All You Can Do Is This | Ask DS

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2:20That's givewell.org, code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording.

3:00Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

3:10All we can do is this. Life is unpredictable. Events are uncertain. What can go wrong will. Nice guys sometimes finish last. Bad things happen to good people. So much is outside of our control. These realities are well known to a Stoic. As Seneca said, fortune behaves as she pleases. So why did they try then? Why did they work hard on stuff when it might not work out? Why did they invest and sacrifice? Why did they form relationships and attachments, set goals, or make plans, especially when success and rewards were so uncertain? Because, to quote a line from the famous play about Cato, one that was often quoted in the uncertain days of the American Revolution by Washington and Adams, we cannot ensure success, but we can deserve it.

3:55The former is outside of our control, the latter is not. Deserving success is up to us? Getting it? Not necessarily so. The Stoics aimed high. They did their best. They tried to be good people. They tried to be virtuous. Was this always appreciated or rewarded? No. Did it always pay off? Yes. Because it's the best way to live.

4:32Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're doing a Q &A today that's actually drawn from the Stoicism 101 course. I think it's one of the best courses we've done over at Daily Stoic. If you're looking to get introduced to Stoicism, you want to take your study of it to the next level. You want to go back to basics or you want to build a really good foundation of what Stoicism is and how you can use it. That's what the course is about. I'll link to that in today's show notes. But this is drawing from one of the many Q &As we've done as part of the session. People got to come in and ask me a bunch of questions.

5:05That's where today's Q &A is coming from. It's just a selection, and I hope you join us in Stoicism 101. You can ask some of your own questions. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or just type in Stoicism 101 in the Daily Stoic store. Hi. How are you? Good. First of all, I am not a um student of roman philosophy or okay uh but i fell into listening to some of your podcasts and some guests you were a guest on a couple of podcasts that i was listening to and um the stoicism i guess i had unintentionally been practicing it for a long time okay i did a stint in the military and some of the things that, you know, the being prepared, you know, pre-planning and Amore Fati kind of kind of bled in to my life, you know, instinctually, I guess, or let into it.

6:10For example, I was prepared to have a lot of noises, you know, unintentionally on this zoom call like yesterday so i was already prepared for it just in case that wasn't gonna be shaken but um recently i've been having some kind of like how would your stoicism system kind of deal with uh people making um like judging people with their with my own value system and how How to manage, I guess, I don't really have high expectations for other people, but trying to deal with, you know, whether it's, you know, people you used to work with that, you know, when a crisis happens, you tend to see the true nature of people.

7:02And this is kind of set that up. And I'm trying to talk to some of that. It's a great question. I mean, I think the last year is going to be hard to put to put some to put some of this stuff back in the box. Right. We sort of seen how people that we know, whether it's politically or sort of medically, we now know like, oh, hey, I thought me and this person were on the same page. And it turns out, you know, they're fucking nuts, like not just nuts, but like also awful. Right. So I think it is tough. Social media, unfortunately, gives you a glimpse into people's lives that maybe it'd be, we talked about being deliberately deaf earlier.

7:48It's hard to be deliberately deaf when people are screaming this stuff into your feed. So it is tough. I like Mark Surrealis' line about sort of be tolerant with others, strict with yourself. Right. So you have your standards. But the operative word there is your standards, right? Like they're your standards. And it's not fair to hold other people to a set of standards that they never asked for, right? They never said, here's the standard that I hold themselves up to. So they're not being a hypocrite, right? But it's tough. I just try to remind myself, like, look, I am falling short in enough ways myself that I've got more than more than I could possibly deal with, like here, than than to go around trying to, you know, monitor other people.

8:48So and it's not like I totally agree with that. I've really enjoyed finding you for first of all. Yeah. And that's something that I think I've always believed in. You know, like my standards are not necessarily realistic for anyone else but myself. But I'm just like, man, when people really fall short of anything close to the same value system that you have. And this, I guess, is going back to, you know, Seneca working with Nero, you know. Yeah. No, you get that point like Jesus. You know, you get the sense reading Marcus Aurelius that he has very low expectations for other people. And yet he's constantly disappointed.

9:41Right. Which I think is sort of just a fact of human life that like you you you're not expecting anything of these people. And still they managed to go. They managed to surprise you. Right. Right. So. So, yeah, I think realizing that, you know, one, that's a vice realizing, too, that's a recipe for misery and that it's inherently unfair. But that's what that's what you signed up for. You know, right. You signed up for it. So all you can do is try to carry your load and maybe try to carry other people's load if you're strong enough. But you can't go around resenting people for not carrying the same load as you.

10:21So have you on a personal level found that there are people that you just kind of phased out? Of course. Yeah, definitely. And I think if you're not like I'm not saying that you're you're sort of too good for people. But if your social group or your sort of friends are not growing, that's probably a sign that you're not growing. You know what I mean? If you're not progressing, that's probably, you know, that's probably going to be reflected in the company that you keep. I think that was a really helpful way to explain it. Yeah. Thank you. That's why you're a writer. I forget which stoic writer was saying this, but, you know, the stoics have like sort of what's up to us and then what's not up to us.

11:06Right. But they were saying that's actually probably a little bit simple because there's also stuff in the middle, which is things that we have influence over. And I think this is true for people, friends, family members, right? You can't make anyone do anything. You can't make people love you. You can't make people change. You can't force them to want anything that they don't want from themselves or for themselves, but you can, you can try to help, right? You can lead a horse to water. You can't make them drink, but you can lead a horse to water. And I think that's to me, if you're trying to look most charitably at Seneca and his association with Nero, that's what you see.

11:50Seneca is trying over and over again. This guy has power for reasons that Seneca had no influence over, that Seneca outside of assassination cannot change. How can he try to be of service to not just Nero, but to Rome as much as possible within the constraints of his own ethics. And when I had H.R. McMaster on the podcast, he was saying the same thing. He was like, look, I'm inherently an apolitical person. He's like, I don't even vote. I didn't like Donald Trump, but I felt like I had national security expertise. And insofar as I could provide that expertise, that was my job. I couldn't force anyone to listen.

12:33So I thought that was an interesting way to think about it. You could push back and you could say, McMaster should have done X, Y, and Z. You should, you could push back and say, but Seneca could have done something about Nero. But you know, I, I, I at least understand the logic there of like, I don't control this either way, but I'm going to try to have a positive influence.

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