If You Want A Reason To Live | Expect To Change Your Opinions

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:09And it's in these moments you might wonder why you ought to bother carrying on. Seneca asked himself this question as he was trapped in desolate exile. Marcus Aurelius asked himself this after burying another one of his children. Epictetus must have asked himself this nearly every morning of the first 30 years of his life, which he spent as a slave. What do we draw on in our crises of fate? Fortitude, sure. Stoicism is all about that. But what about finding something encouraging in the ordinary beauty of the world around you? It is this that Marcus Aurelius is doing in meditations, where he marvels at the way bread breaks open in the oven, the way an olive ripens and falls to the ground, the flecks of foam on a boar's mouth.

1:56In the midst of ugliness, in the midst of evil, in the midst of despair, these bright spots are always there. As we said a while back, Seneca spent a lot of time bemoaning Corsica, where he was exiled, totally missing the beauty and grandeur that drew three million tourists to that island just last year. We've talked about how as terrible and deprived as Epictetus' life was, the magnificence of golden hour was always in his reach, and so too apparently were the ideas from the Stoics which made their way to him and brightened his life. Good exists everywhere. We need only to look for it. Beauty surrounds us, waiting to be noticed.

2:38And for every reason to despair, there are countless moments of wonder ready to reveal themselves to those who keep their eyes and their hearts open. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro 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.

3:22There 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. We 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.

3:59And 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. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

4:30Expect to change your opinions. This is the April 7th entry in the Daily Steal. You can grab a premium leather edition. You can grab signed editions at store.dailysteal.com. There are two things that must be rooted out in human beings, Epictetus says in Discourses 314. Arrogant opinion and mistrust. Arrogant opinion expects that there is nothing further needed, and mistrust assumes that under the torrent of circumstances, there can be no happiness. How often do we begin some projects certainly know exactly how it will go? How often do we meet people and think we know exactly who and what they are?

5:11And how often are these assumptions proved to be completely and utterly wrong? And this is why we must fight our biases and preconceptions, because they are a liability. Ask yourself always, what haven't I considered? Why is this thing the way that it is? Am I part of the problem here or the solution? Could I be wrong here? Be doubly careful to honor what you do not know and then set it against the knowledge that you actually have. And remember, if there is one core teaching at the heart of this philosophy, it's that we're not as smart and wise as we'd like to think we are. And then if we ever do want to become wise, it comes from questioning and from humility, not as many would like to think, from certainty, from mistrust, and from arrogance.

5:58Of course, this is the idea of ego is the enemy. Epictetus says, you cannot learn that which you think you already know. And this is the irony, the tragedy of most stupidity is that the stupid are too conceited, too dumb to know how dumb and stupid they are, right? Ignorance often also hides from us the extent of our ignorance. This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's a primary strain in our politics, our cultural life these days. It's not just a disinterest in ideas or what's going on in the world, but it's a sense that one already knows all these things, that one knows better and thus is superior.

6:46There's a great book that I recommend I carried in the bookstore and I had him on the podcast a while back by Tom Nichols called The Death of Expertise, right? The sense that we know better than the people who have spent their entire lives studying and exploring these things. I even see this with ego as the enemy, right? People go, ah, but isn't ego a good thing? I talk about that at length in the book and they go, oh, I haven't read it. And it's interesting. Oh, it's so nice that you have a strong opinion about the book that you have not bothered to read, right? That's it in a nutshell, right?

7:21What gets in the way, and I think Zeno said this, that conceit is the impediment to knowledge, right? That our sense of what we know, our preconceptions, our suspicions, our cynicism, right? This isn't just from ignorance. It can also come from a sort of a jadedness or a sense of superiority. It could come from that other place too. But the point is we get in our own way and we close ourselves off, right? And this prevents us from learning, prevents us from having our minds change, prevents us from understanding new things. It's a toxic force in the world today. It's just a toxic, terrible force.

8:00It holds us back. But let's go back a while, right? Let's go back to Socrates, this hero of the Stoics. Socrates is considered wise, But what is the source of Socrates' wisdom? Diogenes Laertes says it's that he is aware of his own ignorance. Now, whether Socrates really says this himself, you know, that quote comes later, it doesn't really matter. Think about what the Socratic method is. It's Socrates asking questions. It's almost exasperating listening to Socrates, never coming out and taking a position or making an assertion. Just it's all questions. But that's who Socrates was. He was trying to learn, trying to ask, trying to get to truth.

8:46He wasn't trying to prove that he was smarter than anyone else. He was trying to really articulate how elusive and complicated the truth actually is. Think about what the scientific method is. It's a hypothesis. But then the next thing you do after the hypothesis is try to disprove the hypothesis, try to get the information that points one way or another. The hypothesis isn't a conclusion. It's not a certainty. It's a sense. Here's what I think based on my knowledge, based on past information, based on what's intuitive. But then I'm going to go do the work. I'm going to get the evidence. I'm going to poke holes in this.

9:28You know, we talked about, they talk about this idea of the confirmation bias, that when you think things are a certain way or when you're looking for something, when you have a preconceived notion, you tend to only find the things that confirm that preconceived notion. But the opposite of that is true. It means you don't see all the things out there that would make you see it differently, that would make you think differently, that would open your mind to this or that or the other. So remember, the Stoic comes to knowledge from a place of humility, from a place of questioning. Our forefather is Socrates in this regard.

10:04It's humility. You cannot learn that what you think you already know. Focus on what you don't know. Focus on learning. Focus on getting better. If you think you know everything, in one sense, you're right because you have made yourself incapable of learning anything new. So expect to change your opinions. Keep your mind open. focus on all you have yet to learn as opposed to all the things you think you already know.

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