Pain Is A Part Of Life | Become An Expert In What Matters

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1:29Welcome 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 in to works.

2:09Pain is a part of life. Oh, how you wish you could guarantee that they would never suffer. Of course, you know that's not possible. As the character in Herman Hesse's Siddhartha says, we cannot spare our kids the suffering we have gone through in our lives. We cannot prevent them from suffering altogether because suffering and pain are a part of life. As a parent, the goal is to raise kids who are tough enough, loved enough, to deal with what life is going to throw at them. We don't want them to suffer, but when the suffering comes in, it's definitely coming. We want them to be able to endure the initial shock, navigate its ups and downs, and then learn from the consequences.

2:51Think about that today. Think about toughening your kids up. Think about preparing them for an uncertain future. Because that is the one thing we know for certain. Things are going to be tough. Things will go wrong. More pandemics and emergencies and recessions and heartbreak lie ahead. Our kids are going to have to be ready for it. And it's on us to make sure that they are.

3:23Becoming an expert in what matters. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic, April 14th. Believe me, Seneca says in On the Shortness of Life, it's better to produce the balance sheet of your own life than that of the grain market. The things that people manage to become experts in, fantasy sports, celebrity trivia, derivatives and commodities markets, 13th century hygiene habits of the clergy. We can get very good at what we're paid to do or adept at a hobby we wish we could be paid to do, and yet our own lives, habits, and tendencies might be a complete mystery to us. Seneca was writing this important reminder to his father-in-law, who, as it happened, was for a time in charge of Rome's granary.

4:12But then his position was revoked for political purposes. Who really cares, Seneca was saying. Now you can focus that energy on your inner life. At the end of your time on this planet, what expertise is going to be more valuable? Your understanding of matters of living and dying or your knowledge of the 87 bears? What will help your children more, your insights into happiness and meaning, or that you followed breaking political news every day for 30 years? I've said this before, but obviously being an informed citizen in a democracy is really important. But people seem to think that being an informed citizen means watching a lot of MSNBC or Fox News or spending a lot of time on Twitter.

4:58But what you see with these folks is they know a lot of trivia, but they fundamentally don't understand human nature. They fundamentally don't understand right or wrong or virtue or the things that actually matter in life. I think it was Heraclitus who said something like this, he says, you know, these people study all these books for all these years and they failed to realize that day and night are one. What I take from that is he's saying is that they're missing the big picture. They're missing the eternal deep truths of life in exchange for the trivia. You know, they run a great business. They understand these events in fiction or art or sports or whatever it is, but they've fundamentally not come to grasp the truths of existence.

5:48And I think even what I love about stoicism is that stoicism isn't big, arcane, abstract questions, but practical ones. It's about understanding the balance sheet of one's life, as Seneca was saying. It's about understanding their self, understanding their emotions, understanding people. Like I've said this a bunch of times now, but like, you know, you could follow breaking pandemic news or you could read a book about the Spanish flu, which I recommended a bunch of times. If you haven't read The Great Influenza yet, you should. It's incredible. You know, you can, you could have followed one of Donald Trump's impeachments or you could have read a biography of Nixon or Andrew Johnson.

6:30You know, it's better to go back further. It's better to look deeper. You may even learn more from something fictional than you ever, like you could learn as much from Camus' The Plague as you could from, you know, the latest New York Times report. So I think what Seneca is saying is that we often understand everything but ourselves. We ask all the little questions instead of the couple big questions, Like, why am I here? What's important to me? What's right? What's wrong? And that's such a shame. Philosophy is supposed to be practical. Philosophy is supposed to push us to understand ourselves and humans, right?

7:17Like the amount of people that focus on this or that and then just fundamentally don't understand how psychology works or fundamentally understand how like the very system of government works. People who are now talking about what's going on in Ukraine and going, oh, let's put a no-fly zone over it. And then you're like, well, what is a no-fly zone? Or they go, I'm mad about critical race theory. Well, what is critical race theory? They don't know. They're just tied up in stuff, right? And they haven't thought about what the thing they're talking about would actually mean. so we talked about this before about how certainty and arrogance is the is the root of real ignorance and i also think it goes for what are you going to choose to know about trivial ephemeral things are going to probe the deeper questions are going to probe yourself you're going to look inward marcus really says throw away your books you know he says this in meditations and i don't think that meant you know then go watch the gladiatorial games i think he meant throw away your books and sit there and think.

8:24Sit there and get in touch with yourself. Sit there and really examine, think about the things you've already learned. That's what we're talking about. And it's just another sort of deeply powerful, powerful question from Seneca. As the Stoics tell us always, become an expert in the things that matter. Focus on the things that matter. Ask the questions that really matter. Lead the trivia and nonsense to everyone else.

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