Where Has The Time Gone? | 8 Stoic Strategies To Get Your Life In Order TODAY

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1:21Welcome 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.

2:12Where has the time gone? It's been five years now since those unprecedented days of March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic first upended our daily lives. Schools closed, offices shut their doors, social calendars cleared, and those strange, uncertain days were a tragic time full of so much loss for so many people. But it's strange, isn't it, how for all the fear and worry, concern about our jobs and even basic functions, how many of us also found ourselves with what felt like an abundance of time. Days which once felt so short were now almost interminably long. How would we fill them? What hobbies would we pick up?

3:02What would we do with ourselves? Here's the thing, we didn't actually have more time. We had exactly the same 24 hours we have today and have always had. What changed was what was expected of us and how many inessential things were suddenly stripped away. And now five years later, we've filled our calendars back up, often with commitments we don't even enjoy or need. We went back to normal as if that was working before and not filled with waste and silly obligations. And the silliness of some of those obligations, it felt so clear in 2020, didn't they? Well, here we are with a chance to reflect on all that, not just because it's the anniversary and where did five years go?

3:47It's crazy. but because every spring offers us a chance to pause and recalibrate, to examine which commitments truly serve us and our families and which ones we've accumulated like dust, to clear away what doesn't matter. And as the poet Philip Larkin wrote, to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. And that's what the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge is designed to help you do. It's 10 days of all new stoic-inspired challenges that will push you to declutter your schedule and make time for the things that truly matter to help bring you a sense of clarity and purpose in your life. Each morning, we're going to hit you with a challenge that should help you simplify, gain control over time, face your fears, expand your point of view, abandon harmful habits, and do more with your days.

4:40and these aren't going to be pie in the sky theoretical things, but actionable stoic exercises you can do right now. And we'll tell you what to do, how to do it and why it works and how to maintain it, not just for the year, but hopefully for your whole life. As Marks really says, this is what you deserve. You could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow. Well, we would love for you to choose to join us in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward challenge. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com spring. It's going to start on the 20th. Me and thousands of other Stokes all over the world are going to be doing it.

5:14And we can't wait to see you in there. Hey, just to thank you for being an awesome listener of the Daily Stoic podcast, which I very much appreciate. We are offering a discount to anyone who wants to sign up for the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. We're going to kick spring of 2025 off with 10 days of Stoic inspired challenges. And if you go to dailystoic.com slash spring right now and enter code DSPOD20, you'll get 20 % off the Spring Forward Challenge. It's going to be awesome. It starts on March 20th. So don't wait. I'll see you in there dailystoic.com slash spring with code DSPOD20 for the 2025 Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge.

5:58Let's start off spring with a bang. I'll see you in there.

6:05It is a timeless affliction. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, you're old or young, married or single, struggling, successful, if you live in the modern world or the ancient world. What people do is we accumulate stuff. We carry baggage. We hold on to things that don't serve us. We have too many of this, too many of that. Actually, in meditations, one of the few jokes that Mark Sreelius makes, someone who has so much stuff, They're so rich that they don't even have a place to shit. Here we are going into spring. The urgency of needing to do a spring cleaning is upon us. We've got to free ourselves from the weight of our excess and the unnecessary.

6:45We have to rid ourselves of the things that are holding us down. And that's what we're going to do in today's video. We're going to talk about stoic strategies for deep cleaning your life. so you can declutter, get out from under it, and have a better, clearer, happier life.

7:06All of us do have too much stuff, and you got to get rid of some of it because it makes you vulnerable and it oppresses you. Epictetus is born a slave, but he eventually receives his freedom, and he comes to develop a nice little life, nice little house, nice little existence for himself. You know, he would have made a decent living. And with that money, he buys himself, we're told, a nice little iron lamp, which he keeps burning in a shrine in his home. And one morning, he's in another room of his house and he hears a noise and he realizes his house is being burglarized. And he rushes down the hall.

