Everything Is Connected. We Just Forgot.

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0:30Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:44Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So I grew up in the suburbs. I went to school in the suburbs of Los Angeles. That might be a little bit insulting, I guess, to call the Inland Empire a suburb of Los Angeles. But I think it kind of is in a way. But after that, I did the big city thing. All I wanted to do was move to Los Angeles, which I loved. And then after that, I moved to New York City. I lived in New Orleans in between, but I was a city guy. And it wasn't until we moved to Texas, where at first I lived in the city, I lived in East Austin, but it wasn't until we really moved to Texas, as my wife and I like to say, when we moved out to the country, that I just realized how unnatural my life was, how much the noise and the busyness and the craziness of it was not just disconnecting me from myself, which it certainly was, but disconnecting me from the natural world, right?

1:45Ryan Holiday: You sort of stop noticing the seasons. You have no idea where your food comes from. You're operating from this sort of fundamentally modern place, but a place that we were not necessarily evolved to exist in. And it's funny, it wasn't until I went back to New York City after I lived in the country for a while that I like, I just felt it. I was like, oh, I'm not used to this. It's like when you cut something out of your diet and then you put it back in. You're like, oh, I'm maybe allergic to this or my body doesn't handle this. well. You just drift away from nature. And obviously, Stoicism is about living in accordance with nature, not necessarily the natural world, but also the natural world.

2:30Ryan Holiday: This idea of exposing yourself to things much bigger than you as a form, really, of ego death, also as a Stoic concept, this idea of sympathia, realizing our interconnectedness, our place in a larger ecosystem is something I wrote a bunch about in Ego is the Enemy. It's like, how do you remind yourself that you are not the center of the universe? And in fact, the universe is vast and enormous and also wonderful and beautiful and awesome in the sense of inspiring awe. And this is actually one of my favorite chapters in Ego is the Enemy. It's called Meditate on the Immensity. A monk is a man who is separated from all and who is in harmony with all.

3:14A Vagreus Ponticus In 1879, the preservationist and explorer John Muir took his first trip to Alaska. As he explored the fjords and rocky landscape of Alaska's now famous Glacier Bay, a powerful feeling struck him all at once. He'd always been in love with nature, and here in the unique summer climate of the far north, in this single moment, it was as if the entire world was in sync. As if he could see the entire ecosystem and the circle of life before him. His pulse began to pick up, and as he said, he and the group were warmed and quickened into sympathy with everything, taken back into the heart of nature, from which we all came.

4:01Thankfully, Muir noticed and recorded in his journal the beautiful cohesion of the world around him, which few have ever matched since. As he said,

4:39drenching sunbeams, every cell in a whirl of enjoyment, misty flocks of insects stirring all the air, the wild sheep and the goats on the grassy ridges above the woods, bears in the berry tangles, mink and beaver and otter far back on many a river and lake, Indians and adventurers pursuing their lonely ways, birds tending to their young, everywhere, everywhere, beauty and life, and glad, rejoicing action. In this moment, he was experiencing what the Stoics would call sympathia, a connectedness with the cosmos. The French philosopher Pierre Hadeau has referred to it as the oceanic feeling, a sense of belonging to something larger, of realizing that human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity, as he put it.

5:34It is in these moments that we're not only free but drawn toward important questions. Who am I? What am I doing? What is my role in this world? Nothing draws us away from those questions like material success, when we are always busy, stressed, put upon, distracted, reported to, relied on, apart from. When we're wealthy and we're told we're important or powerful, ego tells us that meaning comes from activity. that being the center of attention is the only way to matter. When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it's like a piece of our soul is gone, like we've detached ourselves from the traditions we hail from, whatever that happens to be, a craft, a sport, a brother or sisterhood, a family.

