Life Is Emotionally Abusive | No Shame In Needing Help

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1:30Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

2:10Life is emotionally abusive. One day, everything's easy, and the next, everything that can go wrong does. One minute, everyone tells you that you're great. The next, they've all gamed up against you. Life is too short. It's also interminably long. Things move insanely fast. They also take forever. Look at Marcus Aurelius' life. He loses his father, and then he's adopted by two powerful stepfathers. He's suddenly thrust into power, then forced to wait years to wield it. He's blessed by enormous wealth and then haunted by tragedy after tragedy. Even his job is emotionally manipulative and impossible.

2:47At one point, Marcus Aurelius describes being emperor as a kind of deranged world where one earns a bad reputation by good deeds. So when the Stoics talked about the need for an even keel, this was why. When Antoninus hands power over to Marcus, his final word was equanimity for a reason. When you're in a volatile relationship, when you're being gaslit, it's incredibly important that one has a strong sense of self, a strong sense of inner peace. It was Marcus Aurelius' inner citadel that he relied on to get through the abuse that life threw at him. It was his ability to be like the rock that the waves crashed over that allowed him to endure each onslaught of praise or adversity.

3:29What about you? How will you endure what is in store for you? What emotional stillness are you going to be able to rely on?

3:40That's my key set that I used to get into my office. and I've got the one big key that I turn to get into my office here at the Painted Porch and it's my stillness key, right? And it's actually got that rock on it that Marcus Aurelius is talking about, the rock with the big wave crashing over, but it stays still. It's a reminder to me, actually, as I turn the key into my office, one, that stillness unlocks the kind of creativity and productivity and focus that I need to do what I do. and as I slide that key into the key set, it's a reminder that stillness unlocks the creativity, productivity, connection, focus that I need, the presence that I need to do what I do.

4:25It's obviously what I wrote a whole book about, Stillness is the Key, which came out in 2019. You can grab that book, Anywhere Books Are Sold. You've got signed copies of The Painted Porch and then you can actually get your own version of that stillness key, which I'm super proud of. it comes with this cool box. It makes a great gift for someone who's stressed out or, you know, deserves or needs some stillness in your life. You can check that out at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to it in today's show notes. I think you'll really like it. It also comes with a cool action guide related to the book.

4:57So a bunch of awesome stuff there. Grab your own Stillness is the Key. Or just remember that very important idea, which I also have tattooed on my arm, Stillness is the Key.

5:11I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product. I've used 8 Sleep for many years now. and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically Eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately.

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6:45No shame in needing help. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic, June 16th, which also happens to be my birthday. So a little message on that coming up here shortly. It's actually one of my all-time favorite quotes from Marcus Reelis' meditations, Meditation 7-7. Marcus says, don't be ashamed of needing help. You have a duty to fulfill just like a soldier on the wall of battle. So what if you are injured and can't climb up without another soldier's help? Then the meditation is, no one ever said you were born with all the tools you'd need to solve every problem you'd face in life. In fact, as a newborn, you were practically helpless.

7:24Someone helped you then, and you came to understand that you could ask for help. It was how you knew that you were loved. Well, you are still loved. You can ask anyone for help. You don't have to face everything on your own. If you need help, comrade, just ask.

7:43And the reason I love that quote is that it so pushes back on this sort of stoic stereotype or caricature of like the unfeeling robot, the one that's invulnerable, that never struggles. And also, as I've come to learn in my sort of talks to the military community, that there is this sort of warrior mindset that looks suspiciously on vulnerability, on being vulnerable and asking for help, on saying, hey, I'm struggling. Hey, I'm having a hard time. Hey, this isn't working for me. And I think it's really important to realize specifically Marcus is talking to those people, but all of us at the same time, when he says like, hey, we're all in this together.

8:26We're on the same team. Marcus talks a lot about the common good in meditations about what we can do for the common good, but we also have to realize we're a part of that common good and we can ask for something back from it. And if we can't, I mean, what does that say about our friends and family and coworkers, right? Like when somebody comes to you, they go, hey, I'm really struggling. I need your advice. Or, hey, like, I don't know if I'm cut out for this. What do you think? Or like worse, right? Like I'm thinking of harming myself, really going through rough patch. What do we do? We drop everything.

9:01We not only rush to help them, we feel glad that they trusted us, that they came to us with that thing. It's beautiful and moving. We not only don't look at them badly for it, we're excited. Thanks for coming to me. I appreciate it. That means so much to me. Then for some reason, some strange reason, we think that we're not going to get that same grace from other people. Look, you might not always get it, but I think the vast majority of the time you will, right? And you can't get help. I've come to say this in some of my talks. You can't get help you don't ask for. Just like if you pretend to know something, you can't learn it.

9:44If you pretend, if you not only don't ask for help, but you pretend you don't need help, you pretend to be struggling less than you are. I mean, you're pushing away help that you could so readily and easily benefit from. So this is just, to me, just a really important stoic message and a reminder that we're a team sport. We're all in this together. We should rely on each other. We should not only offer help readily, but be willing to accept help just as readily, not feel guilty about either one of those things. Anyways, today's my birthday turning 36. I'm just putting the finishing touches on my birthday post, which She'll go out here shortly.

10:24Stoics are always a good reminder of our mortality. So as I'm meditating on 36 lessons or so on the way to 36 years old, I'm excited to send this out to you. That'll go out to my email list here shortly. I'm sure it'll get posted on social as well. But I'm taking the day off, spending the day with family. probably going to go swimming, go for a run, and then just appreciate the morbidness, but also clarity of what Seneca famously said. It's not in today's entry. It would have been a good one to put, although I guess we save all the memento mori stuff for the end of the year. But the idea that as time passes, it's gone forever.

11:10And it's interesting for me to think, yeah, sure, 36 is pretty young. If I'm lucky, maybe I'm not even at the halfway point. But it's also interesting to think, 36 years gone by, right? Never to return. What do I have to show for them? I think I have a lot. Do I have as much as I could? And I don't mean to whip myself for not being productive enough. I'm just saying, where did I waste time on things that didn't really matter? What took longer because I was afraid to ask for help or to open up, right? Or to get advice? Right. What did I do alone that I could have done as part of a team or with other people?

11:51Right. What did I not need to be doing at all? Right. What could I have learned from other people's experiences, save myself some painful lumps on the head? And then where was I just angry about stuff, resentful about stuff? You know, that's sort of the theme of today's post that's going out is just about letting things go, not comparing yourself to other people, focusing on what really matters. And that's what I'm thinking about today on my birthday. I appreciate everyone who subscribes. I appreciate all the nice things that people said on social media. And more to come from Daily Stoic as always.

12:29Talk to y 'all soon.

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