7:41What does he find? He finds a thief running off with this prized possession of his. And like any person who's attached to their stuff, he was disappointed and felt violated. He was angry. he missed this thing that he had someone had come into his home and stolen something that belonged to him and that sucks it also happens though and that's what Epictetus tries to catch himself and remind himself he tells himself look okay tomorrow I'm gonna go out to the market and I'm gonna buy an earthenware lamp he says a man can only lose what he has basically he says the problem here is not so much the thief although that is a problem the problem is that they I had something stealable, that I had something so valuable it was worth stealing.

8:24And so he goes and he gets this cheaper lamp and he keeps it for the rest of his life. One imagines breathing a little bit easier and not so worried that someone might steal it. You know, one of Seneca's most powerful metaphors, a bit insensitive, I guess, as we're talking about Epictetus, who was a slave, but Seneca talks about how the slave owners are in fact owned by their slaves and that these wealthy people with these enormous estates were in fact lorded over by the property rather than the other way around basically seneca is talking about how mental and spiritual independence are worth very little if you are oppressed by all your physical possessions that you are afraid of losing in fact that's why seneca would practice this poverty he would he would practice like epictetus did about having cheaper stuff to realize hey the nice stuff that i have is nice but i don't need it he said the purpose of it was to get to a place where you go, is this what I'm afraid of ending up as?

9:20It's not so bad, right? You have your nice house. You can't imagine what living in a studio apartment is like, or, you know, riding the bus instead of your fancy car. Then you do those things and you go, oh yeah, plenty of people do this just fine. It's not so bad. It's totally normal. The worst thing that can happen is that your success becomes normalized and that's your new baseline, and then you can't even conceive of an existence without them. I think Tennessee Williams talked about how luxury is sometimes the wolf at the door. The dependency on the possessions is a kind of vulnerability. And this is why philosophers have always had these various practices where we try to reduce our needs, our attachments.

10:01We try to get used to having little or reminding ourselves of what it's like to lose something. It's never a bad time to go through your house with a trash bag or a box and just start getting rid of stuff that you don't use. You're cleaning out more than just the room. You're cleaning out your mind and your body. You're reducing the amount of things that have ownership over you. Go through a drawer, go through a closet, start with your desk, but just get rid of stuff. And the satisfaction of having this thing that is no longer in your space. And then, you know, you give it away, you give it to someone in need, you sell it.

10:37It doesn't matter. But the point is, you are getting out from under it.

10:46And let's go back to that idea of Seneca talking about how slave owners are slaves to their slaves. Seneca also talks about how basically all of us are slaves to something. He talks about this Roman general. He says, you know, Marius commands these armies, but ambition commands Marius. He's talking about how we're all slaves to various things, urges, desires. A lot of us are slaves to habits or substances. There's a story I tell in Discipline's Destiny about the physicist Richard Feynman. He's the middle of the day, he's, you know, running from one class to another, and he just feels this strong desire to get a drink.

11:22Why, he thinks. What's that about? Most of all, he's shocked by this feeling. Like he's not an alcoholic exactly, but he just realizes in this moment the power that alcohol has over him. And he doesn't like it. And he sort of quits cold turkey. There's another story I tell about Eisenhower. Eisenhower is like a four pack a day smoker for most of his adult life. Has a heart attack. His doctor tells him, you got to stop. So he says, I gave myself the order to quit smoking. And he does. Right. It had been a 40 year habit, but his health was on the line. his ability to be of service was in jeopardy.

11:56He realized he was not in command. The habit was in command. So he put an end to that right then. He says, the only way to stop is to stop. So he says, I stop. Look, no one can make you do this stuff. I think you want to be very suspicious and skeptical of anything that has that power over you. I once heard addiction described as when you lose the freedom to abstain. So when you have trouble, like Feynman did, of not doing a thing that you don't really need to do, that compulsion, that's what the Stoics want us to sort of see as like almost a cancer or a form of slavery and to eradicate it, to get rid of it.

