Step Outside, But Not To Brawl | How to Get Out of Bed When Life Feels Heavy

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.

0:14Step outside, but not to brawl. Things get heated, words get said, somebody crosses a line. Do you want to step outside? Usually that question means the situation is about to get worse. The argument has outgrown the room, emotions are ramped up, and everyone is one bad decision away from regret. But stepping outside does not have to mean stepping outside to fight. In fact, it may be exactly what both people need. That's what we're told Cato did when he was shoved in the baths. He didn't shove back or let that moment decide for him. He stepped away. He gave himself time to calm down. His antagonist had that same time, too, and when Cato returned, the man apologized.

0:56Cato declined to accept the apology. I don't even remember being shoved, he said. And that was the end of that. Most conflict lives in the moment. It feeds on heat and proximity and wounded pride. The need to say something immediately, give it a little space, a little time, and often it begins to evaporate. Things cool down. Pride loses its urgency. And what feels necessary to say no longer feels necessary at all. And this is why stepping outside matters. Sometimes, literally, you take a walk around the block, you let something sit unanswered, you sleep on it. Sometimes stepping outside means writing the letter we never send, putting an angry, worded, righteous thought on the page so it does not have to come out of our mouth, letting the notebook absorb the blow instead of another person.

1:41The point isn't pretending the line wasn't crossed. It's to create enough distance so that we can choose how we can respond. Step outside to breathe. Step outside to think. Step outside to remember who you are. Step outside so that when you come back, You're not carrying the same heat you left with. The fight does not need a winner. It does need space.

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4:38Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just got back from our little road trip down the West Coast. I'll probably do another fuller episode about it. But for the first leg of it, we drove from Seattle down to Portland, saw some wonderful things, really loved Cannon Beach. That was absolutely incredible. Got a nice run in in Portland. And then I did a talk. I pulled up and I was like, wait, am I doing a talk at a high school? I am not. And it turned out it was this old high school that's been turned into something called Revolution Hall. Anyways, it was beautiful.

5:09And one of my cousins and her girlfriend came. That was lovely. Got to see some folks I know for the Trailblazers. The most fun part of it, though, was my kids got to be the mic runners. They gave my kids the mics. They got to run up and down the halls of the theater, up to the second story, hand the mics, pick who's getting the Q &A. They really enjoyed it. My favorite part. This is my favorite part. Listen to this. Hey, Dad. Hey, bud. I know you're invested in the basketball game. Yeah, what's the score? The Spurs won. They did. Amazing. Oh, that's great. Now, sadly, that was the only game the Spurs won of the series, although they led in literally all the games.

5:49So that was pretty heartbreaking. But beautiful drive, fun experience. Did someone siphon gas out of our car in rural Oregon overnight from the Airbnb? Maybe, maybe, I don't know. But, and you can come see me at one of the other legs, dailystokelive.com. I think the other ones start later in the summer. Australia's there in the fall and some East Coast stuff in the winter. But here's some thoughts from some of the folks and I hope you like it. And I hope to see you in Chicago or Detroit or Minneapolis or Auckland or Sydney, Perth, DC. Bunch of dates, dailystokelive.com. Maybe my kids will be there.

6:31Hand you the mic. I'm recently newly married. Congrats. Thank you. What have you learned from stoicism that has probably helped you be a supportive husband to your wife? Yeah, I don't know.

6:51Samantha's around here. Her joke is that one of us writes about stoicism and the other is a stoic. She's not wrong.

7:03Yeah, I think the idea of like that sort of first impression, you know, and telling yourself, is this real or is it something I'm making up? Right. Epictetus would talk about how, you know, events are objective. Our opinions about them are not. Right. And so, you know, somebody does this or that. You think this or that. That action is what it is. And then the problem, the conflict, most of the arguments is about the interpretation of what that means, the intention behind it. And, you know, usually that's something you made up and usually has something that has nothing to do with the situation.

