It’s Right There. Take It. | Stoic Lessons Hidden in Bruce Springsteen Songs

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 right there. Take it. It's right there. It's not under lock and key. It's not secret knowledge. There's an unlimited amount. They're making more and more of it every day. It's there for everyone and anyone. And yet what do most people do? They ignore it. Epictetus said that it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. Truman said that the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know. These two insights combined. You can't learn history that you don't take the time to look at that you think you already understand. History is full of men and women who wrestled with the same problems we are struggling with today.

0:55Ryan Holiday: History helps us avoid the pitfalls they fell into and take advantages of the opportunities before us. It can keep us from losing our mind over breaking news because we better understand how the world actually works. What you studied in school is only a start. What you've read in books is only a start. History must be returned to again and again, looked at from every angle, studied from every perspective. We can't be satisfied with just getting the gist of it, as Marks really said. No, if we really want to benefit, we have to truly understand what happened and what it means. That's something I talk about in Wisdom Takes Work, looking at the lives of men and women who didn't ignore history, who studied what came before them, who learned from it and used it to make better decisions when it mattered most.

1:45Ryan Holiday: History is right there. Take it. Use it. Let it make you wiser.

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4:26Ryan Holiday: Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. You might have picked up on the fact that I am a huge Springsteen fan. I'm always sneaking him in to the Daily Stoic emails, to the Daily Dad emails. If you've watched any of the walkthroughs we've done on the painted porch, I'm always pushing deliver me from nowhere into people's hands. Basically, since the day that book came out, that's the making of Nebraska. Actually, Specifically, Nebraska is one of my favorite albums. And I've quoted a bunch comparing Marcus Aurelius and his brother, Cato and his brother, to the brother relationship in Highway Patrolman, which is one of my favorite songs from Springsteen.

5:05Ryan Holiday: I never really figured out how to put Atlantic City into a Daily Stoic email, but maybe I'll figure it out these days. I'm actually taking my kids. Springsteen's coming to Austin this week. And I am going to take them to see Springsteen. my wife was going to be out of town. That trick got canceled, but still just going to be the three of us. So I'm excited about that. And since his music's been so important to what we do at Daily Stoic and Daily Dad, I thought I'd do an episode where I dive into some of those emails because there are a bunch of them. And you know, it's funny when I had this idea for the episode, I asked Katie and Claire, our email and podcast producers, I said, hey, like, just go find all the different times that we've mentioned Springsteen and the different emails.

5:47Ryan Holiday: And they They found like three or four. And I go, no, no, there's way more. I was searching in my Gmail for not Springsteen's name because I don't always quote him, but like snippets from lyrics. And so many of them came up. So this was an excuse for me to sort of go back through the archives and find some emails I really liked. Here are some stoic ideas inspired by the boss himself.

6:13Ryan Holiday: We're busy. We're tired. We have so much to do. We had dreams once, sure, but they slowly deflated. The mortgage, the kids, the job, watching TV, that's how we fill our days. It's a slow downward spiral that Bruce Springsteen sang about in Racing in the Street. Some guys, they just give up living, he sang, and start dying little by little, piece by piece. If you're not that guy, you at least know him or her. They're the mainstay of the modern world, overworked, undersexed, overtired, and underappreciated. Facebook is to blame, right? The capitalist pigs are responsible, yeah? It's because of the 24-hour news cycle.

6:53Ryan Holiday: Certainly none of those things help. But the truth is that this is a timeless problem. It goes back much further than Bruce or even this century. Because Seneca spoke about those guys, too. How much time has been lost to groundless anguish, he writes. Greedy desire, the charms of society, how little is left to you from your own store of time. Wake up, he says. Stop sleepwalking. Stop giving away what you can never give back. That's from his essay, The Shortness of Life, where he tries to get the reader, as Bruce Springsteen does in his best songs, to realize that you are dying before your time.

7:31Ryan Holiday: We only get one life. Once time ticks by, it never comes back. Yes, each of us will die, that's a fact. But for the moment we are alive, which is why we have to live, which is why we have to protect our time, our dreams, and our spirit. We can't give it up piece by piece. We can't start dying before our time. We have to live now while we still can.

7:59Ryan Holiday: Again, which will you be? Arthur Ashe's time with his daughter was cut tragically short. At the end of his memoir, knowing how little time he had left, he wrote some advice to her that touched on something we have spoken about again and again here at Daily Dad. We are being watched by our ancestors, he said, as I am watching you. We possess more than they ever dreamed of having, so we must never let them down. We are watched by our ancestors, yes, but we are also, as Bruce Springsteen put it, haunted by their ghosts. Which will you be for your child? Are you the kind of example they need? Have you left the kind of legacy that will protect them, that will guide them, that will inspire them to be decent and disciplined, great and good, as Arthur did for his young daughter?

