In The End It Doesn’t Even Matter | A Strong Soul Is Better Than Good Luck

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2:05Welcome 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.

2:45In the end, it doesn't even matter. A couple of minutes of traffic on the way to work, the tone that the person was talking to you with, the scratch in your brand new painted wall, the lost pair of AirPods, the cost of replacing them, the speed of the promised promotion, word that a colleague is making, smidge more, the culture war issue of the moment, the tenor of the media coverage for your new project, or the lack thereof, the insult from someone you thought was a friend. All of these things seemed like they mattered. Certainly that's why you stood on them, kicked yourself for them, argued about them, resented them, worried about them, were mad about them.

3:23But there will come a time when all the reasons, all the legitimate concerns, the perceived significance of these moments will seem baffling to you. You will struggle to understand why you thought any of it mattered. You will wish instead that you let more things go, that you let this very thing go, that you weren't so hard on them or yourself, that you weren't so impatient, that you didn't take things so personally. Where are they now? Marcus Aurelius used to ask. Where are the ambitious emperors who came before me? Where are the angry people? Where are the warriors? Where are the rich and the powerful?

3:57Where are the paranoid and the anxious? They're all dead, and soon you will be too. None of this stuff matters as much as you think it does. None of this stuff is helping you the way you think it is, making the difference you think it does. In time, if you're lucky, that will become painfully obvious to you. So do yourself a favor and give yourself that reality check now. Give yourself the gift of that perspective now.

4:34A strong soul is better than good luck. Here we are, September 1st. It's today's entry in the Daily Stoic. And I can't believe, man, it does not feel like September. But here I am reading today's September 1st entry from the Daily Stoic. The rational soul is stronger than any kind of fortune, Seneca writes in Moral Letters 98. From its own share, it guides its affairs here or there and is itself the cause of a happy or miserable life. Cato the younger had enough money to dress in fine clothing, yet he often walked around Rome barefoot, indifferent to assumptions people made about him as he passed.

5:16He could have indulged in the finest food, he chose instead to eat simple fare. Whether it was raining or intensely hot, he went bareheaded by choice. Why not indulge in some easy relief? Because Cato was training his soul to be strong and resilient. Specifically, he was learning indifference, an attitude of let come what may, that would serve him well in the trenches with the army, in the forum, in the senate, and in his life as a father and a statesman. His training prepared him for any conditions, any kind of luck. And if we undergo our own training and preparations, we might find ourselves similarly strengthened.

5:52Right? The Stoics undergo a hard winter training, to borrow Epictetus's phrase. And the point of that training, whether it's the physical training that Cato is doing, whether it's dressing awkwardly in your worst clothes, as Seneca was talking about, you're trying to cultivate an inner citadel, a strength, a fortitude, a sense of preparedness so that you can, as Epictetus would later say, meet whatever situation happens and go, ah, this is what I've trained for. I got this. I know I'm capable of withstanding this. We've talked a lot about physical training here. And that practice for me, the working out, the getting up off the couch when I don't want to, jumping in the cold water when I don't want to, lifting the weights when I don't want to, running a little bit further when I'd rather be home, taking the longer way on the run than the shorter way, trying to speed up a little bit, trying to get up the hill faster, whatever it is, this is cultivating that strength so that when things are difficult, you got it.

6:55You've trained for that. But it's not, of course, not just the physical training. I think about this when I think about the pandemic obviously i've been through adversity in my life but it was one of those truly historic events those big things you're like i was there right was this great depression or i was in new york on 9 11 or whatever where my philosophical training and my maturity as a human was like this is a this is going to be training for whatever else happens in life, right? And also, this is why, this is precisely what I've studied history for, what I studied stoicism for, what my wife and I have worked on together, what I've worked on in therapy, what I've worked on every place in my life.

7:41It was for something like this, and also the sense that this itself would be training for future adversity and difficulty. There's a Frederick Douglass quote, maybe it's not totally accurate, some people doubt that he said it. He He says, it's easier to create strong children than repair broken men. And I think that's what Seneca is saying here about adversity. And you think of the adversity that Seneca goes through in his life, his tuberculosis young, he has to spend 10 years in convalescence as a child in Egypt, of all places. I talk about this in Lives of the Stoics. If you don't know Seneca's life story, it's pretty incredible.

8:20On the way back, his uncle was killed in a shipwreck. Seneca makes his legal debut, is going places, and then he's exiled on these trumped-up charges. He loses a child. He's called back, but he's called back. He's in Nero's court. Obviously, things are difficult working for Nero. You know, it's one thing after another for Seneca, up until the end when he's forced to, you know, die by his own hand at Nero's demand. But Seneca had trained for this. even Tacitus, who's not a fan of Seneca, goes like, it's very clear that in that difficult moment, it was something he'd thought about, worked on, prepared for.

9:02That's who you want to be. You want to be strong. You want to be able to bear what comes. And it might be physical training, like running for a marathon. It might be something like, hey, I cranked the shower cold. Or it's the reading you're doing, the conversations you're having, the community that you're building, the relationships that you're building, the exercises you're walking through in your mind. All of this is training you, preparing you, putting yourself in a position so you can succeed whatever happens, so you can be strong enough in that moment and not need to be repaired afterwards.

9:34That's what we're doing here. That's to me kind of the mission of Daily Stoic. It's the preparation my own philosophical practice is about. And it served me well the last couple of years. I hope it served you well. And I hope the training and work you're doing now sets you up to be served well in the future. Enjoy. Talk soon.

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