It’s Never an Accident | Ask Daily Stoic

0:00Ryan 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.

0:14Ryan Holiday: It's never an accident. It wasn't some freak of circumstances that allowed Marcus Aurelius to be great amid disaster and unbelievable power. It wasn't a coincidence that Cato was the last honest man in Rome, a brave and solitary figure standing against the tide, wasn't an accident that earned Stockdale the Medal of Honor in the Hanoi Hilton that allowed him to ride out seven years in solitary confinement and torture. No, it wasn't. It was Epictetus who said that the whole point of philosophy was to be able to meet whatever life threw at you with, this is what I trained for. And that is precisely what these men had done.

0:54Ryan Holiday: In fact, Marcus Aurelius thanks Rusticus at the beginning of meditations for teaching him that he needed to train and discipline his character. Cato, as we said, trained his whole life in how he dressed, to what he ate, to how he spoke for some future moment when he would need to stand up, defend the Roman Republic. And Stockdale? Stockdale liked to joke that his plea beer at the Naval Academy prepared him for torture in prison. And of course, his study of philosophy didn't hurt either. And neither did his training in the Navy's SEER program, survive, evade, resist, escape. And now that training program is built around much of what Stockdale learned from experience.

1:36Ryan Holiday: No one magically steps up in the big moments. No, we revert to our level of training. Our true character comes out under pressure. So we must train that character. We must develop our bodies. We have to put in the work. Because when life's true tests arrive, and they will. We need to be ready to respond with both confidence and confidence. And that comes from preparation, not luck. It is never an accident.

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4:27Ryan Holiday: Welcome back to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've said before, like Meditations isn't a book that you have read. It is a book you are reading. And it is a book I I have both read and it is a book I am reading. And there are things that I missed the first time I read it and the second time I read it and the third time I read it. Things that are only appearing to me now as I pick it up. Here, let me grab it off my toe. Like, I grab it and I pull the leather bound down and I spin to something. And that you might see what the life of a good man is like. Someone content with what nature assigns him and satisfied with being just and kind himself.

5:08Ryan Holiday: How many times have I read that passage? Many, many, I'm sure. But there's something about picking it up at random and reading it and rereading it. And it just happens to be that you take something new out of it each time or something new strikes you each time. The randomness of it is a sort of part of my practice. As you know, this has been Meditations Month here at Daily Stoic. We've been reviewing meditations in a variety of different forms, done episodes about it. We've done deep dives about it. And then we're doing our Q &A about it on the day after Marcus Aurelius' birthday on the 27th. I'd love to see you in there.

5:45Ryan Holiday: Just to give you a little teaser of what that's like, here's some of the questions from last year's Meditations Q &A. If you want to join us, if you want to keep doing this deep dive into Marcus Aurelius with us, take our meditations course, the book club we're doing. Well, we'd love to have you join us. You can sign up right now, dailystoic.com slash meditations. I will link to that in today's show notes. But in the meantime, here's me answering some questions from meditations.

6:16Hi, Brian. Thank you. Hi. It was nice to take the course and revisit meditations. It's been a while since I've read it in detail. I dip in and out of it once in a while. One thing that always strikes me, and I'm curious for your opinion on it, or maybe direction to other readings, is when he talks about the cycles of, I think, generations, humans, empires, 749 always strikes me as a good example of that. But he's got other passages, 1027 and so forth, that I always make note of. just on cycles and seasonality. I know you've talked about dark energy and how that sort of makes a reappearance. And I've heard Robert Greene has touched on this when he's in the, I think, Laws of Human Nature.

7:02He's got a chapter on that from Machiavelli. Anyway, just curious on your thoughts on that and maybe other readings you might point to, in addition to meditations.

7:10Ryan Holiday: Yeah, the Stoics did seem to think of history and indeed the sort of whole arc of the world as this sort of cyclical thing. I think we get a sense from Marcus that he believed that sort of human beings have always been human beings and have always sort of had the same vices, always done the same things, been drawn to the same types of characters, made the same mistakes. And he found himself that he didn't live in some sort of unprecedented future, that nothing was new under the sun, that this is just how it always went. And we shouldn't be surprised or disappointed or alarmed by any of this. And I think that's a good lens into where we are now.