12:33And so as you go into spring, let's think about what we're hooked on. You know, what do you like when you don't have that cup of coffee? What do you have trouble doing without? What is taking from you the freedom to not do it? And how can you reassert that freedom and power by deciding not to do it, by eliminating its power over you. And for some of us, that process is gonna be more formal and serious than others. You know, sometimes, hey, I'm not gonna buy that junk food anymore. I'm gonna go to a meeting or I'm gonna start a treatment program. The specifics are for you. But I think spring is a great time to do a quick evaluation of what is in command, what is in control of us, what is taking our freedom and decide to reassert that power and self-command.

13:15Because look, if you wanna live a happier, more fulfilling life, if you care about autonomy, you got to decide what vices you are not going to let rule your life anymore.

13:27This isn't so much a lesson, but it is a challenge. It's actually one we're doing as part of the spring forward challenge we're doing with Daily Stoic, which by the way, is live right now. You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash spring. Thousands of Stoics all over the world are going to come together and sort of kick off the spring with a bunch of Stoic inspired challenges. I'd love to have you join us. We're going to start on March 20th. And one of the challenges we do every year as part of it, and I've done for several years, is I try to think about like, where's a grudge that I'm carrying?

13:58Like where is a conflict or a disagreement or like a source of animosity or tension in my life? And how can I clean that up or clean that out? I'm not saying like, how do I get this person to apologize to me? The stoic would say, you don't control that. I do control what I decide to make amends for, what behaviors of mine I decide to own, where I lay down my weapons. And so I'd encourage you to think as you go into this spring, like what is something you can fix that you can apologize for that you left hanging because you were at a place then that you couldn't be anything other than you were. There was one actually many years ago that I did.

14:42There was someone I got in this sort of big fight with in one of my books and they were mad at me. I thought I was right. Anyways, I wrote this person an email and I just said, hey, look, here's what I feel like I've been carrying. And I wish I'd done it differently. But most of all, what I said is, hey, I feel bad about the way the consequences of what I did fell on you. That sucks. And I'm sorry. And look, I'd love to tell you that this person shot me back an email and we're best friends now. They didn't like my apology at all. They hurled back a bunch of invective and anger at me. It was very clear to me that they're still carrying a lot of anger about what happened.

15:22But making amends, as they say, is a gift you give yourself also. So I said what I needed to say. I resolved it. It's not taking up space in the back of my head. I'm not ruminating about it. I'm not waiting for an apology from this person. I owned my part in it. I tried to be the person that I want to be. If that's not where they are, great. But I tried to clear that up. And wherever we can clear up these things, the better, right? This is something Marcus really says, that revenge is not being like the person that wronged you. Maybe you'll never get them to see your side of it, but let's not end up like them.

15:57Let's not end up like that person, which is still being like, just even the mention of my name, clearly send this person in this tailspin. That's what we want to clean up because that's a heavy and unpleasant thing to carry. We can't change the past. We can't change what happened, but we can take responsibility. We can acknowledge our mistakes. We can own the pain we've caused. We can learn from it. We can practice empathy. We can try to repair and we can become a better person as a result of that. And so look, we have to forgive those who trespass against us. And we should seek, if we can, to be forgiven by the people that we have trespassed against.

16:35We can ask for forgiveness. We can admit our error. What we can't do is just continue to pretend it didn't happen because it did happen and it's there. And that detritus is there. And part of our spring cleaning, part of deep cleaning your life should be getting rid of as many of those things that have accumulated as possible. And look, the Spring Forward Challenge has a bunch of awesome days like that in it, days that have made my life better. And I love to have you join us. And so would thousands of other Stoics all over the world. As I said, you can sign up for that at dailystoic.com slash spring.

17:06It starts on March 20th. 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. What 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.

17:53We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it 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. Toyota 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.

18:32Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone. And then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. But I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

19:16My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

19:53Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

20:13Let's think about our inputs. You know, in programming, they talk about garbage in, garbage out. Like, what are you allowing in? And a lot of us allow too much garbage into our life through the news we consume, through the people we follow on social media, maybe even to some of the people that we spend time with. And I think spring is a great time to go, hey, what are the inputs or what are the access points into my life that misery and negativity and dysfunction and chaos are coming in? And then deciding to do something about that. Mark Scrooge talks about not being bounced around by gossip. So many of us have people who are like just bringing us drama in our lives and let's decide, hey, I'm not going to play that game with that person anymore.

