You Can Let This Make You Miserable, Or Come To Terms With It | Ask DS

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2:10Some 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. But thank you for listening. and we hope this is of use to you.

2:33You can let this make you miserable or you can come to terms with it. It doesn't matter how important you are. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how used to getting your own way you are or how much you have planned or prepared. A single driver can slow down lanes of traffic or lines of cars. A single bureaucrat can decide not to accept your paperwork, not to approve your application. One person with a grudge can tie you up in months or years of lawsuits. One lawyer can bleed you for more than you ever thought possible. One jerk can pass a virus to you and your family or worse.

3:08There's an old story about a powerful politician who asked for an extra pad of butter from their waiter at a banquet. Sorry, the waiter said, one pad per person. Indignant, the politician began to rant and rave, going on about how if only the waiter knew who he was dealing with. Well, do you know who I am, the waiter replied. No, the politician responded. I'm the guy with the butter, he said. Marcus Aurelius has a cryptic allusion to a customs officer, a tollbooth operator in meditations, suggesting that even he and his powerful entourage occasionally felt these very human choke points. They are timeless.

3:44They may not be distributed evenly or equally, but they are universal. No one avoids them all. No one can fight them all. We just have to learn how to accept that we are not in control, that we must from time to time or most of the time experience the consequences of other people's decisions, their whims, their vices, their mistakes, their egos. We can let this make us miserable or we can come to terms with it. We can rail against the world, be angry at the causes of all of this, or we could remember what Marcus said, that the world won't notice or care. And there is no reason to add frustration on top of frustration.

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5:56regards to really um the real like i see a theme running behind stoicism is objectivity versus subjectivity and particularly in terms of controlling what you can control and controlling your reactions and um the line that struck me from today's email is uh what you were saying about what somebody actually says versus what you hear, where the problem is, what's the actual problem there. So I'm just wondering what kind of strategies or tips do you have for situations like that? Yeah, I think we had an email a few years back that was about a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, where someone was asking about her secret to 50 years of marriage or whatever.

6:44And she said that her mother or mother-in-law had told her when she got married, she said, in a long marriage, it helps to be a little bit deaf. Meaning that what I take that to mean, and I think it pertains in the wider scope to stoicism, if you want to be happy, if you want to be undisturbed, part of this is about just ignoring some of the things that are happening around you. If you've got too fine of an antenna, you're going to pick up a lot of stuff that inevitably is going to upset you, make you angry. And I think, so for me, this is like sort of about my news, I would say this is your news diet.

7:31This is, you know, sort of who do you spend time with? Where do you live? You know, sort of shaping the worldview that you have to the degree that that is in your control goes a long way towards being conducive to happiness or serenity or peace. Perfect. That's a great answer. Is there any books you could recommend on that topic? I like the Cal Newport book, Digital Minimalism. I think that's great. Let me see about Information Diet. What would I like? I don't know. It's kind of one of those things where I'm not sure if there's like a book that teaches you how to do. Yeah, I don't I don't have I don't have a great recommendation, but let me think more about that.

8:20But I do like that mantra sort of garbage in garbage out, you know, sort of how you shape your world, what your influences are, what brings what you bring into your life. It determines how happy you're going to be. OK, great. Thank you so much. hello hi so exciting well i'm completely on stoic so thank you so much for everything of course a little bit related with the previous questions so i i lead a very big team and i also teach so i have tons of students and a lot of them are very fixed mindset right so i you know from the learnings of today it's like you know we can only we should only focus on what we can control.

9:02I completely understand the concept, but how can I help others to walk the path of stopping so fixed mindset when you want to explore creativity, right? And you need to, you know, to be in a more creative space. Yeah. So obviously the Carol Dreck book, Growth Mindset is fantastic. I think growth mindset is one, I think the concept itself is helpful, right? Just to understand that there's such a thing as a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. I think even that concept teaches you something. I love this idea of agency, right? How do you believe that you have agency or no? And that might be a weird concept coming from the Stoics because so much of what the Stoics talk about is sort of resigning.

9:48There's the idea of acquiescence or ascent, you know, sort of how do you ascent to the things that are outside your control? And so, yes, the Stoics did believe that there was some areas of life that were fixed, But I think they were very, very focused on where they did have agency and sort of using that agency to the best of their ability. And I feel like it's impossible to be a creative person or an artist or a creator of any kind if you don't have belief in agency. Because otherwise, one, what is the point? But two, how do you actually do the thing? It's all about taking the raw materials that exist around you or that you've been given and deciding to make use of them in some way that you have as constrained as you are, even if you were an artist in the Soviet Union, you know, believing that you have agency over these characters on the page and that you're going to you're going to make something of that.

10:48To me, I think one of the one of the alarming trends of today's world is, you know, as we focus on these things which do exist, you know, systemic injustices, you know, systemic problems, you know, history, the sort of intersecting forms of oppression or what have you. All this stuff exists, but it also runs right into the other trend of we've never had more agency or freedom than we do right now. And so are you focused on where you don't have agency or are you focused on where you do have agency? To me, that's the defining question, both of an individual's life, but also of a creator's life. Very cool.

11:37Thank you so much. Of course. um i decided to focus on the strategies for success and i stumbled on do your own thing because i was like i'm going like one i was thinking about so two ideas that stem my question for today it's for you and billy actually okay so i was reminded of seneca when uh when he got exiled but he got sent back yeah everybody thinks he's a hypocrite like what why did you teach Nero because he ended up killing him. Sure. To dive into context, I think why he did that because it started with his own conviction is because I believe his reference for God, why he got exiled back, not exiled back, but returned back is because God gave him that freedom.

12:27And so that was my first idea. And then the second idea was the Matthew McConaughey selfish, you're a selfish conviction, kind of like stems that, uh, that outer like consensus. So my question is based on your own experiences, what is your definition of success living by these stored virtues? Yeah, I did an article a few months back where I sort of said that my definition of success is autonomy. Like how much sort of control do I have over the direction of my own life? Um, And so Seneca and I might disagree there in that he seemed to sort of see success as sort of being at the center of things, right?

13:12I would argue that Seneca's best contributions came not working for Nero, but the writing that he did, you know, in the period of exile. But I also understand that different people have different callings, and it may well have been that he felt like, look, what I'd personally rather do is stay here and write and be a philosopher, but if I don't take this job, somebody else worse will do it. And I think that's sort of what kept Seneca going probably longer than he should have, some sense of almost sort of an obligation or that he was almost trapped by it. when I think about success, I think about, am I doing what I feel like I was meant to do, or am I doing it or doing things in a way that is because it's how everyone else is doing it, right?

14:06So to me, the idea of that autonomy is not just like, hey, am I in control of my schedule or not, but it's like how in control of my own destiny am I, right? So I want to be able to write, but I also want to be able to write the books that I want to write. So let's say I was selling five times as many books, but I had much less control over what was in those books because a publisher decided or because the market decided or the trends decided. I would view that as actually being less successful than I am now. So, but I do think, you know, whether it's Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, there is this sense, and maybe it's sort of a distinctly Roman idea, maybe it's actually very inspiring, that they were sort of taken in, their life was taken in a direction that perhaps they didn't want to go, but they felt obligated to go for the sake of the common good.

15:10Do you know what I mean? And that's why they call it public service, right? It's service. You're in service of something larger than oneself. And to a certain degree, Seneca did that. To another degree, when you really get into it, it looks like he was also sort of enriching himself. So it's hard to know why he was doing it. Yeah. But great question.

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