There Is Always Both | Marks Of The Good Life

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3:01Welcome 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.

3:37There is always both. It was an awful period of Roman history, a 15-year plague that killed millions, political corruption and deceit, historic floods, tragic wars on distant frontiers. Marcus Aurelius experienced all the disasters that could befall a leader, smack dab in the middle of a period we now see as the beginning of the decline and fall of the whole empire. Yet amidst this, Marcus was not only as good and decent as a leader as a leader could be, but he produced Meditations, one of the most beautiful and enduring works of philosophy ever written. You can actually check out, we have a really cool leather edition of this, by the way.

4:16It calls to mind a quote that the author Eric Larson built his most recent Churchill World War II book around, a must-read also. You can pick it up at the painted porch. Never was there such a contrast, Larson quotes John Colville of saying, such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness. So it was for the modern world recently. There's been a deadly pandemic, an attempted coup, and all sorts of other awfulness. There were also heroic doctors, pioneering scientists who saved millions of lives. There was beautiful art inside splittingly funny comedy. In your own home, amidst the ugliness around you, there may have been new babies born, new businesses started, new relationships blossoming, positive new habits begun.

5:00We don't control the vileness of the world or of other people. We do control whether we contribute to it, whether we choose to contrast it with our own splendor and goodness. We control what we look for also, as Marcus did, filling meditations not just with somber or depressing notes, but also observations about the beauty and majesty of nature and life. Will you be splendid or vile? That's the call you get to make, always and forever.

5:44Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to today's entry from the Daily Stoic. Today is October 20th, Marks of the Good Life. You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere, not in logic, not in wealth, fame, or any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. How is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil. Indeed, in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage, freedom, and nothing evil except that which destroys these things.

6:26Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 8.1. Then the entry reads, what is the meaning of life? Why was I born? Most of us struggle with these questions, sometimes when we're young, sometimes not until we're older. Rarely do we find much in the way of directions, but that's simply because we missed the point. As Viktor Frankl points out in Man's Search for Meaning, it's not our question to ask. Instead, it is we who are being asked the question. It's our lives that are the answer. No amount of traveling or reading or clever sages can tell you what you want to know. Instead, it is you who must find the answer in your actions and living the good life by embodying the self-evident principles of justice, self-control, courage, and freedom, and abstaining from evil.

7:14There's probably nothing that Marcus talks about in meditations more than the virtues, you know, deeply earnest about them too. I think, you know, cynicism is this kind of idea that nothing matters, but there's a self-fulfilling prophecy to that. Conversely, when you take the virtues as important, as significant, and you try to live by them, and you follow them, and you try to live up to them, I think you create meaning, as Viktor Frankl was saying. The decision to say, hey, this is who I am. This is what's important to me. This is what I think I was put here to do. This is what I know I'm capable of being.

7:49That elevates us, right? That's why I've been writing this series on the four virtues, just to courage, self-discipline. The temperance version just came out. Discipline is destiny, the power of self-control, which you can grab anywhere books are sold. And thank you to everyone who supported the book. Now I'm tackling justice in my writings. And yeah, you just read about people who experience so much adversity, so much difficulty, so much pain, who never gave up, who never quit, who never said, eh, nothing matters, never said, fuck it, who stuck with that sense of decency and goodness because they felt like there was meaning in that.

8:32To me, that's what stoicism is all about. That's the journey that we're on. That's the journey that I'm trying to be on in this series. That's what I try to talk about here at Daily Stoic. Like, I don't know what put us here, right? I'll leave that question to a much wiser person. But I know that we are here. And so how do we make that meaningful? It's not by doing whatever we want. It's not by chasing our pleasure. It's not by avoiding pain or risk. It's by standing up, stepping forward, doing what we can, trying to leave this place a little bit better than we found it. So I try to do my writing.

9:10So I try to talk about here. That's what I know so many of you try to do. And whatever it is that you do professionally, it's what I try to do as a parent. It's what I try to do as a spouse. Marcus says that life is what our thoughts make it. And deciding to think that virtue is important is important. You could argue it's the most important thing. And this idea of the good life, right? Cardos, which is where the phrase cardinal virtues comes from, it says that it's about hint, that means hinge or pivot point. I think, put aside the marks of good life. The good life pivots on this, pivots on virtue, pivots on those four key ideas that Marcus was talking about.

9:56And I hope you're hanging your life. I hope you're hanging your hat, your life, your sense of meaning and value as a person on those four things too. And I hope it served you as it served me. I appreciate all the support of the new book, everyone. It's been awesome to see how it's doing. And I've loved hearing from all of you. If you haven't read Discipline is Destiny, you can grab that anywhere books are sold. You can listen to it in audio too. But what I'd really prefer is that you just do your best today to live by those ideas.

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