We Really Screwed This Up, Didn’t We? | A Week Without Complaining

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1:59Welcome 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.

2:39We really screwed this up, didn't we? It wasn't always this way. People used to say it and mean it. People didn't just want to be seen as having it, they built their lives around it. People aspired to it. It was, as Cicero said, the summum bonum, the highest good. But today, virtue means self-righteousness. As the great Thomas Merton writes, what a fate the word virtue has had in the last 300 years. The fact that it is nowhere near so despised and ridiculed in Latin countries is a testimony to the fact that it suffered mostly from the mangling it underwent the hands of the Calvinists and the Puritans.

3:17In our own days, the word leaves on the lips of cynical high school children a kind of flippant smear, he said, and it is exploited in theaters for the possibilities it offers for lewd and cheesy sarcasm. Everyone makes fun of virtue, which now has as its primary meaning an affectation of prudery practiced by hypocrites and the impotent. If only he could have anticipated the way that virtue signaling would become not just commonplace, but that it would also become a pejorative for phonies and earnestly committed people alike. The Stoics would be so disappointed. Virtue was to them a way of life.

3:56It wasn't something you talked about, it was something you did. Aristotle said, we acquire the virtues the same way we acquire any skill. A carpenter builds, a flutist plays, a runner runs, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom, as I say, encourages calling and discipline, assessor and right thing right now. These are nouns, not verbs. And there's really only one way to restore virtue to its proper place, by living with it, by modeling it, by making it something worth aspiring to again, as opposed to something that only hypocrites or Puritans talk about. We need to make the virtues commonplace again.

4:31They are, as Marcus Aurelius said, touchstones of goodness. And if you ever find anything better than them in life, he said, that must be an extraordinary thing indeed. Action by action, we must claw our way back from these unvirtuous, cynical times. And we must start with the only thing that we control, our decisions, our motivations, and our action. And of course, this is what I'm trying to do on the Virtue series. I'm trying to make that accessible. If you haven't read Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, or the new book, Right Thing, Right Now, well, maybe check one out. I don't know which one strikes you, which one is the best one to start with.

5:14I'm proud of all of them. Right Thing, Right Now is the newest. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. But Discipline is Destiny is my fastest selling book ever. That's pretty incredible. And then Courage is Calling is one I'm very, very proud of also. You can grab all those at stuart.dailystoic.com or Swing by the Painted Porch and grab them. Or if you want the audiobook, you can grab that on Audible. Anyways, be well, everyone. And if you can, be virtuous.

5:45A Week Without Complaining Epictetus spoke often to his students about the need to give up blaming and complaining. In fact, he saw it as one of the primary measuring sticks of progress in the art of living. How much of life is wasted? Pointed fingers. Has complaining ever solved a single problem? Marcus Aurelius would say, blame yourself or no one. This week, try constructive feedback over complaining and responsibility over blame. And if something goes wrong, spend some time reflecting on what the true causes were. Don't waste a minute with complaints in your journal or out loud. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing on Reflection in the Art of Living by me, Ryan Holiday, and my co-author, Stephen Hanselman.

6:33You can get this anywhere books are sold, although we also have signed copies in the Daily Stoic store and, of course, at my bookstore, The Painted Porch here in Bastrop, Texas. but we have three quotes from Epictetus today about complaints. He says, You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret. That's the Discourses 3.22. For nothing outside my reasoned choice, he says, can hinder or harm it. My reasoned choice alone can do this to itself.

7:08If we would lean this

7:20That's Discourses 3.19. And then he also says in Coridian 1.3,

7:39have no enemy and no one will harm you because no harm can affect you. It's funny, just as I was sitting here, I was thinking to myself, man, it's so hot. It's hot in my office. I have to turn off the AC when I record. But one of my favorite quotes from Marcus Reelis about complaining, which I actually also have in sort of fictionalized in The Boy Who Would Be King, he says, don't be heard complaining at court, not even to yourself. Right? There are so many parts of Marx to realize his job that we get the sense that he didn't really like. He's kind of an introverted person. He's a good person.

8:13He wants to do what's right. He's not an ambitious person in the sense he doesn't want to dominate or win or everything. And so it must have been so frustrating to be around these obnoxious, annoying, dishonest people, these professional politicians, basically. But he catches himself. He's like, it's not even enough not to complain publicly. And of course, everyone would have indulged his complaints. He's emperor. But he says, don't even complain in your own mind. And that is some higher level shit right there, isn't it? To not only be able to stop yourself from complaining. I think it was Will Bowen.

8:51He had the no complaint challenge. Every time you say a complaint, you have to move the bracelet from one wrist to the other. And the idea is, can you leave it on one wrist for 30 days? Can you get it in one spot for 30 days? no complaints. But imagine how most of us would fail if even thinking about a complaint, not even verbalizing it, disqualified us. But that's the challenge of the Stoics. And I think Epictetus, though, is more honest when he talks about just progress. The less blame, the less complaining, the more responsibility you're taking, the more constructive you are, That's what matters.

9:28Are you making a little bit of progress every day? Are you moving forward? Are you complaining less, right? I think that's a fair way to think about it. So I thought the complaint, but I didn't say it. That's progress. But maybe next time I can just go, the temperature is what the temperature is. If I want to do this thing, it's what I have to put up with. So that's what it is. Thinking about it doesn't help me. It doesn't make me any cooler, right? It just makes me frustrated. And that's why we try not to complain. So don't be heard complaining today, not even to yourself. That's the standard we're ascribing to.

10:03But could we just make some progress? Could we just blame only ourselves or ideally no one? That's progress. Let's do it. Let's work for it. Let's make ourselves a little bit stronger as a result. I'm heading over to Australia in a couple weeks. I'm going to be in Sydney on July 31st. I'm going to be in Melbourne on August 1st. Then in November, I'm doing Vancouver and Toronto, London, Dublin, Rotterdam, all awesome cities I'm really excited to go to. If you want to come to those talks, they're open to the public and you can grab those tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour.

10:56Thank you.