Life is Not a Victory March | Everlasting Good Health

Ryan explains why a Stoic never stops moving forward and getting better, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.→ We hope you join us in the 2022 New Year New You Challenge. It kicks off in a little over a week. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. It’s 3 weeks that will reorient your relationship with time and space. It will help you snap out of the trance and make 2022 your best year yet. Just go to https://dailystoic.com/challenge to sign up before sign ups end on January 1st! Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

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  "Life is not a victory march. It would be wonderful if life were easy. It'd be wonderful if things went our way every time, if people we loved didn't die, if plans didn't fail, if evil didn't exist, if planes didn't crash, and pandemics and wildfires didn't rage." Marcus Aurelius described life as warfare and a journey far from home. Leonard Cohen was speaking about love, but also life, when he said that it was not a victory march, but a cold and a broken hallelujah. A Stoic is resilient because they have to be. Life is not a soft affair. It challenges us. It rolls obstacles in our path. While there may be victory marches in our future,

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  there will also be, inevitably, defeats and retreats, failures and foibles, and funeral processions. We will suffer. We will grieve. We will screw up and be screwed over. But we keep going because that is our fate, because it's our only option. We move forward. We move with growing confidence in ourselves, in our ability to adapt and to grow and to survive. How? Well, we've been there before. Because of what we've been through, we are tougher as a result, more experienced as a result, and wiser as a result.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Everlasting Good Health. And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. "I tell you, you have only to learn to live like the healthy person does, living with complete confidence. What confidence?

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  The only one worth holding in what is trustworthy, unhindered, cannot be taken away, our own reasoned choice." That's Epictetus's Discourses 326. "As the Stoics say repeatedly, it's dangerous to have faith in what you do not control. But your own reasoned choice? Well, for now, that is in your control. Therefore, it is one of the few things you can have confidence in. It's the one area of health that can't be suddenly given a terminal diagnosis, except for the one day that we're all born. It's the only one that remains pristine and never wears down. And it's only the user who quits it. Never will it quit the user.

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  In this passage, Epictetus points out that slaves and workers and philosophers alike can all live this way. Socrates, Diogenes, and Cleianthe's lived this way, even while they had families, even while they were struggling students. And so could you." You know, I did this piece a while ago that said, like, "I don't have confidence in myself. I don't have faith in myself. I have confidence." I was making this distinction between sort of faith, which is based on something outside you, which is based on something irrational, and evidence, which is like proof. I think what Epictetus is really saying here is that if your confidence is based

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  on the fact that you're really, really successful, or that you have a really good reputation, or that you're generally well-liked, or, you know, this, that, or the other, you're vulnerable because although you might have a lot of those things, there are extreme events that can take them away. But if your confidence is based on the fact that you're a hard worker, if your confidence is based on the fact that you don't quit, if your confidence is based on the fact that you make good choices, that's a much stronger source of confidence, because it's up to you always, it's about your actions. And so when we think about a confident person, it shouldn't be they're just walking around because they know that they're popular, or because they know that they're really, really

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  strong, or these things that, you know, aren't fully up to them. We want the confidence to be based, ideally, not on anything exterior at all, but something totally internal, like who we are. Like, the ultimate thing to have confidence in would be character, right? Or reason, choice, for the Stoics, again, is like our mind, the command center, the way we process things, this philosophy that we've integrated into our lives. So the idea of how to always be healthy, how to always be secure, how not to have to worry about anything, is rooted in there, in our own choices.

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  This takes us back all the way to the very first entry in the book. As Epictetus says, "The chief task in life is simply this, to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself, which are externals not under my control." And which have to do with the choices I actually control? Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own. Right to my own reasoned choice. Right to myself. That's where we have confidence. That is what is up to us. That's the source of our health. As Epictetus says, again, we'll get to this maybe later in the year, but flashing forward

• 6:30Speaker 00

  to January 10th. The essence of good is a certain kind of reasoned choice. Right? Reasoned choice is everything in our mind, in our thoughts, in our character, in our actions. And here we are wrapping up the year. I hope you're winding down. I hope you're taking a little time for reflection, for reading, for connection with family, of course, that's what I'm doing. And just trying to think about how I want next year to go. And I'm really excited about the New Year, New Year Challenge, which will be coming your way. It's on sale now at dailystoic.com/challenge. I'm really excited for this thing to kick off in January. I'd love to have you join us. You are welcome to.

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  And we'll work on expanding and growing our reasoned choice, building it up so we can be confident and secure in it. And I'll see you there. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/challenge. Of course, remember, if you're a Daily Stoic Life member, it's free. It should be at the bottom of your email explaining how. And if you're not a Daily Stoic Life member, well, now's a good chance. All right, guys. See you soon.