What A Thing To Have Done! | How To Keep Calm In A Chaotic World

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1:03Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

1:29What a thing to have done. In 175 AD, Marcus Aurelius was betrayed in a palace coup. Marcus was sick and supposedly on death's door. His trusted general, Advidius Cassius, declared himself emperor, making Marcus and his family marked men vulnerable to danger and death. As I talk about in the afterword of The Obstacle is Away, and there's that new 10th anniversary edition, which is now out. You can grab signed and numbered first editions. We are almost out. And you can get a page from the manuscript with my handwritten notes on it. As it turns out, Marcus's health was not as bad as rumors had suggested.

2:05So he could have sprung into action. I think his predecessor certainly would have. In fact, Hadrian was infamous for this. But instead, Marcus held back. He took his time. What a thing to have done. He waited to see if Cassius would come to his senses, and when it was clear that he would not, Marcus knew that he needed to respond. By this point, he was no longer angry. Instead, as he explained to his men, he saw that there was good that could come of this awful situation, that they could settle this affair well and show all of mankind that there was a right way to deal even with civil wars. He gave similar instructions to the Senate.

2:40No one was to be killed. His reign was not to be stained by even a drop of blood. Again, what a thing to have done. Why do we so rarely do the same? Most of our problems are not so urgent, the stakes are not so high, yet we rush, we react emotionally, we punish instinctively. But how much more magnanimous and wise it would be to wait, to think, to calm down, to let things settle. The Stoics say that the greatest empire is command of oneself. Even if Marcus's reign was temporarily in jeopardy, it's clear that he never lost control of that. He was, unlike his rash opponent, calm and philosophical.

3:15He understood the dangers. He knew mistakes once made could not be unmade. And he also saw the opportunity for greatness. By reacting dispassionately and then virtuously, he seized it, and so must we. When I shared this story 10 years ago in The Obstacle is the Way, I never could have predicted that the book would lead to this resurgence in stoicism. I couldn't guess that it would be translated into 40 languages and sell 2 million copies. But there was a bit of waiting. I actually got offered a book deal several years prior. And my dear friend and mentor, Robert Green, he advised me to wait. He said, you'll be better if you wait.

3:51And then when the publisher asked if I could release this 10th anniversary edition of the book, I wanted to emphasize that very idea. I didn't want to rush into it. I took my time with it. That's why it's not coming out exactly on the 10-year anniversary, which was back in May. I knew I really wanted to make it better. And I think that I've done that. And I've been lucky enough to meet Stoics all over the world, to see the world, to interview Stoics from all over the world. By the way, I'll be in Europe and Canada this fall. You can grab tickets at Ryan Holiday.net slash tour. Anyways, I still think it's a great entry point into the philosophy.

4:23I hope you check it out. And we've got some cool bonuses. You can get signed numbered first editions, as I was saying. And you can also get a signed page from the manuscript that went into the making of this new edition. You can see all that at dailystoic.com slash obstacle.

4:472 ,000 years ago, there was someone in Rome who was just like you. There was someone doing their best. There was someone who was working hard, someone trying to live within their means, someone trying to stay focused, to not get distracted, to not be jealous and envious. They were trying to follow politics and be involved in the issues of their time. They were trying, as they said, to follow Zeno and Cleanthes and Chrysippus, the great Stoics. And yet, as much as they tried, they said, something is assailing my mind. He's like, I keep wasting time. I keep comparing myself to other people. I'm not getting the benefits.

5:22I'm not being Stoic, basically. What should I do? This was a man named Sarenus, and he was writing to his friend Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher. And Seneca's reply comes down to us as an essay called On the Tranquility of Mind. It's one of his best pieces of writing because it addresses this timeless thing that they were struggling with back then and we're struggling with now. How do we get to tranquility? How do we get to peace and quiet? And of course, we can't get to peace and quiet by running away from it all. We can't retreat to a monastery. We can't retreat to an Epicurean garden, as many Romans did at that time.

5:53We can't just pretend that there aren't things happening in the world. The key for the Stoics was how do we get to a place of ataraxia, freedom from disturbances, in a disturbed world, in a chaotic and dysfunctional and loud and noisy world. And we know Seneca himself struggled with this. One of his best letters I use in the intro of stillness is the key. Seneca's life is falling apart. Nero's gone insane. Seneca's trying to work on this essay. Maybe he's even working on this essay. He's trying to work on this thing. and there's all this noise. Someone's being arrested downstairs. There's a blacksmith.

6:26He's on top of a gym. He can hear the masseuses and the splashing. He can hear the noise. He can hear the horses on the streets below. It's just, he's like, it's enough noise to drive you insane. He said it was enough to make him hate his own ears. But he says, look, I've toughened myself up against this sort of thing. He says, I force my mind to concentrate. I keep it from straying to things outside itself. He says, all outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance from within. He says, you can get to a place where no noise reaches you, no word shakes you out of yourself, whether it's flattery or a threat, and you can focus on what you need to do.

