This Is a Bad Way To Drive (and Live) | A Garden Is Not For Show

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2:03Welcome 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.

2:43This is a bad way to drive and live. With the proliferation of dashcams and the spread of social media, we see these clips everywhere. It's basically its own genre of video at this point. A driver is frustrated with someone going too slow in front of them, so they honk. Then they swerve and step on the gas to pass them, often waving a middle finger or honking a horn or shouting out a rolled-down window as they do so, almost to immediately get pulled over or immediately crash. And the bewildered filmer passes the wreckage just a few miles down the road. It would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous, but it is at least a good reminder.

3:21First, that life on the road is dangerous. Any one of us could die in an accident at any moment. In fact, nearly 43 ,000 people died on U.S. roadways in each of the last two years alone. Our modern cars, our modern culture built around highways is filled with risks, yet we simply choose not to think about it. It's also a good reminder that impulsive emotional decisions are the cause of so much trouble. Yes, slow drivers are annoying. Yes, in many cases, they're breaking the law themselves, and they are preventing us from getting where we're trying to go. Yet trying to get around them, trying to vent our feelings at them, it's not worth it.

3:58Driving is dangerous enough, the Stoics would tell us if they had lived to see cars. Don't add trouble on top of it. Don't blind yourself, distract yourself. None of us have the cognitive resources to spare. Seneca's wonderful essay on anger is a must-read for anyone traveling on the roads these days. He reminds us what an ugly emotion anger is and how silly it is to be screaming at people you will never meet again. especially since they probably didn't inconvenience you on purpose anyway. And certainly, none of it is worth dying over.

4:42A garden is not for show. This is today's entry, September 15th, in the Daily Stoic. and the quote today is from epictetus's discourses 4-8 he says first practice not letting people know who you are keep your philosophy to yourself for a bit in just the manner that fruit is produced the seed buried for a season hidden growing gradually so that it may come for full maturity but if the grain sprouts before the stock is fully developed it will never ripen That's the kind of plant you are displaying fruit too soon, and the winter will kill you. You know, after you listen to this podcast for a while or follow us on Instagram, it might be tempting to say, oh, this is great.

5:32I get it. I'm a stoic. I've always been that way. But it's not that easy. Just because you agree with the philosophy doesn't mean the roots have fully taken hold. Fooling around with books so you can sound smart or have an intimidating library is like tending a garden to impress your neighbors. Growing one to feed someone, that's a pure and profitable use of your time. The seeds of stoicism are long underground. Do the work required to nurture and tend to them so that they and you are prepared and sturdy for the hard winters of life. The idea is not that we get credit for working on a book, that we get credit for doing this or that.

6:12It's that we are actually doing it, right? The doing is important. And I deeply believe this, that talking and doing fight for the same resources. And you have to cultivate a willingness to be misunderstood, to be not fully appreciated, to just be like, I'm working on my stuff, man. I'm developing. I don't need your approval. I don't need your recognition. I talk about this actually in Ego is the Enemy. There was a great Twitter account or Tumblr account, I forget exactly, a couple years ago called I'm Working on My Novel. And it's just people telling other people how they're working on their thing.

6:51Are they? Are they really? No, by definition, they are not. They wouldn't have posted this, right? So part of this idea is cultivating, you know, Epictetus also says, you know, if you want to improve, be content to be misunderstood. and unappreciated. Be content to be foolish. Say, I don't know about that. He means to not talk about being a Stoic, not to identify with being a Stoic, but to quietly work on being one, to quietly get to work on that project, to put in the hours, to put your butt where it should be, do the work, leave the recognition, the understanding, the appreciation to someone or something else.

7:34That's not why you're doing it. That's not what's motivating you. That's not what is important. So I'm going to leave you here today, let you get after it, get to work, turn this off, go after it, make some progress.

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9:12That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in. It's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

9:56And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.