The Problem Is Within You—And So Is The Solution | Ask Daily Stoic

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1:09anyone who has ever had money, as Seneca did, as Marcus Aurelius did, quickly finds that it too brings its own kind of stress. You're stressed because you're keeping up with the Joneses. You're stressed as many rich people are because despite your ample income, it's still easy to live beyond your means. You're stressed even if you do have a surplus of funds because you always wonder if you're putting it to work effectively enough or you're worried that someone is going to steal it from you or mismanage it for you. What does it mean then to discover that you'll be stressed either way? Stress that you have too little, stress that you have too much, stress that you could have more.

1:47It means the same thing that Marcus Aurelius discovered when it came to his anxiety. I escaped anxiety today, he writes, before correcting himself. No, I discarded it because it was within me. The stress is always there because no matter the situation, there is always one commonality, you. It's your mind that's doing this, the wanting, the comparing, the catastrophizing, the worrying, the scheming, the striving. That's your mind at work. That's you who is choosing not to be happy, to torture yourself, to waste time on what you don't control. Plenty of people with less have been content. Plenty of people with more have been a lot more miserable.

2:31You can lead a good life anywhere, the Stoics remind us. You can be stress-free and self-contained, or at least not a mess, on any bank balance, because these things have nothing to do with money and everything to do with you.

2:51Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think when people think leaders, they tend to think, you know, like generals and heads of state. But, you know, the leaders most of us spend the most time with are like school principals, are our teachers. Certainly our kids spend a lot of time with those leaders and we want them to be good at it. We want them to inspire. We want them to instruct. We also want them to be good at leading, holding people accountable, aka our kids' teachers, the janitor, the coaches, all the people involved in the educational process.

3:32So when I got asked to come talk to a group of school executives and principals and leaders back in October, I was very excited. Went down to the Hotel Van Zandt on Rainy Street, and Joe Joe Powers and Arvind Grover were very nice to moderate the Q &A. There was about 30 to 35 heads of different independent elementary schools and elementary school districts from around the country. Joe and Arvind were from New England, but there were people from all over the country and they asked a bunch of great questions. And so I'm going to bring you another chunk of that Q &A and hopefully you enjoy and hopefully you can take it back to whatever and wherever you are a leader.

4:13And if you want some more stoic principles on leadership, do check out the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge, which is filled with a bunch of leadership experts and leadership lessons for precisely these kinds of situations. You can check that out at dailystoic.com slash leadership, and I will link to it in today's show notes, or just sign up for Daily Stoic Life, because you get this and all the other challenges for free.

4:39I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school, and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although, here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey, because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have prime, with organic birds at$299 a pound. and they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends, everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with competence.

5:20Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. It sounds like the Stoics are defensive pessimists or minefield navigators. how do you reconcile that elementary education is inherently an optimistic endeavor? How do we prepare for the worst, but keep hope for the future? So Marcus Aurelius's life is extraordinarily depressing. He loses his father at age three. He is groomed for power by the emperor of Rome. Hadrian is a sort of paranoid sadist. He has to leave his family and go live in this guy's palace. He is groomed for power. He takes this incredibly isolating job that almost nobody comes out of alive, let alone sane.

6:09Along the way, he experiences a devastating pandemic, a series of historic floods. Almost all of it, all his reign is spent at war, thousands of miles from his family. He dies in Vienna. So if you've ever been to Europe, Rome is not close to Vienna, and neither is Budapest. to places that we know he spent considerable amounts of time. He buries half of his children. I think he has 12 in all. He loses his wife. He loses teachers, loved ones. There is a coup attempt. So it's like one thing after another, to say the least, for this guy. I say all this because when people read Mark Sturbelius' meditations and go, this is a little depressing, I'm like, yeah.

6:57I mean, like, it would be weird if it wasn't. But the other way to think about it is that he even got out of bed in the morning is a profoundly hopeful, optimistic statement. You know, he had health issues. He had personal issues. He had a really tough job. And it's not like the other emperors took that job particularly seriously. Most of them sort of retreated to pleasure palaces or went insane. And he took it all very seriously. There is an earnestness and a commitment to decency and competence and progress in Mark Sturlus' meditations and in his life that you could argue is totally unwarranted by the facts of existence at that time.

