This Is A Great Pleasure | We Are A Product Of Our Habits

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

2:07This is a great pleasure. Of the four Stoic virtues, Marcus really says that justice was the most important. To him, it was the source of all the other virtues. After all, how impressive are courage or discipline if they're only used for self-interest? What good is wisdom if not put to use to make the world better? Over and over and over again, the Stoics talk about community and partnership and fellowship and neighborliness and our relation to a larger whole. If you remember, one of Marcus Aurelius' epithets for himself was cooperative. And it's that belief, the mutual interdependence among everything in the universe, that we are all one that inspired our Sympathia coin here at Daily Stoic.

2:48And it's also what inspired us back in December to ask you all to contribute to our effort through GiveDirectly to raise money for families in poverty. Thanks to the generosity of the Daily Stoic and Daily Dad communities, we raised more than$32 ,000 for families in a village in Rwanda. GiveDirectly's field team ended up providing each family with about an$850 cash transfer, the equivalent of a year's worth of income for people who are used to surviving on less than$2 a day. They actually shot this really cool video from some of the residents showing the impact that the donations had on their lives.

3:27My children used to go to school with no shoes. They only cost$1, but we couldn't afford them. When I now meet someone on the streets, they tell me how lives have changed completely. It is amazing. I used the first payment for tailoring lessons. I'm living my dreams as we speak. One resident didn't even have a place to stand when it rained. So with the money, they bought materials to repair their home. Another woman explained that with the money that we donated, she bought a sewing machine and took tailoring lessons. For the first time, her children got new clothes and shoes. There's this phenomenon called the helper's high, and it's been found that when you give to others, your brain's pleasure and reward centers light up as if you were the recipient of the good deed, not the giver.

4:15And it's hard to watch this video or listen to these people who have been benefited by such a small amount of money without feeling that high, which is something we the Stoics should live for, as Seneca said. We Stoics, he said, take pleasure in bestowing benefits even though they cost us labor, provided that they lighten the labors of others. And Marcus Reulis talked about not needing the third thing, not needing to be thanked for what happened, because doing it was rewarding enough for us. So thanks to everyone who contributed to the Give Directly fundraiser. Marcus Aurelius said that the fruit of this life were acts like that, the kindness we do for the common good, being unselfish, caring for your fellow humans, embracing your good fortune only as a means to lighten the difficulties for those less fortunate.

5:04Marcus would be proud. Thank you. And stay tuned for another fundraiser this year. In the meantime, you can go to givedirectly.org.

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6:50We are a product of our habits. This comes from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living. Journaling, of course, is a critical exercise to the Stoics. It's really hard to separate journaling from Stoicism. Meditations is Marcus Aurelius journaling and talking to himself. And so today's entry comes from the prompt and the sort of meditative part of the Daily Stoic Journal for this week's, and it's all about habits. The Roman Stoics put a heavy emphasis on dealing with habitual behavior in order to make progress in the art of living. The great Roman Stoic educator Musonius Rufus, he's Epictetus's teacher, held that all the theories in the world couldn't trump good habits, and they couldn't overcome bad habits either.

7:42Epictetus followed Musonius in this focus on habit with an eye on not reinforcing bad habits, such as anger, and finding a way to replace them with better ones. We all recognize bad habits when they see them in others, but it's harder to see them in ourselves. So this week, meditate on the habits and recurring behaviors that are holding you back and even ask others around you for their view. And the first quote comes to us from Epictetus. He says, every habit and capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking by walking and running by running. Therefore, if you want to do something, make a habit of it.

8:19If you don't wanna do that, don't, but make a habit of something else instead. The same principle is at work in our state of mind. When you get angry, you have not only experienced an evil, but you've also reinforced a bad habit, adding fuel to the fire. It's Epictetus' Discourses 218. Then he also says, If you don't wish to be a hothead, don't feed your habit. Try as a first step to remain calm and count the days you haven't been angry. I used to be angry every day, and now every other day, then every third and fourth. And if you make it as far as 30 days, thank God, for a habit is first weakened and then obliterated.

8:56When you can say, I didn't lose my temper today or the next day or for three or four months, but I kept my cool under provocation, then you are in better health. That's, again, Epictetus's Discourses 218. And then this is the funny one. He says, what assistance can we find in the fight against habit? Try the opposite. The point is, the Stoics thought a lot about habits. They had to, right? It's not just enough to think philosophical thoughts to sort of have high principles or standards, but how do you make them real in your life? How do you turn them into muscle memory, right? An athlete can watch videos, can be coached, can review painstakingly their swing or their shot or their throw, and then they're going to get tweaks and thoughts, but then that has to become habit.

9:45That has to become part of the routine. That's why they sit in the gym and take, you know, a thousand free throws or a thousand jump shots. That's why they practice doing this or that, so that under immense amounts of pressure, under the stresses of life in the game, they can revert back to that training. They can do what they need to do. And I love this little expression from Seneca about how bad habits, the old way of doing it, First we weaken it, then we obliterate it. You don't just magically do the new thing, you weaken it. And he's saying one way to weaken it is to try the opposite. You know, it's like you have a piece of paper with a crease in it or a bend in it, you can fold it the opposite way and it kind of flattens it out.

10:27I just think that's an interesting way of thinking about it. But look, habits make the man, right? The habits that you do, the things you habitually do day in and day out, this is what we're talking about earlier in the week, that's who you are. Who you say you are, who you want to be, who cares, right? The habits you habitually do, the choices you regularly make, that's what make you who you are. That's what make you beautiful, as we also talk about from Epictetus. We are a product of our choices, our routines, our habits. As a writer, how does it work? You create a routine. You create a structure.

11:03You follow it every day. Work comes out the other side of that. It's not about fits of inspiration. It's not about genius. And I think this is true for all crafts that one seeks out to master. It's about habit. But I've also found even as a parent, if you want to do good, if you want to manage this or that, you create habits, you create routines, you create structures, and then you stick to it. That's the key. So habits, we are a product of our habits. The Stokes believe that habits will make you happier. They will give you a better life. I'm not saying they're easy. They're very difficult, but habit is everything.

11:40And it's also the hardest thing, but let's keep working on our habits.

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