Beware This Thief Of Time | Ask DS

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2:12Beware this thief of time. Not long ago, we talked about the stoic view of punctuality. It's a pretty simple one. Being on time is important. It's a matter of respect, not just for oneself, but also for others. So what do you think the Stoics would have thought of Oscar Wilde's intriguing remark that punctuality is the thief of time? Perhaps they would have agreed. While it's important to be on time so as not to take for granted other people's time, it's also important to recognize and defend against how easy it is to get consumed by meeting some arbitrary standard for its own sake, to lose the forest for the trees.

2:48The person who can't focus because they are anxious about an upcoming appointment who is rushed and frenzied because they feel the need to get everywhere early, feeling guilty because you were late and had to reschedule, cutting this thing short so you can start another. This is not what good self-discipline looks like. It's wasting time while purporting to care a lot about it. It's also worth asking, what is this thing that I am needing to be on time for anyway? One of Marcus Aurelius's most provocative questions to himself in meditations is, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?

3:21We should be asking what the point is of all these appointments we're making. We should ask ourselves why we are so committed to being punctual for work things. Meanwhile, we constantly put off and delay our own self-development. Where is our time for ourselves, for stillness, for philosophy? Seneca notes how much time we waste in life. It may well be that we are wasting much of that time and energy thinking about things as unfulfilling and unproductive as being on time. Being punctual is important, yes, but more critical is making time for the things that really matter and then being on time for those.

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5:06hi ryan thank you hi yeah of course um i have more of a general question um is that because you're in outer space i didn't have much choice in the background i'm at work and there's a whole there's a big mess behind me um so i know a lot of the ancient stoics did not leave a lot of written material so we focus a lot on the big three you know marcus aurelius epictetus seneca because they left the most um whether it's written by them or their students are there any other stoics that left reading material that we should perhaps you know learn more about like as we you know proceed in stoicism so this book uh was translated relatively recently and i enjoyed it This is Musonius Rufus, who's Epictetus' teacher.

5:56And it's called That One Should Disdain Hardships. It's basically like a set of notes from different talks. And like, so one of them is that women too should study philosophy. Should daughters receive the same education as sons? Which is more effective theory or practice? That kings should also study philosophy. that exile is not an evil. He writes an essay that exile is not evil, and he's exiled four times on trumped up charges. He says he has one on what is the chief end of marriage? Is marriage a handicap for the pursuit of philosophy? Should every child that is born be raised on food, on clothing and shelter?

6:43He has one on whether you should cut your beard or not. it's really fascinating. James Stockdale did a number of short books sort of inspired by Stoicism. So I would check that out. As far as the originals go, pretty much everything else is fragments. If you read Lives of the Stoics, which is my book, it gives you pretty much everything that there is from those people, unfortunately. Almost everything else is like a letter here or a quote here. The record is pretty sparse. The only thing I do hold up some hope on is that we have now begun to develop the technology where they can take some of the the rolled up papyrus that was entombed in the ash at places like Pompeii, and they can look, they can like x-ray inside it and read it.

7:48And so it may well be that in time, if the works haven't already been destroyed in various excavations, we may over the next 50 years discover or rediscover some of these lost works from the Stoics, which would be pretty awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, of course. Good afternoon. First of all, I just want to say thanks for your book, Ego is the Enemy. It literally stopped me from, shall we say, talking back to a previous boss that I was working under. All right. Kind of helped me put some things in context at the time. Two questions. You had mentioned, I thought, in a recent email that one of the downsides to the Stoics was their persecution of Christianity.

8:30I wasn't sure if you in particular Stoics in general. Was there a particular reason for that? And I'm not saying this in a way to bash Stoicism, but I'm curious what the reasons were for that. Yes. So I actually have a section on this in Lives of the Stoics. Let me find it because it's worth reading. There's actually a fascinating novel called Blood of the Martyrs, which is by Naomi Murchison. Then she she it's a novel about Christians in Nero's court, which she was trying to sort of write. She was writing it as Nazi Germany is rising in Europe and sort of beginning their persecution. So it's a it's a tricky thing.

