BONUS | The #1 Way To IMMEDIATELY Feel Better

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1:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:56Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I hope you are having a great Thanksgiving break. Ours was going pretty well. A little bit of drama here. My dog was chewing on one of my kids' toys and swallowed a battery. So then we had to take her to the vet. And now I have to walk her around and hope we don't have to do inexpensive surgery. Such is life. I wanted to put together a little piece to make you feel better about the world and everything that's happening right now. I guess before I get into that, just a reminder, I'm going to be in Seattle next week. Ten days, I guess.

2:34I'm going to be in Seattle on 12-3 as part of the Daily Stoic Live Tour. You can grab tickets at dailystoiclife.com. There's a couple other dates in there. But to actually get to today's message, I wanted to give you a simple way to feel better given everything that's happening in the world, right? Kind of feels like everything's terrible. Well, here's something you can do about it. I think it's easy to feel disoriented and disillusioned right now. There's so much happening. So much of it feels terrible. There's dysfunction and conflict and outright lawlessness, corruption and cruelty. And then there's just personal stuff like I'm talking about.

3:10You got to go to the vet. Your car breaks down. You get a crappy message from someone you know. You have your own health issues. But here is a simple way to feel better. And I'm not talking about turning off the news, although you should definitely do that, as we have talked about before. And I don't just mean taking care of yourself, although that matters too, and you should. Go for a run and meditate, eat better, go to therapy. I have to take my dog for a walk, as I was just saying. That's good. This is all great. But I'm talking here about something simpler, something that works immediately, something that every spiritual and religious tradition has taught, but for some reason we keep forgetting.

3:50And that is do something nice for someone else. And this might seem small, but in fact, it's everything. There's an old story about a boy who comes upon a beach covered in starfish, hundreds, thousands of them washed up on the shore. It's an appalling, tragic sight. On the verge of tears, he begins throwing them back into the sea, one by one. Doesn't matter, an adult tells him. You'll never make a dent in this. It matters to this starfish, the boy says as he rescues another. And he's right. To the person that you're helping, to the person whose burden you are lessening, there is nothing small about it.

4:29When the Talmud says that he who saves one person saves the world, maybe that's partly what they mean. You have certainly saved that one person's world. We get this backwards so often. Despite the expression that all politics is local, we tend to think big picture before we think little picture. We obsess over grand gestures, complete solutions, systemic change. Meanwhile, there's suffering right in front of us. A neighbor who needs help, a food bank down the street, a person we could make smile today. In Meditations, Mark Sreelis talks about a period of his life when he felt like good fortune had abandoned him.

5:07And indeed, it certainly looked like it had. There was the Antonine Plague, which killed literally millions of people during his reign. There were wars and floods and famines. He would bury several of his children. He was betrayed by his most trusted general in what amounted to an attempted coup. He did not meet with the good fortune he deserved, one ancient historian noted, as his whole reign was involved in a series of troubles. But instead of throwing himself a pity party, instead of despairing, he rewrote his definition of good fortune. It's not getting everything you wanted, he said. No, true good fortune is what you make for yourself.

5:43Good fortune, he wrote, was good character, good intentions, and good actions. About five years ago, with Daily Stoic, I was just kind of disgusted about the commercialism of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Someone on the team said, hey, are we going to do a Cyber Monday or a Black Friday sale? And I was just wondering about not participating. I hated that I even had to think about this. It's like I write about ancient philosophy. I have to think about a Black Friday sale. And everything was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And, you know, I hated watching those clips on the news of people fighting over a TV.

6:19Those stories of people lining up for hours to get into Walmart or Target or a shopping mall early. But instead of just writing about it, I thought, what can I actually do with my own business? So basically on Black Friday and Cyber Monday for Daily Stoic, we changed the programming like the email that we would send out on those days. And we just did a fundraiser for Feeding America, which is a nonprofit that provides meals to families experiencing hunger here in the United States. I decided to think of a crazy goal. I said, what if we could raise$100 ,000, which would be a million meals. And then I put in the first$10 ,000.

6:53And we did it the next year and the next year and the next year. And cumulatively, since then, we've raised something like a million dollars for Feeding America. That's 10 million meals. That you, people listening to this podcast, following us on social media, getting the email, you did that. We did that together. Did this save the world? No, but it certainly made somebody's world a little better, right? Some family that would have struggled to eat didn't struggle for one meal or two meals or a couple, 10 million meals were provided. That matters. And you know what else it did, though? It made me and my world better because that's what generosity does.

7:35Yeah, it helps the person who receives it, but it also changes you into being the kind of person who does stuff like that. So, yes, this world is filled with overwhelming and intractable problems. We face massive collective action problems, as economists and politicians call them. Systems seem too broken to fix and suffering too vast to address. And yet it falls to each of us to do what we can, where we can, with what we have. Seneca reminds us that every person we meet is an opportunity for kindness. The elderly neighbor sitting alone on their front porch, the parent in the airport trying to wrangle their toddlers and carry-ons through security, The coworker who seems to be overwhelmed.

8:17How are you doing? Do you need anything? Can I help you with that? These opportunities are everywhere, every day. The question is whether we see them, whether we take them. Of course, you don't have to donate to a fundraiser, although I'd love you to donate to this one. As I said, it's dailystoic.com slash feeding. Money isn't the only currency of generosity. You can give time or energy or attention or patience, or as I said, kindness. You can go on hoping or holding your breath until you're blue in the face, Mark Sturelius writes in meditations. People are going to keep doing what they do. If you want to feel good, if you want to see good, you have to do it.

8:53Right? That's how I was feeling a couple weeks ago during the government shutdown and the sort of political escalation. The idea of SNAP benefits being used as political leverage, by the way, to almost complete indifference here in the U.S. and I saw our local food bank was talking about the overwhelming strain that this was putting on them. So Samantha and I, we walked over and we covered a big hole in that budget. And then part of the reason I'm putting this out, part of the reason I wrote an article about this is as I've watched all these different places move up their Black Friday sales, I said, hey, let's move up our food drive too.

9:33So that's what we're doing. We are trying to raise$300 ,000 this year. I put in the first$30 ,000. That will be 3 million meals for families across the country. And you can be one of the people that makes a difference to some of those people. If you head over to dailystoic.com slash feeding, every dollar provides 10 meals. So a small donation makes a big difference. And I'm just, I'm incredibly impressed at the scale they're able to do this. But my overall point, Whether you donate to this or some other thing or you drop off a few cans at a food pantry near you. My point is that it's on us. Like we don't control what's happening globally, but we control how we act locally.

10:11We control who we are. We control what we do. And if you want to feel better, do better. Do more. Give. Like give enough that it hurts and see how good that hurt feels. Do something nice for someone else today. Make life better for them. And I promise it will make you feel better as well. Just reflecting on raising a million dollars is crazy to me. I've sold a lot of books in the last several years, but I think I'm prouder of that than those sales figures, which is ultimately what I mean. You're going to feel best about what you do for others. So I'd love to have you join us. You can donate now at dailystoic.com slash feeding.

10:53I hope to see you in Seattle on the 3rd or Phoenix and San Diego in February. All that's at dailystoiclive.com. And now I got to go take my dog for a walk and hope she passes this thing. I don't have to spend a bunch of money that I could donate at the vet getting you surgery Oreo. That's right. She's excited. All right. Be well, everyone.

11:22Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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