Don’t Let Bad Times Make You A Bad Person | Underrated Stoic Advice For A Better Life (From Seneca)

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1:43Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

2:09Don't let bad times make you a bad person. You see it on the news every day. You see it in traffic. You see it on social media, people being awful, things falling apart, virtue not just in decline, but in an all-out route. We don't control this, but as always, we control how we respond. Will it make us better or worse? Will we be implicated in the ugliness? The real harm Marcus Aurelius reminded himself in his own dark and ugly times was whether he allowed it to affect his character. Bad times can make things hard on us. Bad people can hurt us. But resentment, despair, revenge, these are choices that still belong to us.

2:51So too is the decision to remain decent, to do the right thing, to be a small light in a dark room, as it's been said, or to carry the fire, as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road. The election is not up to us. A pandemic is not up to us. A collapse in public trust, public kindness, public responsibility, these things are not up to us, not as individuals, that is, although of course we all share blame collectively. As individuals, what is up to us is whether these bad times make us a bad person, whether hard events harden our hearts, whether the wrongs of the world make us do wrong. And that's the idea in Right Thing Right Now, that no situation takes away our ability to do what we think is right.

3:40That's what justice is. That's also the idea in The Obstacle is the way, that every obstacle is a chance for us to do right, to be the person we are meant to be, that we're supposed to be, that the world needs us to be. So let's focus on that today.

4:04He was a very famous writer in his own time. So famous that there is a line from one of Seneca's plays, entombed in graffiti on a wall at Pompeii. So he wasn't this obscure, unknown philosopher. In fact, he was known not just as Rome's greatest playwright, but he was Rome's most powerful political broker. He'd had this long, storied, complicated career at the top of Roman politics. Seneca, like all the great Stoics, was not a pen and ink guy. He was a thinker, but he was also a doer. And he can teach us a lot. His interesting life can teach us a lot.

4:42One of Seneca's famous essays is on the shortness of life. And he says, look, life isn't too short. It's that we waste a lot of it. And he said even people who live a long time, their big problem is that all they have to show for it is a number of years. Seneca was in the room where it happened. He was in the arena. He wasn't always perfect. Some people thought he was a massive hypocrite. But what you can't argue is that Seneca wasn't involved in the great moments of his time. It's also interesting to think Seneca is born in a province of the Roman Empire, becomes a wildly popular philosopher in his own time, and then is put to death at the hands of the Roman state.

5:16This should be springing to mind to you the life of another famous philosopher who was born the exact same year as Seneca. I'm talking here about Jesus. And they both die tragically, heroically, magnificently, you might say.

5:32So Seneca has a lot to teach us. First off, about the shortness of life. But he also writes a series of letters. That's Seneca's letters. And he writes a series of essays. He writes a fantastic essay on anger. He writes a fascinating essay on tranquility. And he writes a number of consolations, these notes to people who are grieving about how to work themselves through their grief. My favorite essay from Seneca is his one about tranquility. He has this word that I think about all the time. Seneca said the Greek word for the kind of tranquility he's after is this word euthymia. And he said, euthymia is a sense of the path that you're on in life.

6:06And he said, the ability, the strength, the confidence, the self-awareness to not be distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. He said, especially from those who are hopelessly lost. All we take from Seneca is this sense of euphemia, a sense of why we're here, what we're supposed to be doing, what's important, what's in our control. I mean, that is a massive philosophical contribution and a massive breakthrough. I think about this as a writer. I'm writing my books. I'm in the Ryan Holiday industry, right? What other people are doing, the success they're having, the things they're saying about me, the trends of the moment, right?

6:40None of this pertains to me. None of it should change what I need to wake up and do today. And this is true not just professionally, but personally. It's when we're keeping up with the Joneses. It's when we're comparing ourselves to other people. This is when we steal joy from ourselves. This is when we take our eye off the ball.

6:57I think what struck me so much about Seneca when I read him, this is the first book I read Seneca's letters. You have a friend talking to a friend. And he defines philosophy so excessively. He says, how do I know I'm making progress as a philosopher. He said, I know it because I'm becoming a better friend to myself. So if you think of Stoicism as this stern philosophy, this philosophy that sucks the joy out of it, that's hard, that whips yourself, that is constantly taking stuff from you, you're missing it. Seneca, of all the Stoics, strikes me as the happiest. He's the most Epicurean, I would think.

7:27In fact, that's something else we can take from Seneca. How liberally he quotes Epicurus, his ostensible rival. Seneca said, I'll quote a bad author if the line is good. He says, I want to read like a spy in the enemy's camp. Seneca loved life. He loved ideas. He loved thinking. He loved helping people. He would write to his friend, Lucilius. He said, look, let's have this exchange. I'll send you something every day. You send me something every day. Let's try to find something every single day that makes us a little bit stronger, a little bit wiser, that fortifies us against death or adversity.

7:58That's the path to wisdom. And that's kind of what I built the Daily Stoic around. That's how I built my own philosophical practice. I don't need magical, enormous epiphanies. I don't need to do these huge deep dives. Of course, I can also have those things. I can find one thing a day. That's awesome. And Seneca reminds us that we should linger on the works of these master thinkers, go over them over and over and over again. So my copy of Seneca is well read. My copy of Marcus Aurelius is well read. You got to digest these works. Let them wash over you. Come to them time and time again.

8:32Seneca reminds us that there are temptations out there and he is, I think, corrupted by being in Nero's service. He falls short of his ideals. He's an embodiment of that Upton Sinclair line about it's hard to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding. Other Stokes who were more removed from Nero's service saw more clearly what a threat he was, saw the corruptive power of it, Epictetus being one, Thrasia being another. Seneca flattered himself. He told himself he was making a positive difference, that he was the adult in the room. You know, Seneca shows us how we can fall short of our ideals, but he talks about this too.

9:06It's good to have ideals. It's good to fall short of them. He said it's certainly better than the alternative of not aspiring, not having high standards. So Seneca, the life teaches us something and Seneca, the writer teaches us even more. If you haven't availed yourself of Seneca, you absolutely must. This is just a very surface level, hopefully tease and you'll deep dive into on the shortness of life. You'll read all of his letters. This is just a short collection of them. His many, many essays and his consolations. One of the greatest thinkers to ever live. And he's someone you need to be familiar with.

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