Can You Do This Even Here? | It's In Your Self-Interest

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

0:14Ryan Holiday: Can you do this even here? It was one of the noisiest places in the noisiest city in the world. It was big enough that it would stun you even now. The baths of Diocletian in ancient Rome could accommodate more than 3 ,000 people at a time. People from all over the empire came there to wash off, to work out, to socialize, to primp and relax. Seneca found the noise of the baths intolerable. He describes the sound of fat men being massaged, people jumping in the water, obnoxious people in love with their own voices, vendors hawking their wares, even a thief being arrested outside. It was loud enough, he said, to make you hate your own ears.

0:54Ryan Holiday: So you might think that in order to write, which he was desperately trying to do, he needed to run away from it all. Perhaps he headed out to his country estate or got up early or stayed up late to skip the noise in the crowds. On the contrary, Seneca sought those baths out precisely because they were noisy. With enough practice, he said he found he could think anywhere. He could find stillness and peace anywhere. And so can we. Stillness is not something we just have. It's not a product of environmental conditions being just right, or if it is, we're going to be very vulnerable. No, stillness is something we cultivate inside ourselves.

1:33Ryan Holiday: Marcus Aurelius agreed. He said that he could retreat inside his own soul anytime he wanted. He knew that serenity and tranquility are an interior state of being. By the way, I wrote a whole book about this. It's called Stillness is the Key, and it opens with this scene from Seneca. I actually was just at the baths in Rome recently and standing outside those baths. It was just a fascinating glimpse into what Seneca was talking about. You grab your signed copy of Stillness is the Key at Stuart.DailyStoic.com.

2:09Ryan Holiday: We just got back from an amazing vacation in Italy. I'll bring you some clips from it over the next couple weeks. I recorded a bunch of stuff while we were there, although it was as hot as it has literally ever been. It's one of the best family trips we've ever had. And we stayed in this amazing palazzo that we booked on Airbnb. It was like 500 years old. It had all these Roman funerary headstones in it, which is this crazy Memento Mori thing. It was like staying in a museum. The hosts were incredible. They lovingly restored this place. They took amazing care of it. And by listing their place on Airbnb, they get to share this amazing experience with people from all over the world and get funds to put towards upkeeping and restoring their place.

2:52Ryan Holiday: If you're planning a trip this summer, it's worth considering listing your place on Airbnb. It can be a great way to help offset the cost of your vacation and earn a little extra money to put towards your next adventure. Your place might be worth more than you think. And all you gotta do is go to airbnb.com slash host to find out more. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You've probably heard of today's sponsor. You've almost certainly heard me talk about going to therapy. and you've probably heard about it on this podcast because I've been going to therapy longer than I've been doing Daily Stoic and BetterHelp has been a sponsor of the Daily Stoic podcast basically since we started.

3:30Ryan Holiday: More than 6 million people have used BetterHelp globally and you can check out the reviews for yourself at betterhelp.com slash reviews to see how amazing their customer reviews are. People are getting better with BetterHelp. BetterHelp has an average live therapy session rating of 4.9 out of 5 on over 1.7 million client session reviews. This is feedback from people who have actually used the service. And if you're ready to give therapy a try for yourself, BetterHelp makes it easy to get started. You ask a couple questions, they match you with a therapist based on your needs, and you can switch at any time if it's not the right fit.

4:10Ryan Holiday: Just visit betterhelp.com slash dailystoicpod, betterhelp.com slash dailystoicpod.

4:21Ryan Holiday: It's in your self-interest. This is an entry from The Daily Stoic. I realized I'm recording at my house. I ran upstairs and I grabbed a copy of The Daily Stoic off the shelf. I was looking for one. And I think I found a first edition because it doesn't say bestseller list on it. It doesn't say how many copies were sold. And it's kind of got these yellowed pages. So pretty cool. This would have been the first edition that came out in 2016. Obviously, we've since printed millions of copies. It's in like 30 languages. You can even grab a leather edition at store.dailystoic.com. But I'll get to the entry, I promise.

4:56Ryan Holiday: Today's quote is from Seneca's Moral Letters. Therefore, explain why a wise person shouldn't get drunk, not with words, but with the facts of its ugliness and offensiveness. It's most easy to prove that the so-called pleasures, when they go beyond proper measures, are but punishments. Is there a less effective technique to persuading people to do something than yelling at them? Is there anything that turns people off more than abstract notions? That's why the Stoics don't say, stop doing this, it's a sin. Instead, they say, don't do this because it will make you miserable. They don't say pleasure isn't pleasurable.

5:35Ryan Holiday: They say endless pleasures become its own form of punishment. Their methods of persuasion hew the line in the 48 Laws of Power, appeal to people's self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude. If you find yourself trying to persuade someone to change or to do something differently, remember what an effective lever self-interest is. It's not that this or that is bad, it's that it's in their best interest to do it a different way and show them, don't moralize. And think about what would happen if you apply this line of thinking to your own behavior. I've sometimes said the difference between Stoicism and Christianity is the Christian argument is like, hey, don't do these sins.

6:20Ryan Holiday: Don't violate these 10 commandments or you could go to hell. And I realize this is a simplification, just bear with me. But the Stoic argument is, hey, if you do these things, and there's a similar a probably list of things to do and not do. You will live in a kind of hell, right? The Stoics certainly would have saw people get ahead doing bad things, but they also would have seen how they pay for those quote unquote successes, right? That these were some of the most miserable people. Certainly this is what Epictetus realizes living in Nero's court. He goes, oh man, these people weren't lucky. They're not getting away with anything.

6:59Ryan Holiday: It's horrible to be them. I wouldn't want to be them at all. I'm obviously thinking about this now that I have kids. When you forbid someone from doing something, or you just criticize something, what you're not doing is explaining the why. You're not demonstrating the why. And the stoic argument is like, look, when you do something and you experience that bit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but sometimes the shame or what you had to do to get it or the wrong you committed to get it, that endures. Meanwhile, the other side of the argument the Stoics would say is that when you do something hard or you resist or you push forward, that labor passes quickly, but the pride in it remains.

7:46Ryan Holiday: The good lasts a little bit longer. You know, the Stoics would have tried to point out, yeah, look, I'm not saying that it's not fun to drink, but you got to think about what you're going to feel like tomorrow. You got to think about the road you're going down. I was just talking to someone about this, the idea of justice. You know, he was talking about this like bit of paperwork he had to fill out. And, you know, if he put one number, he had to pay a certain amount of tax. If he moved the number a little lower, it was less tax. And we weren't just talking about whether that was the right thing to do or not, or whether you would get caught or not.

8:20Ryan Holiday: But again, kind of person do you become? Kind of habit are you rebuilding? This matters too. Maybe karma exists. Maybe you will go to hell for it, but is it creating a kind of hell here, making you a hellish person, right? Are you actually getting away with it? Are you paying for it in another way? That's the question I want to leave you with today. That's to me, the Stoic argument. That's what so struck me about the Stoics earlier is they're they're making a pretty self-interested case, a pretty logical case for these things. Because they saw it up close and personal. They know what happens when you go down that road.

9:00Ryan Holiday: The choice of Hercules that I built the Four Virtues series around. Seems like the road of vice is more fun than the road of virtue, but in the end, it isn't.

9:14Ryan Holiday: Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. If you don't know this, You can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoke.com slash email.

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