Nothing Is As Encouraging As This | The Freedom of Contempt

0:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Why did Marcus Aurelius write his meditations? It wasn't for an audience or to practice his Greek. After all, he was already pretty accomplished in those areas. Instead, we should think about what was going on around Marcus while he was writing it. Conflicts threatened just beyond the border. Economic troubles shook Rome's foundations. A plague had ravaged the nation's populists. And that's not even mentioning all the political corruption and the backstabbing and the chaos within palace walls. And yet Marcus doesn't seem to mention any of these events or his reactions to them. Instead, Marcus Aurelius explores himself in the pages of Meditations.

0:57He spends all of book one reflecting on what he's learned from various influential individuals in his life. Debts and Lessons, as it's titled, is 17 entries spanning nine pages in more than 2 ,000 words, nearly 10 % of the book. And there's the fact that almost every page after contains a quote, a story, or a reference to some bit of ancient philosophy. This seems a little odd, doesn't it? That the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man on the planet, was staying up at night exploring the idea of virtue and wisdom, primarily when and how he saw it embodied in others. But then when we come across a passage in book six, it begins to make more sense.

1:39When you need encouragement, he writes, think of all the qualities of the people around you. This one's energy, this one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when the virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we're practically showered with them. It is good, he says, to keep this in mind. Marcus Aurelius was writing to encourage himself during trying times. He was doing so by thinking about the people he admired and who had inspired him. He was showering himself in their virtues so that he might be improved by their association. And as far as we can tell, it worked because he was a good man, despite facing incredible temptations and pressures.

2:22And this example is, of course, rather timely. We should not just be reading meditations, but engaging in it, reflecting on it, journaling on it, using it to become a better person. We've been doing Meditations Month here, and we've been doing a deep dive on how to read meditations. We built out this sort of annotated guide, book club, exploration, explanation of meditations. It's a bunch of modules, videos, podcasts, discussions with me on how to get the most out of this book, how to use it in this moment. And we're going to be doing a Q &A as part of it. We'd love to have you join us. If you grab the guide, you'll get access to this live Q &A with me, where we're going to be doing this deep dive into meditations and reflecting on what it means to be a Stoic today.

3:10I'll link all of that in today's show notes, or just head over to dailystoic.com slash meditations.

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5:49You can just click the link in the description below or you head over to betterhelp.com slash dailystoke to get 10 % off your first month of therapy. The freedom of contempt. The language we use to describe things imputes value to those things. We often embellish our language with superlatives to help make our choices of what to buy, wear, eat, or drink seem much better than they really are. As emperor, Marcus Aurelius could have the finest Falernian wine at his table at any meal, but he preferred to remind himself that this was only grape juice. As emperor, he was the only Roman allowed to wear a purple cloak, but he took pains to point out that this cloak was like any other, just dyed with shellfish blood so as to produce a purple hue.

6:38This week, try to practice cutting your own luxuries and the things you yearn for down to size with a little contempt. Describe them with the bluntest language you can and see how much their power over you diminishes. Just as when meat or other foods are set before us, we think this is a dead fish or a dead bird or a pig. Also, this fine wine is only the juice of a bunch of grapes. This purple-edged robe is just sheep's wool dyed in a bit of blood from a shellfish, or of sex that is only the rubbing of private parts together followed by a spasmic discharge. In the same way, our impressions grab actual events and permeate them, so we see things as they really are.

7:19Marcus Aurelius' Meditation 613. Keep a list before your mind of all those who burn with anger and resentment about something, or even the most renowned for success, misfortune, evil deeds, or any special distinction. Then ask yourself, how did it work out? Smoke and dust, the stuff of simple myth trying to be legend. That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 1227. You know what wine and liquor tastes like. It makes no difference whether 100 or 1 ,000 bottles pass through your bladder. You are nothing more than a filter. This is from the Daily Stoic Journal. The week's entry is titled The Freedom of Contempt.

8:00I don't know. This has long been one of my favorite exercises in all of Stoicism. It's just brilliant. It's cynical. It's funny. It's really practical, too. You know, Marcus really didn't have to live in a time of Madison Avenue advertising. He didn't live in a time of social media influencers. He didn't live in a time of propaganda and misinformation. There wasn't spinning and selling the way that there is now. And yet, even then, he had to practice, you know, just seeing through all the bullshit, seeing through to what things actually were, stripping them, as he says, of the legend that encrusts them.

8:37So when Epictetus talks about putting things to the test, this is what Marcus is doing. He says, I'm not going to get distracted by my urges, by my immediate positive reaction to this, to the way my mouth is watering when I see X or the way that my eyes get big when I see Y. He says, I'm going to really break down what I see here. I'm going to describe it in the most unflinching, unvarnished, least sympathetic language possible. And I'm going to see what that reflection back to me does, how it changes my opinion of it. Right. Right. Sometimes, you know, there's that expression about seeing how the sausage gets made when you go and see the sausage gets made or you see, you know, underneath things, they lose their power over you.

9:21And that's what this stoic practice is really about. And it's so important. It's not that you'll never enjoy this or that ever again. It's just you want to enjoy it with the deceit turned down a little bit, the legend, a little more thread there. And this is an active practice we have to go through. So as you walk out in a parking lot and you see a Lexus, remind yourself, this is just a Toyota with fancier branding, right? When you see a$300 pair of Nikes, remind yourself of the sweatshop that this was likely made in. When you hear someone talking about how they are a billionaire, remind yourself just how dumb a lot of billionaires have turned out to be, right?

10:04When you're intimidated by someone's fancy degree, again, remind yourself who else has graduated from that institution. Think of the corruption. Think of the evil ideas that have come out of that institution over the years. Again, this isn't to dismiss or demean the things entirely. It's just to counteract that impulse of jealousy, of envy, of lust, of fear. There's that expression about if you see a beautiful woman that somewhere someone is sick of that person's shit. And that's true for everything, every person. It'll take it down a peg and then help you see it a tad more rationally.