6:24Ego blocks us from the beauty and history in the world. It stands in the way. No wonder we find success empty. No wonder we're exhausted. No wonder it feels like we're on a treadmill. No wonder we lose touch with the energy that once fueled us. Here's an exercise. Walk onto an ancient battlefield or a place of historical significance. Look at the statues and you can't help but see how similar the people look, how little has changed since then, since before, and how it will be forever after. Here a great man once stood. Here another brave woman died. Here a cruel rich man lived, in this palatial home.

7:06It's the sense that others have been here before you, generations of them, in fact. In those moments, we have a sense of the immensity of the world. Ego is impossible because we realize, only fleetingly, what Emerson meant when he said that every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. They are a part of us. We are a part of a tradition. Embrace the power of this position and learn from it. It is an exhilarating feeling to grasp this, like the one that Muir felt in Alaska. Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has described this duality well.

7:51It's possible to bask in both your relevance and irrelevance to the cosmos. As he says, when I look up in the universe, I know I'm small, but I'm also big. I'm big because I'm connected to the universe, and the universe is connected to me. We just can't forget which is bigger and which has been here longer. Why do you think that great leaders and thinkers throughout history have gone out into the wilderness and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It's because in doing so they found perspective. They understood the larger picture in a way that wasn't possible in the bustle of everyday life.

8:32Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to. Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you're convinced the world revolves around you. By removing ego, even temporarily, we can access what's standing in relief. By widening our perspective, more comes into view. It's sad how disconnected from the past and from the future most of us really are. We forget that woolly mammoths walked the earth while the pyramids were being built. We don't realize that Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those famous pyramids that marked her kingdom.

9:14When British workers excavated the land in Trafalgar Square to build Nelson's Column and its famous stone lions, in the ground they found bones of actual lions who'd roamed that exact spot just a few thousand years before. Someone recently calculated that it takes but a chain of six individuals who shook hands with one another across the centuries to connect Barack Obama to George Washington. There's a video you can watch on YouTube of a man on a CBS game show, I've Got a Secret, in 1956, in an episode that also happened to feature a famous actress named Lucille Ball. His secret? He was in Ford's theater when Lincoln was assassinated.

9:57The English government only recently paid off debts it incurred as far back as 1720 from events like the South Sea Bubble, the Napoleonic Wars, the Empire's abolition of slavery, and the Irish Potato Famine, meaning that in the 21st century, there was still a direct and daily connection to the 18th and 19th centuries. As our power and talents grow, we like to think that makes us special, that we live in blessed, unprecedented times. This is compounded by the fact that so many of the photos we see from even 50 years ago are still in black and white. We seem to assume that the world was in black and white.

10:36Obviously, it wasn't. Their sky was the same color as ours, in some places brighter than ours. They bled the same way we did, and their cheeks got flushed just like ours do. We are just like them and always will be. It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am, Muhammad Ali once said. Yeah, okay. That's why great people have to work even harder to fight against this headwind. It's hard to be self-absorbed and convinced of your own greatness inside the solitude and quiet of a sensory deprivation tank. It's hard to be anything but humble, walking alone on a beach late at night with an endless black ocean crashing loudly against the ground next to you.

11:18We have to actively seek out this cosmic sympathy. There's the famous Blake poem that opens with, To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour. That's what we're after here. That's the transcendental experience that makes our petty ego impossible. Feel unprotected against the elements or forces or surroundings. Remind yourself how pointless it is to rage and fight and try to one-up those around you. Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite and end your conscious separation from the world. Reconcile yourself a bit better with the realities of life.

12:03Realize how much came before you and how only wisps of it remain. Let the feeling carry you as long as you can. Then when you start to feel better or bigger than, go and do it again.

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15:02Ryan Holiday: Epictetus said, never say you are from Athens or Corinth, but that you are a citizen of the world. And they didn't want that disconnection, is that that disconnection has consequences. And when we start forgetting that we're part of a larger system, we don't just feel off, that we do, but we act in fundamentally asocial ways. There's a great writer and thinker on stoicism. His name is Kai Whiting. He's done some really interesting research connecting stoicism and sustainability, not as politics, but as part of like the stoic ethics. We actually interviewed him for an article for Daily Stoic a couple of years ago.