9:17So obviously, put it this way. Rome thought that the Christians were heretics and the Stoics at different junctures were in charge of Rome. And so I more think about it as the Stoics did nothing to stop a persecution or a sort of a set of discriminatory practices that they could have done something about. But let me see here. So Junius Rusticus is Marcus's philosophy teacher who Marcus puts in charge basically of Rome. He's the mayor of Rome. And it's Junius Rusticus who adjudicates the trial of Justin Martyr, one of the most famous Christian martyrs. You can contrast this. Seneca's brother, Gaio, who's mentioned in the Bible, adjudicates a case involving St.

10:11Paul and lets him go free. So it's not as if the Stoics sort of are universally caught up in this, but there is some unpleasantness here. So this is what I say. Justin had in fact studied under a Stoic teacher in Samaria, but left the school in favor of the burgeoning Christian faith. Many of Justin's writings would evoke similarities between the Stoics and the Christians, and he may have well been familiar with Junius Rusticus's own philosophical work. He quite reasonably expected a favorable ruling from his Stoic judge. As a devout Christian, he knew that a century before Seneca's brother had fairly judged and freed St.

10:54Paul in Corinth. But this was Rome in a very different time, and Rusticus was not simply a pen and ink philosopher. His job was to protect the peace. These Christians refused to acknowledge the Roman gods, the supremacy of the Roman state, and this was to them crazy disruptive and dangerous. Was it Rusticus's job to enforce the laws to prevent these kinds of things from happening? And perhaps with Marcus away at the front and no one to check him, Rusticus was a little lost in the sway of his own power. In her 1939 novel about Christianity in ancient Rome, written as fascism was crushing religious minorities in Europe, Naomi Mitchinson has a Stoic philosopher attempt to explain this collision course between the Stoics and the Christians.

11:36The Christians were being persecuted, he says, because they were against the Roman state. No Roman ever really bothered about a difference of gods. In religious matters, they were profoundly tolerant because their own gods were not of the individual heart, but only a social invention or had become so. And yet politically they did and must persecute equally and equally must be attacked by all who had the courage. So the point is there's this sort of Roman policy that the Stoics declined to question that puts them on a collision course with a faith or a religion that questions almost all the essential tenets of the Roman state.

12:22Does that make sense? No, that seems pretty fair as well, right? I understand why Rome persecuted the Christians. It's more so the Stoics were Roman, more that the Romans were Stoic. Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say, but we also, this idea of learning from the past, I don't have any problem saying, you know, Rusticus sits at the head of this trial of this guy who's basically being set up on bogus charges for being a heretic. And instead of letting him off or exiling him or coming up with some, you know, symbolic punishment, he orders him to be scourged and beheaded, right? So there were options and the Stoics don't take those options and that's to their eternal shame.

13:08And there's a quick second part of the question. Do you know of any writers who've written on the relationship like positively between Stoicism and Christianity? I think you'd like this book, The Blood of the Martyrs. And then I do think there are some books out there. I've seen them. I just haven't read them. It was only sort of tangentially related to what I was talking about in Lives of the Stoics. But if you find something good, let us know. Thanks. Appreciate it. Yeah. Let's do Shireen as the last question. No pressure. So I recently listened to your podcast with Shane Parrish from Farnham Street blog.

13:47So I started looking at his blog. And so he has all these mental models and he has one article about how to make smart decisions without getting lucky. And so I just wanted to know if you have various mental models about various decisions that you make, various people that you reach out to? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I don't know. I sort of go back and forth on the mental models things. When I read them, I find them very interesting. I just don't know if people actually explicitly use them. I don't know if Warren Buffett, when he's evaluating a stock actually goes, let's divide by zero here or whatever the mental model is.

14:33It's one of these things that makes sense to me rationally. And then I wonder how they actually get applied. Someone's recommending that Shane has a good course on decision-making. I would probably agree with that. I did talk about decision-making in my interview with Annie Duke when I had her on the podcast. She's great. And she has a new book about this. So I might start by that.

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