When You’re Tired Of Life… | Ask DS

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1:57Availability, speed, and coverage very easy at MintMobile.com. Welcome 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.

2:34But thank you for listening. And we hope this is of use to you.

2:44When you're tired of life, he buried too many children. He was betrayed by those closest to him. He dealt with health issues. he was surrounded by the corrupt and the inept and the endlessly ambitious. He saw plagues and flood and war. So yeah, there is a hint of world weariness in Marcus Aurelius's meditations. It would be stranger if it didn't color his writing. While critics are wrong to call Marcus Aurelius depressing or negative, he was unquestionably in pain, tired, and frustrated. This was a man who quite understandably found himself, as we all do, tired of life. Yet despite the role that suicide had played in the history of Stoicism and the more accepted place it had in Roman history, Marcus did not choose that route.

3:29He did not blame anyone. He did not resent the hand he was dealt or the painful cards he had to play. He soldiered on. He found respite in physical activity and his work. He tried, as we talked about recently, to focus on the beauty amid the ugliness of life. He was brave enough to ask for help, as we have also talked about. Marcus Aurelius not only kept getting out of bed each morning, but he pushed himself to do it early. He reminded himself in those very same pages of meditations the reasons why he was here on this planet, what his nature demanded of him, what his duty was. He carried on and found relief and purpose, and even joy in this.

4:08No matter who you are or what you're going through, the same thing is available to you. Inside your soul, Marcus Aurelius would remind you, there is peace that you can retreat to anytime you like. In philosophy, he would say there is a soothing ointment as well as a shoulder to lean on. It's okay that you're tired. It's understandable and perfectly acceptable. Just use the resources available to you. And most of all, stick around. And if you or someone you know is in a mental health crisis and you live in the United States, please just call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988. You can also contact the crisis text line by just texting home to 741741.

4:49I'll link to that in today's show notes. And for resources outside the United States, you can just go to findahelpline.com. Seriously, stick around. It's what Marcus would want you to do.

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6:05Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We're doing a Q &A today that's actually drawn from the Stoicism 101 course. I think it's one of the best courses we've done over at Daily Stoic. If you're looking to get introduced to Stoicism, you want to take your study of it to the next level. You want to go back to basics or you want to build a really good foundation of what Stoicism is and how you can use it. That's what the course is about. I'll link to that in today's show notes. But this is drawing from one of the many Q &As we've done as part of the session. People got to come in and ask me a bunch of questions.

6:38We're talking about some of Marcus Aurelius' stuff about being tolerant with others and strict with yourself, that we can't hold people to standards that they never asked for, and how you sort of think about your friend, how a Stoic thinks about their friend group, and how you try to be a positive influence. So that's where today's Q &A is coming from. It's just a selection, and I hope you join us in Stoicism 101. You can ask some of your own questions. I'll link to that in today's show notes or just type in Stoicism 101 in the Daily Stoics store. So today's email is about success, right? And I think at around 2018, I read Obstacles Away and in that book, you had a chapter called Seizing the Opportunity or Looking for the Opportunity, something like that.

7:26And you also had a portion in perennial seller when you said that multiple companies sort of look for these new trends and they try to jump at it almost immediately. Right. And so my question is, um, when is it a good time to be the first and a growing trend? For example, like right now growing, a growing industry is cryptocurrencies, blockchain themselves. So when is it good to be the first? And when is it harmful? Yeah. I don't know if there's a great rule of when it's better to be first or whatever. What I'm trying to say there, and a friend of mine wrote a book with this title where he said, what is it?

8:16Only is better than best, right? And that's the way to think about it. So, so sure. Sometimes in a business competition, you want to be first, sometimes you want to be best, but ideally you want to be the only one you want to create a unique value proposition, a unique combination that, uh, that has never existed and likely never will exist. Right. So, so I, I, I might say, let's, let's skip that your question entirely and think instead, how do we focus, as Peter Thiel says, where we have a monopoly, where we're the only one doing it, the only one that can do it. So that would just be something to think about.

8:58I would say generally, though, it's better to be best than first, but it's always better to be the only one. Hi, I have a question about, is there a stoic way to make a decision, or do the Stoics have something to say about decision-making? What do you mean exactly? So I think many times we're kind of on the fence about things. And I wonder if there's something to be said about getting off the fence in a Stoic way. So I actually have a chapter about this in the book that I'm writing right now. There's General Marshall, who's sort of a hero of mine. He would famously sort of preside over these long meetings where people were debating all these things.

9:41and he would sort of say, don't fight the problem, decide the problem. Basically, just like you decide it and you move on. I think a lot of times when we're making the decision, we're thinking like, is this option better? Is this option better? And what never seems to enter our calculus is what is the cost of delaying the decision? So it may have been that deciding one of the options sooner and And then just acting on it would be better than waiting for the more information. So I tend to be someone who tries to make the decision quickly and move on. Although just this week, there was this decision and I sort of agonized over and I went back and forth, back and forth.

10:23I ended up going with what I originally was going to do anyway. I should just trusted my gut on it. I just sort of put myself through the ringer for like three days for no reason that honestly, I could have just decided and use that energy to make sure that the decision that I made was the right one. You know, so I would, I would, I would like to think generally that the Stoics were quick decision makers. And then once they, once they made it, they stuck with it. Okay. That helps. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Ryan. Question for this goes back to day seven's notes, I believe, where you contrasted Buddhist with Stoicist.

