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Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.
0:28 Speaker 00 You can't only see this.
0:32 Speaker 00 The sudden and undeniable rise in costs of everything are painful. Housing is more expensive, flights are more expensive, Ubers are more expensive, takeout is more expensive. And it's understandable that this would be annoying. Even a Stoic like Seneca would have categorized lower prices as a preferred indifferent. But it's interesting how we seem to only notice the higher prices and the inconveniences. As Derek Thompson recently pointed out in The Atlantic, "For the last decade, many goods and services have been artificially cheap." In fact, many venture-backed companies selling these things to us were deliberately losing money. Housing was cheap because of the effects of the 08 recession and suppressed interest rates. Even the last couple of years of reduced traffic and shorter
1:15 Speaker 00 lines at the airport was simply because of the pandemic. But how many of us appreciated this while it was happening? How many of us were grateful, or understood that it couldn't last? And it's important that we realize that part of the Stoic discipline of perception is to not be deceived, deceived by the number of green lights when the law of averages says you'll inevitably hit some red ones. It also means not missing the fact that many of the extra costs of today are actually being paid for by the savings of yesterday. Life has a way of evening out, and perspective helps you notice that. Prices go up and down, markets do what they do. It's our opinions about this, the Stoics would say, that upsets us.
2:08 Speaker 00 In today's episode, we're going to go all the way back to not the beginning, but to the basics. I think it's interesting if you think about what meditation is, Marcus Aurelius is repeating these Stoic practices to himself over and over again. He's reviewing the basics, which I think is a key element here. So whether you've been studying Stoicism for a long time, or whether you just got past this episode, in today's episode, we're going to, we're going to go to where to start. That's really it. Where to start with Stoicism, nine exercises that will either introduce you to Stoic thinking, or remind you of some key Stoic principles. And I hope you enjoy. Again, Stoicism is
2:52 Speaker 00 a thing that you practice. So we're talking about exercises, things you do to apply the philosophy, things that should help your perspective, help your routines, help you deal with the kinds of situations that you experience in life, because that's what Stoicism is for, for your actual, real life. And I hope these exercises, which are both for beginners, but also fundamental building blocks of the philosophy, that I think it's always a good time to review. So enjoy. Here is where to start with Stoicism, nine key Stoic practices that I think you're really going to like.
3:30 Speaker 00 It's really simple. There's all the things in the world that happen, and then there's the tiny, tiny bit of it that you control. All the things that happen in the little dot that you control. The Stoics called this the dichotomy of control. There's some stuff that's up to us, some stuff that's not up to us. The chief task in life, Epictetus said, he was a former slave, he knew all about unfortunate realities. He said, "The chief task in life is discerning what's up to us and not up to us, what's in our control and not in our control." This is also the brilliance of the Serenity Prayer. That's the key. Is this up to me? Then it should deserve 100% of your energy. If it's not up to you, if you can't influence, if you can't control it, then it's none of your concern. All the things that can happen, tiny bit that you control.
4:18 Speaker 00 There's really no way to separate Stoicism and journaling. They're the same thing. You know, Marx really says meditation is to himself. It's his journal to himself. The journal helps me clear my mind. It helps me get centered, helps me remember, helps me work on myself. Seneca talks about putting each day up for review. That's so important. You can't get better if you don't look honestly and with self-awareness at who you've been over the last 24 hours. So I want to see what I can improve, where I fell short. The pages of my journal, they're just for me. I never will show anyone. I don't even often look at them myself, but it's the process of writing them down that helps me get better.
5:02 Speaker 00 The Stoics talk about hard winter training. Epictetus says this. He says, "You must undergo a hard winter training." Exposing yourself, getting out, getting uncomfortable on purpose is preparation for the inevitability of discomfort and difficulty in the future. And the Stoics practice this. They put themselves out there. They would take the cold plunge. They would wear a thin coat. They abstained unnecessary luxuries. They wanted to toughen themselves up for the inevitability of what life had in store. And so if it's cold, step out there, enjoy it. Jump into the snow, turn the cold knob in the shower. Like, step out there, get outside your comfort zone. It's toughening you up, making you better, putting you in a better position to be more resilient and strong in the future.
5:49 Speaker 00 How we see things, of course, matters. The Stoics say that our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts. The way we see things, the story we tell ourselves about things, that's the first and in some ways, the most important step. The idea is that the world is objective. There really is no such thing as good or bad. That is positive or negative. Shakespeare says, "Neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so." "Events are objective. We tell ourselves what they mean. We make up a story about them." Right? There's no such thing as a bear market or a bull market, good weather or bad weather. There's just weather. There's just the market. Our job as humans is to respond to that. Now, of course, we put names on these things, so we have a helpful way of seeing them.
