What To Do When the World Feels Like Too Much

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's just starting to get real hot here in Texas, so I'm excited to get on the road. We're going at the end of the week. We're going to the West Coast because I've got a talk in Portland and I've got a talk in San Francisco, both much cooler places than Texas during the summer. You can come see me and grab tickets at DailyStokeLive.com. Then I've got some other dates, I think, in August. I think I'm doing like the Midwest. But in October, I'm going back to Australia and New Zealand, where not only am I going to be doing some talks, but I'm going to be doing a lot of swimming and sightseeing.

0:57Ryan Holiday: It's one of my favorite places in the world. Because of those gigs, I did a podcast a couple of weeks ago with Ryan Shelton and Hugh and Josh Van Kulenberg. They gave me a dose of that Australian hospitality. and I don't know. I thought there was some good stuff in here I wanted to share. I asked them if I could run a chunk of that interview. You can listen to the full episode over on the Imperfects podcast. You can watch it on their YouTube channel at the Imperfects. Look, the Stoics are not perfect. Stoicism is not about perfection. It is about trying to get better always. Epictetus says, just because we despair of perfection doesn't mean we despair of the pursuit.

1:42Ryan Holiday: of it. So how do we get better? How do we work on ourselves? How do we make those little improvements day to day? That's sort of what we talk about in today's episode. And, you know, I try to get better on each one of the talks that I do. So I hope to see you in Portland on June 8th, San Francisco on June 11th, Minneapolis on the 18th of August, Chicago the next day, Detroit the day after that. And then I'll be over in New Zealand on October 13th, Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th, Perth on the 21st, and then I think some East Coast states in the U.S. closer to November and December.

2:19Ryan Holiday: You can grab all those tickets at dailystoiclive.com. But let's get into today's episode. The Painted Porch at my bookstore here in Bastrop, Texas has a porch on the back and it is painted. We actually just repainted it and then we were sort of trying to fix it up a little bit. It had been sort of an afterthought, but we tried to make it a little bit nicer. And we bought some new outdoor furniture, some chairs, a rug, some string lights, you know, just some stuff that the employees and I myself can hang out on. You know, this is the best time of year in Texas. It's cool and nice. Days are still long, but not so long.

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3:35Ryan Holiday: The inability to see what's happening in their pipeline. And part of the reason they can't do that is because they use software or CRM that's so complicated that people don't even log in. I do this all the time. You get some tool and you're like, I'm going to use it. And then it's so complicated, you don't use it. And that's where today's sponsor, Pipedrive, comes in. It's an easy, intelligent CRM loved by growing sales teams and most important, actually used by them. Pipedrive gives your team one complete trusted record of every customer in deal. It's all centered around a visual pipeline where you can see everything, what stage a deal is in, what needs to happen next.

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4:51We'd love to share that with you and just get your thoughts from a stoic point of view and how maybe Marcus and his mates would respond to the issues we had if we were able to take them to them. I know, Josh, if you want to go first, maybe. Yeah. Well, yeah. All right. I'll start with something small. um i so you sort of alluded there's been a bit of alluding to it today already but i find myself really struggling with the reality this is broad big stuff actually but the the reality of the world there's so much to be go yeah yeah there's more i'll extrapolate more on a day-to-day basis, I get by pretty well.

5:37I've got two kids. I love them. I've got a wonderful wife and things are good. But I find that if I open myself up to the reality of the compounding existential threats in the world, so global warming, nuclear annihilation, AI, and I don't want to be, I find myself thinking, am I getting sort of drawn into the sort of moral panic that comes along with any new technology with AI or is this genuinely a threat? And I feel like if I'm not, if I haven't slept perfectly, if I haven't eaten well, if anything has pushed up against my day that's made my mental capacity a little under and I look at this stuff, I'm bogged down and overwhelmed and overcome with dread.

6:26And then that pulls me out of my life and the life that I want to live. I'm unable to be the dad I want to be. I'm unable to be the partner I want to be. And I think most permanently for me, I think the thing I feel most precious about in the world is time. And I feel like I'm wasting it.

6:45Ryan Holiday: Yeah. I mean, look, if you're worried about what's happening in the world, I guess as an American, I'm obligated to say sorry, because we're responsible for like half of it right now. And when I was in Australia last, I guess this was like maybe 18, 19 months ago, So one of the one of the interesting things was like it was so it was so different to be in another country and watch your guys's news, because like, unfortunately, a lot of it still was American news is like inescapable. It was sort of run up to the 2024 election here. But it was, you know, from the distance of a different country, thousands of miles away, it did feel less like hair on fire.

7:25Ryan Holiday: And I think it's just a reminder that like sort of the inputs often determine sort of how we feel and think about these things. Right. And if you're sort of mainlining disaster porn and, you know, sort of worrisome, horrible information all the time, like the human brain is just not designed for that. Like I think about so Marx realized is the most powerful man in the world. And basically everything that could go wrong goes wrong during his reign. There's a famine, there's floods, there's a plague, there's wars, there's a coup. It's like terrible stuff all the time. But he probably got less bad news over the course of his reign than like we get in a week or a month.

