What Do You Commemorate? | No One Said It'd Be Easy

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1:03Welcome 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 in 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.

1:45What do you commemorate? The Romans did some terrible things. They conquered and they pillaged, they enslaved, they executed and persecuted. And the Stoics were more than just implicated in this. They were active participants. Rusticus, the beloved teacher of Marcus Aurelius, the one that introduced him personally to the writings of Epictetus, was the persecutor of Justin Martyr, sentencing him to a cruel and terrible death. Seneca was an enabler of Nero. They all owned enormous estates tended by slaves. And these are unpleasant things to think about. These injustices may have been commonplace then, but that doesn't excuse them.

2:18They were still injustices, as the Stoics often acknowledged in their writings. Yet these contradictions and cruelties are not what we talk about most of the time here at Daily Stoic. Is that a cop-out? In a recent and all-time best episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, we talked to General Ty Sedgley, a former professor at West Point and a retired United States Army general. In the episode, talking of his work to rename and in some cases remove honors that the Army has bestowed on various figures of the Confederacy, General Sedgley makes a distinction between history and commemoration. As a historian, he said, we have to look unflinchingly at the past, looking at the record of events as they happened.

2:57But commemoration, what we choose to celebrate and honor, is something different. One cannot deny the history of slavery and its ubiquitous and essential role in the history of America. One cannot deny the Civil War happened. One cannot deny the complexity of history, the complicated reasons people made the decisions they made, or the context they made them in. But when it comes to commemoration, the monuments and statues we put up, the stories we tell our children, we must be more selective. And its point transfers over to the Stoics. As students of history, we have to look at the whole scope of Greece and Rome, looking at the good and the bad, taking in and understanding all of it.

3:34And then as people trying to cultivate virtue in our actual lives, we have to, as Epictetus said, choose what handle to grab. We have to choose who to grab from, from the Romans. Caesar, who started a civil war, or Cato, who died trying to preserve the republic. We have to commemorate the values they stood for, even when they personally fell short. We have to celebrate what they did right, which was a lot, not just write them off because they also did wrong. We have to make sure that when we look at Marcus Aurelius, we are celebrating him not for his power and his victories, but for his private struggles, his struggles to be good and decent, moral and just, to transcend the limitations of his time.

4:15We can't do myth-making, but we can still be inspired.

4:33Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. This is the July 5th entry in the Daily Stoic. I am holding a cloth-bound edition here. Actually, it happens this one has a 30 % off Target sticker because that's where I got it. The book was for a brief time available at Target. I don't know if it still is. I hope you had a good 4th of July. Let me read you a little entry from Seneca's Letters 76. No one said it would be easy. Good people, Seneca writes, will do what they find honorable to do, even if it requires hard work. They'll do it even if it causes them injury. They'll do it even if it will bring danger. Again, they won't do what they find base, even if it brings wealth, pleasure, or power.

5:11Nothing will deter them from what is honorable, and nothing will lure them from what is base. If doing good was easy, everyone would do it. And if doing bad wasn't tempting or attractive, nobody would do it. The same goes for your duty. If anyone could do it, it would have been assigned to someone else, but instead was assigned to you. And thankfully, you are not like everyone. You are not afraid of doing what is hard. You can resist superficially attractive rewards. I gave a talk a couple weeks ago and something I said, I was talking about how sort of hard the industry had been ravaged that these folks were in.

5:45And I talked about the last couple of years and how hard it had been. And I said, it's good. It's good that it's hard. Look, if everyone could do this thing, selling a house or assessing risk for insurance, if it's beating the market, if it's delivering things from across the world, like if everyone could do the thing, everyone would do it. right and the fact that it's hard is what creates the margins of a business like do i wish writing books was easier sure but if it was easier i'd have more competition right the fact that it's hard that it's a battle against yourself and it's a battle against all these other things that's what deters people that's what makes doing it worthwhile not just like creates meaning and fulfillment in it but it's it's what makes it success like lucrative in that sense again if if everyone could do it, it would whittle everything down until it's a commodity, until it's replaceable, until everyone has it, right?

6:37It becomes generic. So it's good that it's hard, but that doesn't mean that it's not hard. It is hard. And no one said it would be easy. I am thinking of something else though, as I'm thinking about this Seneca quote, he has some somewhere else. He says something like, think about all the risks and the hard things people will do to be a little bit more famous, a little bit more important, make a little bit more money, whatever. And then think about the excuses we make for why we don't have time to read or like why we can't do these other more virtuous things, right? We're willing to bear incredible burdens, force our way through intense adversity when there's something financially in it for us.

7:19But being a good person or improving in other ways, then we say it's hard, or then we make excuses, then we don't do it. And I think that's interesting too, right? Again, it's supposed to be hard. It's going to be hard. It's not going to be easy. But this is what makes it special. Look, if everyone was honest and principled, Cato wouldn't impress us as a politician. If power didn't corrupt, Marcus Aurelius being a philosopher king, who gives a shit, right? It's hard. But because it's hard, it becomes rare. And because it's rare, it is valuable. And that's just something I try to tell myself working on this book right now.

7:56It's good that it's hard or someone else would have written this book, right? It's good nobody else saw the potential in this thing or they would have gotten there first. It's good that it's hard. Nobody said it'd be easy. It's good that it's hard, provided you do it anyway. I'm heading over to Australia in a couple of 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.

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