11:01Yes. And I was wondering, that's kind of how it led me to Stoicism as far as studying Buddhist and whatnot. And I was wondering if there's any other cultures out there that was having the same sort of virtuous talks and whatnot. Yeah. And my question is, is there any historical evidence that shows there was any communication between the two groups? Yeah, there's not. As far as I can see, there was an Atlantic piece I read a few years ago that was like, maybe David Hume gets this Buddhist text. We don't really know when this stuff starts to make it into Western thought, but almost certainly not around the time of the Stoics.

11:52I almost like it better that way because it means they were independently coming to the same conclusion. You know, if, if, if, if you found that the two philosophies had influenced each other early on, it would almost negate some of the conclusions that they come to the fact that East and West sort of both sort of come to the conclusion that, you know, our unhappiness rests so much on our expectations on our inability to be satisfied, you know, that our fear of death is this sort of universal thing. Like I like, I like that the species co-evolved independently, right? There were definitely other schools.

12:32I mean, if you read the Bhagavad Gita, you get a lot of overlap. But to go to my point, it's like when you read Christian thought, there's a lot of overlap between the Christians and the Stoics, at least the early Christians. But that's because they were both in Rome and they were both sort utilizing a lot of the same source material, a lot of the same assumptions. In that sense, it's really hard to separate the two, decide what's a new conclusion, what's just a previous understanding dressed up in new clothes. I like that they were separated. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Hey, thanks, Ryan. Really excited to talk to you here.

13:16I just finished part one of stillness is the key last night. When you talk about accessing stillness as a fly fisherman and a cyclist, that really resonated with me. I can see the bike behind you. But, but, uh, oh yeah. Uh, but, um, to access it in the office and to get deeper into, you know, my professional life, um, it seemed like there's a little bit of transcendental meditation going on in there. do you have any techniques you could talk about with access to access to stillness and regarding tm uh which i learned from your buddy tim ferris uh or learned about do you believe it's worth paying to learn or are there other techniques you'd recommend so a big part of the the book for me was to talk about stillness and not talk about meditation um just just because i feel like It's not something I fully understand.

14:13It's not something that's really worked for me. And I also kind of dislike that it's like, oh, OK, so the thing to do to get this is I think it's I think there's a lot of things that contribute to getting to that place of stillness. And certainly it's not something the Stokes talk about. So I don't make it a focus of the book. To me, it's I think the way you get there in the office is about routine. It's about limiting interruptions. it's about um sort of locking into what you're doing and i think it's also it quite frankly it's about actually liking what you're doing too so could i get into a flow state you know reviewing spreadsheets possibly but but almost almost certainly not given that i don't like spreadsheets you know what i mean um but i could get into it i could get into a flow state you know uh writing a book in the middle of a crowded coffee shop during an earthquake, because I actually like that, right?

15:09And so I think basically the premise of the book is that sort of mind, body, spirit, there's decisions that you make in each of those domains that either preclude the possibility of stillness or encourage slash inspire the ability to get to a place of stillness. Sure, and does playing music in the background have any impact on that? It does for me, yeah I tend to, I like to write while I'm listening to music But I tend to pick songs and I listen to those songs over and over and over again So it sort of creates kind of a loop And then I'm sort of kind of listening to the music But I'm really not listening to the music It kind of lets me turn my mind off Okay, great So stillness and silence are not the same I would say stillness and silence are related, but it doesn't have to be silence.

16:05I guess I would say silence can come in many forms. I think silence is, I would say, sort of the absence of undesired noise. Got it. Thank you very much. Yeah. So my question is really focused on that magic word enough. Yes. and that idea of you know waking up every day and realizing that you're doing the work of a human being and i am the kind of guy who wakes up and decides to get after it and to a point where it's been brought to my attention that i get consumed by it at times and i have trouble sure like relaxing um like can you just kind of shed some wisdom and maybe discuss like work-life balance and just knowing when to kind of turn off and be present with people and not necessarily like ideals that you're striving for?

16:54So one of the things that I've taken from the time that I've spent with sports teams is the importance of recovery. There's an off season. There's also recovery inside games. They rest pitchers, you know, the load management, as they talk about in the NBA. I've had to start thinking seriously about what are my plans for my career? Am I planning to do this for a short period of time? Or am I planning to do this for a long period of time? So is this a sprint or a marathon? And if it's a sprint, then it's all out and there's no balance. It's inherently an unbalanced pursuit. But if it's a marathon, then it's about pacing, right?

17:38What's the sustainable way that you do this so you can get the, you can travel the distance that you need to travel. And when you look at a lot of athletes, what causes the injury, Whether it's Tiger Woods or Michael Phelps, whether we're talking a physical injury or sort of mental or spiritual injuries, a lot of it comes from overexertion, overdoing it, a lack of balance. So I think about that sort of rest, recovery, pacing oneself as weirdly as a function of the drive. If you want to be good at this and if you want to do it for a long time, you better learn restraint or temperance, as the Stoics say, or you're going to burn out before you possibly get there.

18:21But great question. Great answer. Thank you very much.

18:49We'll see you next time.

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