It’s Almost Unimaginable | Ask Daily Stoic

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0:55It's almost unimaginable. He must have been quite a sight. Marcus Aurelius represented imperial power to be sure, pomp and circumstance. He also must have seemed to the Romans to be a tragic figure. Here was a man who had buried nine of his children. Here was a philosopher whose reign had been marked by wars and disasters and plagues. Here was a wise man whose body was failing him. They would have seen him, as the song about another statesman who lost their son goes. He is working through the unimaginable. His hair has gone gray, he passes every day. They say he walks the length of the city. You knock me out, I fall apart.

1:43Can you imagine? The Romans would have pitied him. They would have felt for him, as they should have. And yet for all this, we don't see in meditations any sense that Marcus allowed himself to give up. In fact, whenever he speaks of his misfortune, he quickly corrects himself. No, it's fortunate that this happened, he writes. It's fortunate that this happened, and I've remained unharmed by it. I was once a fortunate man, he writes elsewhere, and at some point fortune abandoned me. Except he counters himself with hope. True good fortune is what you make for yourself, he writes. Good fortune is good character, good intentions, and good actions.

2:24And in this way, he would have become another kind of sight, the sight of perseverance and resilience, the man who remained unbroken despite life's best attempts, a man whose decency and kindness and love for others was unaffected by all the pain directed upon him. And that is why, though they might have pitied him, people must have admired him, not for his power, not for his wisdom, but for his refusal to be undone, for proving in the face of unimaginable suffering that true fortune is not what happens to us, but how we choose to meet it.

3:05Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Soap Podcast. This is a new intro for me. This is the first intro of its kind because I am holding our new puppy in my lap while I do it. This is Oreo. I did not get to choose the name, but my wife and I were driving down our road a couple weeks ago. And we saw these two little puppies just running on the road. And we rescued them. And we found a new owner for one of them. And my kids insisted that we keep one. And Oreo here is in my lap. We don't know. We just did a DNA test. We haven't figured out what she is. But hopefully she'll be my new running buddy.

3:40and at the very least she's my recording buddy. And I just have a short intro for you guys today. It's a Thursday episode. As you know, we do Q &As. I've been bringing you some questions I answered when I was in London back in November. This was the first stop at the Troxie Theater. I think it went great. Hopefully you can come see me at some other talks. I'm trying to do another tour at some point. And then I'm heading out, actually I'm heading to Riverside, California tomorrow. This might be after you're listening to speak at my alma mater where I went to college. Hopefully I'll be able to bring you at some point in the future as well.

4:16Enjoy. I'm recording this on a Monday and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have prime, with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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5:05I'm finding myself like immersed in reading a lot of books now and doing a lot of note cards, but not dedicating a lot of time into the writing part. And I really like the style that you read. I know that Robert Greene was a great mentor for you. And I would like to know, like, how do you balance both? And how do you apply creativity to the process? Like, I know your perennial seller book is amazing. I have it here, but yeah, I want to know how you balance and how do you strive to be that part of writer, especially during like all these occupations we have, like jobs and everything else happening?

5:39Yeah. Okay. So I only read physical books and I'm proud and happy with that fact up until I have to travel and then I have to decide how many I can fit in my suitcase. Usually it's more a problem of how many I have to bring home from the trip. That's usually the trouble that I get into. But I just find if I'm going to spend the time reading, I want to spend it and actually do it. And then I want to not just a physical reminder of that, but the physical process of reading with a pen, writing in the margins, noting down what I want, and then going back through it. That's the process by which I am interacting with the material multiple times.

6:20Then I'm finding stuff often that I end up using with my other books. So usually like in my office, I try to read just one book at a time and then I finish it and it goes in a stack near my desk. And then whenever I have a few spare minutes, actually, I was talking to James Clear about this. It's really important that you have something to do with your extra time. Like when you have a few extra minutes, when you have time, you don't know what to do with, you know what to do with it. And so when I finished something early, I'm waiting, somebody's late for something. The Zoom was supposed to connect and it didn't.