8:48Ryan Holiday: Or will you haunt them with your mistakes, with the pain you inflicted on them, with the things left unsaid or unresolved? None of us controls how much time we have. None of us control how the future will go. But we do have say over whether we're an ancestor or a ghost, and we must live and parent accordingly.

9:11Ryan Holiday: When it comes to family, we have to be kind. Marcus Aurelius' stepbrother, Lucius Verus, was hardly a great man. Unlike Marcus, he was not as driven or as smart. We hear that he liked to party. he was not always so diligent in his responsibilities. But still, Marcus Aurelius loved his stepbrother and not only found a role for him leading the troops, but celebrated his accomplishments, sometimes at the expense of his own. Would he have treated his other generals so generously? It's doubtful. In Rome, it was said that not all men could be Cato's, and that included Cato's brother. His brother was more stoic than Lucius Verus, but he also loved luxury, at least compared to his brother.

9:53Ryan Holiday: Did it bother Cato that his brother wear perfume? Would he have judged other men harshly for doing the same thing? Probably. But as Bruce Springsteen put it in one of his greatest songs, when it's your brother, sometimes you look the other way. Is this stoic? To hold people you love to different standards? To let them get away with things you wouldn't do yourself? Maybe. Maybe not. It's also life. In Epictetus' famous metaphor that everything has two handles, one which will hold weight and the other which will not, he actually references this exact kind of situation. You can choose to grab hold of the fact that something wrong has been done to you, or you can choose to grab hold of the fact that it was done by your brother, someone you were raised with, someone who loves you and has a good heart.

10:39Ryan Holiday: Which of those is a better handle? Marcus Aurelius and Cato could have looked down on their brothers. Instead, they loved them. When Cato's brother died, he told a friend he'd rather part with his life than his brother's ashes. And they were willing to look the other way, not just for brothers, but with all the people they lived with and were related to. Marcus Aurelius did this well with his wife, who's rumored to be unfaithful, and of course, too well or not well enough with his son, who clearly went astray. Cato did this with his sister, who had a torrid affair with Julius Caesar, his worst enemy.

11:13Ryan Holiday: We must be kind to our family. We must forgive because they are all we have. Like us, they are not perfect, not by a long shot. In fact, they might be obnoxious or deeply flawed, but they are our blood. We share a past. And if we want to share a future, we need to see what is good in them and encourage that. Up to a point, of course. But now, let's grab the kindness and forgiveness and love handle. Look for it and look away.

11:43Ryan Holiday: They'll wreck this. It was a pretty stupid controversy. Josh Gottheimer, a congressman from New Jersey, he got caught photoshopping his 2024 Spotify rap list to include more Bruce Springsteen. He had added in Thunder Road and Badlands and The Rising to his most listened songs of the year, and then posted it on social media. How did he think he was going to get away with that? Well, as parents, we probably shouldn't judge. In fact, we should empathize. As the apologetic and now even more embarrassed congressman explained after online sluice noticed the telltale signs of editing, the problem was that he shared a Spotify account with his teenage kids and they had wrecked his algorithm.

12:30Ryan Holiday: Who amongst us has not had our YouTube and Netflix and Spotify accounts horribly skewed by our kids' love of nerdcore or the Frozen soundtrack? How will we ever convince Google that we do not in fact like Mr. Beast or prank videos? Will our Netflix suggestions ever recover from the cocomelon we have watched? It is annoying to be sure, but it is a small price to pay to help them discover their own interests. It's a small price to pay for peace in the car instead of whining and complaining and gratuitous insults about our taste. And someday, almost certainly, one of these songs will come on and we will be hit with a wave of nostalgia, missing that 12-year-olds who like to belt out Taylor Swift, desperately willing to trade anything for one more road trip listening to the Pokemon theme on repeat.

13:22Ryan Holiday: So we might as well enjoy it while it's here. and not be embarrassed about it for even one second.

13:34Ryan Holiday: What are we fighting about, really? There's a great lyric in the bridge of the new Bruce Springsteen song, Tucson Chain. We fought hard over nothing, he sings. We fought till nothing remained. And I carried that nothing for a long time. Doesn't that just perfectly capture, in such a sad and telling way, many of our relationships and grudges? We turn nothing into something and then hold on to it like it's everything. Then we wonder why we're unhappy. We wonder why we're lonely. We wonder where people we used to love have gone. We wonder where the good times went. The answer, we drove them away.

14:13Ryan Holiday: We ground them into dust. Marcus Aurelius struggled with this too, had a problem like we all do with anger and taking offense and getting into arguments and needing to prove people wrong. If he hadn't, he never would have written this little reminder in meditations. Run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something, the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever. Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend, or not even legend. Think of all the examples and how trivial the things we want so passionately are. It's heartbreaking. It's true. And all of us are guilty of it in our own way.

14:53Ryan Holiday: What are we fighting about? What do we so passionately need? Why do we so passionately need to be right? Why can't we just let things go? If only we could change.

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