15:41Ryan Holiday: I'll link to that in today's show notes, but he actually, he said something similar in a conversation with Professor Gregory Sadler, who's also an interesting writer on stoicism. Let me bring you a chunk of that because I think it's worth hearing. The philosophers here are going to jump up and down now and say future generations, we have no obligation towards them. But when I say future generations in my field, I mean the people that are born now, right? This second. That is the future generation of us. So it's really how we meet our needs without compromising their ability or their capacity to meet their own.

16:14And it's quite difficult because how can we second guess what they really, really need in terms of material aspects. But I think stories are really helpful because we can say, well, they certainly need justice. Yeah. They certainly need the ability to provide for the needs. And that takes in our part self-control because the opposite is greed. It takes courage because the opposite is cowardice. And in today's society, you have a lot of politicians, I won't name names, who are saying, no, we want our things and we want them now. And it takes a lot of courage to say, actually, we can have things.

16:47We can't have everything we want now. And climate change does exist. Not a very popular statement. And it requires wisdom to know how to tackle such statements in a post-truth world.

16:58Ryan Holiday: And it is kind of strange, like when you think about it, that we have one day a year to remind us that we live on a fragile planet. But what Kai is describing, it's not a political thing. It's a philosophical thing. And for the Stoics, living well meant living in alignment with how the world actually works, not how we wish it worked or not our fantasy of how it works. And if we're exhausting the systems that sustain us, that's not just unfortunate, it's irrational, it's unvirtuous, and it's dangerous. As the Stoics also say, it's unjust. In meditations, Mark Scherrullis talks about how what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee.

17:38Ryan Holiday: But of course, part of the busyness and noise of the modern world is there to prevent us from thinking about just that. And it's only when we step off, when things slow down, that we start to see what we didn't see before. And for Chloe Dalton, that came through a wild hare. Back in February 2021, Chloe was a political advisor in the UK, and she's spending the lockdown in her country house in the English countryside. And on a walk there, she found a tiny newborn hare, what they call leveret, that had been chased by a dog. She takes it home and she starts to raise it, even though supposedly raising a wild hare is basically impossible.

18:20Ryan Holiday: But she kind of figures it out as she goes. She was always planning to release it. But then the hare starts coming and going on its own and it roams the fields at nights, but it returns to her house during the day. And even though she knows it might not come back one day, She never tries to stop it because keeping it confined wouldn't really be living. And she wrote this amazing book about it that I've been raving about called Raising Hair. But I actually had a chance to talk to her about just that. Let's talk about the idea of living with nature, because that's obviously one of the beautiful themes in the book.

18:56Ryan Holiday: You talked about just sort of noticing the seasons and the rhythms of life. It seemed like having this wild animal in your house, it's not that it awakened the wild animal in you, but it just awakened you to the sense of nature being this sort of force with kind of rhythms and a power to it and that you sort of accommodate yourself to that or you don't. Yes, absolutely. And the passage of the seasons brings renewal. I suppose it's another way of thinking about what you just said about acceptance. You wait and the spring will come and all the dead things that have broken off and rotted and looked so unpromising will restore life.

19:40And in the process, while they all look dead, they're actually sustaining life. Birds are feeding off them and the ground is being enriched and, you know, all the new growth is being made possible. And I found it incredibly consoling to realize that there are these underlying rhythms to life that govern our lives. And that when, you know, it is just that basic fact that even when things look really, really dark, you know, renewal is usually just around the corner because that is human nature and that's our great capacity. And it is also the sort of nature of the environment around us. So I found myself studying it almost in a daze.

20:21I was drawn in and fascinated by the detail of what I was observing and trying to understand it and trying to think of words to describe colour and to think about how little I understood about the basic elements of the landscape. What is grass and what are these plants that grow amongst the blades of grass? But also at the sort of larger level, I saw myself and my place in nature and my place on the earth and in history in a totally different way. And I let go, I think, a bit of some of my previous struggles and was a little bit more accepting of life in all its complexity.