20:58I'm not going to pick up the phone when they call. I'm not going to get sucked into this group text. I think a lot about what are parts of my information diet that are making me unhappy. Hey, when was the last time I went on Twitter and afterwards I thought, I'm so glad I did that, right? When's the last time I went on Reddit and I thought that was time well spent? When was the last time I walking through the airport, see the news is on, I stop and watch. And then afterwards words, I was informed. That's very rare, but like my mood was improved. Again, rarer still. And so managing our inputs is a really essential part of the spring cleaning.

21:36If we want better outputs, if we want more tranquility, more peace, how do we manage the inputs, right? Cut it off at the source. I'm not saying you're not informed. I'm not saying you don't have friends, that you have no one in your life, but it's just deciding to be intentional about where you get your information, what kind of information you consume, what kind of, you know, inboxes you allow yourself to check or not check. And managing your information diet is a really key and essential part to having a happy and tranquil life. I prefer to read books about the world, about human nature. Let me just tell you, they're not, it's not all fun and sunshine and kittens.

22:15There is dark stuff in history. But I find that I learn ultimately more from that and I apply more from that than I do from breaking news. I try to be intentional about, you know, what chats I'm in, what texts I do, people I spend time with. I want to cultivate good influences. I want to let the opposite of garbage in because I want the opposite of garbage out.

22:42We have a lot on our plate. We've got emails to respond to. We've got calls to make. There's a meeting in a couple hours. there's the person we met with yesterday that need an answer from us there's groceries to pick up there's errands to run kids to drop off social media there's just stuff right we have our hopes and dreams and an endlessly long to-do list right and so we feel overloaded and overwhelmed as people have felt basically since the beginning of time the the ancient world was not like this quiet chill, peaceful place. In fact, they had more day-to-day domestic responsibilities than many of us do.

23:24You know, things took longer and there were the same distractions and there was gossip and there was other people and there was Murphy's Law. There was just a lot, right? People were busy then. They're busy now. To be good at anything though, we have to cut through all that. Mark really said, if you want more tranquility, if you want to be better, you have to ask yourself a question. You have to say, is this thing essential? He says, because most of what we do and say is not essential. And he says, but if we can eliminate the inessential, we get the double benefit of doing the essential things better.

23:57So to clean up and declutter your life, you got to get rid of stuff, physical stuff, but also items on the calendar, items on the to-do list. Here, let me show you. This is an ideal day in my calendar. That's not a day where I'm not doing anything. That is a day where I have not scheduled interruptions. That is a day where I have not agreed to be anywhere or call anyone and I can do the essential things that I have to do. That's what you need more of. We need to say no. We need to say no to people who wanna pick our brains. We need to say no to people who just need a few minutes of our time. We need to say no to meetings that could actually be an email, emails that could be a text.

24:37We need to be ruthless with the superfluous things that don't matter. And we need to realize that whenever we say yes to things because we don't want to be rude, we are in fact being rude. We're being rude to ourselves. We're being rude to our family. We're being rude to our work. We have to say no. No is a complete sentence. You don't need an excuse. You don't need a justification. You just need to say no. You need to say no to more things that you say yes to because when we say no, what are we also doing? We're saying yes to ourselves, to the people we love, to our most important and essential obligations.

25:16Seneca reminds us that a love of busyness is not industry. He says that it is the restlessness of the hunted mind. And actually, that's how he describes a lot of Romans. He refers to their lives as a kind of busy idleness. We're just going around doing and doing and doing, but what? What are we actually accomplishing? What of it is actually moving the needle? How much of it really matters how much of it, if it went away, would they miss it? Would the world miss it? Would anyone miss it? So you got to go into this spring and then summer and fall and winter, every period of your life, you got to be asking yourself, is this thing essential?

25:51Do I actually need to do it? What would happen if I said no? What would happen if I was more discerning? How much more productive and happy and content could I be if I had better boundaries? If I was firmer, if I had better priorities. You only have one life. Stop wasting it. Stop letting people steal it from you. Say no. Do less.

