the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  So one of the things we talk about on Soul Boom a lot is mental health and tools for mental health, especially spiritual ones. And we talk to comedians about their mental health journeys and doctors and theologians and authors and experts. And your work with Stoicism has just brought so much invigoration and excitement, inspiration to young people. In all of this work, and I don't want to boil down like all of your bestsellers down into, well, actually I do. I want to boil all of your bestsellers down into some easy to-

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  Save everyone the trouble.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Easy to digest kind of nuggets, having to do specifically with what you see as young people struggling with mental health today.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And where the Stoics might provide some solutions, some just where the rubber meets the road, meat and potatoes, solutions to gaining resilience, gaining courage, finding stillness, overcoming obstacles, gaining wisdom, all of these things that the Stoics put front and center.

• 5:58Ryan Holiday?

  I think at the most basic level, Stoicism is this idea, we don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens, which to me is resilience. Resilience is not like, oh, I prevent all bad things from happening.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:11Ryan Holiday?

  Or I simply endure all bad things happening and I absorb them and they don't affect me in any way. No, it's this ability to bounce back from the things that happen, to use them in some way. And it's this idea that we have a choice, whether this thing makes us better or worse. Not, does this thing make us more or less money? Does this thing, you know, improve our physical health or not? Right? Because, you know, you could have cancer, you could get in an accident. There's all, all these things can happen to you and be taken from you. And I think the ancients felt this very acutely in a world where, you know, medicine was what it was, where there were tyrannical emperors. Well, child mortality rates.

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. Marx Lewis buries half of his children. Right? And he was a king. Yes. So no amount of wealth or power, especially then, protected you from the mercilessness of nature and fate and time. But we decide what it's going to mean in our lives. And, and when, when the Stoics are saying the obstacle is the way, that's what they mean. What, how are you going to use this as an opportunity to do something? Or to be someone, even if the majority of the benefits reaped by this experience are not you, right? Like you go through something terrible and then you write a book about it,

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  or you make a piece of art about it, and then that helps other people down the road. That is a, a way that the obstacle is the way. It's not necessarily the way for you. Like you, you wouldn't have chosen, like to you, it's not necessarily fully redemptive, but it is, uh, you know, beneficial as a whole. I think that's what the Stoics are saying. So I think resilience is not this like toughness that allows you to endure and absorb everything, but it is this ability to be flexible and adapt and adjust. And the Stoics are saying, you want to be able to go, okay, I can work with that. Because that's the, we don't really have a choice, right? If, if you need everything to go a certain way, you're either, you gotta be real lucky.

• 8:21Ryan Holiday?

  And we're not all real lucky, right? And in fact, when you look at a lot of these people we admire, like you think about Socrates, right? We, we, when kid learns about Socrates, they think of Socrates as this clever guy, this guy that lives in this quaint time of togas and, you know, walking around the olive groves and having these discussions. Um, even if they know the end of the story that he's put to death, there's still kind Kind of a, uh, an idyllicness to it that totally belies when he actually lived. Socrates lives through the great power conflict of Athens and Sparta, which would be like a world war between.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:00Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, America and China. And he has to fight in this war and most of the battles he fights in, his country loses. Eventually they're taken over by the Spartans, which was this, despite what the movie 300 wants you to think, like this deranged military cult. And then that ushers in a time in Athens known as the time of the 30 tyrants. 30 tyrants, that's a high number.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. That doesn't sound fun.

• 9:27Ryan Holiday?

  And then, you know, he's largely thought of as like a loser. He's largely disliked. He's brought up on these trumped up charges and then he's executed. Like Socrates does not live in fun times and yet it was fun to be Socrates. Socrates has a great time. Socrates is the best that he can be. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, he would say that he thinks Socrates is the great athlete of his time. And someone says, what do you mean? And he says, an athlete doesn't spend a lot of time saying whether something is a good throw or a bad throw. He says, a ball player catches the ball and throws it back, catches the ball and throws it back. That's to me what resilience is, is catching the ball and throwing it back, not going like this is unfair.

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  This, it sucks. Why did this happen to me? Why didn't people listen to me? It could have gone otherwise. You know, what if it was like this? It is like this and resilience and I think excellence, at least the Stoics, was the ability to, to make this into something.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  I was listening to this meditation by this guy Rupert Spira that Pete Holmes, the comedian, told me about.

