Beware This Heavy Burden

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1:02Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

1:30Beware this heavy burden. It might not be Seneca's greatest observation, but it's certainly up there. He said, with regard to the objects which we pursue and for which we strive for with great effort, we should note this truth, that some objects are superfluous, others are not worth the price we pay for them. But we do not see this clearly, he said, and we regard things as free gifts when they really cost us dear. We are eager to attain them at the cost of anxiety, of danger, and of lost honor, personal freedom, and time. There is a hidden cost to everything you own. Things don't just cost you monetarily, they cost you mentally too.

2:05On an episode of the Daily Stoic podcast last summer with the one and only Kevin Rose, who I've known for a very long time, he said... The thing that I've realized in my life, and I'm sure you probably preach this on the regular, is that every object that I own, everything is a subconscious mental burden, without a doubt. Yes. There's like, it can be the wheelbarrow that has a flat tire sitting out in the backyard. Yes. Like at some point, I know I have to go figure out how to get that fixed, right? Yeah, yeah. It's like, so it's anything I am, I've like reduced the stuff that I have by like an order of magnitude over the last like five years.

2:44The things we own as the writer Chuck Palniuk put it in Fight Club, end up owning us. Because now we have to use it. We have to get our money's worth out of that. We have to figure out where to put it, how to take care of it, how to insure it. Some part of you is constantly carrying these and other subconscious mental burdens. If you can't stop prizing a lot of other things, Mark Sreles wrote, you will never be free. Free, independent, and imperturbable. You will always be envious and jealous, afraid that people might come and take it all away from you. It's really that simple. Reduce the amount of stuff you have and you'll free yourself from this very and often unnecessary burden.

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