20:57Ryan Holiday: Yeah, there seemed to be in the book, you did seem to have a certain respect for sort of the laws of nature in the sense that like you don't give it a name. You're not trying to turn the hair into a pet. You're not trying to train it. You're just sort of going like, hey, this is nature sort of intersecting with my life in a way that's a little bit unnatural. But for the most part, I want to respect that nature as much as possible. Absolutely. But I think a lot of people would have done the same thing in the sense that, you know, it was so obvious that this was a wild animal. You know, hares have never been domesticated.

21:36And we're just not used to this idea as humans. When you think about the fact that 96 % of all living biomass on Earth, as it were, are made up of humans, livestock and pets, and only 4 % are wild animals. We don't really come into contact with wild animals very much. But the idea of an animal that has lived alongside humans for thousands of years, but we've never domesticated it, instrumentalized it in the way that we do other animals. I felt like I was in the presence of something very different, an animal that wasn't conditioned genetically to need me or approach me or seek food from me, that was just living alongside me, got all its sustenance for the most part from the hedges and the field margins outside.

22:23and just chose to sleep in the house and to rest alongside me. Giving, you know, the idea of giving the hair a name, it just would have felt wrong. It would have felt like I would have trivialized this kind of glorious wild animal that I didn't fully understand and I felt so privileged to be able to see. So it wasn't based on any kind of ideology about humans and nature. It was just an instinct.

22:45Ryan Holiday: Did it give you a glimpse at all into your own nature, like into human nature? It's kind of a controversial topic these days. And obviously, you know, there's that what they call the naturalistic fallacy that just because humans naturally do things doesn't mean we should keep doing them. A lot of a lot of this thing we call society is us triumphing over some of those parts of our nature. But we do seem to somewhat be in denial that humans are have done certain things for millions of years and are supposed to do things for millions of years. Like, did it give you any sense of your own kind of nature and the rhythms of your life?

23:21I think two things. One is it certainly made me think that we are in the habit of thinking that nature, the nature outside of us, exists for us. And even if we don't have a religious sort of upbringing or mindset, it's that sort of idea that trees make firewood, animals make this, and we get our clothes and our food and whatever from the landscape around us. and it really made me think about that that those automatic assumptions that if human and animal interests come into conflict the human should automatically prevail because somehow we're more important it definitely made me think about that and on the level of like my own personal nature and I'm just going to be very open here take it as you will but I think it made me made me very conscious of the way I had shaped myself into something that would be successful in a certain context i worked in politics and in foreign policy very male dominated world still although i never that never held me back i was given incredible opportunities i sort of felt there was a certain way i had to be in order to be taken seriously in that kind of environment which did involve suppressing in a way parts of my nature and obviously we all have to do that in order to sort of exist alongside other people you can't just let it all hang out but um i realized that and it seems probably self-evident maybe I was a bit late to this realization but it just made me conscious of myself as a broader much broader person than the person I'd made myself into so that I could succeed in this particular professional niche and being able to step back and kind of lean more fully into those other parts of myself was really refreshing and and I would probably have thought in a way in the past that some of those had to be sort of jettisoned so that you could be more of this thing you make these choices in life and then you kind of you know live by them um so i'm not sure that it was you know but so it's more like what i learned from the hair but definitely i had i stopped and looked at myself and it was almost like a i felt a kind of blossoming inside um a bit like one of the you know drop one of those sort of flowers into tea it felt like that but on a very large scale around my heart um and that's that process

25:26Ryan Holiday: is still continuing yeah it's it's like your profession whatever it is but politics is a good example, it probably heightens and exaggerates part of our tribal nature and then also suppresses part of our nature. And then when you step off the treadmill or step off the path, you go, oh, I don't like this part of myself or I've been suppressing this part of myself and trying to get something somewhere closer to whatever we're supposed to naturally be or would be without the pressures of our industry or society. Yeah. And also, you know, I, there are all these trade-offs we make, you know, I use my brain a lot more than my body.