26:15Life is a dirty, dusty thing. It was like that in Rome, and it's like that way today. You know, you step in a puddle, you get some dirt on the hem of your pants. Once someone else's nasty mood infects you, the heat makes us sweat, the news of the world, we carry around the nastiness and energy of the time that we're in. We spill some food, frustration spills onto us. That's like how life goes. You know, like we wake up in the morning and we're fresh and ready to go. But by the end of the day, we're dirty and disgusting. There's the dust of our emotions, of work, of stress, of everything. And of course, the Stoics knew this.

26:55They experienced it. You know, their togas were dirty by the end of the day. And that's why they knew it was critical to find ways to do, as Marx really said, which was to wash away the dust of earthly life. And there were a bunch of ways to do this, again, literally and figuratively. Seneca talks about how Socrates liked to play music and to play games. He wanted to relax and have fun. Cato would have long meals over wine where he discussed philosophy. We also know that he frequented the Roman baths, as did Seneca and most Romans, where this is a place where the grime of the city could be scrubbed away, but where they also might have, you know, some time to think.

27:37Even that observation from Marcus Aurelius, I think, is worth thinking about in its larger context, right? Marcus was talking about washing away the dust of earthly life. And he didn't mean that in the baths. He meant by looking up at the stars at night. And where was he talking about this? Marcus was talking about it in his journal, right? In the pages of the journal where he is clearing his mind, clearing his thoughts, cleaning himself off. I think about the runs that I go on. I live on a dirt road, but I go on a long run. And that run is a place that I sort of get dusty, literally. But figuratively, I am cleaning off some of the grime and dust of life.

28:16When I get in my cold plunge, it is washing me clean in one sense, but it's also invigorating me and challenging me in another sense. So the question, I think, for cleaning yourself up is what activities do you do? Is it a hobby? Do you meditate? Do you have a weekly therapy session? Do you and your spouse have a nice little conversation before bed? Maybe it's swimming laps. Maybe it is a cold plunge. Maybe it's the time after the kids go to bed and you just sit and read or you call a friend. Maybe it's a morning walk or an evening prayer. But what are the rituals? What are the habits? What are the practices where you wash off the dust of your dirty, dusty life?

28:56Because it can't be saved up for a two-week vacation to some island paradise. And it can't. It should be more than just your literal bathing. It should be a practice. It should be a process, right? And so for me, as I said, it's usually the physical. Walking is a huge part of it. But my journaling is it? My writing is it? Hanging out with my kids is it? But you got to do something that cleans you out. This is a dirty, dusty world that we live in. And without this cleansing, without this process, even the purest and strongest souls will become filthy and corrupted. When I go out and feed my animals at night, one of my rules is I try to make sure I look up at the stars and just soak it in, even if only for a few seconds.

29:42And I think about that exact exercise for Marcus surrealists. So pick a practice and stick with it this spring. You got to let it support you. You got to let it wash you clean.

29:56You know, we talked about washing off the dust of earthly life. There's a term, I think it's in Japanese that I love. I won't try to butcher it with my pronunciation, but basically it translates to this idea of forest bathing, like getting outside in nature, getting outside the busy, modern world of glass and concrete and getting off into the actual dust and the dirt and the pollen and whatever. And you find how clean you get real fast. Marx really says his writings are filled with these poetic observations. He talks about the weight of the grain bending under its own weight. He talks about the furrowed brow of the line he talks about the flecks of foam on a boar's mouth you know he he talks about the way that olives fall right from the tree he's bathing himself in the beauty of nature i took my son for a bike ride this morning we're gonna go on a walk when we get when he gets home from school getting outside getting active getting out into nature is an essential part of cleaning yourself off.

31:05One of the reasons I live out in rural Texas is because I love that. I love the beauty of the natural world. Seneca called it a temple of all the gods. And yet so many people's lives exist inside a cubicle, inside an office building, inside their car, right? They go from one hermetically sealed container to the next, to the next, to the next. And what they're missing is beauty of that world. I went for a run in Utah the other day when I was out traveling, and I ended up cutting through this cemetery, and these deer were running by. I went back to my hotel room after, and I just felt amazing. There's a William Blake poem about how a wandering deer here and there keeps the human soul from care.

