You Can Never Do This Twice | The Freedom Of Contempt

0:00My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner and honestly it's my favorite vehicle I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for. Off-road confidence, rugged durability, and the freedom to explore. Toyota has a long history with the outdoor community, and they're committed to helping more people get out there and experience what nature has to offer.

0:29From remote trails to scenic byways, Toyota Trucks empowers you to take the detour, roam freely, and discover places that still feel wild and untouched. And they're not just making great trucks, they're working to expand access to adventure so more people can connect with the outdoors and pass that passion on to the next generation. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. That's toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck. That's the sound of no crowds, no alerts, no distractions, and no telling what you'll find next.

1:15You know, like a detour. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota trucks.

1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

2:07You can never do this twice. The first time was revelatory. The first time you watched Mad Men or The Godfather or cracked open Marcus Aurelius' meditations or heard Tom Petty's Free Falling or listened to Fantane sing, I dreamed a dream from Les Mis or stood in front of a Carvaccio painting. It hit you with all the power that new and brilliant art has. It shook you. It opened up something in you. It taught you something. But in some way, the power of these moments is actually overrated, or at least overstated. It's powerful because it's new and immediate, or new to you. But what's actually more transformative is what happens when you return to those works of art, lingering, as Seneca said, on the words of the master thinkers.

2:54The Stoics were fond of Heraclitus' idea that we can never step in the same river twice, because the river is in a constant state of movement and change. Well, with art or literature or music or film, it's a little different. The work is the same. It's you who is different. This notion of re-watching is a misnomer because you're re-introspecting. Christelle Antonio Russell recently said in a New York Times article about the burst of popularity of certain TV shows many years after they came out. The generation who watched HBO's Girls in their 20s, for example, is now in their 30s, and they have a very different understanding of themselves as well as that time in their lives.

3:35We can never watch the same show twice. We can never listen to the same song twice. We can never get the same piece of advice twice, because our experiences, our tastes, our understanding of the world has changed. But those second and third and fourth encounters, those re-introspectings are actually where the real insights and breakthroughs can come from. That's when we really get it. That's when we might really come to get ourselves in the process. For instance, some of you might be on year four or five of the Daily Stoic, or in some cases, I guess six or seven. I'm on read, what, 150 of meditations?

4:15I don't even know. But every time I pick it up, I get something else out of it. And that's also the idea behind the new book, The Daily Dad, 366 Lessons on Parenting and Love and Raising Great Kids, which is meant to be read in a loop each day, bringing new insights from the same pages each year. You can grab it to pre-order. It's out beginning of May. You can get signed first editions from me, which I'm really excited about. They just arrived. And you can grab that at dailydadbook.com. The Daily Stoic, if you have put a number of readings on it and you want one that will hold up better over time, there's a special leather edition, which you can grab at store.dailystoic.com.

5:00I'll link to that in today's show notes also. Anyways, grab The Daily Dad, Keep reading and rereading and lingering on the master thinkers. It works if you work it.

5:35So you can organize your holiday shopping and make custom holiday decor and search for great holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers requesting custom things and plan the perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet. Luckily, you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster so you can get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours before the holidays at dell.com slash deals. Terms and conditions apply. See dell.com for details.

6:18The freedom of contempt. The language we use to describe things imputes value to those things. We often embellish our language with superlatives to help make our choices of what to buy, wear, eat, or drink seem. much better than they really are. As emperor, Marcus Aurelius could have the finest Falernian wine at his table at any meal, but he preferred to remind himself that this was only grape juice. As emperor, he was the only Roman allowed to wear a purple cloak, but he took pains to point out that this cloak was like any other, just dyed with shellfish blood so as to produce a purple hue. This week, try to practice cutting your own luxuries and the things you yearn for down to size with a little contempt.

7:05Describe them with the bluntest language you can and see how much their power over you diminishes. Just as when meat or other foods are set before us, we think this is a dead fish or a dead bird or a pig. Also, this fine wine is only the juice of a bunch of grapes. This purple-edged robe is just sheep's wool dyed in a bit of blood from a shellfish or of sex that is only the rubbing of private parts together followed by a spasmic discharge. In the same way, our impressions grab actual events and permeate them. So we see things as they really are. Marcus Aurelius' Meditation 613. Keep a list before your mind of all those who burn with anger and resentment about something or even the most renowned for success, misfortune, evil deeds, or any special distinction.

7:55Then ask yourself, how did it work out? Smoke and dust, the stuff of simple myth trying to be legend. That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 1227. You know what wine and liquor tastes like. It makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand bottles pass through your bladder. You are nothing more than a filter. This is from the Daily Stoic Journal. The week's entry is titled, The Freedom of Contempt. I don't know. this has long been one of my favorite exercises in all of stoicism. It's just brilliant. It's cynical. It's funny. It's really practical too. You know, Marcus really didn't have to live in a time of Madison Avenue advertising.

8:37He didn't live in a time of social media influencers. He didn't live in a time of propaganda and misinformation. There wasn't spinning and selling the way that there is now. And yet even then he had to practice, you know, just seeing through all the bullshit, seeing through to what things actually were, stripping them, as he says, of the legend that encrusts them. So when Epictetus talks about putting things to the test, this is what Marcus is doing. He says, I'm not going to get distracted by my urges, by my immediate positive reaction to this, to the way my mouth is watering when I see X or the way that my eyes get big when I see Y.

9:16He says, I'm going to really break down what I see here. I'm going going to describe it in the most unflinching, unvarnished, least sympathetic language possible. And I'm going to see what that reflection back to me does, how it changes my opinion of it. Sometimes there's that expression about seeing how the sausage gets made. When you go and see the sausage gets made or you see underneath things, they lose their power over you. And that's what this stoic practice is really about. And it's so important. It's not that you don't want, you'll never enjoy this or that ever again. It's just you want to enjoy it with the deceit turned down a little bit, the legend, a little more thread there.

10:04And this is an active practice we have to go through. So as you walk out in a parking lot and you see a Lexus, remind yourself, this is just a Toyota with fancier branding, right? When you see a$300 pair of Nikes, remind yourself of the sweatshop that this was likely made in. When you hear someone talking about how they are a billionaire, remind yourself just how dumb a lot of billionaires have turned out to be, right? When you're intimidated by someone's fancy degree, again, remind yourself who else has graduated from that institution. Think of the corruption. Think of the evil ideas that have come out of that institution over the years.

10:51Again, this isn't to dismiss or demean the things entirely. It's just to counteract that impulse of jealousy, of envy, of lust, of fear. You know, there's that expression about if you see a beautiful woman, there's that expression about if you see a beautiful woman, that somewhere someone is sick of that person's shit. And that's true for everything, every person. And it'll take it down a peg and then help you see it a tad more rationally.

11:41Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like the daily stoic going so if you want to support a show but not listen to ads well we have partnered with supercast to bring you a ad free version of daily stoic we're calling it daily stoic premium and with premium you can listen to every episode of the daily stoic podcast completely ad free no interruptions just the ideas just the messages just the conversations you came here for.

12:35And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.