Don’t Let It Change You | How To Actually Be Happier In 2024 (According to the Stoics)

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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. 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.

1:51Don't let it change you. Cato was too good for his own good, some Romans thought. He didn't take bribes. he didn't cook the books, he wasn't motivated by ego, and worse, he seemed to expect others should follow this same moral code. They didn't want to. We can't all be Cato's, went the expression, usually said with a shrug before someone did the wrong thing. So eventually, a group of corrupt Romans contrived to have Cato assigned to a posting in Cyprus, a veritable hotbed of misdeeds and sin. It was a place where politicians got rich, where they had fun, where they lived the high colonial life.

2:27You will come back from there a far more agreeable man and more tame, one of them predicted to Cato. They weren't trying to bribe him, they just wanted to expose him to how things were supposed to be done. They wanted him to get a taste. This is what Marcus Aurelius was warning about in meditations where he talked about imperialization, being stained purple, about being Caesarified. The status quo doesn't like people who buck it. No, the status quo contrives to apply pressure and persuasion on us to get us to go along. It tries to change us, tries to lead us away from these pesky virtues of courage and temperance and justice and wisdom.

3:03We have to be strong like Cato. We have to resist. We have to come back as he did, the same person we were when we left. We have to keep fighting to be the person that philosophy wants us to be. And by the way, we have a really good video and a really good podcast episode all about Cato. If you want to learn more about him, You can check out Five Stoic Secrets from the Man of Principle. I'll link to that. And of course, I have a chapter all about Dear Cato in Lives of the Stoics. So check that out also.

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4:41Go to HelloFresh.com slash Stoic10FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. One box with active subscription. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. That's HelloFresh.com Stoic10FM to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life. Mark Cirelli says that ambition is tying your well-being to what other people say and do. He says sanity is tying it to your own action. Try to want everything to happen the way that it will happen. Very little is needed for the happy life. It's all within yourself.

5:19There's this image that the Stoics were unfeeling and unfun, that they sort of shove everything down, that they're joyless, which couldn't be further from the truth. When people think of Stoicism, I think the last thing they think is happiness. I think to the Stoics, happiness was also the removal of destructive emotions, Things like envy or fear or avarice or aggression or ambition. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've not only written now 10 books about Stoic philosophy, but I'm a real human being for whom happiness is important. Aristotle talks about happiness as eudaimonia, our human flourishing. I think that's the place that Stoicism is trying to get you.

5:55And so in today's episode, we're going to talk about some Stoic strategies for happiness. It doesn't mean exuberant excitement and pleasure. That's not what the Stoics thought of happiness as. We're going to talk about strategies for stoic happiness, what that looked like for stoics.

6:14What is the number one source of our unhappiness? It's focusing on things that we don't control. It's we're worried about this. We're anxious about that. We're hoping that this will happen or that that won't happen. We basically take our chance at happiness and we hand it over to random events. And this is where the key, essentially the premise of stoicism comes in. Epictetus says the chief task in life is to separate things into two buckets, what's in my control and what's not in my control. And he says the only way to happiness is to cease worrying about things which are beyond my power of control.

6:50So when you narrow your focus from the things that everyone thinks about, from the things that everyone worries about, from all the things that are outside your grasp, and you decide to focus instead on what's up to me, you have a much better chance of being happy. Voltaire said, the most important choice you make each day is to be in a good mood. Your mood is something you control. If you decide, hey, I'm gonna be in a good mood today, you have a much better chance of being happy than the person who wakes up and says, well, I hope everything goes right today. And if I get everything that I want, and if nothing bad happens, and if everyone's nice to me, then I can be happy.

7:23Then I can have fun. That is not a recipe for day-to-day dependable happiness. But look, for the Stoics, ultimately what's in our control is our thoughts and our actions. Everything else is up to someone else. Marcus Aurelius says, you have power over your mind, not events. He says, realize this and you will find strength. But I would say, realize this and also you will find happiness. Not just resilience, not just the ability to muddle through, but to say, again, I control my mood. I control what I'm going to do about this. I control this little window of stuff today and I'm just going to crush it there.

7:57That's where I'm going to focus. and because I'm focused there, I know I can make myself happy.

