It’s A Brilliant Flash | Ask Daily Stoic

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.

0:55It's a brilliant flash. Marcus Aurelius was born, and just a few decades later, he was gone. Cato, Rome's great defender, went down in defeat. Seneca, for all his power and fame, could not escape Nero's nihilism. For generations, his important plays, which he so labored over, had their authorship attributed to someone else. How many schoolchildren today know who Cicero was, or care that Musonius Rufus once had a reputation that rivaled Socrates? And these are the bold-faced names, the who's who of who's that, as we've said. But what about all the forgotten Stoics, who out-out brief candle had ordinary basic lives that barely registered.

1:41This is sad and tragic. It's also beautiful. We come into existence by some impossible, unbelievable set of circumstances and then come out of it. Why? How? No one can say for certain. But certainly we are here for a period. Isn't that quite wonderful? In Adam Lindsay Gordon's haunting poem, Doubtful Dreams, he captures something close to the Stoic's bittersweet sense of the human condition. For the great things of earth are small things, the longest life is a span, and there is an end to all things, a season to every man, whose glory is dust and ashes, whose spirit is but a spark, that out from the darkness flashes and flickers out in the dark.

2:28Here we are. Let's do something with it. Let's not let it go to waste. Let's make a brilliant spark in the dark.

2:45We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone. And then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond. right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a bestselling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

3:22Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent And just as a human being and daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15, you just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

4:13Thanks 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 in 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.

4:58We 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.

5:38Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

5:50Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in June, I was in LA. I was doing a talk and then my wife had a little family reunion. And towards the end of the trip, we drove out to Malibu area and I did Rainn Wilson's podcast, Soul Boom. And the reason I interrupted the trip, it was not because I'm always working, but because my oldest son has become obsessed with The Office. We don't let him watch whole episodes, just little clips. In fact, it started because he was in an improv class at school and I showed him the Michael Scott scene where Michael Scott is taking improv classes and he just turns everything into like, freeze, FBI, I've got a gun.

6:31My son thought it was the funniest thing. So we started watching clips and then he found out about Dwight and he thought Dwight was hilarious. And then when Rainn Wilson, who I've known for a while, he came on the Daily Show podcast a couple of years ago, and then he came on again when he had this new book out, Soul Boom. When he asked, I said, oh, this is a great chance. I'll introduce you to Dwight. And both my youngest, who also got to watch some of the clips, thought this was the absolute coolest thing in the world. And then afterwards, Rainn sent them a very nice video, you know, like a cameo thing.

6:59He's like, I'll record a video for your kids. Let me send this to them. So he's an absolutely sweet person and a really deep philosophical person. And I think he's building something awesome at Soul Boom. He actually has said that Daily Stoic is sort of his model for that. So what I asked after we did the episode, we ran an excerpt of the book on the podcast. And then I'm going to run a chunk of him asking questions from me for today's Q &A, because I thought he asked some really good questions. It was a great chat. If you don't know who Rainn Wilson is, I don't know what's wrong with you. If you don't know what the office is, I really don't know what's wrong with you.

7:31But you can follow Rain on Instagram at Rain Wilson. That's Rain with two N's. On Twitter at Rain Wilson, two N's. And you can grab a copy of Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution at The Painted Porch. And you can check out my interview on the Soul Boom podcast and both of Rain's episodes on the Daily Stoic podcast.

7:50So one of the things we talk about on Soul Boom a lot is mental health and tools for mental health. especially spiritual ones. And we talk to comedians about their mental health journeys and doctors and theologians and authors and experts. And your work with stoicism has just brought so much invigoration and excitement, inspiration to young people in all of this work. And I don't want to boil down like all of your best sellers down into, well, actually I do. I want to boil all of your bestsellers down into some easy to - Save everyone the trouble. Easy to digest kind of nuggets having to do specifically with what you see as young people struggling with mental health today.

8:38Yeah. And where the Stoics might provide some solutions, some just where the rubber meets the road, meat and potatoes, solutions to gaining resilience, gaining courage, finding stillness, overcoming obstacles, gaining wisdom, all of these things that the Stoics put front and center. I think at the most basic level, Stoicism is this idea we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens, which to me is resilience. Resilience is not like, oh, I prevent all bad things from happening, or I simply endure all bad things happening, and I absorb them, and they don't affect me in any way.

9:19No, it's this ability to bounce back from the things that happen, to use them in some way. And it's this idea that we have a choice whether this thing makes us better or worse. Not does this thing make us more or less money? Does this thing improve our physical health or not? Because you could have cancer, you could get in an accident. There's all these things can happen to you and be taken from you. And I think the ancients felt this very acutely in a world where medicine was what it was where there were tyrannical emperors. Well, child mortality rates. Totally. Mark Sewell is buries half of his children, right?

9:58And he was a king. Yes. So no amount of wealth or power, especially then protected you from the mercilessness of nature and fate and time. But we decide what it's gonna mean in our lives. And when the Stoics are saying the obstacle is the way, that's what they mean. How are you going to use this as an opportunity to do something or to be someone, even if the majority of the benefits reaped by this experience are not you, right? Like you go through something terrible and then you write a book about it or you make a piece of art about it. And then that helps other people down the road. That is a way that the obstacle is the way.

10:45It's not necessarily the way for you. Like you wouldn't have chosen, like to you, it's not necessarily fully redemptive, but it is, you know, beneficial as a whole. I think that's what the Stoics are saying. So I think resilience is not this like toughness that allows you to endure and absorb everything, but it is this ability to be flexible and adapt and adjust. And the Stoics are saying, you want to be able to go, okay, I can work with that. because that's the, we don't really have a choice, right? If you need everything to go a certain way, you're either, you gotta be real lucky and we're not all real lucky, right?

