Who Decides Who Gets What? | What Young Men Get Wrong About Stoicism

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.

1:10And yet, despite this success, this track record, this leverage you have, your life is so backwards. In one of his letters, Seneca tells a story about Alexander the Great, then on the verge of conquering another distant land. The rulers of that country came to him and offered him some of their territory if he ceased his attack. Alexander, Seneca tells us, quietly corrected them, saying that he hadn't come to Asia with the intention of accepting whatever they cared to give him, but of letting them keep whatever he chose to leave them. And so it ought to go for our time and priorities, Seneca continued.

1:47Philosophy, likewise, tells all other occupations, he wrote. It is not my intention to accept whatever time is left over for you. You shall have. Instead, he says, what I regret. Philosophy should not get the leftovers. Or as we said in a Daily Dad email and podcast about this same idea, and neither should your family. It should not be relegated to the scraps of time between other obligations. It is not some frivolous hobby. It is the key to everything we are trying to do. It's a compass, a guiding light. It's what we owe our ultimate devotion. So as you look at your day, as you look at your life, make sure that you are prioritizing properly.

2:30Make sure that you are giving your best, your most productive hours to the most important things. Because you're not really successful if success doesn't allow you to do that. You don't really have leverage if you have to give the best of yourself away to things that don't matter. You're not really in charge if you can't say, my work on myself comes first. You shall get what's left over.

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5:51Look, there's a reason that stoicism is particularly attractive to young men. I totally get it because I was once one of those young men. And there's no one who will give them the guidance that they desperately need and crave. There's no one that says, hey, here's how you live a good and meaningful life, but also a challenging life. Here's how you do what you were put here to do. And by the way, you were put here to do something. You're not worthless. You're not a piece of shit. Society is not discarding you. You have value. You can make a positive difference. And in fact, society needs you and it needs you to do those things.

6:31When I got Mark's Religious Meditations, when this book landed on the table of my college apartment, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I described it as a quake book, a book that shook everything that I thought I knew about the world. And here you have this guy that I'd heard about in movies or in the History Channel, the most powerful man in the world, was writing notes to himself about how to be a badass, how to be great. And that's what stoicism was for me and what it opened up in me. And I think what I got the most out of stoicism early was all the things that it could do for me, right? How to master my emotions, how to push myself physically, how to put up with people's obnoxiousness and hypocrisy and bullshit.

7:20And by the way, there was a lot of that in Marcus's time, but there's a ton of it in our time. I don't think it should surprise us then though, that grifters and demagogues would step in to fill this space. What you see people doing, whether it's Andrew Tate or whoever, is they pervert the ideas in Stoicism. They take some of these core ideas and they mix it with notions of masculinity, other cultural traditions. When you're speaking to people who feel misunderstood or even mistreated, it's easy to direct them towards a kind of a resentiment. It can even be channeled into what you might call kind of a a modern day know-nothingism or what you might call anti-wokeism that's like a reaction against extremes or misguided even well-meaning cultural forces what these young men and then the grifters who are taking advantage of them what they're missing about stoicism is this place that society has always gotten stoicism wrong there's a huge difference between lowercase stoicism and uppercase stoicism.

8:30Lowercase stoicism is all the stereotypes of stoicism. Has no emotion, invulnerable, repressed. That's not what stoicism is. The stoics weren't emotionless. There is a part of stoicism that's about being less emotional, particularly destructive emotions. So the stoics were not repressed, emotionless robots. And if you think that's what stoicism is going to help you do, you're doing it wrong. Like I think about someone like Andrew Tate, if he thinks stoicism is just a way to not have to feel human emotions about the women that he's exploiting, that he is taking advantage of, and I would say victimizing, like that's not what fucking stoicism is at all.

9:14And in fact, what I think one of the best quotes from Mark Sturow is, he says, the point of life is good character and acts for the common good. So if you think of this sort of emotionless stoic is getting to a place where you can just do whatever you want and not have to care about the consequences of those actions on other people, again, you're getting it extremely wrong. When I think of stoicism as this self-help philosophy that seems to be about indifference to other people, or it seems to be a toolkit for being, you know, simply better at business negotiations or being a get rich quick scheme or Stoicism as a prosperity gospel or Stoicism as a way to turn away from what's happening in the world.

9:57And this is emphatically, the last part is emphatically what the Stoics were not doing. Seneca would say the difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics was the Epicureans retreated into the garden to pursue individual self-development and self-fulfillment. And he said they only got involved in politics and public life if they had to. And he said the Stoics, on the other hand, got involved in politics and public life unless something prevented them. So every once in a while, I'll say something political in one of these videos or I'll talk about some social issue in our time. And people go, what do you think Seneca would think about you talking about politics on The Daily Stoic?

10:36And I go, he'd probably not be surprised given that his day job was as one of the most powerful politicians in Rome. One of the things I talk about in the afterward of Right Thing right now is that like, I get it. I get where this sort of initial infatuation, understanding this entry point to stoicism is, because I had the same way. I could not have written a book about the stoic virtue of justice early on in my pursuit and understanding of the philosophy. But the thing about stoicism is that as you study it, it is working on you. You can't escape the fact that Mark Sturlus talks about the common good like 80 times in meditations.

11:15He talks about doing the right thing. He talks about justice dozens of other times. And all these really important ideas over and over and over again. For a guy that had unlimited power, he never lost his compassion and his empathy and his love for his fellow human beings. He saw himself as a true cosmopolitan, a person of the world, not just a member of a race and tribe, only caring about people who were related to him or looked like him or lived in his country. He tried to have this broader sense. In fact, that's what the Stoics said, that there were these circles, right? There's the circle of us and the circle of our family, circle of people who live near us, people who live in the same country as us or the same city as us.

11:59And then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it ultimately includes all living things. The purpose of Stoic philosophy, the irrational purpose, was to pull these outer rings inward, to really care about other people and to try to make the world better for them, sometimes, especially even at the cost of one's own interest. This is the kind of Stoicism that we have to be focused on. Life is short. We have to be good and we should try to do good. We should love and be loved. We should do the right thing because it's the right thing and we should resist that hardness of heart that can so easily come from a philosophy that is so focused on being in command of oneself and mastering one's emotions every day totally free we send out the daily stoic email it's the largest community of stoics ever assembled in human history and just one stoic idea one ancient lesson to chew on every single day i'd love to have you join us if you like our videos i think you'll like the email it's also a podcast version of it too You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email.