31:53And that's what I was thinking about. I just I just love that and how I was cleansed by that experience. And so how are you making concerted time to get out in nature? You might get a little dirty doing it. You might get some mud on your boots, some dust and dirt on your clothes, but you will come back cleaner and clearer than ever. Pierre Hidalgo, one of the translators of the Stoics, talks about these experiences of immensity that make you feel both very small and very big at the same time. And I find that that That helps give me perspective. It reminds me that my stuff isn't that important, that my house in the country is not nice because it is big.

32:28It is nice because it is in the country. And it's that the dirt roads that I walk on, that's the real luxury, not the square footage that I have. And that there's beauty everywhere. I remember one time I was flying out of Heathrow and I had a layover, and so I went for this run during the layover. and you know, Heathrow is a disgusting airport and busy and noisy and loud and it took just like a half mile to basically end up in the woods into that there's this creek and there are these trails and these trees and just how quickly and clearly you can clear out all this modern stuff and get out into nature and how often we have to do this because you know, it restores our happiness, our balance, it gives us joy.

33:13I think it humbles us. It's part of a life worth living. And there's something I think here about spring, especially, right, where I live, it is bleakest in late December, January, and February. And then just starting in mid-March, it just gets amazing. Everything gets green. Life starts to come back. That's the special time. It hasn't gotten hot yet. And I want to take in and soak in as much of that as I can.

33:43one really important question i try to ask my employees this and i try to ask myself this often i go what is eating up a lot of my time and is that actually a good use of that time right the the practice of memento mori is of course like reminding you how how little time you have how quickly life can go by how how life can end at any moment but i think doing a brief time audit right going hey what am i spending a lot of my time on what is something that started by taking only a little bit of time and is now ballooned to take an enormous amount of time in the way that if you sat down with a nutritionist they'd be like what are you eating right and they might have you do a food diary how can you take some time and think about what is consuming a lot of your time my screen time app tells me i spent you know this amount of time texting today this amount of time on instagram today i spent this amount of time on email today and go is that actually a good use of my time is that the best use of my time hey uh my commute is taken longer and longer i used to to dip in and get coffee here and now that that thing takes 30 minutes of my day i think we need to take time as we go into the spring it's not just about getting rid of stuff but it's about getting rid of time sucks getting rid of places where we've gotten muddled or inefficient because a lot of times we're just doing that out of what Epictetus would call wretched habit.

35:01It's the way we have been doing it for a while, so it makes sense. But if you'd asked us at the outset, hey, do you want to spend this amount of time doing this every day? You'd be like, that's insane. Or you want to say over the course of a year, you want to spend this much time doing this? You'd be like, what? No, that's insane. One of Mark Sebelius' tests, he says, and this ties into the memento mori, he says, you know, whenever you're doing something, ask yourself, am I afraid of death? Because I won't be able to do this anymore. Because a lot of the times we spend our time doing frivolous, stupid, wasteful things, and we want to eliminate those things.

35:35I try to tell my employees like, hey, if this is taking up a lot of your time, maybe we're not doing it the right way. Maybe there's not actually a return on investment for that time. I try to be protective of their time, and they've got to be protective of their time also. And I try to be protective of my time. As you are evaluating your day, your life here, ask yourself, how am I wasting the time? Because Seneca is right. Life is not short. Life can be pretty long. It's just that we waste a lot of it. And we waste a lot of it doing and being the way we have always been. And here, in this brief moment before life gets crazy again, let's ask ourselves, what's some waste that I am going to get rid of?

36:19Maybe you're one of those people, you started the year off with a bunch of resolutions, you had a bunch of ideas, and then life got in the way. You got tired, you got sick, things happened. You shouldn't write the whole year off. And in fact, spring is a great time to come back to the rhythm as the Stoics talk about. We've been jarred by circumstances, sure, but this is our opportunity to get back on track, right? To return to philosophy, to fight to be who we're meant to be and to do the things we know that we're supposed to be doing. And I'd love to have you join us in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge.

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