Can You Fight To See Their Side? | Ask DS

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members, or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

2:11One gets the sense that Seneca, like many smart and active people, was often frustrated by other people. It is inevitable that someone like him, someone creating art, actively participating in government, managing properties, etc., would have regularly found his interests and his will thwarted. Perhaps a neighbor opposed some change he was making to his land, or an intriguing enemy at the palace sought to undermine him with the emperor. Maybe his brother jostled for an inheritance. Maybe he bumped into a rude person in the street. These are timeless and common occurrences, and quite naturally, they are prone to make us angry, especially if we impute the least charitable motivations on the other party.

2:56My neighbor is trying to screw me over. So-and-so wants my job. My brother is up to his old tricks. This guy is a selfish jerk. When we think this way, we get angry. It's hard not to, which is why Seneca, from experience, said that we have to try to resist. Instead, we should try to go through life like a lawyer, or rather a public defender. We must, he said, plead the case of the absent defendant despite our own interests. That is, really take the time to think about what is motivating other people. Take the time to act as if we were trying to help them escape punishment from the judge and jury that is the emotional and vindictive part of our mind.

3:41Oh, he really just wants what's best for everyone. My brother doesn't know any better. This guy didn't mean to bump into me. He's just having a hard day. Don't just fight to see the worst. Fight to see their side. When we do this, when we give people the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence instead of the presumption of guilt and ill motives, everything relaxes. We can forgive. We can find common ground. We can focus on what is actually important, our own behavior.

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5:48Well, it's great to be here. Thank you all. Do you want me to stand to show people's best? Do you want me to stand? I want to stand. All right. How do you want to start this? I'll go ahead and get you kicked off. In your opinion, how is stoicism different differ from profession to profession, for instance, sports versus the military? Yeah, I think the core stoicism Epictetus, the great Stoic, he says, you know, the chief task in life is to separate things into two categories, what's in our control and what's outside of our control. So, I think whatever profession we're talking about, what those externals are, what's in our control, is going to differ from one to the other, but the fundamental task of saying, hey, I don't control what happens, I control how we respond to what happens.

6:35This is the task. This is the job. So I think when I'm talking sports teams or military or insurance salesmen, you know, the domains are going to differ very widely. But at the end of the day, I think, you know, sort of performance is performance. Maximizing one's potential is maximizing one's potential. focusing on what one controls is the chief task. So I see stoicism, I think part of the reason it works so well is that it's not dependent on what you do exactly, but how you adapt the principles or the ideas to what you do. Thank you. Yeah. I have a question, Ryan. All right. I think when you are talking about, you know, how we, stoicism being how we control how we respond, and I think we live in a society now where people very much embrace kind of feeling your emotions and embracing your emotions.

7:33So how do we build stoicism with, I guess, embracing those emotions, which we have instead of kind of tampering them down? No, it's a tension. And I think, unfortunately, when we hear the word stoic, we tend to think of the lowercase word stoic, which means surpassing emotion, invulnerable, robotic, etc. One of the great tragedies of both the word Stoic and the word Capricorn in the English language is that it's a total perversion of what the actual philosophies would be about. So we make a distinction between lowercase stoicism, which is maybe even the character that all of you deal with is lowercase stoic.

8:12I stuff it all down. I suppress the emotions. I don't feel things, I just endure we contrast that with the uppercase stoicism which is the actual philosophy which is based around the four virtues of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom it's a robust way of living and when we think about who the actual stoics were these are people that got married these are people that did great at their jobs these are people that raised children these are people that wrote great works of literature and art So they weren't just sort of nothing matters, I don't care, I sort of take things as they come. That's not what the actual Stoics were in practice.

8:52And so I do think it's important that we, one, push back on the stereotype, and then two, that we make another distinction, or what I try to make, which is having the emotion and then acting in the sway of that emotion. So being angered or outraged by something is different than sending the angry email, right? Or acting or reacting emotionally in the moment, not fully thinking through the consequences of what one's doing or how one is going to feel about this later. So I think if we can make a distinction between feeling the emotion and then acting out in that emotion, I think we're getting closer to what maybe the sort of modern conception of what stoicism should be.

9:41And I tend to think of it as how do I process those emotions? So I'm feeling X. Why am I feeling X? what is the best or the healthiest or the most appropriate, the most effective way to deal with that emotion. And it's usually not vomiting it all over the person next to you or sort of flying off the handle. And so I don't think the Stoogs were emotionless, but they did try to be driven less by emotion, and that distinction is a really important one. and the problem actually with never feeling stuff and stuffing it down is that I find it eventually does come out, it comes due but there's interest attached or it's even less control than it should have been and so I don't think stoicism as being emotionless but I do try to think about it as being less driven by emotion certainly less instructive emotions or the Stokes refer to these as the passions and being in the sway of the passions is usually never the place where afterwards we're like, I'm so glad I did that.

11:04Hello. So one of the biggest challenges in the military is the work-life balance. We hear this talk about a lot, so I was wondering if you could just kind of speak to the still at the viewpoint of that? Yeah, it's a timeless issue. There's actually a line in meditation. So Mark Serious, the most powerful man in the world, 2 ,000 years ago was writing these notes to himself. He goes, you know, stop being bounced around. And he says, stop being all about business. Right? And so I think we can go in two directions. We can be all about business, or we can have no space for business because our personal lives are a mess or a muck.

11:43I do like the idea of balance. I like the idea of tension. I think people tend to have professional goals. I want to get to this rank. I want to make this amount of money. I want to have this kind of life. I think we're less likely, unfortunately, or less prone to creating goals for our personal life. So one of the other interesting parts in meditation is Marcus says, you know, you're trying to be a better wrestler. but not a better friend. He says, not a better forgiver of faults, not a better friend in tight places. And so I think the idea of like, well, what are you working on? Are you working only on your professional development?

12:27Are you also working on your personal development? And I tend to find that when we're working on both, they help each other. And I'd probably argue that personal development helps you professionally more than professional development transfers over personally. So I kind of think about my goals or who I want to be or how I want my life to look as kind of a couple of things that are in tension with each other. But understanding that if I go too far in one direction, it comes at the expense of another one, which ultimately harms me in all capacities. So, you know, if my personal life is ordered and peaceful and productive and happy, like when I sit down to write in the morning, I'm coming at that from a better place.

13:15But also if I'm procrastinating, putting off, you know, not being my best self professionally, I bring those feelings of inadequacy or frustration or guilt. I bring those home. And so I kind of think about it that way as a tension. as opposed to having just some really clear professional goals. I have a sense of what I want my life to look like day to day, and I try to keep that in balance with each other, if that makes sense.

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