Will You Seize This Reminder? Or Let It Pass? | What Expensive Things Cost

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.

1:09turning of seasons is a kind of darkness. As the poem goes, the trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said. The recent buds relax and spread. Their greenness is a kind of grief. The inherent message is about the passage of time. Each season brings new life, yes, but also marks the sensation of life. It's a painful truth, the poem says, that's written in the rings of a tree. Winter is dead and over, and all of us a little more so too. This notion serves as a gentle nudge, reminding us of the preciousness of every moment. It urges us not merely to exist, but to truly live, to seize each season and extract its full potential, which is what we mean when we say here at Daily Stoic that it's time to spring forward.

1:59If you did our New Year New You Challenge, you heard us talking about that back in December. Well, we've got a new one for you. It's called the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. This is the time of year where, you know, we're talking about spring cleaning. It's worth pondering, how often do we organize not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines, and our assumptions as well? Reflect on the last week. How many of those seven days were efficient and as productive as they could have been? Or did you find yourself wasting time overcomplicating things and falling back on old habits?

2:30Are you, like many others, still feeling the lingering effects of winter's inertia? Well, the Daily Stokes Spring Forward Challenge is designed to prompt introspection into those aspects of your life, to help you scrutinize your choices, your relationships, and your habits, and help propel you towards a life of fulfillment. As Mark's really said, this is what you deserve. You could be good today, but instead you choose tomorrow. So the choice is yours. Are you going to let your New Year's resolutions fade into missed opportunities and continue with the status quo? Or could you invest 10 days into self-improvement, create some runway for some genuine lasting change?

3:06Challenge yourself with me and thousands of other Stokes all over the world to spring forward and become the person you inspire to be. And you can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash spring. I'll see you in there. We're going to do a bunch of awesome stuff. Q &A with me, some great lessons, all kinds of great thinking on how to spring forward, Grab this next season and get the most out of it. And I'd love to see you join us, dailystoic.com slash spring. And you can also join Daily Stoic Life if you've been thinking about doing that and get this challenge and all the other challenges we're doing for the rest of the year, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff for free.

3:42And you can do that at dailystoiclife.com. 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.

4:29We 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. 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, Discover your uncharted territory.

5:11Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

5:25What expensive things cost. From the cynics, the Stoics learned the powerful practice of focusing on the true worth of things. that the cost of an item isn't simply what it's sold for, but what it costs the owner to own. So much of our desire for material goods comes at the great price of both anxiety and the loss of our serenity. And even when gained, these things often leave us more anxious and less serene. So today, spend some time reflecting on what the things you buy actually cost you and see if they are really worth what you have been paying. And that's from today's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal.

6:06We have some quotes from Seneca and Epictetus here. So concerning the things we pursue and for what we vigorously exert ourselves, we owe this consideration. Either there is nothing useful in them or most aren't useful. Some of them are superfluous, while others aren't worth that much. But we don't discern this and see them as free when they cost us so dearly. That's Seneca's moral letters. Then we have Epictetus. If a person gave your body away to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along so that they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled.

6:44Have you no shame, Epictetus asks. And then we have Diogenes Laertes quoting Diogenes of Sinope. That's Diogenes the Cynic. He says, we sell things of great value for things of very little and vice versa. You know, they say the best things in life are free. And that's not really true. But I would say that a lot of things are much more expensive than they appear. Right. So we chase these things. We want these things. We want a fancy car. And then we're worried about making sure nothing happens to that fancy car. I remember a few years ago, I put new floors in my house. And on the one hand, I hated the old floors and it made the house look better and they were easier to walk on and improve my life.

7:33But then we had kids and now all of a sudden there's this part of me that worries about the floors all the time, right? I don't want them to get scratched. I don't want water to sit on them. And so this thing that cost me money, it was not cheap to put new floors in the house, didn't just cost what it cost. It cost all the anxiety. It cost the arguments between me and my wife about who's to blame for this scratch on the floor from the couch. You know, it cost goodwill between me and my kid because I'm like, hey, why did you spill, you know, that part of you that just blurts out, you know, trying to protect things?

8:09And the truth is, it really doesn't matter. I remember I was talking to a therapist about some version of this and she said, just write it off, like write it off in your head. You spent the money. It's gone. You can't try to keep it all together, right? You can't try to keep it pristine. It's like the people who buy a toy and then they want it in mint condition. I mean, this is not just a violation of the law of entropy. It's a violation of the law of happiness. You will not be happy if this is how you're spending all your time trying to keep everything in one place, trying to keep them together.

8:43It's an illusion. It will not last. You cannot do it. You have to be able to let go. So that's the old Zen saying that, you know, the cup is already broken. The cup is already broken. The Stoics knew that expensive things cost even more than their price tag. That's why there's the great story of Epictetus. He has this lamp. It's stolen. And the next day he says, I'm going to go get a cheaper lamp so I don't have to worry about it getting stolen ever again. And I don't have to be sad that it's missing ever again. So for the Stoics, remember, it's not just what actually is valuable and isn't. You know, a lot of times we ascribe value to things that are superficial and meaningless and pointless.

9:21But also it's realizing that you are spending even more money than you think on things and you're spending your happiness is really what you're spending on. So I want to leave you with that thought. It's not that you live in a pigsty, you don't care about anything. You should try to keep your things nice and not unnecessarily wear them down. But you also cannot resist entropy. You cannot resist time. You cannot resist wear and tear. And if you do so, it comes at the expense. The most important thing, which is time, and the other most important thing, which is your happiness, and the other most important thing, which is the relationships, the people in your life.

9:58So you only have so much time to think or worry or spend time on things. Are you going to spend it trying to preserve your floors? You're not going to live there forever. You're probably going to tear them out at some point anyway. No. Focus on what matters.

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