What Has It Stolen From You? | Ask DS

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1:02Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you

1:42what has it stolen from you you left way earlier than you should have because you got nervous and stressed before your flight you were a mess the whole trip because you were worried something might go wrong while you were gone you spent the whole last couple months dreading convincing yourself that the news you were waiting for would be horrible. And how did it end up going? You missed time with your family, spending it instead sitting at your gate for no reason. You missed the vacation, the time with friends because you were not present. You built up this whole scenario in your head and it turned out to be nothing.

2:15Anxiety. Just think about how much it's stolen from you, how much you missed because of it. A few times did it turn out to be right? Sure, sometimes there is traffic, sometimes alertness and vigilance pay off. But for the most part, as Seneca reminds us, we suffer more in imagination than reality. And as a result, we do suffer in reality. He who suffers before it is necessary, Seneca wrote, suffers more than is necessary. Being trapped in the tunnel of anxiety, unable to think straight, emotion speeding like a runaway train, it is a crippling experience. But fortunately, the Stoics had an answer to freeing ourselves from stress and worry almost 2 ,000 years ago.

2:55In meditations, Marcus Aurelius put it like this, today I escaped my anxiety, he says, or no, I discarded it because it was within me in my own perceptions, not outside. What Marcus understood was that anxiety comes from inside the house. We are the creators of our anxiety, which means we can do something about it. We can stay in the present moment and not get lost in the past or the future. We can remind ourselves that we are not our emotions. That, as Epictetus said, it's not events that upset us, but our opinions about them. We can zoom out and take the bird's eye view, or Plato's view, as Marcus called it, reflecting from a larger perspective and recognizing how small our lives are in the grand scheme of the universe.

3:39You could argue that Stoic philosophy is basically a set of tools designed to help us combat our anxiety and worries, to help us focus on what we control, which is actually why I've been working hard on this thing here at Daily Stoic I got on my desk. It's a powerful little device to bring that lesson, that perspective from the Stoics on anxiety and worry. You can carry everywhere you go. It's, I don't know if you've seen like our Memento Mori coin, which is supposed to be a reminder of mortality. This one is much more explicit. It's got this cool hole in the middle. On the front, it says the Greek phrase for, is this in my control?

4:14Is this up to me? And then on the back, it has those quotes from Seneca and Marcus that I was talking about, about how we don't escape our anxiety. We discard it because it's within us. And that when we suffer before it's necessary, we suffer more than is necessary. There's this cool hole in the center. As I've been recording it the whole time, I've been spinning it between my fingers. My kids are, let's say, neurodivergent, if you will. We have these like little fidgets, just little toys they can play with to sort of out their nervous energy well that's what this is and um it's also got this cool snake on the front representing the ouroboros the snake eating its own tail which is sort of what we're doing when we're feeling anxious but the idea is like i wanted a reminder of how much time am i spending consumed by anxiety 10 minutes 30 minutes three hours all day and and what if i cut just a little bit of that in half what if i prevent that spiral from happening how much happier and healthier would i be and that's the idea of the daily stoic anxiety coin fidget whatever you want to call it and we're launching it today.

5:13You can check out, I'll link to a photo of it in the description and it's really awesome. You can grab it, dailystoic.com slash anxiety and check it out. I think you'll really like this one.

5:33Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am just in the closet of my house trying to put away the suitcases. There's a funny joke that I have in Right Thing right now. Truman was asked what he did the first day after coming home from being president. And he said, I took my suitcases up to the attic. So I just got back from Sydney and it was amazing. I spoke to 2000 people in Sydney, almost 2000 people in Melbourne. One of the coolest experiences I ever had, there were these beautiful venues. I don't get to talk to like you guys that much. Normally when I'm doing my talks, it's like, and you've heard them here on the podcast before, usually it's to like a corporate audience or a conference or, you know, like some specific group like a sports team that brought me out.

6:17I don't usually get to like sell tickets and meet fans who've read the book. So it was an amazing experience. I'm still coming down from it. But then the realities of what Truman's talking about, you got to put the suitcases away and go back to your regular life. And this is the first little Q &A episode that I am recording since getting back. And I wanted to bring you, you weren't able to travel all the way across the oceans if you don't happen to live in Australia. I wanted to bring you some of the questions that they asked in the audience at the event. So I'm going to bring you that. And if you want to ask me a question, I'm going back on tour in November.

6:50I'm going to be in Vancouver and Toronto, London, Rotterdam, and Dublin. I'm super excited. And I hope you come. You can grab tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour. You can get all the ticketing stuff there. I'll link to it in today's show notes. and then maybe you'll hear yourself on a future episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast when I do the Q &A. I know we're doing like a VIP Q &A beforehand or if you've got like sort of privatey questions you don't want to ask in front of a huge audience, we can do that there. And then there'll be a Q &A at the end of the talk as well. So come see me in London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto in November.