6:34 Speaker 00 But we have to understand that the way we see them and the story we tell ourselves about them determines what we're going to be able to do about them. So if you focus on the fact that something is unfair, that something is not your fault, that something sucks, right? That something is impossible, insurmountable, right? These words have a kind of self fulfilling prophecy to them.
6:59 Speaker 00 My favorite exercise from the Stoics is in the most beautiful lines from the Stoics. It's not Marcus Aurelius describing the Colossus of Rhodes or, you know, the aqueducts or the Colosseum. It's Marcus Aurelius writing about, you know, the way a stalk of grain is bending under its own weight or the sound that plucking a grape makes or, you know, he's talking about the furrowed brow of a lion. And so he would have seen that in the horrible carnage of the Colosseum. Do you know what I mean? But what he's spotting, he's actively looking for beauty amidst what would have been a violent, disgusting, you know, dark place. Right.
7:44 Speaker 00 And so actively doing that, you know, it's not like, oh, look at that pretty sunset. It should be like, look at the lines on this table. Like, finding it in the ordinary.
7:58 Speaker 00 Marcus Aurelius loved to zoom out. He would zoom way, way out. He would try to imagine himself in space, the top of a mountain, flying above the earth with wings. And he said, "When you look down, you see how tiny everything is." He says, "Like little ants fighting over territory." And even though he ruled the greatest empire in the world, he did this practice to humble himself. Calm himself down to wash away the stress. And when I look at a big sunset like that, that's part of what I get out of that experience. It's so much bigger than me, so much vaster than me, so much more beautiful than anything I will create, and it's totally unintentional and it's not even trying, right? And so we seek out these experiences.
8:40 Speaker 00 We get lost in what the Stoic philosopher Pierre Hidot calls the oceanic feeling, where you're an infinitesimal point in the immensity. And this is what centers us, what makes us still, what gives us the perspective we need to go back out in the world and do what we need to do.
8:58 Speaker 00 Marcus Aurelius writes this journal, it's called Meditations. What's even more interesting is that he wrote a big chunk of it here in Budapest, right up in the Roman camp, not far from the city. And what he writes in Meditations, he asks this question, he asks it to himself, he never knew that we would read it, but he says, "Stop whatever you're doing at this moment and ask yourself, 'Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?'" And by this, he means what we spend so much of our time doing. Are you afraid of death because you won't be able to play video games anymore? Because you won't be able to watch pornography on your computer? Because you won't be able to argue with people you don't know on the internet? Because you won't be able to sit on your couch and get drunk or high? These are not reasons to be afraid of death. You shouldn't be afraid of death at all, he's saying. But what you definitely shouldn't do is be afraid of death and then, when you have
9:43 Speaker 00 life, sit here and waste it on things that don't matter. Seneca says it even more bluntly, he says, "You are scared of dying, but tell me, is the kind of life you lead any different than being dead?" And there are so many forms of life that are a kind of death, right? A life filled with resentment, a life filled with regret, a life that's all about you, a life that's all about chasing fame, or money, or power, a life of loneliness or isolation. These are forms of living death. When we think about our mortality, it wakes us up to that fact, it gives us perspective on how meaningless a lot of the things we spend our time chasing are, and the expense that those things come at, right?
10:24 Speaker 00 We put things off to the future, "I'll start a family later, I'll follow my dream job later, I'll start that company later." We need more and more time because what we're not doing is being present, we're not taking advantage of what's in front of us right now. We don't want to postpone anything, we want to balance life's books each day.
10:46 Speaker 00 "You take away power over events by expecting them," Seneca says. "It's what catches us off-guard, what we refuse to prepare for, what we refuse to think about. That's what lands heaviest." So the Stoics practice premeditatio warmum, so they're prepared, so they can take advantage in advance of the opportunity to plan, prepare, to be resilient, to stiffen themselves up so the blows of fate don't land unexpected and unnecessarily hard.
11:14 Speaker 00 "Moving forward begins with one thing, always: acceptance. If you're fighting it, if you're denying it, if you're blaming about it, you won't be able to make progress, you won't be able to do anything with it, and you certainly won't be able to move on." That's why, for the Stoics, this idea of the art of acquiescence was sort of step one. But step two is amor fati, a love of it. You not only don't run from it, you embrace it. You say, "I don't have to do this, I get to do this." You don't say, "It's unfortunate that this happened to me," as Marx realized it. You say, "It's fortunate that this happened to me." You accept it, you run towards it, and you use it, and that's how you move forward.
11:56 Speaker 00 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 at dailystoic.com/email.
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