Enjoy These Moments While You Can

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1:20Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

1:58Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. I've been talking about this a little bit as I sort of reflect on the different phases, different eras, if you will, the books that I've done. In 2018 or so, I was sort of just coming off the success of a bunch of stuff in a row. Ego's Enemy had come out, The Daily Stoic had come out, Perennial Seller had come out. I think Conspiracy had just come out. This is when my books were just really starting to go. So I was doing a lot of talks. I had my marketing company. I just had my first son and we were planning for our second.

2:36I just had like a lot going on. And I was a bit overwhelmed and I was certainly overcommitted. And sometime around the summer of 2018, I went up to Portland, Oregon to talk at the World Domination Summit. My friend Chris Guillebeau is the creator of that. I think it was the second to last year, maybe the last year. He invited me and I was just beginning to work on the book that would become Stillness is the Key. It was this awesome conference, basically built around this question, like, how do you live a remarkable life in a conventional world? But what I was really thinking about is how do you cultivate quiet moments of reflection and stillness while living a remarkable life?

3:13and the moments that give us time and space for gratitude in our life, where we have the ability to see the big picture, where we can get perspective, where we can have the breakthroughs that we need to have. And as it happened, not long after this, in summer, fall of 2019, I was on a walk with my family and I had the idea for what would become the Virtue Series. If I hadn't gone for this hike, if I hadn't created a little bit more work-life balance, If I hadn't done the stuff I was talking about in this talk, I don't know if that whole series would have happened. So this is a talk that I guess it's, I can't believe it, I'd say it's six years old, but it set up so much in my life.

3:54I thought it was an interesting insight into sort of me as a work in progress, which I am and you are and we all are. And that's what stoicism is about to me. I just have this lucky ability to kind of work it out on stage, work it out on the page, work it out on this podcast. and I appreciate all of you listening. So thanks to Chris and WDS for having me out in 2018. Thanks to my editor, Nikki Papadopoulos, who had pushed me to do this talk. And I think she was Chris's editor, so she had helped set it up. Yeah, thanks to the audience for indulging me, and thanks to you for listening. So here is me talking about the importance of quiet moments.

4:33I had this belief that the quiet moments are the best moments in life. There's this wonderful speech you can see of Mr. Rogers. He gave an acceptance speech for winning an Emmy in 1997. And he gets up on stage. And so obviously, this being the Emmys, it's filled with talented, successful people. And he gets up there and he gives this magnificent speech. He says, look, everyone's going to come up here and they're going to talk. I'm going to do the opposite. He's like, I'd like everyone in this room to spend 10 seconds sitting silently to yourself. And all you can think about is someone who means a lot to you, someone who helped you along the way in your journey.

5:07And you can see the uncomfortable faces of everyone in the room. Again, these are people whose default is to do, not to sit and think, not to be sort of alone and quiet with themselves. Like if I was to ask you to stop for 10 seconds, this room would get real awkward real quickly. And you can see it in the video. It's really spectacular. And one of the things that's so wonderful about Mr. Rogers, such an important lesson that he taught kids, was that kind of quiet, that stillness, this sort of slow, methodical, deliberate, sort of patient sort of understanding that sort of permeates his show. And he said that his sort of mission in life was to give people more of these quiet moments.

5:49And my favorite quiet moment, I get up early most mornings on my farm and my son and I would go for a walk. We sort of walk on the dirt roads around our neighborhood. It snowed in Austin earlier this year, which is super weird. It never snows in Texas. So we go out for this walk, and look, he eats his applesauce, and he doesn't really appreciate what this moment is. But to me, it's this sort of stillness, this quiet reflection. I'm not checking email. I'm not listening to a podcast. I'm not doing anything. I'm just sort of fully very much in the moment. And we go, and we see the animals. Sometimes we see armadillos and deer.

6:24We go see our donkeys. We pet the cows. We just sort of go and experience nature for a moment. If we have time, we stop at the lake and sometimes we'll fish or we'll just sort of sit there and watch the sunrise. And it's this really, again, it's a sort of incredible experience. It's my favorite part of my day. And so when I was prepping this talk, I was sort of thinking, well, if these moments are so important and these are the moments that give us sort of profound meaning and sort of gratitude for what we have, well, what prevents them? Why don't we have more of them. They're something that we can access at any moment.

6:54We could always have. They don't cost any money. And yet, they're sort of exceedingly rare in our lives. And so, what prevents these quiet moments? Well, one of the Stoics has this great line. He says, we sell things of great value for very little and vice versa. What he means is that we give up our time, which is this priceless asset, for things that don't really matter. And meanwhile, these very valuable experiences, is since they don't seem like they cost money, we don't value them. We sort of say yes to things instinctively we do because that's what we're supposed to do, but we don't actually question what they're worth.