7:26I'll link to those, ryanholiday.net slash tour. And thanks to everyone. If you weren't in Sydney, thanks so much for coming. Truly highlight of my life. I loved it there. It was an awesome experience. And enjoy.

8:04Maybe we have better of this time and maybe we'll figure it out. Yeah, look, Mark Suleys lives in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. So in one sense, I want to be like, oh, this is scary. This is real. It could happen. So it was actually still last forever. Now that I mean, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for hundreds and hundreds of years, and you could argue that the Pope is still the emperor of Rome. He has the same title, Precious Maximus, that Mark Suleys has, right? Okay, so this idea that this moment we're in is the pivotal moment that everything matters, that could be a way of working ourselves up into a state of anxiety and worry.

8:43I'm not saying I'm attacking the world of that. Of course it does, and there are definitely alarming things that are happening. But I try to step back and see a longer-term view, and I try to think about what I control, or what it's important for me to do. How can I not be a part of the bad stuff that's happening, and how can I be a part of the solution? Good stuff. I think the Stoics were definitely cognizant of the way it was easy then and now to be caught up in trends or feds or, you know, frenzies. Like Chrysippus, one of the Stoic philosophers, said, if I want to be part of a mob, I would not have become a philosopher.

9:25And so the Stoicism has to be able to cultivate, again, an ability, a strength of character. It doesn't let us get caught up in the excesses or the evils of the moment that we happen to be in. And I think this whole group of Stoics called the Stoic opposition. We're just like a perennial thorn in the side of the tyrannical emperor. So to me, it's not our Stoics. It's not enough. They're very involved. They also have a sense of what's in front of them that they have to work on, that they can make a difference. And that's kind of how I think about whether these are the end times or not is a question for either people hundreds of years from now.

10:07What's a question that'll come with its own answer and we'll have a real life. Hi Ryan. Hi. I've been a fan of yours since 13 and I wrote an email years ago and you're finding some advice that changed my life. So thank you for that. Thanks. and then you feel very normal. My question relates to this idea that stoicism can encourage sort of pacifeness or extinguishes the prior of life. What stoic strategies or supplements to stoicism could we use to count that? Yeah, I've never quite gotten that because something happens. The world is a certain way. to change it or respond to it, you first have to accept that it happened what it is.

11:00Right? And so when the Stokes talk about the art of aquinescence or the idea of assent, and not A-S-C-E-N-T, but A-S-S-E-N-T, acceptance, that's what they're saying. You first have to accept things as they are. You accept the facts on the ground. If you are in denial of them, or you are focused on how unfair they are, or how they are, or how annoying it is, or how you warned everyone that it was going to happen this way, what you're not doing is focusing on the part of it. It is in your control, which is the response, which is what happens next. So that, yes, there is a lot of resignation and acceptance in the Stoics and Stoic writings, but I see that as like the first part of the sentence and then there's an and, right?

11:53That's step one. And step two is, well, now what am I going to do about it? My question is about ego and seeing it in other people and maybe wanting to help. So you can work on yourself constantly. Sure. But as you write in a prologue, who am I to judge someone else? Yeah. So, have you ever encountered that situation? Do you have a solution for that? Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing about mediocrity is, although it masquerades or it sometimes appears as strength, people up close see how easy it is to manipulate, right, to direct because the person's vulnerability is how they see themselves or how they want things to do.

12:41I'll give you a funny example, because I'm writing about this and what I'm doing now. The intelligence agents who are responsible for briefing Donald Trump when he was president, the presidential gay and briefing, the collection of the most important things that the most important person in the world needs to know. He's so egotistical and fragile. He's not interested in all these things that are happening. What they found is the more they made it about him, the more they put his name in it, the more responsive he was to things. Right? And I bring this up because we don't think about how vulnerable ego makes us, and how people who understand or see that ego, and that's how they really interact us and use the information they give us to our own purposes, right?

13:30So I guess what I'm saying is that that's another reason we have to be careful about ego, that's the fragility that it creates with us. But when we think about ego, if someone has it, and we want to help them when they're not about it, or something, or not trying to manipulate them, I think where you have to start is just remembering that no egotistical person has ever been convinced of anything when they were challenged head on in or about that thing that they are egotistical about. It requires some creativity or fruity. You've got to go around. You've got to convince them that it was their idea all along.

14:07When we think about ego, we want to think about it seems so transparently illegal in the vulnerability as it creates them. I just think it's imperative that we go, okay, how would, when I am managing up and telling my boss what they want to hear, sandwiching this bad news and in between some good news or some compliments or whatever, right? And we go, ugh, so silly. Think about how people are doing that to us. That's the real lesson we should take from that. Not to become paranoid, but to become, oh, okay, I can see how this is holding me back as the CEO, the boss, the parent. This is holding me back from getting what I say I want, which is truth, information, honest, honesty, right?

14:53That's something they come up. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

15:41now at Wayfair.com.

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