8:07Ryan Holiday: Just because like, you know, he gets like a scroll with like some information on it. Meanwhile, this is like mainlining it directly into our brain, you know. um it's just not it's just not our our information diets are just as unhealthy if not more unhealthy than most people's like actual diet in the modern world right like if there's if there's you know sort of literal obesity there's also kind of informational obesity and then there's also like sort of anxiety obesity like you're just consuming information that's just impossibly bad and designed to sort of put you in that catatonic state because then you'll keep watching, right?

8:52Ryan Holiday: Like you'll refresh it again and you'll check it again. So this isn't to say that we don't have an obligation to be informed and we shouldn't know, you know, the broad strokes of what's happening in the world. But I try to remind people, like, unless you're like working for a hedge fund or you are literally working in, you know, the highest levels of government, you probably do not need to follow things as closely as you are. Like I always, you were saying you're worried about AI. Like I would ask like, you know, so how's that worrying helped the global AI situation so far? Like, do you feel like it's making a difference?

9:25Ryan Holiday: You know, are they like, oh, well, was those three guys in Australia, they're putting a lot of brain power on it too. And, you know, we can feel it's making a difference. Like we tend to monitor situations in real time as a kind of substitute for action as a, I don't know, like, like a junkie basically of just getting our fix. And I try to remind myself, like from my study of history, that there's not a single time in human history when existential dread was not a pretty pervasive emotion. and obviously we wouldn't be here if if that had come true but the feeling of the existential dread like okay nuclear annihilation is a like i would say that we are probably closer right now to nuclear war than we have been in a very long time again largely because of america's totally incompetent and uh irrational leadership but um unless unless i'm going to channel this energy into building a bunker in my backyard, like me thinking about it is not really doing anything.

10:32What do the Stoics have? I'm sure they do insight into why it's more alluring to worry than to act.

10:40Ryan Holiday: Yeah. I mean, the worry kind of puffs you up, right? The worry is like, well, I'm the center of the universe and obviously this affects me. And obviously I have a better version of how this should go, blah, blah, blah. And then the doing it, you know, hey, I'm going to vote. Hey, I'm going to donate to this campaign. Hey, I'm going to go to this protest. In that, we're sort of reminded of how little impact we actually have. I do think there's part of it there. Just the, you know, do you want to think about it and feel fully engaged? Or do you want to do your little part and then go back to your life?

11:16Ryan Holiday: So I think that's part of it. But, But, you know, negative emotions tend to linger and be felt more profoundly than positive emotions. Like they find, like, for instance, in news articles, like negative articles have a higher virality potential than positive articles. And certainly, you know, that's just the extreme between like negative and positive. Like nobody shares, hey, things are pretty OK. It wasn't as bad as we thought. You know, like that obviously is super not spreadable. Right. You do want to share something about the latest outrage about something that's incredibly scary about something that that is uncertain because you can speculate about it.

12:00Ryan Holiday: but like okay hey they um they caught the guy and uh you know now the law is going to take its course you know that's not super interesting but like fugitive at large in your neighborhood you know is incredibly activating and so i i think that's part of it yeah it's a it's sort of at a place where like the news is a genre of entertainment now and it's it's yeah and news not even just news organizations but I think any media publisher including us it's like you you have to put everything through the filter of like well we want as many people to see this as possible and so this is like a thing that we struggle with all the time especially on like YouTube where it's like we know the tricks that we've been told that we have to use in order to get more people to see this but it just feels at odds with our it's icky it's it feels icky and so it's it's a tricky thing because even you know we're so conscious of it but at the end of the day it's like if you want to if you want to if you want people to see this really helpful content that we believe is helpful at a certain point you have to kind of play the game and then it just makes everyone's playing the game then you're playing at these extremes yeah and it's like i think having some insight into the game how the game is played should affect your own habits uh as far as what you consume, you know, like, I think it's really important to be informed about what's happening in the world.

13:26Ryan Holiday: I would just dispute whether like refreshing your Twitter feed is the best way to do it. It's like pick up a book, right? Go travel, talk to an actual expert. You know, there's a lot of things you can do to understand what's happening. And, and, and a lot of what's happening is not good and it's going to require action and change and involvement and creative solutions. It's just, you know, following the news in real time is probably not the way to do it. You know, sometimes you hear people and they're like, well, I'm just really concerned. You know, what's this going to mean for, for my grandchildren and my great grandchildren?

14:02Ryan Holiday: And it's like, dude, you're going to be dead. Like, I'm not saying you shouldn't care. I'm just saying you, you have children in front of you right now that you're neglecting for, for worries about, you know how they're going to handle something 20 30 40 years from now and that that's really the thing is like we sometimes spend a lot of time and energy thinking about what things are going to mean in the future and what that takes us away from is the things we can and should be doing right now i mean this is a sort of a massive hypothetical question but if marcus aurelius were alive today and was elected into power and was running America, or maybe like in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to elect an AI version of Marcus Aurelius to run the country.

