When Everything Falls Apart, This Remains | Practice Silence

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1:13Ryan 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.

1:28Imagine Cato's despair as Caesar proved unstoppable. Imagine Seneca and Thracia and Epictetus as Nero spun out of control. Imagine Marcus as the triple threats of war and plague and flood converged. It must have felt, as it has for many of us, that the world was caving in, that it was hopeless, that it was unfair, that it was only going to get worse. But we should remember that when everything falls apart, there is something we can always depend on, and that is philosophy. William Alexander Percy, who survived combat in World War I and the death of his father and brother to suicide in the Great Flood of 1927, would say of Stoicism that when all is lost, it stands fast.

2:16That's what Cato and Seneca and Thrasia and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius found in the pages of the books they loved in their own journals and the wisdom they had been taught. They had a dependable support system. They found something that gave them hope, gave them purpose, gave them clarity. As bad as things are today, it should console and inspire you that stoicism is still here. It has survived all those tragedies and countless others for more than 2 ,000 years. And so has humanity, it's worth pointing out. The world only feels like it is caving in. Stoicism stands fast. Courage, temperance, justice, wisdom.

2:55These are constants. Rely on them. Turn to them. Hold fast to them.

3:12Ryan Holiday: Practice silence. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. Social media teaches us to have an opinion about everything. Silence beckons us to speak. We live in a loud culture and we try to keep up by being louder in return. And how much trouble does this cause us? How much might we learn if we spent more time listening to others than trying to sandwich our opinions in at every turn? How much of what we say do we come to regret? So really, the truly loud thing to say is nothing. So spend some time writing your thoughts down this weekend. See how many of them you can keep to yourself.

3:48Ryan Holiday: Be bold in your silence in how much you hold your tongue this week. One of the benefits of philosophy is that it centers you, you come back to it. And so I'll give you four quotes today, two from Zeno actually, that should help you and certainly helping me to think about. Zeno says, better to trip with the feet than with the tongue. It's inevitable, right? An actor goes on a press tour and they say something dumb because they're just forced to talk. They're forced to answer all these questions. but you get in trouble the more you talk. That's just something I found. As Robert Greene says, always say less than necessary.

4:22Ryan Holiday: Another quote from Zeno, to a youngster talking nonsense, Zeno said, the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth so we might listen more and talk less. It's beautiful. I love that. And then Plato, talking about Cato the Younger, says, Cato practiced the kind of public speech capable of moving the masses, believing proper political philosophy takes care like any great city to maintain the warlike element. But he was never seen practicing in front of others and no one ever heard him rehearse his speech. When he was told that people blamed him for his silence, he replied, better they not blame my life.

4:56Ryan Holiday: I begin to speak only when I'm certain that what I'll say isn't best left unsaid. Beautiful. That's something I do try to carry forward when I do talks and stuff. People go, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And I try to, on a pretty regular basis, maybe even once per talk, go, I don't know. I don't know about that. Because you don't want to get the habit of forcing an answer about things when you don't know. If you don't know, it takes courage to be like, I don't know, or I don't care. I have not studied that. I don't have enough information. To be okay being thought dumb or foolish, as Epictetus says.

5:30Ryan Holiday: Silence does that. Practicing silence is a discipline. It takes discipline. It is not easy. And you will sometimes look silly and you will sometimes hurt people's feelings, but I think you'll hurt people's feelings less by not talking than you will by talking. And that gets us to the final quote. This is from Seneca's play, Theestes. He says, silence is a lesson learned from the many sufferings of life. Another great quote I love from Seneca says, when I think of all the things I said, I envy the mute, meaning he wishes he couldn't talk because he said so much dumb stuff that when he thinks back on it, he's almost overwhelmed with shame or awkwardness.

6:08Ryan Holiday: And the hard parts about being a writer, having a social media presence is you know what's out there and you cringe. You think about it. There's always a tweet. There's always a dumb article. There's always a time you jumped out to take a hot take. You should have just left it there because you didn't know enough. You didn't put the work in. You didn't actually care. You forced it. You let your ego get a hold of you. And that never makes good work. So let's practice a little silence this week. If you have something to say, write it down in your journal. Don't say it on social media. Always say less than necessary.

6:37Ryan Holiday: Try to say less than necessary. That's the Stoic way. Talk to you soon.

7:03Ryan Holiday: Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.