7:54Ryan Holiday: You know, the types of politicians that we have today, I don't think any of their personalities would be surprising to the Stoics. Some of the political dysfunction we have certainly would have been familiar to Cato or to Seneca or to Marcus Aurelius. Maybe there was anything that they would be surprised by. It would be the progress that we've made, the way we've gotten out of some of these traps, some of the vexing sort of problems that we've solved, the things we've been able to tackle as a society over the intervening 2000 years. But one of the things that you get when you study the Stoics is all the similarities.

8:31Ryan Holiday: And then you're also struck by some of the unfathomable differences. You know, the past is a foreign country, they say, but not a radically unfamiliar foreign country. And I think that's always what is so striking about meditations. Like on some level, Marcus Aurelius's life and the role that Marcus Aurelius lived should be incomprehensible to us. I mean, this is a guy with an arranged marriage. This is a guy who's the head of an enormous empire. This is a guy who owns slaves. This is a guy writing in a foreign language. There are all these ways that he shouldn't be like us. And yet he still has to get out of bed in the morning and he still is insecure or has anxiety or has ambitions.

9:17Ryan Holiday: He's still fundamentally a human being. And I think that's what makes him so recognizable and relatable to us. And so when Mark Stavillis is saying you, although he means me, he accidentally ends up meaning all of us. And that is the beauty of and the power of meditations. Deborah, you're up. Hello. Hi, how are you? I'm doing great. When you read meditations, what passages are the biggest struggle for you, either in terms of just trying to understand physically what it means or personally that you really grapple with? Oh, that's a great question. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I don't have my OG copy on me.

10:03Ryan Holiday: I have a new one here in front of me. But it's funny to watch as I go through it. I can see that I asked questions to myself when I read it the first time that, you know, I've subsequently been able to answer or differing opinions as I go. So, I mean, when Marcus Aurelius talks about the idea of living in accordance with nature, that's not a concept the Stoics define super well. There are also, I think, some passages in meditations that feel almost nihilistic. You know, he says, this is book 636. Asia and Europe, distant recesses of the universe, the ocean, a drop of water, Mount Athos, a molehill, the present, a split second in eternity, minuscule, transitory, insignificant.

10:50Ryan Holiday: You know, there are moments, you know, there's one passage where he goes, what does it matter if you live to be old or not? What do you care? There's just some passages where I wouldn't say Marcus seems depressed, but he does seem almost excessively cynical or, yeah, there's just a darkness to it. And I sometimes struggle with those. That's not exactly how I think about it. You know, continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life and the span of things around us. A grapeseed in infinite space. A half twist of a corkscrew against eternity. So there's something about that that seems kind of sad and insignificant.

11:31Ryan Holiday: And then book 10, 16, the one immediately above it, he says to stop talking about what a good man is like and just be one. So there's this kind of tension in Marcus Aurelius where he's like, we're all infinitesimal and small and don't matter. And, you know, nothing lasts. And then he's like, but make sure you do good stuff. You know, that tension sometimes strikes me. And I think I've wrestled with that for quite some time as I've read meditations. And I sometimes wonder, like, if you saw him the day that he wrote that, would you be like, oh, he was just in a mood that day? You know, what's the where is he coming to from that?

12:08Ryan Holiday: I think about that quite often. Thank you. Yeah, great question. Let's do Joseph. Hi. Hi. My question is, when you read meditations, he kind of mentions when somebody wrongs you, you should think about it in the way of that person wronging themselves. And we should try to not let it kind of take the weight that it does on us. My follow up to that is, well, you know, undisputably, that's a great mindset to have. How does that kind of work with like the struggle of reality and being a human being that does take the weight from those things? Yeah, I think what he's saying is, first off, that we're all sort of part of this, you know, interconnected universe.

12:47Ryan Holiday: And so when we harm one thing, we harm all things. But I think he's also saying that they're harming themselves by making themselves the kind of person that would do that thing. Right. So by stealing from you, yes, they're harming you in the sense they're taking something from you, although the Stokes would go, did you really need it? You know, did you really lose anything by losing it? But they're also saying that one thing that did happen is that that person became a thief, right? And that that is undeniably not a good thing to be. And so by doing it, they became that thing. I think that's what Marcus is saying.

