What's It All For? | Wants Make You A Servant

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:09today's show notes and you can grab a signed copy of the actual book from the Daily Stoic Store, which I'll link to. So look, we tell ourselves we're accumulating it all for a reason. We're playing the long game. We're building up allies. We're developing a reputation. We're gaining influence, getting people in our debt. We're acquiring freedom, financial or otherwise. We tell ourselves that this is all for the future, that someday in some big moment of significance will use it to make a big bet on an idea, to be independent, to make a hard but expensive or hard but scary decision. But will we?

1:47Think of Cicero and Seneca. They accumulated so much political power. They piled up wealth. They had enormous audiences and impressive reputations. Yet in the moments of great flux and difficulty for their country, when public opinion was perhaps up for grabs, Cicero and Seneca did not do enough. They largely kept silent. They accommodated when they should have resisted or agitated. Think today of Columbia University. This is a school with a$14 billion endowment. But when threatened by a hostile presidential administration, they folded their academic independence over a threatened$400 million dollar federal contract, which spread out over many years, represented only a small fraction of their annual budget and a tinier one for their reserves.

2:37What was the point of that power? What was the point of their influence? Why accumulate an enormous financial war chest if you don't ever use it? We lie to ourselves. We say courage will come later, that right now we just have to be practical. Right now we have to play for the future. We'll speak out when we're more secure when our platform is bigger. We'll make that move when we're in a better position. But do you know what happens when that inevitable future arrives? We tell ourselves the same thing and we make the same excuses. The right thing is not something we should plan on doing someday.

3:12We have to do it right now while we have the chance with the resources we have today. And this is the idea from Right Thing Right Now. Martin Luther King says the right time to do the right thing is always right now. In the Jimmy Carter administration, the number one thing you could do to upset Jimmy Carter was tell him that we should wait until after re-election to do this. And I'm fascinated by that. When and how people do the right hard thing now, not later. How do they use their assets, their power, their influence, their platform to do the right thing right now? That's what right thing right now is all about.

3:46The stoic virtue of justice, courage and doing the right thing. They're related. So courage and justice are interrelated, of course. But that's the idea. Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. That's the series. You can grab the ebook right now. It's$2.99 on Amazon. Very timely, I think. Probably the cheapest it will ever be. And if you want a signed hardcover, of course, I like to read all my books in physical. We have those over in the painted porch, and I will link to that in today's show notes. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck.

4:28What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields. and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck.

5:11Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

5:52Wants make you a servant. This is the April 28th entry in the Daily Stoic. The highest power. This is a quote from one of Seneca's most brutal and fascinating plays, Theestes, which is worth reading. And I've talked about it in a couple of different entries of the podcast. One of my favorites, of course, with James Rahm. But here's the quote again. The highest power is no power if you desire nothing. In the modern world, our interactions with tyranny are a bit more voluntary than they were in ancient times. We put up with our controlling boss, even though we could probably get a different job if we wanted one.

6:34We change how we dress or refrain from saying what we actually think because we want to fit in with some cool group. We put up with a cruel critic or customers because we want their approval or their business. And in these cases, these powers exist because of our wants. You change that, and you're free. The late fashion photographer Bill Cunningham occasionally declined to invoice magazines for his work. When a young upstart asked him why that was, Cunningham's response was epic. If you don't take the money, they can't tell you what to do, kid. Remember that taking the money and wanting the money, it makes you a servant to the people who have it.

7:10indifference to that, as Seneca puts it, turns the highest power into no power, at least as far as your life is concerned. I've said before that my definition of success is spelled autonomy. I want control over my own life. And if I don't have that, it doesn't matter how much money I have, how respected I am, how powerful I am. I'm not that powerful because I can't do what I want. I don't control my day. My wants control my day. My needs control my day. What I've agreed to, what I've signed up to controls my day. And I don't like that. It doesn't make me feel good. And it reminds me that I'm wasting this precious resource.

7:48There's that great line in the first episode of Billions. Brian Koppelman is just such a great writer. But the line in that show, he says, what's the point of having fuck you money if you never say fuck you? And sorry, I know it's a lot of cursing in this episode. But the point is, I actually don't think you need fuck you money. You just need like polite, no thanks money. You just need the power of being content with what you have. There's a stoic line we quoted on Daily Stoic. Sometimes people don't like it. It sounds very privileged. I believe it's Seneca. He's saying, you know, poverty isn't having little.

8:16It's wanting more. I think he's saying that, obviously, as a very rich, successful person. What he means is he sees the people who can't say no. Maybe he's even speaking to himself. He wanted to be in the center of things. He wanted to be in the room where it happened. He wanted to throw big parties. He wanted to have beautiful estates. And this puts him in a position where it's hard for him to say no. He doesn't have as much control over his life as you'd think someone in that position is. So the point is, tyranny is not just the tyrant telling you what to do. It's not just, you know, living in Vladimir Putin's Russia.

8:50Tyranny is not just slavery. Tyranny is also often self-imposed. Slavery is often self-imposed. We put ourselves on a treadmill. We put ourselves in a position of vulnerability. We put ourselves in a position of dependency because we want. We want to get this. We want to get there. We want to have access to this. We want to be like these people. And that makes us have to agree to do certain things. That makes us need to spend a certain amount. That makes us need to dress a certain way. The people who don't give a shit about any of that, the people who are content with what they have, people who have enough, that's a position of real power.

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