Everybody Wants To Rule The World | Don't Unintentionally Hand Over Your Freedom

0:00You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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1:13To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org, code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. Look, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of HelloFresh, right? They're the number one meal kit in America. They make home cooking easier with chef-crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door. This fall, they're serving up even more to love. It's not the HelloFresh you remember.

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2:57Welcome 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.

3:34Everybody wants to rule the world. They fought their whole lives for it. They sacrificed family for it. They sacrificed happiness, ethics, moral tranquility for it. For as long as there have been groups of people, people have wanted to be in charge of those people. For as long as there have been armies, people have tried to use them to conquer, to rule, to accumulate empires. Was it worth it? Did they enjoy it? Did it mean anything? Few, if any of them, ever bothered to honestly answer that question, which is what makes Marcus Aurelius' meditation such a remarkable and unprecedented text. Here you have the most powerful man in the world, head of the most powerful army on earth, a victorious general whose triumphs warranted 130 foot tall marble column lauding his achievements.

4:19And what did he say this all amounted to? Not much. Meditations is Marcus Aurelius's refutation of the idea that you should want to rule the world. It strips it of its glamour and its delusions. Literally at one point, Marcus Aurelius breaks down the feast he was given, removing, he said, the legend that encrusts it. Being famous is empty, he tells us. Being remembered is worthless. Power is corrupting and an immense burden. Don't be fooled, he is saying to his successors to the crown. He is also saying this to us in our own more humble fields. The top spot is not what you think it is. Don't trade your life and your identity for it.

4:59Don't lie to yourself. Don't become the monster necessary to acquire it and to keep it.

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6:23Don't unintentionally hand over your freedom. This is the March 8th entry in the Daily Stoic. I'm holding the hardcover in my hands, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. But of course, you can get it as an audiobook. You can get it as an e-book. We've even got a cool leather edition in the Daily Stoic store. The quote in today's entry, if you haven't seen it, comes to us from Epictetus' Incaridian, the handbook. Talked about that before. But this also ends our streak. I think of, we ended it last week, but we had like five, six, seven entries from Marcus Aurelius in a row, but now we've got two from Epictetus in a row.

7:08It's one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus. This is from Inchiridion 28. He says, if a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. Have you no shame in that? Epictetus asks. Instinctively, we all protect our physical selves. We don't let people touch us, push us around, control us where we go. But when it comes to the mind, we're less disciplined. We hand it over willingly to social media, to television, to what other people are doing or thinking or saying. We sit down to work and the next thing you know, we're browsing the internet.

7:48We sit down with our families, but within minutes we have our phones out. We sit down peacefully in a park, but instead of looking inward, we're judging people as they pass by. We don't even know that we're doing this. We don't realize how much waste is in it, how inefficient and distracted makes us. And what's worse, no one is making this happen. It's totally self-inflicted. To the Stoics, this is an abomination. They know that the world can control our bodies, we can be thrown in jail or tossed about by the weather. But the mind, that's ours, and we must protect it. Maintain control over your mind and perceptions, they'd say.

8:28It's your most prized possession. We did a Daily Stoic email, maybe last year, about how armies fight over these little bits of territory. People are trying to accumulate these enormous business empires. They want to be financially independent, politically independent. They want to control physical stuff. They want to control ideas. They want to control all this stuff out in the world, basically. But they ignore what Seneca calls the greatest empire. In the kids book we did, The Girl Who Would Be Free, Epictetus' father calls it the empire between our ears. We fight for physical space, but we ignore what controls our mind.

9:13We relinquish control of our own mind. We hand it over to social media, right? We hand it over to distractions. We hand it over to jealousy, envy, gossip. We just hand it over to other stuff. Seneca said, it's the most baffling thing in the world, right? That we protect physical property. We protect our bodies, protect our money, but we let people steal our attention. We let people steal our time. The one thing that you can't get more of, the one thing that once you give it away, you can't get it back. And that's so strange. And so it requires discipline. It's a battle. The term in the military community is control the battle space.

10:00You have to control the battle space of the mind. You can't unintentionally hand over, relinquish control of your most precious resource, your attention, your finite amount of time. When you let people get inside your head, when you let them skew your sense of self, your priorities, your interests, you let them get riled up. We're in an election year. It's actually the biggest election year in the history of the world, I think. So many different countries are going into elections this year. So I'm not just talking about this from my biased, somewhat concerned American perspective, but a bunch of people are battling for that space in your head.

10:42And I don't just mean the political candidates. I mean the media. The election in America has been going on for two years. It's basically been going on for four years. And there's a bunch of people with very vested interests in making you monitor events in real time. Again, not the candidates, but the news entities, right? The people who want to solicit donations from you, the poll, like everyone wants you to be watching this as though it's a horse race when it's not, right? They want you to be watching the individual ups and downs, this scandal, this gap, this, and how much of that actually matters, right?

11:18How much of this could be avoided if you would just sit down, do some thinking, read a few, you know, intelligent things. And then you'd be able to make your decision and go, I'm not going to follow that. I'm not going to monitor that because I don't control that outcome. I already thought about who I'm going to vote for. I already know what my values are. Everything else is noise. I think about this with sports, right? I love sports, but I have to not watch the sort of ESPN shows. And I know I had Stephen A. Smith on the podcast. I think he's a fascinating guy, but his job is to get up and create controversy and debates about things for which the debate and the controversy has no impact.

11:59It's just opinions about reality, not reality itself. And so when you unintentionally, maybe for entertainment, sometimes it's fine. I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm just saying you have to control that space between your ears. you have to command the greatest empire, command of oneself, right? You hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, Epictetus says, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled. I put myself out there on social media. I just did this. So I was so disappointed in myself. Some thread popped up on Reddit or whatever, or maybe it didn't even pop up on Reddit, got like a Google alert, which I should probably turn off, but maybe someone emailed it to me.

12:43I don't remember. So the point is, I saw this thread and I could tell from the subject line it was going to be a bunch of people shitting on me. And so why would I click that? But I clicked it anyway and I read it and I just, my wife came out after she put our youngest down. I put the oldest down and I was just like, I did it. I just read this thread. Now I just feel so not good, right? Why did I do? And she was like, why did you do that? I didn't have a good answer. I was unintentionally handing control of my body over to people who were going to abuse me, disturbing me and troubling me. I'm not ashamed of it, but it was just a stupid waste of time.

13:22It didn't make anything or anyone better. So that's the message today. I hope everyone is doing well. Try not to be too rattled by what's going on in the world. Try to control the battle space. Command the greatest empire. Control the empire between your ears. I'll talk to everyone soon.

13:45Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way. Ego is the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry.

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