Rule The Empire Between Your Ears | We Reap What We Sow

0:00You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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1:13To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's givewell.org, code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it.

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2:15Welcome 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.

2:52Rule the empire between your ears. It'd be nice to be the head honcho. It would be cool to be the owner. It'd be nice to look out over a vast bit of territory and say, this is all mine. This is the fantasy. This is the ambition that drives so many of us, that drove so many in the ancient world too. But as the Stoics noted, when we pursue power, control, or money, we end up neglecting what's right in front of us. Epictetus, who was a slave, looked at Nero's court and saw rich and famous men who were less free than he was because they spent all their energy trying to get more than what they had, because their happiness was tied up in what other people thought, because their fears were based on things that were not up to them.

3:33In The Girl Who Would Be Free, our fable based on the life of Epictetus, Epictetus' father says that to be great, we have to first focus on the empire between our ears. He's referring to our thoughts, our emotions, our urges, our desires, our fears, our own choices. You have to understand that if we rule this, then we are the head honcho, then we are the owner, then we do control an immense territory. We're more powerful than many emperors, many conquerors, and many billionaires. We're as free as it's possible to be. I'm actually just so proud of that book, The Girl Who Would Be Free. I did The Boy Who Would be king early in the pandemic.

4:12I did The Girl Who Would Be Free later in the pandemic. The idea was like, how do I tell the story of stoicism for all audiences? But I was really writing to my own two young boys. And the books have been really, really cool. And people have loved them. I was just signing a bunch of copies downstairs at The Painted Porch. You can grab them there, or you can go to store.dailystoic.com. I think we have a deal where if you buy the signed copy of one, you get The other one, like 75 % off, something like that. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Check them out.

4:52We reap what we sow. This is the October 27th entry in the Daily Stoic. Crimes often return to their teachers. This is from Seneca's play, Theestes, which is a dark, disturbing play. to put it mildly, but a fascinating read. It's ironic that Seneca would have one of his characters utter this line, because as we know, for many years, Seneca served as a tutor and mentor to the Emperor Nero. And while there is a lot of evidence that Seneca was in fact a positive moral influence on this deranged young man, even at the time, some of Seneca's contemporaries found it strange that a philosopher would serve as the right-hand man to such an evil person.

5:34They called him the tyrant teacher. And just as Shakespeare taught in Macbeth, bloody instructions which being taught return to plague the inventor. Seneca's collaboration with Nero ultimately ends with the student murdering the teacher. And it's something to think about when you consider whom you work with and whom to do business with in life. If you show a client how to do something unethical or illegal, might they return the favor to an unsuspecting you later? If you provide a bad example to your employees, to your associates, to your children, might they betray you or hurt you down the road?

6:10What goes around comes around, is the saying. Or karma, the notion we have imported from the East, teaches us a similar idea. Seneca paid the price for his instructions to Nero, and as has been true throughout the ages, his hypocrisy, avoidable or not, was costly. And so too will yours be. There's a great tweet that came out March 12, 2019 that I think of often. It says, me reaping. Ha ha, fuck yeah, yes. And then it says, me reaping. It says, me sewing. Ha ha, fuck, yes. And it says, me reaping. Well, this fucking sucks. What the fuck? And then there is, of course, the other famous tweet that says, well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions.

6:59As the expression now goes, right, fuck around and find out. That's what happened to Seneca, right? Seneca rolled the dice, thought he could feed the monster, thought he could constrain Nero. He was exactly like a lot of the figures that I talked about in my podcast episode with Tim Miller, the right-wing political operative who saw so many people convince themselves, he said these sort of minor savior complexes, that they were very important. They were important enough they could constrain Trump or get something out of him that it would be good for them in the short term. It always comes back to bite us, right?

7:46The consequences of our actions come back to us. Crimes return to their teachers. You reap what you sow. And this was the biggest mistake of Seneca's life. It's a mistake I've made in my life. I thought it was different. I thought the rules wouldn't, you know, I thought it was different. I thought I could make it work. I thought I was making a bargain that would work out, And it didn't. It never does. So we learn from the Stoics not just what they tell us, what they teach us, what they write about, but the mistakes that they made in their life, right? Marcus Aurelius, his example shows us hopefully something about being a better parent.

8:28Seneca teaches us, you know, who to work for, who not to work for, how to detangle ourselves from clearly toxic, unresolvable, toxic, unchangeable situations. Seneca never, unfortunately, speaks about this explicitly or explicitly enough. He just sort of hints at it at his plays. But we can learn plenty from this example, and it's why I put it in the Daily Stoic, And it's just a reminder, crimes return to their teachers.

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