6:56And now I have 30 extra minutes before my next thing. I pick up one of those books and I go back through it and I transfer those to note cards, which I then organize for my books. And every one of my books is a collection of those note cards. And I just more or less finished the manuscript for the wisdom book, which will be the fourth book in this series. And then on Thursday, before we flew here, I took out a box from the shelf to start the note cards for the next book that I'm working on. So I'm just always doing it. And it's not spending hundreds of hours uninterrupted, you know, hours on it.

7:31It's whenever I can squeeze it in, I do it. As far as the relationship between researching and writing, whenever I'm having trouble writing, it's because I haven't done enough research. I find the writing stringing together of sentences to not be particularly difficult. But what is in those sentences, what is the material that you are distilling down to say what you are trying to say, that is the rarer part of the process or that is the rarer raw material. And so whenever I'm having trouble writing or I'm even finding myself procrastinating for writing, it's usually because the material is not there.

8:07And at some level, I know that the material is not there and I have to go back to do more research. Like in the book I just finished, I was going to write this chapter about Lincoln and I've already read a lot about Lincoln. I thought I had a lot of cards and I had to read like another 2 ,000 pages and distill all that down again. So it's usually, I don't think writer's block is the problem. The research is what's blocking the writing. And once I do the research, the writing tends to come real easily. My name is Nick and I'm a scientist. I'm specialized in infectious diseases. Oh, you've been busy.

8:45Yeah, I know. And for the last four years, everyone has an opinion about my discipline, right? All big fans? Yeah, I know. How would you manage these type of arguments or opinions? Do you choose a specific fight? Or do I just focus on the overall picture and try to fight the big fight? There's a Marcus Reles quote that maybe you'll relate to. We don't know what he's talking about specifically, some incident, something somebody said about him. But he says, being emperor is to earn a bad reputation by doing good deeds. And he was talking about how you inevitably don't please everyone, right? There's some group of people who are upset with you.

9:29And it is a reality of any profession. I think the tragedy of your profession is that if there's somebody that doesn't like my stuff and I ignore them, there's no cost to society in that. We are struggling as a society to how do we balance freedom of speech, which is essential, and then people who are actively poisoning or polluting our information ecosystem, which has real world consequences for the human society. And I'm not quite sure we figured out the balance. I'm not quite sure we figured out what you ignore. what you respond to. Sometimes we're responding too heavily to things and other times we're not responding enough and we're just allowing things to take over whole platforms and systems.

10:26My first book is kind of all about the wicked incentives of the system that leads this. I have another Marcus Reelers quote that I think a lot about. He lives through a plague, the Antonine Plague. It's a fascinating book about this called Pax Romana, all about the Antonine Plague. And it's a pandemic that doesn't last for a couple years, last for like a decade and a half. Millions of Romans die, and they have essentially no ability to respond to it. And as distant and different as it was, he has this quote in there that I didn't really understand until 2020. I didn't understand meditations as a book written during a plague, but it was.

11:09And he says, you know, there's two types of pestilences. He's like, there's one that can destroy your life. That's the actual virus. And then he says, there's the one that can destroy your character. And you could say, there's also the one that can destroy your brain. There's a whole bunch of people that we haven't gotten back since COVID. And they caught a different kind of virus, usually on the internet. And that is a tragic thing. I think it goes to what I've been trying to say is our big problem. How do you stay sane in an insane world? And how do you stay sort of clean and unaffected or uninfected when all these people around you are catching this thing?

11:53And it's not always about infectious diseases, but it's a mistrust in institutions or it's a loathing for a specific group of people. I mean, you could argue anti-Semitism is like the oldest virus that there is. And many of the Romans caught it. So there's always been this thing that spreads amongst human beings of distrust and hatred and disillusionment and despair. And the ability to not be infected with it is kind of like the ultimate strength that we have to have. And we have to figure out how you immunize yourself. How do you develop an information diet, cultivate a sort of sense of self, an information ecosystem that allows you to get information from people who you agree with and disagree with without also breaking your brain, as so many smart people seem to have done.

12:50Hey, 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.

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