This is How You Win the Day | Circumstances Have No Care For Our Feelings

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world. In April 1960, the writer Richard Whelan was trying to meet with Diane Nash and the sit-in students for a Time magazine cover story. These young students had suddenly become the focus of an immense amount of attention, not just from the press, but from the police and politicians and the rest of civil rights leaders. How were these kids going to upend years of stymied racial progress? How could they possibly challenge a system in which the police and the courts and elected leaders in public opinion were all against them?

0:41Ryan Holiday: Could they win? It seemed very unlikely. Richard Whalen was stunned to find that he had trouble asking these students questions because they were not particularly interested in meeting with him. They were too busy. They did not have the time, even though he represented what was, at the time, one of the most important publications in the world. Finally, Diane and her team agreed they would see him at 6 a.m., before the morning strategy that started their day. Waylon could only marvel 6 a.m. The only time they can meet with me is 6 a.m. They're going to win, aren't they? He said. Winners attack the day like that.

1:19Ryan Holiday: It doesn't matter what their cause is. They win that discussion that Marcus Aurelius has with himself in meditation. It's the one we all must win when the alarm goes off. Yes, it is warmer under the covers, but we are not meant for that. We have a duty. Our nature, justice demands something from us. It demands that we get up, that we get after it, that we wear ourselves doing it. It's what you must do if you want to win.

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4:42Circumstances have no care for our feelings. This is the February 23rd entry in the Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. Today's quote, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 738. You shouldn't give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don't care at all. Actually, I like the Hayes translation a lot too. I've got it from memory. It's seared in my mind from my first reading, I think. He says, and why should we feel anger at the world as if the world would notice? A significant chunk of Marcus Aurelius' his meditations is made up of short quotes and passages from other writers.

5:29This is because Marcus wasn't necessarily trying to produce an original work. Instead, he was practicing, reminding himself here and there of important lessons, and sometimes these lessons were things he had read. This particular quote is special because it comes from a play by Euripides, which, except for a handful of quoted fragments like this, is lost to us. From what we can gather about the play, the hero, comes to doubt the existence of the gods. But in this line, he is saying, why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take these things personally? After all, external events are not sentient beings.

6:07They cannot respond to our shouts and cries, and neither can the mostly indifferent gods. That's what Marcus was reminding himself of here. Circumstances are incapable of considering or caring about your feelings, your anxiety, your excitement. They don't care about your reaction. They are not people. So stop acting like getting worked up is having an impact on a given situation because the situation doesn't care at all. A couple things jump out to me here. Number one, it's worth noting just how cool that is. There's a line in Meditations from a play that if Marcus Aurelius had not written down, had not been such a fan, had not jotted it down in his diary, we would not have it.

6:55It would be totally lost to us. It's interesting to think of Marcus as this literary conservator, this savior of ancient texts, but he is. We know about that line because he wrote it down, because it jumped out to him. He liked it. Maybe he didn't get it perfect. We can't compare it against the original. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? And then something else I found out about this, I forget why it jumped out at me, but I thought, who was Euripides to Marcus? Because I knew Euripides is a Greek playwright and Marcus is Roman. Greece was the powerhouse, then Rome supplants it. But I was like, you know, it kind of all blurs together, right?

7:38BC, AD, there's all the ancient world. How far from? And it jumped out at me. So anyway, so I looked, you know, when does Euripides die? When does Marcus die? They're separated by centuries, not like one or two, but like five or six. And in fact, I remember looking it up. Euripides was further from Marcus Aurelius than Shakespeare is from us. so first off just the credibleness of like how great work can last so it's it seems weird that you know we're reading marcus 2000 years later like how we got so good at preserving things but even in the ancient world they had ancient texts and history and they marveled at you know great lines and quotes and and that they preserved them for centuries that's just so freaking cool So Marcus is thinking of Euripides the way that we think of Shakespeare today, although you do get the sense that it didn't seem so ancient from them because life maybe hadn't changed as much, right?

8:44Right. Like Euripides and Marcus obviously lived in very different worlds and Euripides would have been had his mind blown by Marcus's world. And Marcus would have thought he was living in the future. Right. Which he was. But but I do think there'd be more culture shock. If you fast forward it to today or transported any of those two to today, I didn't actually see the whole movie, but the most recent Indiana Jones, you know, I think it's Archimedes sort of marveling at this airplane that Harrison Ford crashes. as he somehow goes back in time. Literally, my only understanding of the movie is watching it on the screen next to me on an airplane.

9:20But that's what I understood was happening. Maybe I'm totally wrong. But anyways, the other big thing, the actual wisdom of the quote here is incredible. He's right. You know, the pandemic was awful and frustrating, but it didn't care about us. The virus was indifferent to us. It didn't give a shit about us. It didn't give a shit about our plans. It didn't give a shit about people we loved. didn't give a shit about anything because it's not capable of doing that. And understanding that so much of the world is that way. I do love the idea Marx realists later in meditations talks about not treating inhumanity the way it treats human beings.

9:57So not letting the impersonal, awful, cruelty, overwhelmingness of the world make you into that kind of person. But it is understanding that being angry at objective events, being angry at the march of time, being angry at natural disasters, being angry at cancer, being angry at mortality, being angry at these things that are frustrating, tragic, and painful, and all these things. It doesn't change anything. And so why waste that extra energy? It's not making a difference. You can shout at the gods, but they will not be moved. And I think that's the lesson that Marcus is trying to pass on, or that Marcus noted from Euripides, preserved it all those centuries later.

10:45And then all these centuries later still, here we are talking about it. That's the power of a great quote. That's the power of writing things down. It's beautiful. I'll talk to you soon.

11:03Ryan Holiday: hey 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

11:29Thank you.