7:50So I actually find the Stokes to be very inspiring. Do you guys know who Viktor Frankl is? He wrote Man's Search for Meaning. So that's his famous work. And a few years ago, they discovered a lost series of lectures and essays that he wrote that was published maybe in 2021. And I think the title of it sort of captures everything about what I'm saying about Marcus Reles here, too. The title is Yes to Life in Spite of Everything. To me, that's what Mark Sturrilis embodied, and that's kind of what stoicism is. Now, to get your point about sort of young people, obviously, this is not what you would, I dump on my eight-year-olds.

8:32I don't think that's what stoicism is about. Obviously, at a young age, you have to be sort of, and clearly Mark Sturrilis was steeped in, you know, a belief in your own agency, a belief in the power to change and grow and do hard things. You know that poem, Good Bones? Has anyone read that poem? It's a beautiful poem, but basically it's, I won't quote it because I don't know it off the top of my head, but basically she's saying that as you teach kids, you have to talk to them about, you have to talk to them like a realtor showing them through a house that's not looking so good, and you tell them that, you know, sort of in spite of everything, there's good bones.

9:13and that you could make this something, right? And to me, that's the sort of hopefulness in the Stoic message. So there's a brutal realism to it, but it doesn't lapse into cynicism or nihilism because there is the hope that one can be great inside of that and do good inside of that. And in fact, that's your obligation as a person. I'm going to combine two questions here. And so one of the questions is, what's a counter philosophy to Stoicism if there is one? And when might the approach of Stoicism not work? Sure. So the two rival schools in ancient Rome and Greece around this time are Stoicism and Epicureanism.

9:59Now, both these philosophies are done a complete hatchet job by what that word means in the English language, right? So Epicureanism, we take like lowercase Epicureanism means hedonist, glutton, you know, we associate it with food or other forms of pleasure. and then Stoicism, lowercase Stoicism means has no emotions, feels nothing, stuffs everything down, just sort of brute force, brutish existence. And this, of course, is not what either of the Stoics or the Epicureans were actually about. The Epicureans, though, and the Stoics diverge. Epicureanism, to me, has a more of an Eastern flavor in that Epicurean builds this famous garden.

10:47It says, stranger, you would do well to Terry here. That's what the sign on it says outside. And I take the Epicureans to look at the craziness and dysfunction of the world and say, let's turn away from all that. Let's go to this nice place. Let's focus on our own individual self-improvement. Let's try to avoid pain. Let's try to enjoy pleasure. But by that, they don't mean like, you know, orgies and feasts. They mean, how do you enjoy the simple pleasures of life? You know, Epicurus talks a lot about how when you measure a pleasure, you have to add the hangover in also. And so Epicurus was not some crazy guy who's like pretty chill and pretty low-key.

11:34And the Stoics, you know, got married. They had kids. They went to the theater. They made works of art. They were regular, well-adjusted people. They weren't like, you know, walking around in rags or something. But they did believe that the world was tough and you had to be tough. And Seneca says that the key difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics is that the Epicurean gets involved in politics or public life only if they are forced to. And the Stoic gets involved unless something prevents them. So it's funny that we have the idea of the Stoics as being uninvolved and apathetic when they were almost to a man and woman involved, you know, deeply in public affairs, ran for public office.

12:24I mean, the philosophy that influences the American founders more than any other is Stoicism, and they created a new country. So the idea that, you know, these revolutionaries were at the same time, you know, resigned, strikes me as insane. So that's kind of how I would think about the rival schools. Is there a place for both? I do. And I think it's fitting. You know, Epicurus is basically, we just have a series of fragments from Epicurus' work, but the title of it, the Penguin title anyway, for Penguin Classics is called The Art of Happiness. and happiness isn't something the stoics talk as much about.

