Burn this Letter | The Enemy of Happiness

0:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:15Burn this letter. They're wrong. They did you wrong. You know better. You'll show them. So you sit down and you write a text, an email, or as people have done for thousands of years, a letter. And you know what people have also done for thousands of years and what you will almost certainly do as well, you will come to regret it. There's a famous poem taught to young naval officers that offers them rules to follow to succeed in their profession. One of the most important stanzas goes like this. Dost think in a moment of anger, tis well with thy seniors to fight. They prosper who burn in the morning, the letters they wrote overnight.

0:57This is also the very same advice that Athena Doris gave a future emperor, named Octavian. He told him that there was a rule he was always to follow. Whenever you feel yourself getting angry, Caesar, Athenodorus advised, don't say or do anything until you've repeated the 24 letters of the alphabet to yourself. It's not that you should never speak truth to power, it's just you should never do it while you are angry. Do it after you've calmed down. Do it after you've had time to think about it. Do it after you've slept on it. Do it after you've counted the letters in the alphabet. Delay is the remedy.

1:34It is also a key to prosperity and leadership.

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4:16The enemy of happiness. This is from today's entry in the Daily stoic. It's quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for that which we don't have. Happiness has all that it wants and resembles the well-fed. There wouldn't be hunger or thirst. That's Epictetus' Discourses 324. I'll be happy when I graduate, we tell ourselves. I'll be happy when I get this promotion, when this diet pays off, when I have the money that my parents never had. Conditional happiness is what psychologists call this kind of thinking. Like the horizon, you could walk for miles and miles and miles and never reach it.

5:00You'll never get any closer. Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario. As pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chances at happiness here and now. So locate that yearning for more, for better, for someday, and see it for what it is, the enemy of your contentment. Choose it or your happiness. As Epictetus says, the two are not compatible. That's a heavy one, I think, the idea that yearning is the enemy of happiness. Sometimes I'll talk to really successful people who have like a lot of money and be like, what are you doing?

5:51Like, why don't you just relax or whatever? And I always find it fascinating when you hear that they have a number. So maybe they have a million dollars, but their number is$10 million. Maybe they have$10 million dollars or their number is a hundred million dollars. They've told themselves that when they get X, then they'll be okay. Then they'll be good. From a different Zeno, there's this Zeno's paradox, the idea of like, if you're like walking from here to the other side of the room and you go halfway there and then halfway there and then halfway there and then halfway there, they'll never actually arrive, right?

6:27Because it's always half, there's always more, there's always some half left of the distance. But I think that's kind of what yearning is. We tell ourselves, oh, when I get this, when I get this, when I get this, but we never get there, either because it's not actually something that a person can possess or because we move the goal posts. Like, oh, all I want to do is win a championship. And then you do it and then you're, oh, all I want to do is win back-to-back championships to prove it wasn't a fluke. And it's like, oh, but now I want to win it on a different team to prove that it wasn't a fluke there either.

7:02Whatever it is, right? Remove the goalposts. That's the tricky thing about yearning is it never gets there. And I think it's stillness is the key, but there's a quote I love from Stefan Zweig, the novelist. And he says, in the history of conquerors, no conqueror has ever been surfeited by conquests. Alexander the Great said, aren't we going to conquer the world together? And his men said, no, we want to go home. And the truth was, he always would have found something new, something beyond it, always would have kept pushing. And the result of that was he not only lost his life, but I think he lost a lot of happiness as well.

7:48So contentment. And I've read a study many years ago that said like young people associate happiness with accomplishment, older people with contentment. I think they've learned something along the way. It's a hard one lesson, I'm sure. Even if we can't fully internalize it or understand it or accept it now, we can try to approximate it. We can try to incorporate some of it. We can fake it till we make it, which is that we don't need anything. We can be happy now. That doesn't mean that we don't keep trying. Of course we keep trying. Of course we keep doing. But we try to do those things from a place of fullness, from a place of, that'll be a nice extra, as opposed to a place of yearning, that I'll be happy if this, once this, after that.

8:35It doesn't happen, man. It's a myth. It's a shimmer. It's a mirage. You'll get there and you will realize it was a figment of your imagination or worse, your mind will fool you so much you won't even realize you're there. It just feel like, I just got to go a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, and you never arrive. And at the cost comes your life and your happiness. But for people who don't want to do things, this is not a particularly important or tricky subject. For those of us who are ambitious, those of us who are driven, those of us who are talented, it's something we really have to wrestle with.

9:10So I'm wishing you the best. You're enough as you are. Journaling is the enemy of your happiness. Remember that. Be well, everyone. We'll talk soon.

9:43I just wanted to say thank you.