26:09And you look at an animal like the hair and that is in balance somehow, you know, the brain and the instinct and the ability to survive. You see that alertness, you know, every single moment of their existence, but they also, this is powerful body that carries them away from danger. And I suppose I sort of, sometimes I had these days where I just felt like a kind of brain on a computer stand. I'm not saying it was a particularly aggressive brain but it was a brain and it was that was what I was required to sort of so and these are all really sort of basic obvious things you know my family or friends looking at me when I was working in politics would say to me that I was you know burnt out and all these things that probably you know you and your listeners here said about themselves or to say to each other but it was just having sometimes you listen more to I don't know maybe an animal to the thoughts that you have that are drawn out of you by something unexpected than you do to what all the well-meaning people in your life say to you.

27:03And I find it astonishing. I would have been embarrassed to admit before that the catalyst for a lot of this sort of dawning of awareness in me was a wild animal. But I happily, proudly own it now because I feel so grateful to have had such a beautiful experience. And it's never too late. I think that's the thing about nature and ourselves and the environment and trying to change something about your life. It is never too late, really.

27:27Ryan Holiday: I just think it's interesting, our view of nature. It's like people complain about traffic and it's like, but you're also traffic, right? And we'll look at a rabbit or some other animal and we go, oh, it has a nature. This is its nature or this is a part of nature. As if we don't have our own nature and as if we aren't part of the larger thing that is the natural world. You're absolutely right. And I sometimes think about the fact that if you think about, and I'm no historian, I'm really a total amateur when it comes to all of these thoughts and observations. But, you know, you think that for sort of millions or certainly hundreds of thousands of years, humans evolved in a wild world in which we weren't even anywhere near the top of the food chain.

28:15And survival would have been very, very fragile. And there would be a very small number of people relative to the huge wild world around them. And then how rapidly we have turned it on its head and how fast we're moving now. I mean, it's almost astonishing to me that we have any sense of self-awareness because we're sort of hurtling. And life is changing so dramatically even now. But I think, you know, the point is there are certain fundamentals, you know, the kinds of things our parents and grandparents, if we're lucky, tell us when we're growing up and you store somewhere in the back of your mind that you sort of know, We can't escape our own bodies, our own natures, our own limitations.

28:53And there are certain things that we need. And I'm coming increasingly to the conclusion, based on my small, narrow personal experience, that we need contact with nature in whatever form that takes. and that we suffer when we're separated from nature because we're kind of separated from part of ourselves. And in the way the vocabulary lets us down, when you talk about animals, talk about nature, we are animals and we are part of nature, but it's just that we live as if we were somehow in a different category. We'd been catapulted from another planet.

29:23Ryan Holiday: Chloe didn't try to control the hair, but she did pay attention. She slows down. She was patient. She responded thoughtfully. I think that's what stoicism is about. When you're out of alignment with yourself and with the world, you feel it. You're scattered and restless and off. When you come back into that alignment, even a little, you can feel that too. You're calmer and clearer and more grounded. And I do think that's why getting back into nature, even in small ways, can be so powerful. It pulls you out of that loop and it puts you back into something real. And again, if you think that this disconnection doesn't have consequences, you're wrong.

30:00Ryan Holiday: I talked to Michael Easter, who wrote this great book called The Comfort Crisis, about that. And we talked specifically about all that modern noise. Humans have increased the world's loudness, I think it's fourfold. Yeah. And there's only, I believe the number is 12 places in the lower 48 states where you can be in nature without hearing any human sounds for 15 minutes. Only 12 places. So we've really changed loudness. Yeah. And we now live in a ton of noise. and in the context of the past, loud noises were often scary. It's a storm. It's a tiger. It's a rock slide. So we sort of evolved to get stressed out over loud noises.