• 10:38Ryan Holiday?

  The best.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  It was an incredible meditation because it was all kind of like, everything is exactly the way it should be.

• 10:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Right now, everything is perfect. Everything is as it should be. Live in total acceptance of how everything is right now. And in doing this meditation, there was more to it than that. But I was realizing like, wow, I always want things to be different from the way that they are.

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  I want someone I'm driving behind to be driving faster.

• 11:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Or someone driving behind me to be driving slower. Or I want so and so to call me back, or I want this job offer to be given to me. Or I want my knee to not hurt so much, or.

• 11:16Ryan Holiday?

  You wanted someone else to win an election. You wanted a different policy to be enacted. You wanted the economy to be different.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  It can be big, it can be small. It can be from your knee to, to the world economy and how it affects you.

• 11:28Ryan Holiday?

  I'd like not to die.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  But there is a, a profound power in just even just taking some stillness, finding some clarity presence in the inner life in kind of like a rabid acceptance, radical acceptance of how everything just is the way it is.

• 11:51Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Epictetus said that the first task of a philosopher is to understand there are things that are in our control and things that are not in our control.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 12:02Ryan Holiday?

  And really only the things that are in our control are worth our attention. And that's why I've always, I, I find the Serenity Prayer to be so remarkable because I feel like if you wrote it down and you asked someone when they thought this was written, like when's the, when's the earliest they would guess? No one's guessing like 1955 or whatever. Like you're not, I think, I think he dashes that, I think Reinhold Niebuhr dashes that off like on a transcontinental train. Like that's not the technology that that prayer should be interacting with. That should be like, uh, the Renaissance at the earliest, you know? This is, this feels like.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  It could be written above like the Parthenon or something.

• 12:46Ryan Holiday?

  Totally, totally like this is, these were words uttered by the oracle at Delphi. That's when that feels like, my other favorite one is like, this is totally a tangent, but. Free Falling by Tom Petty was not written in 1989. That makes no fucking sense to me. You like the, that is not an 80s and 90s song. That is like the first rock and roll like that. That's like a 60s song, you know? It doesn't make any sense like sometimes there's things that clearly tap in to an ethos or an energy that is much, much older than it is. And I think the Serenity Prayer is obviously a very good example of that because it is, I think rooted ultimately in Stoic philosophy and, and sort of Christian wisdom.

• 13:30Ryan Holiday?

  But, uh, yeah, you, you have to go, hey, I don't have a choice that this happened, but I do have a choice in what I tell myself about what's happened and what it means to me. And that most of the time, the reason I'm upset or frustrated or hurt, offended, or insert whatever word is because I am choosing to see it the wrong way. Epithesis, you know, everything has two handles, which handle you're going to grab it by. And when we're, we, we tend to grab it by the aggrieved handle, the harmed handle, the I'll never recover handle, you know, we, the, the disempowering handle

• 14:12Ryan Holiday?

  instead of the, the handle that says, okay, I'm gonna use this or this is good enough. And it is funny because in a different context, we might see the same thing totally differently. You know, like last night I was, took my whole extended family out to dinner and I, I thought I lost my wallet, like in, I thought I was, we're driving there. I was like, where's my wallet? I couldn't find my wallet and I'm like, okay, how much cash is that in my wallet?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Cancel my credit cards.

• 14:41Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, what a giant pain it's going to be to cancel my credit cards. I got, I'm going out of the country, I gotta get, do I have my driver's license? Just all this stuff, right? And then like right before the dinner, I find the wallet, my, it just got under the seat. Did not care about the check subsequently because it's free. Do you know what I mean? Like two, I had already, I just resigned myself to this enormous imposition. And then that imposition is lifted and I suddenly see. Other impositions differently because you've got the high of the difference, right? So it is so often that we see things in one context and it's upsetting and frustrating. And then in other contexts, we see it totally differently.

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  And that to the Stoics, and I think to any philosopher, you realize, oh, I have an immense amount of discretion over how I choose to process this thing. Like, the thing is, Stoics would say, it is objective, our opinion about it is not. And so they go, the thing isn't what's upsetting you. It's what you've told yourself about this thing that is upsetting you.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Which is a basic of Buddhism.

• 15:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  It's your, you are in control of your attitude about something. Your thought and your attitude about something.

• 15:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Is your greatest freedom.

• 15:58Ryan 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.