8:05And what I think is one of the best passages in all of meditations, but certainly the most illustrative, Marcus Aurelius says, the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good. And I think if we're shortening that to a mantra, we'd say good character acts for the common good or good character, good deeds. Meaning that you work on yourself, of course, that's a huge part of stoicism, but it's also about what you do for others, whether you're being a positive difference maker in the world. Mark Surrealist refers to the common good something like 80 times in meditations. And so it's really important that we don't see stoicism as this, simply this interior philosophy.

8:41It's about perfecting the self or working on the self so one can make a bigger difference in the world. That's the motto that I think you want to try to live by every single day. You want to say to yourself in every situation, what am I doing for others?

8:58If you want more tranquility, more happiness, Marcus really says you have to do less. You have to say no more. When you eliminate the inessential, the Stoics say you get this double benefit of doing the essential things better. That word less, that's been my word of the year for my wife and I. Less stuff, less commitments, less travel, less drama, less wasted time. Our goal is to eliminate the inessential things so we can do the essential things better. So should you.

9:29People think money will make them happy, which of course it doesn't. Although up to a point, money can contribute to your happiness. But generally, people think if I'm wealthier, I will be happier. Well, I'll tell you how you can become wealthier right now. It's by wanting less stuff, by needing less. Seneca says poverty is not being poor. Poverty is wanting more. And he's not being flippy. He's not trying to say that some struggling mother on welfare does not have it hard. What he's saying is that there are rich people who are very poor and they're poor because they're comparing themselves to other people.

10:02He says they're poor because they're greedy, because they're insatiable, because they think when they get a million more dollars or a billion more dollars, or maybe it has nothing to do with money, maybe it's when they win another Super Bowl, when they get this other thing, then they will be happy, right? So they, again, by focusing on something they don't control or something that's in the future, they've deprived themselves of happiness right now. So your wants and your happiness are in a tension with each other. So if you can decide to be grateful and satisfied and good with what you have now, you have a certain amount of wealth and you have something to be happy for.

10:34Mark Cirilla says, look, we want all this other stuff, but we forget that if we lost what we had right now, we'd be sad. Also, if we didn't have it, but someone gave it to us, we'd be grateful, right? So I think wanting less and being grateful for what you have is a great way to produce happiness now. Epictetus says wealth is not having many possessions, it's having few wants. And again, what do you control, right? You control the want part of things more than you control how much you have.

11:07You can't base your happiness on external approval because the Stokes would say it is firmly outside our dichotomy of control. It's not up to us. Mark Cirelli says that ambition is tying your well-being to what other people say and do, meaning you don't control it, meaning they can take it away from you. They can reject you. They can deprive you of it. It says sanity is tying it to your own action. You have to have the internal compass that says to yourself, I'm doing good work. What I'm doing matters. This is the right thing. This is success. You have to define that for yourself. You can't let other people do it because then you've handed over your happiness, your wealth, everything to somebody else.

11:48the central idea of stoicism is that adversity is unavoidable it is a fact of life the future is uncertain actually the future is certain things are going to go wrong things are going to be difficult you're going to face challenge that's what the stoics knew firsthand that was the central fact of existence to them there was nothing we could do to make it go away they said but we could prepare ourselves, we could strengthen ourselves, we could be ready for that to happen. Epictetus said the whole point of philosophy is to get to a place where whatever happens, you're able to say, this is what I trained for.

12:23So the Stoics were always challenging themselves mentally, physically, spiritually. They were seeking out difficult experiences, trying to get out of their comfort zone to prepare for what could happen. there was a stoic his name was chrysippus and he's supposedly one of the only people to ever die of laughter do you believe that's possible i think chrysippus had a heart attack or was doing whatever synthetic drug was around then and had a good old laugh that that tipped it off you've never laughed so hard you thought you could die no the joke is like the joke partly survives to So apparently he was like sitting on his front porch and a donkey walks up and he starts eating out of the garden.

13:09And the person, you know, rushes up to get their donkey. And he says, does your donkey want some wine to wash down those figs? And then he starts laughing at his own joke. And he laughs so hard that he kills over and dies. So it's kind of the ultimate, like you had to be there because it makes no sense. Okay, Chrysippus, I know what happened. Okay. Because that joke is bad. Yes. That's not a joke is what that is. First of all, let me tell you what's happening across this life. Okay. Everything is shit. Okay. Everything is so, but this is actually my favorite emotion though. Okay. Everything in his life has just exploded and then crumbled to rubble.

