Don’t Say You’re One Of These | Stick With Just The Facts

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2:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

2:41Don't say you're one of these. We study philosophy, we discuss philosophy, we admire philosophers, But what should we not do? Thomas Wentworth Higginson would write that according to Epictetus, no man should ever profess to be a philosopher, but that each should leave his character to be inferred from his actions. Cato didn't write any works of philosophy, but he was widely admired as one of the greatest books. Epictetus' lectures were recorded and published by one of his students. But it's the example of his life rising from slavery and overcoming literal torture to become a great man worthy of teaching an emperor that makes these works worth reading.

3:22Gregory Hayes, a translator of Epictetus, our favorite, we even published our own edition of his meditations, he'd point out that Marcus never explicitly calls himself a Stoic or a philosopher. But of course, he was unmistakably a Stoic, perhaps the most famous one who ever lived, not only due to the private thoughts he put down in meditations, but also how he comported himself as the emperor of Rome. And what of Higginson himself? This was a man who translated the discourses of Epictetus, sure, but he proved himself worthy of Stoicism with his fierce advocacy for abolition in the 19th century, by leading black troops in the American Civil War, by fighting for women's rights and labor rights, by discovering and helping publish a shy poet named Emily Dickinson, by calling for the rights of Russian serfs and religious equality.

4:09The point is you don't need to call yourself a Stoic. You must act like a Stoic. Let other people worry about labels while you worry about the work. Look, if you want to learn more about Stoicism, if maybe this has just got forwarded to you and you're learning more about the philosophy, you can check out our Stoicism 101 course. I'll link to that in today's show notes. You can grab it at store.dailystoic.com.

4:43Stick with just the facts. This is the August 9th entry in the Daily Stoic. 366 meditations on perseverance, wisdom, and the art of living. You can grab a premium leather edition. You can grab signed editions at store.dailystoic.com. Our quote today is from Marcus Aurelius' 849. Don't tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. It has been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you. This is the report. The report wasn't that you've been harmed. I see that my son is sick, but not that his life is at risk. So always stay within your first impressions. Don't add to them in your head.

5:25And this way, nothing can happen to you. At first, this can seem like kind of the opposite of everything you've ever been taught. Don't we cultivate our minds and our critical thinking skills precisely so that we don't accept things at face value? Yeah, most of the time. But sometimes this approach can be counterproductive. What a philosopher also has the ability to do, as Nietzsche put it, is to stop courageously at the surface and to see things in plain objective form. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, the Stokes are superficial, he said, out of profundity. Today, while other people are getting carried away, that's what you're going to practice.

6:04a kind of straightforward pragmatism, seeing things as their initial impressions make them. I wrote this back in 2015 before I had kids. And there's something about having kids that really forced me to practice this better, right? Especially where he says, and I don't think it's a coincidence, Mark's realist is talking about this, right? Because what you're constantly inclined to do as a parent is extrapolate. What does this mean? What if they keep doing this? What's going to happen next, right? And so he's saying, you know, my son is sick, but not that his life is at risk. And you can imagine for Marcus Rios, who buries multiple children, what an anxious, worried mess this would have made him at the first sign of a cough or a sniffle or a fever.

6:48Is this it? Is this the big one, right? We were probably like all like this during COVID. Why do I feel this way? The allergies suddenly mean you have COVID and then you're going to end up on a ventilator, right? The mind can run crazy because we can't just stick with things as they are. Part of us is extrapolating what they mean, how we're going to respond to this, what it's going to cost us with the worst case scenario. A psychologist called this catastrophizing. It's this tendency to not stick with things as they are. You know, your kid falls, right? They've fallen and you currently don't know anything else, but you're like, oh my God, there's going to be so hurt.

7:22They're going to be upset. They're going to cry and then I'm going to have to comfort them and then people are going to judge me and then I got to go. or your kid smacks their brother and you go, if I don't nip this in the butt, if I don't teach them that this is wrong, they're going to think it's okay to hit him. And then they're going to do this. And then they're going to do this. And then they're going to do this. And then they're going to end up living under a bridge somewhere. And I'm going to be a failure as a parent. Everyone's going to judge, right? It's this running part of our mind. This is the part of the mind that Seneca was talking about when he said, we suffer more in imagination than in reality.

7:53That's not to say that things are never serious, right? That the sickness never results in serious sickness, that slander doesn't have consequences, and that you might not have to speak up or speak out about things. Of course. It's just saying that that will reveal itself in due time. Part of our proactiveness, our on-top-of-it-ness, is actually at a disadvantage because it's jumping to conclusions, right? The additional information will reveal itself. Let's pause. Mark Staviles tells us in another passage that we always have the ability to have no opinion. But maybe we could just say, like that famous Zen expression about wait and see, let's just wait and see a sec, right?

8:35Let's wait and see a sec. Let's stick with the facts for now. Stick with what we know for now. Leave things as they are. Stay courageously at the surface. Don't delve beneath just yet. Don't run it through your machine that spits out the most likely scenario just yet. Stay superficial out of profundity. Stay disciplined here. Get your mind in check. Get your assumptions in check. Don't let things race just yet. Calm down. Think about it. Look at it. Wait and see. let it develop and then go from there. And this isn't something I'm great at as a parent. It's something I'm struggling with that I'm continuing to look at, that I'm continuing to work on as must you.

9:25But I certainly catch myself when I'm not doing it and I'm well aware of the consequences that it causes me. So that's today's message and I'll talk to you all again soon. 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 dailystoic.com slash email.