14:51How do you think it would be different? What would he implement? Obviously, there'd be lots of differences, but what specifically would change, do you think, that we need?

15:02Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I mean, look, hopefully he wouldn't be, you know, taking billions of dollars from foreign governments, starting stupid wars, you know. Marcus Rullus is an interesting leader because he's sort of late in the Roman period. Rome's already having a number of problems. It's sort of falling, coming apart at the seams. He deals with one crisis after another. I do think it's really interesting. Obviously, we went through the pandemic six years ago, almost exactly. Marcus Reelus lived through what's known as the Antonine Plague, one of the worst sort of plagues in human history. And he seems to have done a reasonably good job listening to the experts.

15:44Ryan Holiday: He doesn't take rash action. He doesn't run around with his head cut off. He's sort of calm and collected and he's empathetic and, and, you know, tries to do what he can. So obviously it was, it was striking the first go around with Trump to just sort of watch what, you know, sort of totally ineffectual leadership looks like in the middle of a crisis. But, you know, sometimes philosophers don't make the best, the best rulers. We'd like to think they would, but, but politics is, is kind of a, a tricky, you know, unsexy business of a lot of compromise. So there was another stoic, um, a few generations before named Cato who was widely considered, you know, one of the most principled and honest and, and, um, you know, sort of, uh, towering figures of integrity.

16:32Ryan Holiday: And he was just horrible. Like he was just really bad at it because he couldn't do the kind of deal-making and campaigning and compromise that was required. So it's, it's kind of interesting. I, I would like to think that, you know, good people can make for good leaders. That's not always the case. But I certainly think you want from your heads of state, both sort of competence and cunning, as well as integrity and values. And I think we're seeing in America what happens when you sort of throw all that out and replace it with what's effectively like a cult of personality. I'm keen to move to your challenge in a minute, Ryan, But I just have a question for you around, I think I'm particularly interested in maybe Epictetus's, like what his thoughts would have been on empathy.

17:25Because going into slavery, I feel like empathy can be a double-edged sword. It's something we talk a lot about in our school programs. Empathy can often lead you to action that you mentioned before, but it can also be overwhelming and lead you to worry. Yeah. Stoics in general, but also Epictetus. How would he talk about empathy?

17:47Ryan Holiday: Well, what's really interesting about Epictetus, so he is a slave. He's not working in the fields. He's owned by a high-ranking member of Miro's administration. So he has this interesting life where he is owned by someone else who treats him very poorly, and yet he's surrounded by incredibly wealthy, powerful people who are jockeying in the king's court. And what he comes to understand is that there are a few different kinds of freedom, right? There's sort of the literal freedom, and then there is sort of emotional freedom. There's spiritual freedom. There's intellectual freedom. And he sort of realizes, looking around at Nero's court, that he's actually freer than a lot of these people.

18:33Ryan Holiday: He notices at one point he tells this story about this guy, this sort of powerful Roman who comes in and he tries buttering up Nero's shoemaker, like Nero's cobbler, because he wants to get in good with Nero. Right. And so he's kissing this guy's ass and Epictetus goes like, oh, I'm more powerful than this guy. Like, I'm freer than this guy who, because of his business interests, can't tell the truth, can't afford to piss off this person in Nero's administration. And he sort of comes to pity it. And again, this is something we see, you know, we see happening in the U.S. right now where you have these like tech billionaires who have to stay on the administration's good side.

19:18Ryan Holiday: So they make donations to these, you know, silly projects. They say nice things on social media. They have to attend the like Tim Cook worth billions upon billions of dollars has to go to the White House to watch the premiere of the Melania documentary, which which was which which, by the way, another billionaire. No spoilers, please, Ryan. I haven't seen the Melania. Another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, overpaid twenty five million dollars for as a bribe to the administration. So so you're like you would like to think like, hey, if I ever had a hundred billion dollars like Jeff Bezos does or if I was the CEO of Apple, like that'd be pretty sick.

20:03Ryan Holiday: Right. Like like no one could tell me what to do. I would I would be the master of my fate. and then you go no actually i'd have to go to the fucking melania premiere because because if if i don't go and then trump gets mad at me he's going to slap tariffs on apple products and then this the stock price is going to go down and then the investors are going to yell at me and then my own net worth is going to go down and so the the point is epictetus is realizing that often power, and Seneca talks about this too, because he's there in some of the same moments, that this power is actually a form of slavery.

20:42Ryan Holiday: And this wealth is actually like a golden prison. And they're just sort of talking about what it actually means to be, you know, sort of free in command of yourself, what it means to sort of live your life on your own terms and like what we're actually chasing. And it's just a fact that often the things that we chase that we think are going to make us happy or think are going to make us free or think we're going to make us feel secure have the exact opposite effect.