This Is Why You Shouldn’t Be Jealous | A Proper Frame Of Mind

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1:41Welcome 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.

2:19This is why you shouldn't be jealous. Imagine the jealousy they must have felt. Hadrian was gifting the purple, the job of the emperor, to a teenager he wasn't even related to. In 138 AD, his succession plan involved adopting Antoninus Pius, who in turn was to adopt young Marcus Aurelius so that he would one day become the most powerful man in the world. How many Romans hated Marcus for this? How many distant relatives of Hadrian thought themselves more qualified, more entitled to it? And how many people disliked Marcus throughout the year simply because he seemed to have a perfect life, a happy family, a great reputation, perfect character?

2:57Yet Marcus Aurelius' story is also a great reminder of why we should not be jealous, why we should remember Salon's advice to Croesus, to count no man as happy until he has died. Because how did Marcus Riles' perfect reign go? As we have detailed here before many times, it was one disaster after another, plagues and floods and wars. Sure, fate and fortune and luck had handed Marcus incredible gifts, but the man also buried a half dozen children. This was a man who was betrayed. This was a man who was in so much pain from a medical condition that he was regularly prescribed opium. He had a real rough go of it, is what I'm saying.

3:33Most of us would count ourselves lucky not to live through half of that. The point is, we wish for others' fate and fortune at our peril. Jealousy and envy rarely see the full picture, rarely take into account all the costs, past and future, that go along with something. And besides, it's pointless. We have our life, our fate. We have our own happiness to attend to. And Marcus's life should humble us. None of us know how our story will end, what tragedies or obstacles lay ahead. Focus on the present moment, the good you have at hand now. Don't ignore them while pining for someone else's.

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5:49This is the February 2nd entry from The Daily Stoic, a proper frame of mind. I'm reading in my bedroom. My kids are sleeping next door. I'm reading from a hardcover edition of The Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, because this is the only one I had with us where we are. And I guess there's the leather-bound one you can grab, too. That's a little, stands the test of time a little bit better. But today's quote comes from Meditations 2.2, the one and only Marcus Aurelius. Frame your thoughts like this, he says. You are an old person. You won't let yourself be enslaved by this any longer.

6:31No longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse. And you'll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future. We resent the person who comes in and tries to boss us around. Don't tell me how to dress, how to think, how to do my job, how to live. This is because we are independent, self-sufficient people. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. Yet if someone says something we disagree with, something inside us tells us we have to argue with them. If there's a plate of cookies in front of us, we have to eat them. If someone does something we dislike, we have to get mad about it.

7:08When something bad happens, we have to be sad, depressed, or worried. But if something good happens a few minutes later, all of a sudden we're happy, excited, and want more. We would never let another person jerk us around the way we let our impulses do. It's time we start seeing it that way, that we are not puppets that can be made to dance this way or that way just because we feel like it. We should be the ones in control, not our emotions, because we are independent, self-sufficient people. And I guess Seneca would say, are we really independent, self-sufficient people? He says, show me a man, show me a person who isn't a slave.

7:47He says, this person's a slave to their mistress. That person's a slave to ambition. This person, a slave to power or status or all the things, right? How many of us are slaves to coffee, slaves to our schedules, slaves to outrage porn, slaves to the news, just slaves to stuff? We're just hooked. We're just hooked. It's in charge. My phone's in the other room, thankfully. It makes this statement a little bit more powerful. You go, who's in charge? Are you using the phone or is the phone using you? Do you have social media accounts or do those social media accounts have you? And so the way in which we're jerked around, we're not actually in control.

8:36Wretched habit is in control, as the Stoics would say. That is not freedom. So it doesn't matter if you're rich or powerful or important or legally you can do whatever you want. You actually can't. You're not in control. You're not self-sufficient. You're not free. You know, I've talked about this before, but Epictetus is in Rome roughly the same time as Seneca, and they're both adjacent to Nero and Nero's palace. Epictetus is owned by one of Nero's secretaries. Seneca is Nero's advisor. Epictetus is literally a slave, but in some ways he's more free than Seneca, who tries to quit working for Nero at one point and can't, and then is ultimately killed by Nero.

9:23But Epictetus looks around and he just sees, he sees these people are not self-sufficient. They are not free because although they are powerful and important, it's their ambition, it's their ego, it's all these other things that make, he sees someone sucking up to Nero's cobbler at one point, right? He realizes that the powerful, important people in Nero's court are slaves, just as Seneca was saying they were. And then he extrapolates that, like even just regular people in regular life, you know, people who have, who are controlled by their temper, people who are controlled by their base physical urges, people who can't not do stuff because their body or habit or impulse or their emotion tells them to do something.

10:16That's what Marcus Aurelius is trying to free us of. Seneca talks about how if you handed your body over to someone, you'd be livid, but then you hand your peace of mind over to people all the time. And so we can imagine Marcus himself struggling with this. He's saying, you're an old person. How much longer are you going to be tied up in these impulses, in these habits, in this way of living? You've got to free yourself now while you still can. And that's today's message. As we start a new year, this is obviously something we should all be thinking about and trying to work on. How free are we really?

10:54How self-sufficient are we? Who's in charge? Us or the urges? Us or the emotions? Us or the habits? And let's free ourselves and set up that proper frame of mind while we can.

11:19Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, That would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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