13:20Ryan Holiday: Now, look, someone comes and steals your life savings, you know, again, okay, you still have your life, you know, you still have, you know, your character, you still have all these things. Sure. I think I get what the Stoics are saying. And yes, that person degraded themselves by being the kind of person that would steal someone's life savings. But it doesn't change the fact that you now still have to figure out how you're going to afford to live in retirement. So I think it's a philosophical point that is easier to stomach the smaller the stakes. But the bigger the stakes doesn't change the same fundamental assumption.

13:56Ryan Holiday: It just means it's still true. It's just still kind of a big thing that you have to deal with. Right. And again, I bet if you were talking, if you read a passage like that in meditations and then you were talking to Marcus Rielus and you were like, okay, but I still have to figure out how I'm going to live in retirement. I don't think he'd be like, yeah, we'll get over it. That's, you know, it's nothing. I do think as human beings, you know, the Stoics would have been understanding and empathetic and perhaps even generous, but they're just trying to get you to see it that way. I don't think if you were to come to Marcus Realist and go, hey, someone just stole my life savings or, hey, my child just died.

14:35Ryan Holiday: He would go, yeah, but you knew they were mortal when you had them. He would say, hey, when that happened to me, here's how I felt. And one of the things I reminded myself of was X, Y, and Z. So I think there's sometimes when we take the words in isolation, they can feel a little blasé or a little black and white. But when we actually look at who the Stoics were as people, and I would also say who we are aspiring to be as people, we can add a little bit more empathy and patience and understanding here. All right. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, of course. Somebody's asking a question about a Stoic official who they realized he couldn't be bribed when they saw him cooking radishes, that he wasn't materialistic at all.

15:17Ryan Holiday: I believe that is a chapter in Right Thing right now or maybe in Discipline is Destiny. And it's not Cato. I think it's one of Cato's heroes. Yeah, it's in Discipline is Destiny about sort of keeping your needs small, if I'm remembering correctly. Indira. Hi, Ryan. Thanks. Hi. Of course. All the content that you put out there, it's so inspiring. As I'm reading meditations, I keep seeing pleasure come up sprinkled all throughout, and I'm getting the sense that he feels that pleasure is innately wrong, and I'm just grappling with that. Yeah, I don't know if you would say it's innately wrong. I think he's certainly pushing back against, you know, sort of outright hedonism or against doing whatever you want, whenever you want it.

16:08Ryan Holiday: I think there's a skepticism in the Stoics about the permanence and the power of pleasure, you know, that it's rather fleeting, that building your life around doing things so you can have this sort of ephemeral experience is probably not worth what people are often willing to give up to get it. Although the Epicureans themselves, although they had this reputation as being hedonists, talk about this too. The idea that it's not just how you feel when you are getting the thing, but how do you feel after the regret or the shame or the pain that you inflicted on someone else. So, yeah, I don't think the Stoics were anti-pleasure, but they did look at it with some skepticism and they prioritized it differently than, you know.

17:00Ryan Holiday: we got to, again, imagine who Marcus Aurelius is seeing quite often. And we can kind of see better pictures of this in Epictetus's writing. So Epictetus lives in the court of Nero. And although he is quite powerless, he's surrounded by very powerful, rich and important people. And he sees the ways in which they are actually more enslaved than he is, because they're trying to be richer than other people. They're trying to outdo each other. They can't endure setbacks or, you know, sort of ordinary life because they've become so soft and entitled by their pleasures. So I think Marcus and the sort of general stoic writings, when we hear them talking about pleasure, we should probably contextualize how often this is a reaction against the decadence and the overindulgence of people of their class and space, right?

17:53Ryan Holiday: Like there's a story that Epictetus tells about this Roman who, you know, spends through most of their money and they go to Nero and they go, hey, I'm like basically down to my last million dollars. And Nero goes like, oh my God, how can you bear that? Like the idea of not being a millionaire was, you know, the worst fate that these guys could imagine. That's how sort of spoiled and out of touch they were. Right. And so I think that's kind of the pleasure that that the Stoics are reacting against. Thank you so much.