30:43And now we kind of live in this low grade loudness and it is associated with a lot of health impacts, high stress. People who live in more noise tend to be more depressed, more anxious. They even have higher rates of heart disease because heart disease is so tightly linked to stress levels. And so when we remove noise, although it is uncomfortable at first, because we were so adapted to noise, you tend to find that although people are uncomfortable at first, they tend to calm down over time.

31:11Ryan Holiday: It's a more natural wavelength to be at. The low-grade noise or the punctuated with extreme noises is the unnatural place. Silence is the norm. In Helsinki, there's this church, and it's called the Church of Silence. And it's sort of this non-denominational place right in the middle of the city. And you walk in and there's just no sound. You're not allowed to talk. There's no music. There's no noise. It's designed to be sort of sound deadening. It doesn't even have like one of those big sort of creaky church doors. You just walk in and you just go, two seconds ago, you were in the middle of a busy city.

31:47Ryan Holiday: And then suddenly you're in complete and total silence. And you realize just immediately that there's something inherently holy about silence and that that's kind of one of the main features of churches, too, although they might have sort of chanting or whatever. You're in this enormous, you know, high ceiling stone thing where everyone is trying to be respectful or doing their own inward thing. And then, yeah, you just notice like the absence of noise and disruption, which we totally take for granted as a species. We obviously care a lot about pollution and society's done a lot of work collectively to reduce pollution.

32:27Ryan Holiday: but we just have thrown up our hands about around noise pollution. Enter leaf blowers. Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Like the one I hate is like, like I hate New York city because of the noise that like a big trucks make like a dump truck or whatever, where it's like that big, heavy back part and they kind of go into an intersect and that, that sort of. Yeah. Not the engine. It's like just the sheer weight of the big metal thing moving around on top of a big metal thing. And I can feel that like in my chest cavity. And I just, I have a stress response to those, to just loud noises. Yeah. It's not natural to hear a car horn from six feet away, not in your own metal cocoon, you know, and you feel it and your cortisol level and your emotion.

33:17Ryan Holiday: Like, it's just not what a human is supposed to be experiencing. Yeah. What got me thinking about the silencing and the comfort crisis is that, and that, that section on silence was not in the proposal, but I went up to the Arctic and I'm there for like a month. And one of the craziest things is just how silent it is. Yeah. Like I'm standing on the tundra one morning, it is dead silent. And then I just hear this. I'm like, what is happening? Yeah. Is this like a black Hawk helicopter? And I turn around and it's a Raven flying. yeah you can hear the flapping of a bird it is so silent that those sorts of noises get amplified yeah almost and then when i went back into i'll always remember this when we get to uh back to anchorage i go in my hotel room and it's near an airport yeah and there's a plane taking off and it was just like it was like you're in an imax movie and your seat rumbles like the noise from that because my sense of hearing was just so dialed down to yeah um and then of course that fades away eventually right yeah and like you adjust but it is crazy to me how not just sound but just all sorts of stimulation that we have today well i live out in the country and that's one of the weird things i'll be like on my back porch and i'll hear voices and i'll be like is someone like in my yard and then it's like no they're like very far away but there's the sound is carrying across the water, you know, like because all the other sounds are turned down, you're able to hear things, you know, that you would never ordinarily hear and you're subjected to phenomena you would ordinarily not be able to experience because there isn't that sort of low grade, just like white noise blanketing it out.

35:05Ryan Holiday: So here on Earth Day, I'm just asking you to take a second and ask yourself, where am I out of alignment? Where am I reacting instead of cooperating? What am I trying to control that's not mine to control? And where can I do a better job respecting nature? Future generations are going to be shaped by choices that we make now. And many of the fundamentally unnatural parts of our modern environment are not good for us, and they're not good for the future. But we can make small and basic decisions about where we live, what time we wake up, what our routines are like, what we do, what we consume, what we pay attention to, how we respond.

35:46Ryan Holiday: When we do that work, we get more in alignment, we get closer to living in accordance with nature. And as I found in my own life, we are happier and more well adjusted. Happy Earth Day, everyone.

36:06you