Let Them Be Flexible. You Stand On This. | Count Your Blessings

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.

0:56Let them be flexible. You stand on this. They weren't totally wrong. Seneca, Cicero, plenty of Stoics before and since, especially the ones in politics, have had to accept, as Marx really said, that they did not live in Plato's Republic. This meant being flexible. It meant working with unsavory bosses, supporting flawed policies, not saying what they actually thought because they wanted to maintain their influence. Seneca, for instance, told himself what many modern politicians have told themselves in recent times, that if he fell out of favor with Nero, he'd be replaced by someone worse, that he'd lose his ability to moderate and mitigate.

1:34And again, this is a real dilemma for them. Sometimes someone has to play that role, but you know what? Chances are you are not that person. We can say with certainty that most people are not that person. The onus on most of us is not backroom compromises or keeping our mouth shut until some critical future moment. No, the onus on most of us is closer to the reminder that Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations, the one about being a good person and speaking without hesitation, he said, the truth as we see it. The world does not need more Senecas and Ciceros. It needs more Thrasias and Cados. It needs more Helvidias.

2:10You can read about all of them in Lives of the Stoics, by the way. It needs unbending, courageous people. It needs people who day-to-day do what's right, not what is expedient. It needs people who are not afraid to lose their position, not people who will do anything to keep it. It needs people who call a spade a spade, who speak truth to power, who do not live by lies. Rome needed more of these people, and the modern world does too.

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 best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

3:20My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky'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.

3:57Becky. 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. Count your blessings. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my wonderful collaborator Stephen Hanselman, who I also worked on The Daily Stoic with. This week's entry begins with the following meditation. It's easy to complain about things missing in our lives. It's so much harder to appreciate what we already have.

4:40Seneca reminded us that everything we need to be happy is right in front of us. while the luxuries we might be missing could themselves come at a great cost, the cost of what we already have. Marcus agreed and reminded himself to count those blessings present in our lives and try to imagine what it would be like to not have them and how much we'd miss them. So take a minute and list some of your blessings this week. Take a conscious note of what you are fortunate to have and enjoy so you can see clearly, as Epictetus put it, where they come from, feel a sense of gratitude for that. The first quote is from Mark Surrealis' Meditations, 727.

5:19He says, don't set your mind on things you don't possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think about how much you would desire them if they weren't already yours. But watch yourself that you don't value these things to the point of being troubled that if you should lose them. That was a really helpful exercise for me about envy. You know, you can look at all the things that other people have that you'd want to have, but it gives you a whole nother perspective. If you take a minute and think about all the things that you have that other people would be jealous of.

5:47And it is funny how often we lust or crave things that other people not only don't like, but they would lust or crave for our life. And that should give you some sense that this is all crazy. This is all some freakish evolutionary drive that's making us miserable. Focus on what you have. Be grateful for that instead of craving what you don't have. But of course, don't be so obsessed and grateful for the things you have that you would miss them if you lost them. This is from Seneca's Moral Letters. The founder of the universe who assigned to us the laws of life provided that we should live well, but not in luxury.

6:20Everything needed for our well-being is right before us. Whereas what luxury requires is gathered by many miseries and anxieties. Let us use this gift of nature and count it among the greatest things. Seneca is a bit of a hypocrite here. He's a very, very rich man. Famously has something like 300 tables that he uses for entertaining. But the point is, he knew even richer people, and he knew people who were not as rich but craved what he had. He said marble and gold are forms of slavery, that the people who live under them are slaves. He said that these things are won at the cost of life. And so when we're not counting our blessings, what we are doing is, by definition, is chasing other people's blessings or more blessings or other blessings.

7:03And this is preventing us from being satisfied with what we have right now in front of us. And then we have a quote from Epictetus's Discourses 1.6. He says, it is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen if you have two qualities, a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance and a sense of gratitude. Without gratitude, what is the point of seeing? And without seeing, what is the object of gratitude? And look, it's not just gratitude about possessions. It's not just focusing on material items. But it's also just grateful that you were born here to these parents, to this or that, grateful for your set of experiences because they made you who you were.

7:44And that it's impossible, for instance, to have had different parents or be born to a different nationality or to have had this or that. And it not changed the whole course of your life, right? You can't just pick and choose. You have no line item veto over the things that happened to you in life. So in that sense, you have to be grateful for the whole of it because all of it made you who you were. All of it shaped who you are and will become. And so this sense of gratitude for everything, for the stuff we have, as well as the stuff we haven't had, as well as the experiences we've had. And as the different experiences that were out of reach or didn't happen to us, or the things we thought we wanted, but we didn't get.

8:27Gratitude for all of it. Gratitude for what it is because it made you who you were. and it couldn't have been any differently. The Stoics would say, this is what fate chose for you. This is how it worked out. There's no reason to feel anything but gratitude for this. And that's what Amor Fati is really about. I spend a lot of time journaling about this this week. I hope you do as well. Enjoy, focus on gratitude. Enjoy what you have instead of lusting over the things you don't have. Keep working on it. I'll talk to you soon.

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