This is What You Do With Your Freedom? | A Strong Soul Is Better Than Good Luck

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.

0:14Ryan Holiday: This is what you do with your freedom? People fought for this, to set up this system of government, to secure these rights, to wrench us free from a controlling church or an oppressive culture. People fought against the elements, against biology itself to give us this health, this life expectancy. People have since Prometheus developed technology that frees us from backbreaking drudgery and toil. And what do you do with this freedom, this incredible bounty? You spend it fiddling on your phone? You spend it obsessing over what other people have? You spend it gossiping about nonsense? You spend it being afraid or lazy, failing to put yourself out there or be yourself.

1:01Ryan Holiday: You take drugs. You drink too much. You spend it procrastinating, doing the same things you've always done. You spend it complaining, wishing that things were better. Enough of this wretched, whining, monkey life, Marcus Reillus writes in meditations. This is not freedom. On the contrary, it's almost a form of willful slavery. You can do anything you want and you choose to do this? Come on. This is not how you will want to have spent your inheritance. This is not what it was all for. You are capable of so much more than this and you know it. People struggled, sacrificed, invented, endured, and died so you could have the choices they never had.

1:45Ryan Holiday: Do something with it.

1:54Ryan Holiday: We just got back from an amazing vacation in Italy. I'll bring you some clips from it over the next couple weeks. I recorded a bunch of stuff while we were there. Although it was as hot as it has literally ever been. It's one of the best family trips we've ever had. And we stayed in this amazing palazzo that we booked on Airbnb. It was like 500 years old. It had all these Roman funerary headstones in it, which is this crazy memento mori thing. It was like staying in a museum. The hosts were incredible. They lovingly restored this place. They took amazing care of it. And by listing their place on Airbnb, they get to share this amazing experience with people from all over the world and get funds to put towards upkeeping and restoring their place.

2:37Ryan Holiday: If you're planning a trip this summer, it's worth considering listing your place on Airbnb. It can be a great way to help offset the cost of your vacation and earn a little extra money to put towards your next adventure. Your place might be worth more than you think. And all you gotta do is go to airbnb.com slash host to find out more. Running a business means you're always reachable, but of course, it's not really possible as a person to always be reachable. And so the moment you miss that call, that text, that follow-up, a competitor is the one that picks it up. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity, so you can actually be always reachable, even if it's not possible for you to literally be always reachable?

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4:06A strong soul is better than good luck. The rational soul is stronger than any kind of fortune, Seneca writes in Moral Letters 98. From its own share, it guides its affairs here or there, and is itself the cause of a happy or miserable life. Cato the Younger had enough money to dress in fine clothing, yet he often walked around Rome barefoot, indifferent to assumptions people made about him as he passed. He could have indulged in the finest food. He chose instead to eat simple fare. Whether it was raining or intensely hot, he went bareheaded by choice. Why not indulge in some easy relief? Because Cato was training his soul to be strong and resilient.

4:47Specifically, he was learning indifference, an attitude of let come what may, that would serve him well in the trenches with the army, in the forum, in the Senate, and in his life as a father and a statesman. His training prepared him for any conditions, any kind of luck. And if we undergo our own training and preparations, we might find ourselves similarly strengthened. Right? The Stoics undergo a hard winter training, to borrow Epictetus' phrase. And the point of that training, whether it's the physical training that Cato is doing, whether it's dressing awkwardly in your worst clothes, as Seneca was talking about, you're trying to cultivate an inner citadel, a strength, a fortitude, a sense of preparedness so that you can, as Epictetus would later say, meet whatever situation happens and go, ah, this is what I've trained for.

5:37I got this. I know I'm capable of withstanding this. I've talked a lot about physical training here and that practice for me, the working out, getting up off the couch when I don't want to, jumping in the cold water when I don't want to, lifting the weights when I don't want to, running a little bit further when I'd rather be home, taking the longer way on the run than the shorter way, trying to speed up a little bit, trying to get up the hill faster, whatever it is. This is cultivating that strength so that when things are difficult, you got it. You've trained for that. But it's, of course, not just the physical training.

6:13I think about my philosophical training and my maturity as a human. I was like, this is going to be training for whatever else happens in life. Right. And also, this is precisely what I've studied history for, what I studied stoicism for, what my wife and I have worked on together, what I've worked on in therapy, what I've worked on every place in my life. it was for something like this, and also the sense that this itself would be training for future adversity and difficulty. There's a Frederick Douglass quote, maybe it's not totally accurate. Some people doubt that he said it. He says, it's easier to create strong children than repair broken men.

6:57And I think that's what Seneca is saying here about adversity. And you think of the adversity that Seneca goes through in his life, his tuberculosis young, He has to spend 10 years in convalescence as a child in Egypt, of all places. I talk about this in Lives of the Stoics. If you don't know Seneca's life story, it's pretty incredible. On the way back, his uncle was killed in a shipwreck. Seneca makes his legal debut, is going places, and then he's exiled on these trumped up charges. He loses a child. He's called back, but he's called back. He's in Nero's court. Obviously, things are difficult working for Nero.

7:33you know it's one thing after another for Seneca up until the end when he's forced to you know die by his own hand at Nero's demand but Seneca had trained for this even Tacitus who's not a fan of Seneca's goes like it's very clear that in that difficult moment it was something he'd thought about worked on prepared for that's who you want to be you want to be strong you want to be able to bear what comes it might be physical training like running for a marathon it might be something like, hey, I cranked the shower cold. Or it's the reading you're doing, the conversations you're having, the community that you're building, the relationships that you're building, the exercises you're walking through in your mind.

8:12All of this is training you, preparing you, putting yourself in a position so you can succeed whatever happens, so you can be strong enough in that moment and not need to be repaired afterwards. That's what we're doing here. That's to me kind of the mission of Daily Stoic. That's the preparation my own philosophical practice is about. and I hope the training and work you're doing now sets you up to be served well in the future. Enjoy. Talk soon.