11:24And in fact, when you look at a lot of these people we admire, like I think about Socrates, right? When a kid learns about Socrates, they think of Socrates as this clever guy, this guy that lives in this quaint time of togas and, you know, walking around the olive groves and having these discussions. even if they know the end of the story that he's put to death, there's still kind of an idyllicness to it that totally belies when he actually lived. Socrates lives through the great power conflict of Athens and Sparta, which would be like a world war between America and China. And he has to fight in this war.

12:05And most of the battles he fights in, his country loses. Eventually they're taken over by the Spartans, which was this, despite what the movie 300 wants you to think, like this deranged military cult. And then that ushers in a time in Athens known as the time of the 30 tyrants. 30 tyrants. That sounds bad. That's a high number, you know? That doesn't sound fun. And then, you know, he's largely thought of as like a loser. He's largely disliked. He's brought up on these trumped up charges and then he's executed. Like Socrates does not live in fun times. And yet it was fun to be Socrates. Socrates has a great time.

12:44Socrates is the best that he can be. Epictetus, the Stoke philosopher, he would say that he thinks Socrates is the great athlete of his time. And someone says, what do you mean? And he says, an athlete doesn't spend a lot of time saying whether something is a good throw or a bad throw. He says, a ball player catches the ball and throws it back, catches the ball and throws it back. That's to me what resilience is, is catching the ball and throwing it back, not going like, this is unfair. It sucks. Why did this happen to me? Why didn't people listen to me? It could have gone otherwise. You know, what if it was like this?

13:21It is like this. And resilience and I think excellence, Lisa Stokes was the ability to make this into something. I was listening to this meditation by this guy, Rupert Spira, that Pete Holmes, a comedian, told me about. The best. It was an incredible meditation because it was all kind of like, everything is exactly the way it should be right now. Everything is perfect. Everything is as it should be. Live in total acceptance of how everything is right now. And in doing this meditation, there was more to it than that, but I was realizing like, wow, I always want things to be different from the way that they are.

14:03I want someone I'm driving behind to be driving faster. Or someone driving behind me to be driving slower. Or I want so-and-so to call me back. Or I want this job offer to be given to me. Or I want my knee to not hurt so much. Or you wanted someone else to win an election. You wanted a different policy to be enacted. You wanted the economy to be different. It can be big. It can be small. It can be from your knee to the world economy and how it affects you. I'd like not to die. But there is a profound power in just even just taking some stillness, finding some clarity presence in the inner life in kind of like a rabid acceptance, radical acceptance of how everything just is the way it is.

14:51Well, Epictetus said that the first task of a philosopher is to understand there are things that are in our control and things that are not in our control. And really only the things that are in our control are worth our attention. And that's why I've always, I find the serenity prayer to be so remarkable because I feel like if you wrote it down and you ask someone when they thought this was written, like when's the earliest they would guess? No one's guessing like 1955 or whatever. Like you're not, I think he dashes that. I think Reinhold Niebuhr dashes that off like on a transcontinental train.

15:31Like that's not the technology that that prayer should be interacting with. That should be like the Renaissance at the earliest. You know, this feels like - It could be written above like the Parthenon or something. Totally, totally. like this is these were words uttered by the oracle at delphi that's when that feels like my other favorite one is like this is totally a tangent but free fallen by tom petty was not written in 1989 that makes no fucking sense to me you like the that is not an 80s and 90s song that is like the first rock and roll like that that's like a 60s song you know it doesn't make any sense, like sometimes there's things that clearly tap in to an ethos or an energy that is much, much older than it is.

16:21And I think the serenity prayer is obviously a very good example of that because it is, I think, rooted ultimately in Stoic philosophy and sort of Christian wisdom. But yeah, you have to go, hey, I don't have a choice that this happened, but I do have a choice in what I tell myself about what's happened and what it means to me. And that most of the time, the reason I'm upset or frustrated or hurt, offended or insert whatever word is because I am choosing to see it the wrong way. Epictetus said, you know, everything has two handles, which handle you're gonna grab it by. And we tend to grab it by the aggrieved handle, the harmed handle, the I'll never recover handle, you know, the disempowering handle instead of the handle that says, okay, I'm going to use this or this is good enough.

17:21And it is funny because in a different context, we might see the same thing totally differently. You know, like last night I was, took my whole extended family out to dinner and I, i thought i lost my wallet like in i thought i was driving there i was like where's my wallet i couldn't find my wallet and i'm like okay how much cash did i have my wallet cancel my credit cards yeah what a giant pain it's going to be to cancel my credit cards i got going out of the country gotta get do i have my driver's license just all this stuff right and then like right before the dinner i find the wallet my it just got under the seat did not care about the check subsequently because it's free.

17:58Do you know what I mean? Like I had already, I just resigned myself to this enormous imposition. And then that imposition is lifted and I suddenly see other impositions differently because you've got the high of the difference, right? So it is so often that we see things in one context and it's upsetting and frustrating. And then in other contexts, we see it totally differently. And to the Stoics, anything to any philosopher, you realize, oh, I have an immense amount of discretion over how I choose to process this thing. Like the thing is, Stokes would say, it is objective. Our opinion about it is not.

18:39And so they go, the thing isn't what's upsetting you. It's what you've told yourself about this thing that is upsetting. Which is a basic of Buddhism. Yes. It's your, you are in control of your attitude about something, your thought and your attitude about something. Yes. Is your greatest freedom.

18:59Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

19:29Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in. It's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

20:23And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.