13:01They talk about it here and there, but there is no sort of stoic text on happiness because I thought that it wasn't important, but I think they believed it was more of a byproduct than something to pursue. And, and I'm not sure that's exactly right. Could you pivot a little to the practice around family? And many of us have all different kinds of families and how this applies into the life of raising a family, being in a family? Yeah. My oldest is eight. My youngest is five. So they're not so interested in these things. But I wrote these two kids books that I tried to sort of illustrate the ideas.

13:41I sort of try to talk to them about these ideas, mostly in also sort of in accordance with the ancient tradition, which is through stories. I mean, it's fascinating to me. There's a passage in Meditations where Mark Srelius makes an allusion to one of Aesop's fables. And it's just fascinating to think, okay, here 2 ,000 years ago, this old man is remembering a fable that he learned as a kid, which is what fables have always been there to do, to sort of teach these kind of timeless lessons. And we were listening in the car the other day to this podcast that sort of does a breakdown of the fables and just the sort of timelessness of that.

14:18I just really love. I think there's something I'm writing a lot about, Lincoln, in the book that I'm doing now, I went back and you can read a lot of the school books that someone like Lincoln would have read as a kid. And obviously, from a sort of historian's point of view, they're really bad. Just all sorts of stories that are not true at all. And they're kind of this hodgepodge of stuff that they, you know, here's a passage they stole from a Shakespeare play. And then here's a story they took from here. And here's one of Aesop's fables. And then, you know, here's some, you famous speech, they're kind of these, they were called readers and they were just these kind of collections.

14:56And that was because books were so rare. Is it Parson Weems? I think that's the historian around that time. That's where we get like the George Washington and the cherry tree story, which is totally not true at all. But Lincoln, I think on his way to assume the presidency is talking to someone about how he thinks Parson Weems is like the greatest historian of all time and how much he learned about Washington from him. He's a very smart man who at this point, it's crazy, as a congressman, Lincoln actually used the Library of Congress as he was writing his famous speeches against slavery. When he comes back to Illinois to protest the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he would like go and check out books.

15:41As president, by the way, when war breaks out, He has someone get him all the books they can about military history and strategy because he was just sort of going back to his practice of being a self-taught learner. But the point is he knew at this point that the fables about Washington had no basis in reality. But what he had taken from this study of Washington was what history is supposed to do, which is teach us moral truths, which is to teach us timeless things about human beings. whether he literally chopped down a cherry tree or not is to me not that important. And I feel like historically, I'm getting way far from your question at this point, but I think like I remember as a kid learning that George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree, but no discussion of what the reason that that story was taught at some point was.

16:36And certainly there was no kind of replacement moral instruction, right? Because we've removed that from school. And I'm not making this like, oh, we took gods out of school or whatever. But what I'm saying is that the purpose of learning all of these things to the ancients was to figure out how to be a good human being and to live a life of virtue. And when you focus so much on literal facts, I think you kind of miss that. And so when I talk to my kids about it, or I think when people talk to their kids about it, I think it's through story that we learn. And the earlier you learn these stories, the more they stick with you.

17:12I gave a talk at the Naval Academy a couple months back. And every time I'm there, I like to stop at the Annapolis Statehouse. You can see where George Washington resigns his commission, where he returns to civilian life. Now, why does Washington do this? It's because as a young boy, he learned about Cincinnatus, the Roman statesman who has made dictator, saves Rome, and then lays down his title and returns to his farm. There is almost no evidence that Cincinnatus was a real person. This is a complete myth. But Washington himself learns this as a young man, and our country is made possible by his sort of belief in the higher truth of that story, that there is a separation between sort of civilian and military commands, and that there is nothing more powerful than a leader voluntarily laying down power.

18:11So even the peaceful transition of power that operates in this country for the next 200 years until January 6th is built around Washington's understanding of that myth, and then for many generations, a shared understanding of that myth, and then that goes away. So all of which is to say, I think, understanding these sort of classical ideas, and not just their origins, but how we have integrated them into Western society over, you know, thousands of years, is to me, that's what I try to do in my books.

18:51hey it's ryan thank you for listening to the daily stoic podcast i just wanted to say we so appreciate it we love serving you it's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it it's an honor please spread the word tell people about it and this isn't to sell anything i just wanted to say thank you

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