13:52And it was that moment, you know, when everything seems like it's just the worst. And, and you have that realization that I'm just going to sit here and, and just, there's nothing to be done anymore. It's all rubble and you're sitting in, in just the grief of it all. And then something silly happens. And you know, it takes, it's like when you laugh after crying a ton or, or, you know, you're sitting in your house, it's been destroyed by a tornado and something silly happens and everyone laughs. When you're laughing in the, in the hospital room after somebody has just died. Or like all this terrible stuff has happened.

14:25And then one more terrible thing happens and you just start laughing maniacally at the absurdity of it. That's exactly what happened to him. And it was just the dumbest thing. Somebody maybe right before that had choked on some, one of somebody he loved choked on wine and died. And he goes, you want some wine with that fig? And died from all the major emotions hitting him at once. I think that's what happened because that's a really bad joke. It's the straw that breaks the camel's back. Yes. Okay. Yes. All right. That's an interesting theory. I hadn't thought of that theory. But it is my favorite emotion is laughter in the midst of despair.

15:01And actually, there's a thing from Seneca where he's talking about like life is terrible. He basically says life is terrible. Yeah. You can cry about it or you can laugh at it. Yeah. Like take your pick. Yeah. It is pretty beautiful and cruel all the time.

15:18Don't try to get everything to happen the way you want it to happen, the Stokes would say. Try to want everything to happen the way that it will happen. Epictetus, who said this, what he meant is that the stronger your expectations, your desires for things to be a certain way, the more likely you are to be disappointed. This actually intersects with Eastern philosophies and Buddhists talk about willful will. When you have expectations, when you have demands, when you have needs, you're likely to be disappointed. If you can live in accordance with nature, the Stokes would say, if you can accept things as they are, if you can make yourself in sync with the logos, you're much more likely to be happy and you're much less likely to be disappointed.

15:57Talking about wanting less, the other path to happiness related to this is the idea of simplification. Marcus Aurelius says, ask yourself, is this essential? Because most of what we want and do and say and get tied up in is not essential. We chase things we don't want. We chase things we don't actually care about. We We make life so much more complicated than it needs to be. When the Stokes talk about living in accordance with nature, I think part of what they're saying, it's not like literal nature, but it is commenting on how unnatural and complicated and busy and frenetic most of our lives are.

16:34And when you simplify, when you remove stuff, you get closer to kind of who you're meant to be and how you're meant to be. I think the pandemic was so powerful in this regard. in March of 2020 when life shut down and suddenly we weren't traveling, we weren't going to meetings, we weren't as busy as we have been our whole lives. We looked around. I mean, my wife and I looked around our farm and we're like, I don't think we've ever been here at this time of year and truly noticed how wonderful it was. So we found these wild blackberry bushes in our backyard. We watched more sunsets in a row than we'd ever seen.

17:07I found out at one point that I'd spent 500 consecutive nights in a row with my children. And I could not have comprehended just how profoundly significant that was, that simplification, that presence, that routine was to my happiness. So by simplifying, by removing all the extraneous, the inessential things, I was reminded of the power and the importance of the essential things. If you want more happiness in your life, start by removing complexity, particularly unnecessary complexity. Very little is needed for the happy life, Marcus Aurelius says. It's all within yourself.

17:52Nobody is more unhappy than the person who's never gone through adversity, Seneca says. He says because they've never been permitted to prove themselves. That's something I try to remind myself when stuff gets hard, when I run into a bunch of obstacles in a row, when it doesn't turn out the way that I want it to go. I'm going, hey, this is an opportunity. This is a chance for me to practice the virtues. That's what the Stoics say. The obstacle is the way it's a chance to practice virtue, to practice excellence. But more importantly, it's a chance for me to prove myself, if only to myself. Yes, of course, I would have liked it to go the way that I wanted it.

18:22And I might feel a little unhappy that it's not that way. But I'd be more unhappy if I never got this chance, if I didn't get this practice, if I didn't get these reps with things not being the way that I wanted them to be. So I embrace that opportunity. I do the practice willingly. I take the rep and I get better for it and ultimately happier for it. When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up.

18:55Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you want to get the email, if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email.

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