7:41And when time, as time passes or the, you know, as the heat of the moment passes, it feels silly that you made such a big deal out of it. Right. And I think that is something the Stoics can teach us in that regard. I say the stoics can teach us, not me, because I still very much struggle with it. What does stoicism say about kind of extreme or unusual events like somebody getting murdered? What do they say about somebody getting murdered? If you know somebody who gets murdered, it's kind of hard to wrap your mind around that. Stoicism seems to talk about how to deal with jerks or how to get out of bed in the morning or how to have discipline.

8:17But there are these extreme and unusual events that we all face. like you've got cancer, you're going to die next week. Somebody you love just got murdered unexpectedly. I mean, I think you can't read the Stoics and not get a sense of how capricious and violent and random and dark the Roman world was. I mean, our world is as well, but then you could get exiled. There were people fighting to death in the Colosseum. There were these enormous wars of conquest and plunder, you know, people own slavery. Like the world was a dark place then. I mean, sometimes we don't give ourselves enough credit for the improvements and progress we have made as a civilization.

9:01You know, we have solved problems that the Romans would have thought were intractable and, you know, fundamental facts of human existence. Just like today, we, you know, more or less accept cancer as a, you know, a fact of existence. And, And, you know, hopefully 100 years from now, it'll be a solvable. It'll have been such a solved problem that people will look back and wonder why we were, you know, so accepting of it, right? The world was violent and random and unfair. And part of stoicism as a philosophy was around, you know, just how do you deal with that? How do you make sense of that? How do you not let it wear you down?

9:42As Seneca was saying, sometimes just waking up and continuing on, not becoming cynical and nasty and mean is a triumph of the human experience. And I think that's sometimes what tragedies are asking of us. Thank you. And welcome to Portland. Yeah. So, Stoicism, your frame of mind, do you have any techniques when it's getting hard to get out of bed? How do you make that happen? Yeah. Let's read this passage because I think it's so powerful. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work as a human being. What do I have to complain of if I'm going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into this world to do?

10:27Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm. But it's nicer here. So you were born to feel nice instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don't you see the plants and the birds and the ants and the spiders and the bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can, and you're not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren't you running to do what your nature demands? But we have to sleep sometimes. Agreed, but nature set a limit on that, as it did on eating and drinking, and you're over the limit. You've had more than enough, but not of working.

11:01There, you're still below your quota. He says, you don't love yourself enough, or you'd love your nature too and what it demands of you. He says, people who love what they do wear themselves down doing it. They forget even to wash or eat. I don't know about that. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money, or the social climber for status, When they're really possessed by what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you and not worth your effort?

11:33So, look, I don't think Marcus is saying, like, get up and go to your boring ass job that you hate. You know, maybe a slave to the corporate machine or something. He's saying that we have obligations and responsibilities as human beings to contribute to the common good, to make the world a better place. and that, you know, it's nice under the covers and there's a time and place for that. And at some point we hit the limit on that and we have to get up and get after it, like everyone and everything else that's ever lived. Now, are there such things as depression or clinical depression where this is, you know, incredibly difficult, a feat of strength, maybe even impossible?

12:10Sure. And I don't think the Stoics are just like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you know, you're being weak. Obviously they didn't know about some of the things that we've learned in the years since. And so I understand it can be a struggle for different people at different places in their life. So I understand the difficulty of it, but I like this idea of the talk, right? He wants to stay in bed. He knows it would be easier to, but he's reminding himself of the people that are depending on him, the things that he was meant to do, the difference he can make, the positive impact he wants to have.

12:43And ultimately he's sort of dragging himself out, getting up, getting after it. And I go through that many mornings. My kids go to school on the other side of town to get up very early. And it'd be easier to stay there. But I don't like getting up early, but I'm always glad afterwards that I did it. And I think that's true for a lot of the things that we have to do in life. It's not so much how we feel, as Musonius Rufus would say, in that moment, whether we feel bad because it's hard or we feel good because it's easy. It's about how does that feeling age, right? And how do we feel about it after?

13:16To me, that's what I sort of use as my motivation or my clarifier.

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