7:30Seneca talks about how if your neighbor encroached on your property or someone stole money out of your wallet, you would be immediately upset and you would defend yourself and you would demand that that cease, that reparations be made. And yet we let people steal our time from us and we don't think twice about it, right? If your neighbor built his fence on your property, you would object. But if your neighbor came over and wasted 30 minutes of your time talking about something that you didn't want to talk about, you just politely nod your head, right? And this is the paradox because time is the most valuable resource.

8:03You could always get more property, but you can't get more time. And so he talks about how we sort of lay waste to our own lives. He says, you know, life is long, we have so much time, but we also waste so much of it. And again, this is sort of the paradox of it and how little we have left to ourselves because of the things that we do. And when I think about one of the reasons that I do as much as I do, one of the things that I think drives me, probably destructively so, is comparisons with other people, right? I see what other people are doing. I see how much money they're making or the places that they're going or the awards that they're winning or the cool accomplishments that they're racking up.

8:43And I go, well, I should have that too, right? I want what they have. I should compete with them. This is how I'm going to get better. And Seneca has this unique definition of tranquility, which in Greek he translates as euthymia. And he talks about how we're sort of on this path and we're walking on our path, but then there's all these paths that crisscross ours. And that this is confusing and overwhelming, right? If there was just one set of footprints, we'd know where to go. But since there's other footprints, it makes it harder. And he talks about how tranquility, how real peace is sort of having a confidence in yourself and the path that you're on.

9:19And he says to not be led astray by the paths that crisscross yours, that go close to yours but ultimately are headed in a very different direction. And so it's this question that I think we need to spend those quiet moments thinking about, this idea of like, what is my path? What am I actually trying to do? I talk to lots of people and I go, look, what does an ideal day in your life look like? What are you trying to get to? Not what are you trying to accomplish, but what's the reward for all this? What does it look like in the future? If you could choose exactly what a day in your life looked like, what would it look like?

9:53And then the things that you're saying yes to, the things that you're doing, the people you're comparing yourself against, you've got to ask yourself, am I actually getting closer or further away from that, right? So this is really hard, especially for someone like me. When I get an opportunity, it might pay extraordinarily well or it might take me to a cool place. Well, now I have to go, okay, but does this get me more of those quiet moments? Does it get me more moments by myself or at my house? Does it get me closer to what I want my life to look like? And then you have to have this sort of discipline to actually, again, be disciplined about your discipline.

10:27And so who are your peers, right? Making sure that you're not comparing yourself against people who are running very different races, right? If you're doing a marathon and someone comes by sprinting 200 or 300 yards, they're going to beat you, but you're on a totally different race. And so one of the things I learned as a runner is that I've got to know how far I'm running, what pace I'm keeping, and then I have to tune everyone else out unless those two things are in perfect alignment, and they rarely are. And so again, this sense of the race that you're on, the people that you should actually be measuring yourself against, gives you some of this clarity.

11:01And ultimately, ideally, there's no comparison at all. You're comparing yourself only against the potential that you have, the thing that you are trying to do, the person that you actually want to be. What I love so much about being a writer is that at the end of the day, it's just me and a blank page. I just sit there. And the struggle of the job, the leap you're making is trying to get this thing that's in your head on the page exactly how you want it to be. In my case, it's often on a note card. As I was backstage, I was scribbling things on note cards, working on my next book. So again, this is the process.

11:36I'm not thinking about what other writers are doing. I'm not thinking how many copies other writers are selling or where their placement is relative to me on a bestseller list. I'm focused on what I'm trying to do on sort of being the best version of myself within that. And then, of course, if I'm honest, what really prevents the quiet moments is not simply a sort of drive or ambition. It's this device in our pocket, right? I use this app called Moment that tells me how much time I've spent on my phone every day. It's not a nice indictment typically, right? And so you'll see here, this is me. It's not totally accurate.

12:11For instance, to me, if I'm listening to music, but my phone is in my pocket, am I really on my phone? Or if I'm listening to a podcast, am I really on my phone even though I haven't seen it? I don't think so. But the point is, this is way too much time that I'm spending on my phone. And then I wonder why I don't have quiet moments, why I'm not at peace, right? Can you imagine anything less philosophical, less sort of bigger picture than, you know, having this as your home screen, sort of missed calls and alerts and text messages and push notifications from stupid apps you never should have downloaded?

