We Are All Unreliable Narrators | Revenge Is A Dish Best Not Served

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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.

2:40We are all unreliable narrators. All day we tell ourselves stories. When something goes wrong, say this is my fault. We blame ourselves, even though the reality might be that we had little control over the situation. When someone is rude, we say they don't like me. We take other people's actions or behaviors personally, even though the reality might be that they're going through a tough time. We walk into a meeting. We think they're all judging me. We think everyone is thinking about us when the reality is that everyone is thinking about themselves. This is what a lot of us don't realize. The psychotherapist and writer Lori Gottlieb said in a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, every single one of us is an unreliable narrator, she said.

3:24hang on.

3:28As she told me in the interview, remember Epictetus's line about putting every impression to the test? Well, that includes your own stories, your own beliefs about yourself, your own comfortable patterns and instincts. Think of his famous observation that every situation has two handles or two interpretations. We decide which one to grab. We decide which story to tell ourselves. What will it be? The right one or the wrong one? When something goes wrong, you can find a better story to tell yourself other than it's your fault. When someone is rude, you can tell yourself a better story other than they don't like me.

4:01And when you walk into a meeting, you can find a better story to tell yourself than everyone is judging me. You just need to be aware enough of the fact that everyone is an unreliable narrator and know that you have the power to tell yourself better stories.

4:27Revenge is a dish best not served. This is from today's entry, October 13th, from the Daily Stoic. The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that. Mark Cerelius' Meditations 6.6.

5:05And then today's entry from the Daily Stoic says, Let's say that someone has treated you rudely. Let's say that someone got promoted ahead of you because they took credit for your work or did something dishonest. It's natural to think, oh, that's how the world works. Or one day it will be my turn to be like that. Or more common, I'll get them for this. Except those are the worst possible responses to bad behavior. As Marcus and Seneca both wrote, the proper response, indeed, the best revenge, is to exact no revenge at all. If someone treats you rudely and you respond with rudeness, you have not done anything but prove to them that they were justified in their actions.

5:42If you meet other people's dishonesty with dishonesty of your own, guess what? You're proving them right. Now everyone else is also a liar. Instead, today, let's seek to be better than the things that disappoint or hurt us. Let's try to be the example that we'd like to see others follow. It's awful to be a cheat, to be selfish, to feel the need to inflict pain on our fellow human beings. Meanwhile, living morally and well is quite nice. It is funny, though, because I wrote this book, Conspiracy, about Peter Thiel and his sort of epic quest for revenge. And I'm fascinated by the sort of brilliant, diabolical, some would say driven by justice response that he takes against a media outlet that had not just rudely and I think wrongly outed him as gay, but it also bullied and picked on a number of people.

6:34And while I do discuss revenge at great length in that book, it wasn't until I was actually finishing up the book that that expression, revenge is a dish best served cold, that I actually got what it was saying. There's a funny joke in 30 Rock where he goes, revenge is a dish best served cold, like pizza. And he goes, really? Cold pizza is better than hot pizza? Now why? So what is it saying? Almost no dish is better cold than hot, except for maybe, I guess, dessert. But even the best desserts are hot, if you think about it. I think the expression, the emphasis there is on the serving. The dish is best served cold, because when you grab the hot dish, it burns you, right?

7:17And that is what Stoics were warning against when they talk about revenge, that it often does evil to you, it changes you, it warps you. And I think you could even make an argument that this is the trajectory that Peter Thiel is on, right? From his sort of secretive, contrarian bet on destroying Gawker, this leads him to Trump. This leads him and some of his people to ultimately run for office on despicable platforms. It makes him a sort of hated villain. I don't know if he would do it again in retrospect. I don't. The counterfactual is fascinating to me. You know, just said that, you know, beware that he who fights monsters, meaning that you become like the monster.

8:01You could argue even America after 9-11. There's some sort of irony as we go to get our revenge, to get back at the people who do this. Now we're a nation with domestic terrorism and religious fundamentalism. And we squander trillions of dollars in the Middle East that makes us quite vulnerable and quite hypocritical when it comes to much more pressing and ominous and evil enemies. So revenge is something that we have to push away for the most part. Seneca does make an interesting distinction between getting justice. He says, if someone kills your father, you should get justice, not revenge. I think that's important.

8:45Obviously, same thing about justice as I'm writing this new book. But we have to make sure that as we're responding to treatment, that we don't become like the thing that so mistreated us. That we don't add insult on top of injury, that we don't add self-inflicted injury on top of the injury. And that's today's message from The Daily Stoke.

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10:26That'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.

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