A Sense of Urgency. A Sense of Urgency. | Practice True Joy

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. A sense of urgency, a sense of urgency. It's remarkable, it's sad, it's entitled and irresponsible. Even though things are moving very quickly, even though tempest, buget, time flies, people are taking it slowly. People are hemming and hawing. People are putting things off. People are acting like they can afford to do this, as if they are not paying for their indecision and their slowness in their pocketbook and with their life. The Smashing Pumpkins sang about how we had to live and love tonight.

0:49Ryan Holiday: It's a great lyric, in the resolute urgency of now. In the kitchen of Per Se, there's the famous sign, a sense of urgency, and it's mounted beneath the clock. And I think both these reminders are essential. And so is Seneca's. The whole future lies in uncertainty. Live immediately. This is your life that sits before you. Time is ticking away. Don't delay. Don't procrastinate. Don't make excuses. Don't be entitled. Own it. Do what must be done. What you do with the seconds ticking before you is the most important decision you will make in your life. Act with resolution and urgency. Live while you can.

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4:08Ryan Holiday: Practice true joy. this is this week's meditation from the daily stoic journal 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living there is no audio book of this journal so the weekly podcast episode is the only way to hear this sort of weekly meditation that we do inside the journal it's always been weird for me i don't know if i should call the journal that i wrote a book it's 20 000 words it's got writing in it is it a journal is it a book in any case here is today's meditation? The Stoics held joy to be one of the good passions worthy of practice in everyday life. But Stoic joy isn't about the delights of the senses or material pleasures.

4:51Ryan Holiday: To Marcus Aurelius, joy was being kind to others. To Seneca, it was freedom from fear or suffering and death. Let's laugh with Democritus, as Seneca says, and engage in our proper human work with joy. So consider making your study of philosophy this week around the idea of where you might find joy and what good you might find to do with it. And here's Mark Cirelius on meditations. Joy for human beings lies in proper human work, and proper human work consists in acts of kindness to other human beings, disdain for the stirring of the senses, and identifying trustworthy impressions and contemplating the natural order and all that happens in keeping with it.

5:33Ryan Holiday: Then we have Seneca in his moral letters. He says, trust me, real joy is a serious thing. Do you think that someone can, in the charming expression, blithely dismiss death with an easy disposition? Or swing open the door to poverty, keeping pleasures in check? Or meditate on the endurance of suffering? The one who is comfortable with turning these thoughts over is truly full of joy, but hardly cheerful. It's exactly such a joy that I would wish for you to possess, for it will never truly run dry once you've laid claim to its source. Finally, we have Seneca in On Tranquility of Mind. He says, Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public.

6:10Ryan Holiday: Democritus laughed. One saw the whole as a parade of miseries, the other of follies. And so we shall take a lighter view of things and bear them with an easy spirit, for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it. There is this sense, right, that the Stoics are joyless, that the Stoics are humorlessness, that the Stoics don't appreciate existence, that they're just here, beasts of burden, unfeeling, and ready to face death with barely a whimper. But I think there's, first off, too much humor in the Stoics, whether it's Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, or of course Chrysippus, who allegedly died laughing at some inside joke whose meaning barely even survives to us.

6:52Ryan Holiday: I just don't think that the Stoics were without joy. You could look at Seneca's enormous parties. You know, he famously has like 300 ivory tables as hypocrisy, or it could be an insight to a side of the Stoics that perhaps doesn't appear in their writing very much, but clearly was a big part of their existence, which was, you know, socializing and connecting and having fun with people. But I think what the Stoics, what Seneca most of all is trying to say here is that joy is not hedonism. It's not just pure happiness and lightness. The joy comes from that place of resilience, from removing the unnecessary disturbances that cause misery.

7:35Ryan Holiday: I'd probably define stoic joy as the absence of misery that a lot of people experience, whether it's fear or anger or jealousy or anxiety. Instead of like joy is luxury, joy is parties. I think for the Stoics, it was joy was the absence of the longing for those things or anything that made you unhappy. But then we have to add in Marcus Aurelius' wrinkle, which I think Marcus truly found, although he seems to be an introverted, quiet person who loved his books, he clearly found joy in being of service, helping people, of making the world better. And we have to see that as a key part of our role.

8:21Ryan Holiday: As an introvert myself, I do empathize with that expression that hell is other people, that life is easier when you focus on your stuff. But this is also its own form of misery ultimately because it makes you lonely. It deprives you of purpose. It deprives you of connection. The Stoics did celebrate joy. They did believe it was an important passion, an important part of life. They just would have disagreed with the Epicureans who seemed to find joy in external things, external pleasures, external experiences. I think for the Stoics, joy was something deeper. It was a way of living. It was a way of thinking.

8:59Ryan Holiday: It was a deeper emanation of self-sufficiency, but also connection, a locking in on one's purpose, doing the work that one is put here to do. When Marcus Aurelius says the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good, I think he's also talking about what gives him joy and what makes him happy in this life. And I hope you find the same thing. Seek out joy. Certainly don't disdain joy and certainly don't think that this philosophy is about not experiencing the joy. I wish you much happiness and joy. You deserve it. My life is better when I have it. And it's something that I actually actively have to work on.

9:37Ryan Holiday: And so do you.

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