They Are Cut Off From Truth | A Little Better Every Day

0:28Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. to it.

0:41They are cut off from truth. Chances are you're not that angry at the victims of Bernie Madoff. You don't get mad at someone in a bad relationship, you help them get out. You feel sorry for someone who has been brainwashed into a cult or a multi-level marketing scheme. And yet when it comes to politics or culture war issues, specifically today's political demagogues, we act very differently. We call them names, we judge them, we blame them, as if it is not the exact same scenario, as if they haven't been fed a steady diet of lies and appeals to emotion. Not just recently, but for decades. In meditations, Mark Sreelis quotes Epictetus, who himself is riffing on Plato, to remind us that against their will, people's souls are cut off from truth.

1:27He was talking about the people that frustrated and disappointed him, the people that supported bad policies who did and said untrue things. They were not wrong on purpose. They thought they were correct, largely because someone had misinformed and even manipulated them. The same is true today. Millions of people have been cut off from truth. We can be sympathetic to this without assenting to it. We can understand that had our upbringing been a little different, our algorithm gone a little differently, we might have ended up in the very same place.

2:06A little better every day. This is week four in the Daily Stoic Journal. This week's entry is, the Stoics saw their lives as works in progress. They didn't believe they were born perfect, but they believed that with work and dedication, they could get a little better every day. There is real delight in this progress, as Epictetus quoted by Way of Socrates. Marcus Aurelius avidly pursued his own education and improvement, eagerly looking for advice for mentors and historical examples. Well, let's follow that example this week and see how you get a little better as each day passes. We must keep constant watch over ourselves and, as Seneca phrased it, put each day up for review.

2:52Looking back on our day helps us to better understand where we may have fallen short and gives us tangible feedback for how to improve and grow. Only what you measure and record can be monitored. Only what you put up for reflection can be learned from. And our first quote is from Seneca's Moral Letters. I will keep constant watch over myself and most usefully will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil, that none of us looks back upon our own lives. we reflect upon only that which we are about to do and yet our plans for the future descend from the past mark cyrilius from rusticus he said i learned from rusticus to read carefully and to not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something and then epictetus says but what does socrates say just as one delights in improving his farm and another his horse so i delight in attending to my own improvement day to day.

3:50This is Epictetus's Discourses 3.5. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

4:27My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

5:04Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code Stoic 15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. As I think about the decade and a half now I've spent studying Stoicism, I sometimes marvel at who I was when these ideas first hit me and how far I've come. Some ways I look at how not far I've come and how I still find myself making the same mistakes over and over again, which Marcus remarks about in meditations. He goes, look, you're still an old man, and yet here you are. you're afraid of death, you're losing your temper, you're prizing the wrong things.

5:47But the truth is he had come very, very far. And I feel like I have come far. I'm not perfect, I'm not where I want to be, but I can't deny that I have made progress. And so that's what stoicism is, it's progress. What does that progress look like? Well, one of my favorite observations from Seneca says, how do I know I'm making progress as a stoic? He says, I'm a better friend to myself. are you right i don't know when you first came into understanding these ideas what you first read but it's wonderful in those moments where you catch yourself and go this really would have rocked me before this really would have sent me off before i really wouldn't have caught myself before i think about this even with my marriage with my wife like just things we were talking about something the other night and it's like yeah we're just coming around to realizing that when you do this, I do this, or that I do this.

6:39And so on the one hand, it's like, man, things would have been easier if we figured this out earlier. And yet, it's also wonderful that we're figuring it out now. And the time it's going to save us, and the frustrations it's going to save us, and the heartache it's going to save us, right? You delight in your improvement day to day. You make little bits of progress. It can be taken too far if you only look at what you can do better, if you only look at where you fell short, if Seneca's sort of putting yourself up for the review every day becomes a kind of torture. That's not the idea. The idea is that we, you know, we push ourselves to get better.

7:12We notice where we've made improvement. I interviewed Michael Dell on the podcast and he had this great acronym. He says, pleased but never satisfied. That's how the company celebrates the success it's had, how he celebrates the success he's had or the improvements he made. But that doesn't mean you rest on your laurels. That doesn't mean you call it. No, you're always trying to get better, right? And the person who focuses on where you can get better, who is pleased but not satisfied, that's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's how we get better. That's how we push ourselves. That's the idea.

7:45So if you think of Stoicism then as a day-to-day journey, a week-to-week journey, a year-to-year journey, right? It's not a magical transformation. It's something you work. as they say in sobriety circles. It works if you work it. The ideas, if you work it, if you make small improvements, if you try to apply them here and now a little bit every day, it adds up, adds up. Well, being is realized by small steps, Zeno said, but it's no small thing. So the little tweaks, little breakthroughs, little conversations, all the things that have happened for me over the years, they're not major. Not any one of them is probably worth writing home about.

8:24That's why I don't tend to put myself in the books. But cumulatively, you know, it's changed the course, the bearings, the direction of my life in a really, really big way. And I know that's true for lots of you. And here we are at the beginning of the year. Let's set out to make some small improvements day to day over the next 12 months and think about who you would be if you made 1 % improvement every day for the next year, every week for the next year, every month for the next year, every year for the rest of your life, right? That adds up. It adds up. Small steps, but it's no small thing. That's the message from the Daily Stoic Journal, which of course you can pick up store.dailystoic.com.

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