7:03To him, that was tranquility. So this is what the Stoics are working on. And this is what we're going to talk about today, what Seneca can teach us about tranquility. Now, first off, let's talk about some definitions here. My favorite definition of tranquility, Seneca uses this word, euthymia. And he says, euthymia is a sense of the path that you're on. And he says, it's not being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. He says, especially the footprints of those who are hopelessly lost. So remember, a lot of what distracts us, a lot of what disturbs us from our tranquility is not literal noise.

7:34It's not the pinging of our phone. It's when we pull up the phone and we see what other people are doing. We have that FOMO, or we have jealousy, or we feel inadequate that we're not accomplishing and achieving the way that they are. Because what we're forgetting is the path that we're on. We forget what we're trying to do. We forget what's important to us. It is important that we don't see stoicism as an escape. Seneca opens the essay by talking about people who flee the noise and busyness of the world, some sort of retreat. He says, you know, someone says, let's go here. Let's go here. Let's go there.

8:07They're from one far-flung exotic destination to the next. He says, they make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. He says, he's quoting the poet Lucritius, he says, thus each man ever flees himself. But we never flee ourself, right? Because wherever we go, there we are. He says, he pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion. And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the place, but ourselves. So basically, Seneca is saying that tranquility is a frame of mind. It's not eliminating all the things that rattle us, but cultivating a kind of fortitude, a sense of self, a mission, the ability to tune out certain things while we're in the scrum of it.

8:53Mark Sreus in meditation talks about retreating into oneself. He says you don't need to run away from things to get away from them. That's exactly right. But Seneca in his essay sort of bounces around and it gives his friend a bunch of different things you can do. One of the more interesting ones, he says, is you got to pick your friends well. You want to have people in your life who also prize tranquility, people who also have similar values. So you're not constantly trying to keep up with them or impress them. So they're not leading you astray. Epictetus would talk about this in one of his things about how he says, if you live with a lame man, you will learn how to live.

9:25He was saying that we become like the people we spend time with. So if all your friends are going a thousand miles an hour, if they're busy, if they never see their family, if they're always distracted by their phones, if they're prizing the wrong things, if they don't have tranquility, it's very unlikely that you will get it. Our influences are a big part. Yeah, we can't run away from the world, but we can select our surroundings. We can pick who we spend time with. And this is why Seneca talks to people like Serenus. This is why he and Lucilius write these letters to each other. They're trying to pick philosophical influences, good influences on themselves that help them cultivate the stillness that they want.

10:01Speaking of influences, he specifically points out a type of person who is prominent in Rome. You probably know one like this today. He says, if you were to catch them coming out of their house in the morning, they'd seem very busy. They'd seem very intent. You go, so what are you doing today? What do you got? And they'd kind of just be like, well, I just got a bunch of stuff. And you go, but to what end, to what purpose? And they wouldn't have a good answer. He was calling this like busy idleness, how people are busier and busier and busier than ever. They're not very intentional about it. They're not very strategic about it.

10:31They couldn't tell you how one thing connects to the next thing. They're just kind of slaves to the calendar. They're slaves to the energy. They're kind of just running around because everyone else around them is running around. Seneca says, if you ask one of them as he comes out of his house, where are you going? What do you have in mind? He will reply, I really don't know, but I'll see some people. I'll do something. He says, they wander aimlessly around. They do not what they intended, but what they happen to run across. How many people are like that? And then how often are we like that with our email inboxes?

11:00We let what comes in decide what we do and think during the day, as opposed to being intentional and deliberate. Again, this idea of euthymia is a sense of what you have to do today. What's important versus what's urgent, what's meaningful to you versus what's an obligation, what's essential versus what's inessential. These are really important parts about cultivating tranquility. You could be frantic and busy on vacation if you feel like there's all these boxes you have to check. So tranquility is more this state of mind, as he said, a firmness of mind that allows you to know what you need to be doing and allows you to be comfortable knowing that you don't need to do certain things.

11:36Right. So much of FOMO is just thinking, oh, if they're doing it, I should be doing. Oh, this person has a podcast. So this person is doing this. This person's putting out this. This person just did this to their house. This person is taking their family here. And this sense of I need to keep up with all these people is what causes us so much distress and busyness and worry. Seneca talks a lot in the essay about limiting one's possessions. He says in another piece of writing that slavery lurks beneath marble and gold. We think of the cost of acquiring something like its price as the sole expense that we're paying.

12:11But of course, there's the insurance and there's the worrying about what's going to happen about it. There's the cost of figuring out how to use it. There's the guilt we have for not using it enough. So many of our possessions come to possess us. We become slaves to them. And this comes at the expense of our tranquility. So if you're like, hey, I'm too busy, I'm too frantic, it's too noisy. One thing you can start with is what can I get rid of? What do I not need? What is taking away my peace of mind versus what do I own that is giving me peace of mind? And often we unthinkingly acquire things going, oh, this will be fun.

12:45This will help me relax. when in fact it does the exact opposite. And Seneca even talks about Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, who, as we talked about before, loses everything in a shipwreck. He says, when a shipwreck was reported and he heard that all his possessions had sunk, our founder Zeno said, fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher. His point was that as a Stoic, Zeno sees that actually having less is the way to be more philosophical and, of course, more tranquil. Let us turn to private possessions, the greatest source of human misery. He says that more than death and illness and fears and desires, he says the evil that money brings us far outweighs the others.

