What Will You Choose? | What Can Go Wrong Might

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

2:07What will you choose? All of our upbringings were different. Some were given two parents, others only one. Maybe it took a village to raise you. Either way, we didn't get to decide who our mom was or who our dad was, if they got divorced, if they were present, if our step-parents were a blessing or a nightmare. It was all outside of our control. Yet every one of us, as Seneca said, gets to choose whose children we will be. In ancient Rome, this was even more true than it sounds, because it was common for people to be adopted into families. Seneca's brother, for instance, was adopted by a man named Gaio, whose name he eventually took.

2:48And if that name sounds familiar, it's because Seneca's brother is in the Bible. Marcus Aurelius didn't choose for Hadrian to set in motion their succession plan. He didn't select Antoninus as his stepfather, but Marcus did choose to attach himself to that kind and virtuous man, modeling his life on that goodness and greatness. And conversely, one of the things we hear from the ancients about Commodus, Marcus's son, was that the first thing the man did after the death of his father was reject all the tutors and guidance that had been laid down for him. Whose children will we be? Whose footsteps will we follow in?

3:26What tradition will we follow? This is the question of our lives, and it's the question that will determine the course of our lives. Will we go the way of Marcus or Commodus? Will biology and circumstances be our destiny, or will we choose a brighter, fresher, better path? And for no one is this question more urgent and essential for those of us who choose to have children ourselves. We must decide what lineage we will give our family, what legacy they will inherit. Will we simply pass along what we grew up with, or will we choose to give what we didn't get, to turn over a new leaf, to do better, to hold ourselves to a higher standard?

4:04Each of us has the ability to choose an Antoninus as our model, a Fred Rogers, an aunt who showed us what unconditional love and support, as well as hard work and decency was. We can choose to make the most important choice there is, whose children we will be, and thus who our children's grandparents will be. And this is basically the idea behind the new book, The Daily Dad, 366 Meditations on Parenting and Love and Raising Great Kids. It's been my honor to write and record these notes to you each morning, and if you've gotten anything out of them, if you enjoy what I produce at all, it would mean so much to me if you could support the new book.

4:45It's just gone up. It's a daily read like the Daily Stoic, made up of the collected wisdom of some of history's greatest thinkers and parents, easily people whose children we should aspire to be that I aspire to be. And we've got signed first editions, a limited number, so you've got to claim those before we run out. There's a bunch of other awesome bonuses, including a philosophy dinner with me and a parenting mastermind group that we're setting up. So there's a bunch of awesome stuff. If you go over to dailydadbook.com, you can grab that copy. Please grab it as soon as you can. It means a ton and it matters most the earliest you pre-order because then the publisher and the bookstores and all these things make a bunch of decisions based on this data as it's coming in.

5:27So if you could please grab the Daily Dad 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids. If you're a parent, if you know a parent, if you've got parents, I think this book will help. I'm really proud of it. I'm in the middle of recording the audio book right now and I think you're going to love it. Check it out, dailydadbook.com.

5:46You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

6:26Over 150 ,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than$2.5 billion over the last several years, and research suggests that these donations will save over 300 ,000 lives. I myself am one of those donors. I donate to GiveWell every year. It means a lot to me. And you can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. And thanks to the donors that sponsor this research, GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax-deductible donation to their recommended funds. And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last.

7:01To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic, and you'll get your donation matched. That's givewell.org. Code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more.

7:21What can go wrong might. And this is from this week's entry in The Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours truly. We call people who dwell on what might go wrong pessimists. Some even think that bad thoughts attract bad events. The Stoics found this all to be nonsense. In fact, they had a practice, pre-meditatio malorum, pre-meditation of evils, that specifically encouraged musing on the so-called worst-case scenario. Marcus would begin his day thinking about all the ugliness he would see on display in court, not for the purpose of working himself up, but precisely the opposite, to calm and focus himself, to be prepared to act in the proper way rather than just to react.

8:07Seneca too practiced meditating in advance, not only on what normally happens, but on what could happen. Epictetus went as far as to imagine losing a loved one every time he would kiss them. The Stoics believed that all we have is on loan from fortune and that negative visualization helps increase our awareness of the unexpected. So don't shy away from this in your thoughts. And we have two quotes today from Marcus Aurelius and from Seneca. When you arise in the morning, tell yourself I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous, and cranks. They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don't know the difference between good and evil.

8:46Because I have understood the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, I know that the wrongdoers are still akin to me and that none can do me harm or implicate me in ugliness, nor can I be angry at my relatives and hate them for we are made for cooperation. Before I get to the Seneca quote, I would say that the many first times I read this quote, especially when I read it young, I focused on that first part where you list just how awful and frustrating everyone will be. And I think that's sort of the rudimentary understanding. It's like, look, don't go into the world all rosy-eyed and bushy-tailed or you're going to get your heart stomped on, right?

9:20You got to be aware. You got to be prepared. You can't be naive. Marcus really says, don't go expecting Plato's Republic. But it's really the second part of that that's hit me more, right? Why is he doing that exercise? It's so when he's hit by it, when he's hit by a cheat or a liar or a person who is, you know, messing around on their spouse, or, you know, when he sees somebody do something wrong, he's not surprised by it. It doesn't make him bitter and it doesn't make him right off all of humanity as a whole. You know, he says, because I know better. I know that the wrongdoers are still akin to me.

9:59And he says, and none can do me harder, implicate me in ugliness, nor can I be angry at my relatives or hate them. That's something I've been working on. It's like I was just dealing with someone who I really care about and they're just, you know, being, you know, not safe or smarter or who I know them to be. And I wanted to unload on them and I had to go, no, I care about this person. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to let, I should have prepared for this. I shouldn't have built them up in my head. They're a human being. They have flaws. They do the wrong thing sometimes. I'm not going to cast them out of my heart or out of my life for what they've done.

10:35And then this goes into the second Seneca quote. Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person's pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out in advance to all the things, and we shouldn't just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen. For is there anything in life that fortune won't knock off its high horse if it pleases her? You know, I have the Prima Tashio Malorum coin here on my desk, and I just look at it and go, look, look, Murphy's Law is real, man.

11:09Things can go sideways fast. I mean, imagine where you were the first week of March 2020. Did you see the next 12 months coming? Very, very few people did. But we would have been better had we been more prepared, had we been more realistic, had we been less in our own fantasy world. You know, Seneca says, the only unforgivable thing for a general to say is I did not think it would happen. So, of course, positive visualization is thinking of all the good things that can happen. You can succeed. You can break through. You can make it. If it's humanly possible, know you can do it, Marcus says. At the same time, the law of attraction is not real.

11:47If you think about negative things, you don't attract negative things. You actually make yourself more prepared to wrestle with and deal with and conquer those difficult things. And that is why we do our premeditatio malorum. That is why we think of all the things that can happen. And that's why we meditate on the people we're likely to meet so that they can't drag us down. They can't implicate us in ugliness and they can't make us unhappy.

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