You Are Not Seeing The Whole Picture | Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

Ryan explains why legacy is for everyone else not for you, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. 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

  Bienvenidos a otro episodio del Podcast Daily Stoic. El jueves hacemos doble trabajo, no solo leyendo nuestra meditación diaria, sino también leyendo un pasaje del libro "El Daily Stoic", 366 Meditaciones sobre la sabiduría, perseverancia y la arte de vivir, que escribí con mi maravillosa coautora y colaborador, Stephen Hanselman. Así que hoy os daremos una rápida meditación de uno de los estoicos, de Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, y luego un análisis de mí. Y luego os enviamos al mundo a hacer lo mejor posible para convertir estas palabras en obras.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  "No estás viendo todo el panorama. Puede ser realmente desalentador. En línea vemos a las personas siendo ruidas de las otras. Vemos el señaling y el sinfín de la arrogancia y la obsesión del estatus. Vemos a las personas que no están siendo seguras, inteligentes o conscientes durante la pandemia. Vemos a las personas que usan a sus hijos como propias para obtener validación y atención o dinero, y en algunos casos, los envían fuera cuando ser un padre se vuelve demasiado difícil. ¿Es todo esto lo que nos preguntamos? ¿Estoy haciendo algo malo? ¿En realidad soy el que está loco? No, tenemos que recordar que no estamos viendo todo el panorama. No estamos viendo a las personas que están distanciándose socialmente porque, por definición, están o estando en casa o lo suficientemente lejos que no se encuentran en el marco de una foto de Instagram.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  No estás viendo a tus colegas moderados porque no entran en argumentos ridículos y no se ruidan de las personas. Las personas que viven sus vidas con quieto dignidad, privacidad y bondad, sus nombres y caras nunca van a ser aplastadas en las noticias. Marcus Aurelius nos dice cómo tenemos que asegurarnos de que no estamos viendo lo que el enemigo quiere que veamos, que solo estamos viendo lo que realmente hay allí. Tenemos que recordar que las personas locas son las que están desesperadas por la atención. Las personas ruidosas quieren que sepas lo que están haciendo. Quieren que te gaslighten. Tienen que hacerlo. Su dissonancia cognitiva exige que te tengan que intentar convencer. Y la única forma en que saben hacerlo es siendo más fuertes, más enojados, más compatibles, más sinmiles y más seguros que todos los demás.

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  It's all very strange and ultimately rooted in their own issues. It has nothing to do with you. The important thing is to understand how much this can distort our picture of reality. It'll mess with your compass if you let it. You have to see through the noise, through that distortion field. You have to use objective judgment, an essential Stoic skill, to account for the biases and the outliers. When you do, when you have honed that timeless discipline of perception, you will realize you're not actually alone. Stoicism just doesn't photograph well. It's not viral, it's quiet, it's private, it's self-sufficient. But don't let you think that you're the only one sticking to those core virtues of courage and moderation and justice and wisdom

• 2:52Speaker 00

  in a time of excess and stupidity, selfishness and paranoia. As they say on Arrested Development, "There are dozens of us, dozens."

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Nothing to fear but fear itself. But there is no reason to live and no limit to our miseries if we let our fears predominate. That's Seneca's Moral Letters, and I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by yours truly and 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. Spend 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.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  But let's get on with today's reading. "In the early days of what would become known as the Great Depression, a new president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in and gave his first inaugural address. As the last president to hold the office before the 20th Amendment was ratified, FDR wasn't able to take office until March, meaning that the country had been without strong leadership for months. Panic was in the air, banks were failing, and people were scared." You've probably heard the "nothing to fear but fear itself" soundbite that FDR gave in that famous speech. But the full line is worth reading because it applies to so many difficult things we face in life. He says, "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,

• 4:32Speaker 00

  nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." The Stoics knew that fear was to be feared because of the miseries it creates. The things we fear pale in comparison to the damage we do to ourselves and others when we unthinkingly scramble to avoid them. An economic depression is bad, but a panic is worse. And a tough situation isn't helped by terror, it only makes things harder. And that's why we must resist it and reject it if we want to turn this thing around.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  I'll do a little surprise for you because, you know, obviously I wrote the Daily Stoic quite some time ago, but as it happens, I retold this story and I forgot that I told it in the Daily Stoic, but I retell part of the story in my new book Courage is Calling, which you can actually preorder right now. There's a bunch of bonuses, you go to dailystoic.com/preorder. But I'll read you some riffing from this chapter because I'm very proud of it. And let me see if I have it here. All right, so this is from, I think, the third or fourth chapter in the book, and it says, "The important thing is to not be afraid. It's easy to be scared, especially lately. Events can escalate at any moment.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  There is uncertainty. You could lose your job, then your house, and your car. Something could even happen to your kids. Of course, we're going to feel something when things are shaky like that. How could we not? Even the ancient Stoics, supposedly the masters of all emotion, conceded that we'll have involuntary reactions to loud noises, to uncertainty, to being attacked. They had a word for these immediate precognitive impressions of things, phantasia. They were not to be trusted." Do you know what is the most repeated phrase in the Bible? It's "be not afraid." Over and over again, these words appear, a warning not to let first impressions rule the day.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  And then I quote some of the parts from the Bible where they talk about this. It's actually stunning how much it appears. And I reference a Hebrew prayer that dates back to the 1800s. It says, "The world is a narrow bridge and the important thing is not to be afraid." "The wisdom of this expression," I write, "has sustained the Jewish people through incredible adversity and terrible tragedies, was even turned into a popular song in the Yom Kippur War." It's a reminder, yes, things are dicey and it's easy to be scared if you look down instead of forward, but fear will not help. And when the markets crashed in October 1929, America faced a horrendous economic crisis that lasted 10 years. Banks failed, investors were wiped out, and employment was some 20%.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt succeeded a president who had tried and failed for three and a half years to make a dent in the problem. Was he scared? Of course he was. How could he not have been? Everyone was scared. But what FDR counseled in that now legendary inaugural address in 1933 was that fear was a choice. Fear was the real enemy because it only made things worse. It would destroy the remaining banks. It would turn people against each other. It would prevent the implementation of cooperative solutions. Who does good work when they're afraid? Who can see clearly when they're afraid? Who can help others? How can you love when you're afraid? How can you do anything when you're afraid? The receiver can't catch the football if they flinch in anticipation of the hit.

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  The artist can't deliver the performance if they tremble at the ready pens of the critics. And the politician will rarely make the decision if they worry about the consequences at the polls. The family will never get started if all the couple can think about is how hard it's going to be. And an army that lets a retreat turn into a rout will be slaughtered. There is no room for fear, not with what we want to do. This life we're living, this world we inhabit, it is a scary place. If you peer over the side of a narrow bridge, you can lose your heart to continue. You freeze up, you sit down, you don't make good decisions. You don't see or think clearly. So the important thing is to not be afraid.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Anyway, that is like the first riff I have given at all about courage is calling. I got a little excited. I'm here recording at like 10 o'clock at night after the kids are asleep and I... Thought I'd throw up this little teaser. I do hope you preorder the book. There's a bunch of amazing bonuses. You can do that at dailystoic.com/preorder. If you've liked the podcast, if you want to support Daily Stoic in any way, that would be it. It means a whole bunch to me. I love this book. You're gonna love it. It comes out at the end of September, but if you could preorder it now, it would be so helpful. Thank you.