13:22And Seneca, a lover of books and ideas, is it takes pains to point out that this can do it too. He's basically talking about our information diet. If you're being besieged with information, if you have this huge stack of books next to you that you feel guilty for not reading. If he was talking today, he'd talk about if you've got all these news alerts on your phone, you've got these articles that you feel you need to read. if you're following everything that's happening in real time, of course you're going to feel frantic and stressed out. Seneca talks about lingering on the works of the master thinkers, that it's actually a relatively short stack of books or people that we should be following, and that this gives us a better sense.

13:59When I want to understand what's happening in the world, one of the ways I get tranquility is I go read old stuff. Reading this essay from Seneca that's 2 ,000 years old helps me understand what's happening in the world better than refreshing my Twitter feed. If I want to understand a current day news event, I want to read about a historically equivalent event from 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 2000 years ago, because this strips the partisanship out of it. It strips the recency bias out of it. It lets me see it as it is without the modern trappings. And then I can have much more clarity about what I should know about this specific event.

14:33More importantly, the mistakes people make in situations like this. during the pandemic, reading Marcus Aurelius, who was also writing in a plague, would help give us some perspective, but also give us a clear framework for how we should behave inside of it. But I think ultimately Seneca's real answer for how we cultivate tranquility is, he says, it's through flexibility, the ability to adjust. And he's talking about something that he himself specifically experienced. His whole life is dedicated to politics. He becomes a senator, but then he gets sick. He has to travel to the Middle East for many years.

15:05He comes back, then he's exiled. He comes back, then he's exiled again. He's always sort of bouncing around. And Seneca talking about the sort of fickleness of fortune. He says, if fortune gets the better of someone and deprives him of means of action, he should not immediately turn his back in bolt. He should apply himself more sparingly to his duties and choose something carefully. He should find some way to be of service to his country. He says, suppose he cannot be a soldier, let him seek public office. Suppose he has to live in a private capacity, let him be an advocate or a lawyer. says suppose he is condemned to silence let him help his fellow citizens by unspoken support suppose this is dangerous for him to be seen in the forum in private homes it shows at banquets let him play the part of a good companion a loyal friend suppose he has lost the duties of a citizen let him practice those of a man the idea it seneca is saying is it doesn't matter where you are you have to figure out how to be of use how to make a positive difference how to focus on what you can can do.

16:00This is, of course, what Zeno is doing after the shipwreck. Okay, I can't be a merchant. I'm going to be a philosopher, right? So flexibility allows us tranquility because we're always adjusting and accommodating. This is what the obstacle is the way means. There's always something for us to do. So instead of going, all is lost, I'm ruined. This thing was taken from me. We have tranquility because we go, okay, thank you next. Seneca specifically points out, it's like, if you think today is bad, if you think even Rome was bad, Seneca says, can you find a more wretched city than Athens, which was being torn apart by the 30 tyrants.

16:32Having killed 1 ,300 of their best citizens, they did not stop at that, but their very savagery spurned itself on. There was no hope of liberty. There was no hope of justice. There was no hope of freedom. And yet, he says, and yet Socrates was in the thick of it. He comforted the gloomy city fathers, encouraged those who were despairing of the state, reproached the rich who now feared their own wealth. To those willing to imitate him, he was a walking inspiration as he moved about a free spirit among 30 masters. The point is that even in the midst of the craziness of then tyrannical Athens, Socrates was of use.

17:07Socrates was himself. Socrates was good. He was tranquil. He focused on what he was in his control. This is why Socrates was the hero of the Stoics. So in our own tumultuous, stressful, strange times, tranquility then is this sense of who you are, what you're supposed to be doing. Sure, it's eliminating some needless distractions. It's finding the right influences. It's getting rid of unnecessary or cumbersome possessions. It's winnowing our information diet. But mostly, it's just doing what we're supposed to do. It's doing what we can do. It's focusing on what's in our control. It's doing the right thing.

17:44When you do what's right, when you focus what's in your control, no one is saying you're guaranteed to be successful. But at least you will be present. At least you will be locked in. At least you will know that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing. And that gives us that peace of mind, that euthymia that we all crave. I don't know what the future holds. In fact, all I can tell you is that the future holds uncertainty and chaos and dysfunction and frustration and noise and distraction. But if we can cultivate euthymia, if we can cultivate tranquility, if we can have a sense of the path we're on, if we can follow those four stoic virtues of courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, if we don't try to run away from it, if we face what's in front of us, well, then we can be tranquil and calm and strong and good inside all of that.

18:32Seneca said that philosophy was about acquiring one thing a day, one quote, one idea, one insight, one story. That's what we do every single day with the Daily Stoic email. You can sign up totally for free at dailystoic.com slash email. Join more than 350 ,000 people from all over the world who are studying philosophy. Love to have you. Dailystoic.com slash email.

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