12:43You know, no wonder we don't feel at peace. No wonder we don't have clarity and we can't see the big picture. We carry around, we pay a lot of money every month to have something that actively gets in the way of that, right? Again, an Apple Watch, do you really need an alert to tell you that half the United States is going to be cold? Probably not. And what action are you actually going to take on this information, right? But one of the best decisions that I made is I sort of deleted every push notification. I have no social media apps on my phone. I might use it sort of deliberately when I'm sitting at my desktop when I'm working.

13:17but I'm not going to have this sort of thing just burning in my pocket knowing that, hey, instead of being here and being quiet and focusing and thinking, I should just pull this up and see if anyone texts me. I should just see if anyone called me, right? And again, as a parent, this is extraordinarily difficult, right? The idea of just sort of watching a kid who's just experiencing the moment, who's fully present, this feels like the perfect opportunity to take this phone out, right? Even if it's just to take a picture of it, instead of experiencing it, the phone tells us we should take a picture of it because that somehow that's experiencing it, right?

13:50If we didn't take a picture of it, it didn't happen, right? And so again, these are the kinds of things that prevent us from those moments. The amount of friends that I have that I'll talk to at nine in the morning and they're already upset because something that somebody else who's not them tweeted angrily this morning. And again, this is preventing them from doing the things that they should be doing. This is a nice quote from some Facebook data scientists. They're like, Look, we get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to make you spend more time on Facebook. It's like a casino. The reason there's no clocks in the casino, the reason it's at the perfect temperature, the reason they're giving you free drinks, the reason there's not many mirrors around, is to make you feel like you're in some special place that feels so good that you lose all track of time and all sense of yourself, and then you keep doing what they want you to do.

14:37And Facebook is the same way. Look, the news business is the same way. Look, we've got to stop watching the news.

14:49I'm not saying we shouldn't be politically active. I went to the immigration march yesterday. I'm not saying we shouldn't take a stand on things that matter, but there's a certain amount of ego in thinking that we have to be the perfectly informed person who knows of everything that's happening everywhere in the world, or otherwise someone else might seem smarter than us, right? And again, what we should be thinking about is this bigger picture. This is the blue marble photo. It's one of the most famous photos of all time. How crazy is it that it wasn't until 1972 that it was even possible for humans to have this viewpoint, right?

15:21We now have it, right? And the astronauts who saw the Earth from this perspective for the first time, almost every person that's been in space has spoken about this. It's called the overview effect. And they say when you see the world from this distance, all your sort of petty cares and concerns go away. all the squabbles, all the fighting. You feel this sort of immense kinship with other people. You realize we're all sort of in this same thing together. One of the astronauts, Edgar Mitchell, says it makes you want to grab a politician by the scruff of their neck. He says, look at this, you son of a bitch.

15:52What are you doing? Right? And again, this is the bigger picture. This is what we should be taking time to consider, not the minute by minute breakdown of everything that's happening in the world. Again, I love sports and it occurred to me that it's perfectly fine to watch football on Sunday, but why am I watching SportsCenter on Tuesday speculating about what may or may not happen on Sunday? It's going to figure itself out.

16:24Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastrop County. I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

17:10We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

17:51Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

18:01So going out into nature, experiencing these bigger things is really important. You know, Marcus Aurelius talked about his version of the overview effect. He says, you know, watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself alongside them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other. For such thoughts, wash away the dust of earthly life. They wash away petty jealousies, feelings of insecurity, feelings of needing to do more and more to be valuable. It allows you to see that bigger picture and calm down. There's a national park in Texas right outside Dallas. If you guys are ever there, you should 100 % go to this.

18:38It's called Dinosaur National Monument. And you can wade out into this river and you can stand in a footprint left by a dinosaur 110 million years ago. This, of course, being Texas, there's a creationist museum not far from it that pretends that this didn't happen. But, you know, when I stood in this footprint for the first time, this sort of immense feeling of calm washed over me, this sort of sense of, in some ways, the pointlessness of chasing some enormous legacy or fame. I mean, this dinosaur left more of a legacy for a longer amount of time than even the most successful person alive on the planet right now.

19:12And I get a similar feeling again when I walk out on my farm. This is my donkey. His name is Buddy. I walk out and see him and you know sometimes he comes and sees me when I saw him for the first time He's just sort of standing there not doing anything. I mean on the one hand So donkeys are livestock guarding animals So having them around for keeps away bobcats and coyotes and mountain lions But basically he's just standing there and and you know, I'm sort of laughing You know the stupid animal is just standing there. What's he doing? Been there. This has been like 20-30 minutes. I'm just watching he hasn't moved and then it occurred to me that he was doing his job, right?

