You Can Never Do This Twice | The Freedom Of Contempt

The first time was revelatory. The first time you watched Mad Men. Or The Godfather. Or cracked open Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Or heard Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ or listened to Fantine sing, I Dreamed a Dream from Les Mis. Or stood in front of a Caravaggio painting. It hit you with all the power that new and brilliant art has. It shook you. It opened up something in you. It taught you something. But in some way, the power of these moments is actually overrated or at least overstated. It’s powerful because it’s new and immediate. But what’s actually more transformative is what happens when you return to those works of art, lingering as Seneca said, on the words of the master thinkers.---And in today's Daily Stoic Journal excerpt reading, Ryan discusses how the practice of treating the luxurious things that we yearn for with contempt through thoughtful and intentional language serves to remind us of what really matters in life.📙 The Daily Dad: 366 Lessons on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids is available for preorder right now. ✉️ 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 a special leather edition of The Daily Stoic.📱 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  You can never do this twice. The first time was revelatory, the first time you watched Mad Men, or The Godfather, or cracked open Marcus Aurelius's meditations, or heard Tom Petty's Free Fallin, or listened to Fantane saying, "I dreamed a dream from Les Mis," or stood in front of a Carvaggio painting. It hit you with all the power that new and brilliant art has. It shook you. It opened up something in you. It taught you something. But in some way, the power of these moments is actually overrated, or at least overstated. It's powerful because it's new and immediate, or new to you. But what's actually more transformative is what happens when you return to those works

• 1:22Speaker 00

  of art, lingering, as Seneca said, on the words of the master thinkers. The Stoics were fond of Herakles's idea that we can never step in the same river twice, because the river is in a constant state of movement and change. Well, with art, or literature, or music, or film, it's a little different. The work is the same, it's you who is different. This notion of re-watching is a misnomer, because you're reintrospecting, Cristel Antonio Russell recently said in a New York Times article about the burst of popularity of certain TV shows many years after they came out. The generation who watched HBO's Girls in their twenties, for example, is now in their thirties, and they have a very different understanding of themselves, as well as that

• 2:07Speaker 00

  time in their lives. We can never watch the same show twice. We can never listen to the same song twice. We can never get the same piece of advice twice. Because our experiences, our tastes, our understanding of the world has changed. But those second and third and fourth encounters, those re-introspectings are actually where the real insights and breakthroughs can come from. That's when we really get it. That's when we might really come to get ourselves in the process. For instance, some of you might be on year four or five of The Daily Stoic, or in some cases, I guess, six or seven. I'm on read, what, 150 of meditations? I don't even know. But every time I pick it up, I get something

• 2:52Speaker 00

  else out of it. And that's also the idea behind the new book, The Daily Dad: 366 Lessons on Parenting and Love and Raising Great Kids, which is meant to be read in a loop each day, bringing new insights from the same pages each year. You can grab it to preorder. It's out beginning of May. You can get signed first editions from me, which I'm really excited about. They just arrived. And you can grab that at dailystoic.com. The Daily Stoic, if you have put a number of readings on it and you want one that will hold up better over time, there's a special leather edition, which you can grab at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to that in today's show notes also.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Anyways, grab The Daily Dad. Keep reading and rereading and lingering on the master thinkers. It works if you work it.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  The Freedom of Contempt. The language we use to describe things imputes value to those things. We often embellish our language with superlatives to help make our choices of what to buy, wear, eat, or drink seem much better than they really are. As Emperor Marcus Aurelius could have the finest Philharmonic wine at his table at any meal, but he preferred to remind himself that this was only grape juice. As emperor, he was the only Roman allowed to wear a purple cloak, but he took pains to point out that this cloak was like any other, just dyed with shellfish blood so as to produce a purple hue. This week, try to practice cutting your own luxuries and the things you yearn for down to

• 4:36Speaker 00

  size with a little contempt. Describe them with the bluntest language you can and see how much their power over you diminishes.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Just as when meat or other foods are set before us, we think this is a dead fish, or a dead bird, or a pig. Also, this fine wine is only the juice of a bunch of grapes. This purple-edged robe is just sheep's wool dyed in a bit of blood from a shellfish, or of sex, that is only the rubbing of private parts together followed by a spasmodic discharge. In the same way, our impressions grab actual events and permeate them, so we see things as they really are. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 6:13. "Keep a list before your mind of all those who burn with anger and resentment about something, or even the most renowned for success, misfortune, evil deeds, or any special distinction. Then ask yourself, how did it work out?

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Smoke and dust, the stuff of simple myth trying to be legend." That's Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 12:27. "You know what wine and liquor taste like. It makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand bottles pass through your bladder. You are nothing more than a filter." This is from the Daily Stoic Journal. The week's entry is titled "The Freedom of Contempt." I don't know, this has long been one of my favorite exercises in all of Stoicism. It's just brilliant, it's cynical, it's funny. It's really practical, too. You know, Marcus Aurelius didn't have to live in a time of Madison Avenue advertising. He didn't live in a time of social media influencers.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  He didn't live in a time of propaganda and misinformation. There wasn't spinning and selling the way that there is now. And yet, even then, he had to practice, you know, just seeing through all the bullshit, seeing through to what things actually were, stripping them, as he says, "of the legend that encrust them." So when Epictetus talks about putting things to the test, this is what Marcus is doing. He says, "I'm not going to get distracted by my urges, by my immediate positive reaction to this, to the way my mouth is watering when I see X, or the way that my eyes get big when I see Y." He says, "I'm going to really break down what I see here. And I'm going to describe it in the most unflinching, unvarnished, least sympathetic language possible.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  And I'm going to see what that reflection back to me does, how it changes my opinion of it." Right? Sometimes, you know, there's that expression about seeing how the sausage gets made. When you go and see the sausage gets made, or you see, you know, that underneath things, they lose their power over you. And that's what the Stoic practice is really about, and it's so important. It's not that you, you don't want, you'll never enjoy this or that ever again. It's just you want to enjoy it with the deceit turned down a little bit. The legend, a little more thread there. And, and, and this is an active practice we have to go through.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  So as you, as you walk out in a parking lot and you, you know, you see a Lexus, remind yourself, this is just a Toyota with fancier branding, right? When you, when you see a $300 pair of Nikes, remind yourself of the, of the sweatshop that this was likely made in. When, when you, you know, when you, when you hear someone talking about how they're a billionaire, remind yourself just how dumb a lot of billionaires have turned out to be, right? When you're intimidated by someone's fancy degree, again, remind yourself who else has graduated from that institution. Think of the corruption. Think of the evil ideas that have come out of that institution over the years.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Again, this isn't to dismiss or demean the things entirely. It's just to counteract that impulse of jealousy, of envy, of lust, of fear. You know, there's that expression about if you see a beautiful woman, there's that expression about if you see a beautiful woman, that, that, that somewhere, someone is sick of that person's shit. And that's true for everything, every person. And it'll take it down a peg and then help you see it a tad more rationally.