Ask Yourself These Crucial Questions | Practice True Joy

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1:29Welcome 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.

2:06Ask yourself these crucial questions. There's a story of Musonius Rufus paying, who awarded a sum of money to a charlatan who posed as a philosopher. When an observer stepped in to say that the man was a liar unworthy of the payment, Musonius replied, money is exactly what he deserves. It's a great line, and it brings up a point. We all want to have money, but when we look at people who have money, they're not always who we want to be. The writer Anne Lamott jokes in Bird by Bird, you ever wonder what God thinks of money? Just look at the people he gives it to. Marcus Aurelius in Meditations writes of the robbers and perverts and killers and tyrants.

2:53He says, gather for your inspection. They're so-called pleasures. I think the idea when we think about money, when we think about wanting to be rich, when we think about what money might do for us, is to really be sure that we have clarity about what we want to do and what we think is going to happen. Here are some important questions that you need to think about when it comes to your own ambitions and desires. Are you sure that the goals you are pursuing are what you truly want? Are you sure that money will fix your problems? Are you sure that you have correctly defined financial freedom? Are you sure that you can handle success?

3:36Are you sure that you deserve that success? Are you sure you're going to do things differently than the many cautionary tales out there? Are you sure you're going to be happy with what you get? Are you sure it's going to be worth it? In The Wealthy Stoic, our new course, A Daily Stoic Guide to Being Rich and Free and Happy, these are the kinds of questions we dig into. Not just what stocks to invest in, what's the best savings account. All that's great, but you gotta go deeper than that. And The Wealthy Stoic does that over the next nine weeks. It's gonna be a bunch of emails every week, nearly a book's worth of content from me, Ryan Holiday.

4:17We're gonna look at how a slave became the richest stoic, how the richest man in Rome was actually the poorest Stoic, how the right ambitions and motivations have fueled the Stoics, how a wealthy Stoic spends and saves, what they prize more than money, how they recover and respond to setbacks, and a lot more. There's weekly resources that are hand-selected by me that I think are going to help you on your journey to financial independence or whatever you're after. There's live video sessions from me. You can ask me questions about my own entrepreneurial journey, my investing journey, my financial journey, businesses that I've built, including Daily Stoic, and so much more.

4:58The idea is to put you on a path to greater happiness and prosperity, to financial security, and so many other things. And I can't wait for you to join us. We've got a great lineup. We've got great programs in here, and I'm really excited to bring it to you. You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash wealth, or you can just go to store.dailystoic.com Or as always, if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life, our membership program, you can join that and you get this course and all our other courses for free. I think you're really going to like this one and I can't wait to see you all in it.

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6:21practice 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 audiobook 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 and uh 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.

7:05To 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 Sebelius 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.

7:48Then 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. And finally, we have Seneca in On Tranquility of Mind. He says, Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public.

8:25Democritus 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.

9:10I just don't think that the Stoics were without joy. You could look at Seneca's enormous parties. 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 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.

9:56I'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 drinking, 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's 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.

10:47As 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.

11:26It 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 really 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. Don't, 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, that I actually actively have to work on.

12:06And so do you.

12:35We'll see you next time.

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