19:44Like, as an animal, his main job is just not to die in the course of a given day. If he doesn't die, that's success, right? That's a good day. You know, he's not, like, comparing himself against, like, the neighbor's donkeys. You know, he's just chill. He's just alive, right? My therapist said to me one time, she said, it's human being, not human doing for a reason, right? And animals have sort of embraced this much more easily than humans have because we have this gift curse of self-consciousness, of self-awareness. And so we can compare ourselves to other people, and we can think about things like our potential and whether we're doing what we're supposed to be doing and whether we're doing enough and whether we look good enough, whether other people are better than us.

20:30These are the sort of feelings of churning anxiety that I think work against us, that make us say no to the quiet moments that are so accessible, that are there for us if we just choose to take them. So the question then to sort of bring this full circle for me is, so why did I say yes? First off, I love Chris. I love WDS. I love what all you guys are doing. This is an amazing audience. You should give yourself a round of applause. You've done an amazing job the last couple of days.

21:01But one of the reasons I do say yes to things is that it takes me out of my comfort zone and it does expose me to things that I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. And earlier this February, when I was in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, it was February, it was freezing cold, but I got up and I went for a run. I was about two or three miles in, and I found this small cemetery, and there's some Revolutionary War veterans buried there. So right in the middle of the neighborhood, it was really incredible. It's sort of dusted with snow, and there's Revolutionary War graves and early American settlers there and early patriots of this country.

21:37It was really spectacular. And then this one gravestone caught my eye. It was a woman who died in 1805, so she was born long before America was even a country. And what she has carved on her tombstone is this incredible verse. She says, verses on tombstones are but idly spent. The living character is the monument. And so there were a lot of spectacular monuments in this cemetery. There was obelisks and statues and beautiful gravestones. And this sort of subtle one is in a way an indictment of all of that. It's an indictment of the idea that we need to build this monument to ourselves, that our fame matters, that being better than other people matters.

22:17What really matters is who you are in life and what you do for and with other people. That's what she was saying. Your character is what matters. The choices that you make matter. The things you believe matter. And I carry this coin sort of along these lines in my pocket. It's got a famous piece of Renaissance art on it. The Renaissance style is called vanitas. And it's this idea to sort of sober us and remind us of the vanity of so much of what we chase. It's always got these three elements, vanitas. It's got time, that's the hourglass. It's got the skull, that's death. And then the flower, which symbolizes life.

22:53And memento mori just means remember that you will die. Remember that you are mortal. And on the back, it has a line from Marcus Aurelius, which you see here. He says, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. And what he means is that life is very fragile. It can be taken from us at any moment. We could disappear at any moment. We could get hit by a bus. We could get a cancer diagnosis. This speech could be the last speech that I give. My flight home today could be the last flight I ever go. It could be my last conversation with my wife. It could be the last email that I send.

23:24So some of these things are trivial. some of them are important, but how I do them matters, right? What I do matters. And when you think about the choices that you make, when you think about what you think about in the light of our sort of hanging or looming mortality, it puts them in a different perspective, right? If today was your last day on earth, you might do all of the same things that you're going to do today, but you would do them very differently, right? You would treat some things more seriously, and you would let other things slide. I remember when I was at American Apparel, I decided to leave.

24:01I'd been really miserable, but I had about six months left that I had to work there. The day I told myself I was leaving, all the things that made me so miserable disappeared, right? Because now I realized that I wasn't gonna endure them forever, that they didn't really matter. And this sort of meditation on our mortality has a similar effect, right? We don't need to take things so seriously. We don't need to be so insecure about them. We don't need to be so upset by them. We don't need to follow the news necessarily in real time because we understand these things are going to figure themselves out, right?

24:34And so I have this coin in my pocket and I touch it throughout the day when I find myself getting stressed, when I'm losing sight of that bigger picture. It's a sort of tangible reminder for me. And that's what Seneca is really talking about. Seneca thinks about death quite often. He writes about it in this sort of profound, moving way. He says, let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books every day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time. If we live not as if we're going to die tomorrow, but if we live today as if it is the most important day of our life, then we'll make the right decisions.

25:11We will value the quiet moments and we will have the power to say no to things that don't matter, whether they're sort of the distracting chatter of cable news or an opportunity that comes at the expense of some larger goal or principle that we stand for. And so the idea, I know it's sort of a sobering, weird thought to end a talk at a cheerful conference about, but we don't know how long we're going to be on this planet, right? Memento mori. We don't know how long we're going to be here. So we should enjoy those quiet moments while we can. We should seize them and take advantage of them. And then we should go about our lives with that never far from our view of never escaping us.

25:50The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time. So thank you very much. I really appreciate you guys having me. Thank you.

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