You Are The Solution To Your Problem | Our Duty To Learn

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2:28Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

3:09You are the solution to your problem. The girl couldn't have been much older than four or five, and it was one of those lazy, boring days, and she was bothering her mother. She wanted attention. She wanted to be entertained. But instead of giving her that, Joan Didion's mother gave her a gift that would last a lifetime and change the shape of modern literature. Handing the girl a blank notebook, her mother said that if she was bored, then she ought to go write a story which she could then read. I had just learned to read, Didion later explained, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something and then read it.

3:44We can imagine Epictetus having similar exchanges with the students that he taught. A philosopher must blow their own nose, he used to say. They must understand that they hold in their hands and their minds the solutions to almost all of their problems. No one but ourselves can truly alleviate our boredom or our anger. No one else can make us feel better. no one else is responsible for our time. And this is a lesson we need to learn when we're young, of course, but it's so easy to forget when we're older. We hold in our hands all the tools that we need to be happy, to be stimulated, to be productive, to have purpose.

4:19We just need to put them to use. We just need to blow our own nose.

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6:04Our duty to learn. This is today's entry, July 7th in the Daily Stoic. This is what you should teach me, how to be like Odysseus, Seneca writes in Moral Letters 88.7. How to love my country, wife and father, and how even after suffering a shipwreck, I might keep sailing on course to those honorable ends. And I write, many school teachers teach the Odyssey all wrong. They teach the dates. They debate whether Homer was really an author or not, whether he was blind. They explain the oral tradition. They tell students what a cyclops is or how the Trojan horse worked. Seneca's advice to someone studying the classics is to forget all that.

6:47The dates, the names, the places, they don't matter. What matters is the moral. If you get everything else wrong from the Odyssey, but you're left understanding the importance of perseverance, the dangers of hubris, the risks of temptation and distraction, well then, you really learned something. We're not trying to ace tests or impress teachers here. We are reading and studying to live, to be good human beings always and forever. Of course, there's an entertainment element to something like The Odyssey or really any great book. That's why it's survived for thousands of years as a text. There's literary value as well.

7:26You'd study it as a writer. And by the way, my favorite translation of The Odyssey is this one by Emily Wilson, who's also Seneca's biographer. if you haven't read The Greatest Empire by Emily Wilson you absolutely should and you should read her newer-ish translation of The Odyssey which I quite quite enjoyed and I actually carry both of them in the bookstore it struck me at one point like how crazy it is that like it was one of our best-selling titles for a while because I was recommending it really hard after I read it and it's like the best-selling book in this brand new bookstore is a book that's thousands of years old that's what great art can do, right?

8:06It's perennial. It stands the test of time. All of which is to say, I also love how perennial Seneca's example is, right? Like, I'm sure you remember the pedanticness and the boringness with which you dissected texts in English class or whatever in high school. It's like quizzes. What year did this happen? And what is the name of so-and-so's father in insert novel, right? They're trying to test whether you read it or not, as if just reading it is the accomplishment. No, you have to internalize the ideas, the lessons that the author was trying to teach. You have to understand it and translate it into insights as a human being, not recite trivia from it.

8:54and sadly that's what so much mediocre education focuses on they get us to memorize things i i think this is funny too this is like the knock on um on like kids who have been raised in this digital era about how they don't remember things they can just google it what matters is that they remember the gist of the insight not like the dates and places screw that right like does it actually matter to you in a tangible way whether napoleon was a real person or a literary character, right? No. The insights that you can learn from his life, the strategic lessons, of course, even if they were fictional, obviously the fact that they are real makes them more worthy of study.

9:34But my point is, you don't study Franco-Prussian battles unless you're a student, unless you're going to become a general or something. You study them to learn about hubris, to learn about celerity and hustle, to learn about creativity and courage, right? To also learn about overreach and stupidity and the power of alliances, right? We study history to learn those things. I don't think, like, again, you mispronounce Chrysippus or, you know, sometimes I'll refer to Epictetus as a Roman slave and someone will give me an angry email. Actually, he's Greek. It's like, okay, but he lived in Rome and was owned by a Roman.

10:22I think we're getting into a rather pointless conversation. What matters is what you learn from Epictetus and his example, right? I bet if you'd asked Stockdale, if you said, oh, you know, the Roman slave Epictetus, he wouldn't have been like, oh, I think he's Greek, right? No, what he took from Epictetus was the power of the courage and the fortitude and the strength and the lessons, and that's what he applied there in the Hanoi Hilton. That's why we're studying the Stokes, and that's how we learn. This is how I try to teach my kids. This is what I try to study. The trivia is not important, right?

10:57The trivia is not important. What matters is internalizing the moral lessons. Epicurus would say that vain is the word of the philosophers, does not heal the suffering of man. I would say vain are most facts that you're not going to apply and use, not even in your work, but to be a better human being. That's the purpose of this study. That's the purpose of this philosophy. That's what I try to talk about here on this podcast. And it's a wonderful reminder, again, from a really smart person. Seneca was brilliant. He knew lots of facts. He knew all those things about the Odyssey. But what he really wanted to learn how to do, what the study of his life was, is how to be like Odysseus.

11:37Although I think when you read Emily Wilson's translations, you're also reminded how not to be like Odysseus, because I saw in her translation that he was much more of a flawed character than perhaps I'd felt early on in my readings of that wonderful play, or that wonderful poem slash play. And again, is it a play? Is it a poem? Who gives a shit? What matters is what you do with it. And I do urge you to read it and read it for the right reasons and read all the things that you read for the right reasons just to become a better human being in the world.

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