What Comes Next Matters Less

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2:26Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

2:49what comes next matters less it's not that the stoics didn't love it's not that they didn't like the nice stuff they had or the jobs they worked hard to earn of course they liked these things and they would have preferred to keep them would have preferred a world in which fortune was less fickle where everything lasted and no one ever grieved or missed or regretted when richard fineman was in high school he fell in love with a woman named arlene they had a lovely youthful kind of happiness that seemed like it would last forever. But while Feynman was a graduate student at Princeton, Arlene was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

3:23Despite the terminal diagnosis and their parents' protests, the two married a year later, and she died within 16 months. This was tragic and devastating, and it took a long time for Feynman to heal. It's wrong to think that a Stoic would be less devastated by such a loss. Cicero grieved deeply for his daughter. Seneca wrote three beautiful essays on grief, and Marcus Aurelius, as we talked about recently, grieved the children that he had lost. How did they carry on? In part by relying on an insight that Feynman also expressed. With Arlene, Feynman said, I was really happy for a while, so I've had it all.

4:00After Arlene, the rest of my life didn't have to be so good, you see, because I had already had it all. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about how just a day, just a minute of happiness, of perfection, of peace is enough. And the same goes for the people we love, the things we've gotten to do, the glory we've experienced. That you have or you have had it or them is itself a wonderful thing, something to be so grateful for. Whatever comes after, whatever fortune has in store for us for the future, it can't change that. It can't take away that we've had it all. And in fact, we need it less in the future now.

4:34What happens next matters less because of the wonderfulness of these few fleeting seconds.

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6:43And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public, and we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.