This Surprises You? | Role Models

Ryan talks about why Stoics anticipate adversity, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal. InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://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.

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  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

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  This surprises you? There are some 8 billion people in the world. There are 365 days in the year. It surprises you that some of those people are dumb? That some of those days are not great? It's amazing the attention and the hand wringing paid to the handful of absolutely batshit crazy members of the United States Congress? As if the body of 535 people elected to lead us wasn't drawn from the same far-flung corners of this enormous continent that produced the people in embarrassing viral memes and WorldStar videos? It's not a surprise that some of them are fools. It is a statistical and historical certainty. It's a big world out there. A world with mental illnesses, with addiction, with narcissism and sociopathy.

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  Some of the people we meet, some of the people we hear about, some of the people who rise to the top of the heap, going to be those people. It would be wonderful if that weren't so, if we had developed a system that weeded out those people, that weeded those people out of important positions. But that is simply not how it is. Think of the history of the Roman Empire. Rome had approximately seven emperors during its 50 years of existence. Marcus Aurelius belonged to a group historically referred to as the Five Good Emperors. Five out of 70. That's a 7% success rate if we're measuring for morality and enlightenment. And this surprises you? That the cast majority of those attracted to absolute power turned out to be ruthless and selfish and deranged?

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  In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that a certain percentage of the population is going to be shameless. And he says when you accept this fact, it helps you be more tolerant of the individual representative of that cohort when you meet them. But tolerant is not the right word. It makes you wiser, less shocked, less vulnerable to them. Accepting their existence is not the same as accepting or tolerating their behavior. You will still do your best to make sure they are not your Congresswoman. You will do your best to educate and correct people. Yet, just as it's unlikely and unreasonable to expect all your days to be good, you cannot expect all the people in your orbit to be good either. It's setting yourself up to be miserable if you're surprised by it. If you fall to pieces every time the thing that was destined to happen inevitably does

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  happen. So don't be surprised. Be aware.

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  Role models. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, "366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living," by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night we keep thoughts like this at hand: write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.

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  Adoption was a widespread practice in Roman society, especially the senatorial class, and as a provision for imperial succession. Marcus Aurelius was himself the adopted son of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who himself was adopted by the Emperor Hadrian, so that Marcus could one day succeed them both to the purple. While Seneca was never adopted, his brother Novatus was, become Ingaio, who in the New Testament refuses to press charges against Saint Paul. But Seneca liked to look at the phenomenon of adoption the other way around, saying that we can always choose whose children we want to be. For him, Cato, the towering, resolute Stoic who railed against Julius Caesar in defense of the Republic,

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  was always standing by in his mind. The first book of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, in fact, is a catalog of all the people that Marcus had learned from and the lessons he had taken from their lives. So this week, take a minute to think of the models that you can follow, wise and admirable people that you can measure yourself against. "We like to say that we don't get to choose our parents," Seneca said, "that they were given to us by chance. Yet truly, we can choose whose children we'd like to be," that's in "On the brevity of life." But then, in Moral Letters, Seneca said, "We can remove most sins if we have a witness standing by as we are about to go wrong. The soul should have someone it can respect." By whose example it can make its inner sanctum more inviolable.

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  Happy is the person who can improve others, not only when present, but even when in their thoughts. I think for me, this idea of choosing whose children you want to be is great, right? Whether you had amazing parents or the world's worst parents, you can also choose to be the children of the greats of history. We did a Daily Daddy not long ago where Bruce Springsteen is talking about being an ancestor or a ghost. You know, who are the ghosts that haunt you and who are the ancestors that inspire you? And how can you choose to follow in the right footsteps? For me, Robert Greene is kind of an adopted father. He's about my father's age, but he's who I want to be as a person in many ways.

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  Professionally, he's deeply inspiring to me. The way even that he has spent so much time and energy and patience shaping me into the writer that I became, that in and of itself has been inspiring and is an example I try to follow in. So like, I've never met Marcus Aurelius, I'm not related to Seneca. I have no lineage that puts me back into ancient Rome with Epictetus, but we can still be the descendants of these people. We can still be their children. James Baldwin was famously talking to his nephew and he said, "You come from steady peasant stock, people who built the railroads, people who escaped via the Underground Railroad,

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  people who responded to the blows of fate in life with dignity and poise and creativity and perseverance." Now, is this literally true? Does he know for a fact about the railroads or the Underground Railroads? No, but we choose what tradition we hail from. We choose whose child we want to be by the example that we follow, by the heroes we give ourselves in our mind. And that's what today's entry is about. And I hope you take a minute to think about whose footsteps you're following in and what example you are setting so that perhaps someday someone else might choose to be adopted by you.

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  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out, dailystoic.com/email.