You Can Wake The Dead | Don’t Be Mad At Good People

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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1:19Welcome 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 in 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.

2:00You can wake the dead. It's a magical thing, a superpower, if you think about it. No mortal can raise the dead. No one can bring back someone who's left this world, except, of course, the artist. Someone once pointed out to the filmmaker Ken Burns, who has a must-listen episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. Do check it out. I'll link to it in today's show notes. They pointed out that his job was mind-blowing. Look at what you do for a living, they said. You wake the dead. And if you've ever watched one of Ken Burns' documentaries, this makes perfect sense. Through the photos that he slowly pans across, through the diaries he has voice actors read, through the historians he interviews, Burns brings the Civil War back into the present moment.

2:45He puts us in the ring with Jack Johnson. He puts us with Da Vinci in Florence. He wakes them from the dead. And as it happened, Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, received a very similar prophecy as a young man. The secret to wisdom, the oracle told him, was to have conversations with the dead. It wasn't until years later that as Zeno listened to a bookseller read a dialogue from the long-dead Socrates that he realized that this is what books allow us to do. Indeed, this is what philosophy is, a conversation with Marcus Aurelius, a walk with Seneca, a chance to examine Cato in the flesh. Every time we open a book, watch a documentary, or listen to the words of someone long gone, we are waking the dead.

3:28We are bringing them back into the present, giving them voice, allowing their experiences and wisdom to shape our lives. And in so doing, we become part of something eternal, a chain of memory and meaning that stretches across time. Through this superpower, we ensure that the dead are never truly gone. and that their lessons continue on. 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.

4:11What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation, station 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. We 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.

4:54Toyota 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. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

5:32On Fridays, as you know, we bring you an excerpt from the Daily Stoic, a quote from the Stoics and we meditate on it. That's what the Daily Stoic is. It's one page a day. Well, I'm going to change plans a little bit because I have in my hands, you might hear this. That's not my old bones cracking. That is a fresh, right out of the box copy, the leather edition of the Daily Dad. It's got these gilded pages that have never been broken before. So it's like you're hearing them crack for the first time. It's awesome. I'm really proud of this thing. We've got a small run of them that we just did. If you haven't read The Daily Dad, it's stoic parenting lessons, one page a day, wisdom from the ancients, from great parents throughout history on what I think is our most important job.

6:18And so I thought I would read an entry from that today, like we've been doing every once in a while, because a lot of them are very stoic inspired. This does not correspond with today's date. This one is actually the April 11th entry, which is an important one to me. It's something I'm working on. And the quote is from Ambrose Bierce. Now you might think, what does he have to do with Stoicism? Well, would you believe that his father's name was Marcus Aurelius Bierce and that his uncle, his father's brother's name was Lucius Verus Bierce? So he's steeped in Stoicism from day one. He's associated more with, I guess, a modern tradition of cynicism, but I found him to be a Stoic guy.

6:56Don't be mad at good people, April 11th in the Daily Dad book. You can grab that at store.dailydad.com. Here's the quote, speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech that you will ever regret. And then here's the stoic inspired meditation. When you lose your temper, whom does it inevitably seem to be with? Your family. It's strange. We'll stomach some pretty rude behavior from strangers on the street, but God forbid your son leaves his shoes out. You're a professional while asking your assistant for the thousandth time to do something, but you're short with your spouse because they couldn't hear you over the noise in the other room.

7:31It feels like a paradox, but really this is a problem of proximity. Precisely because they're closest to you, you have more opportunities to get upset with them than anyone else. It's a sad, twisted state of affairs. The people who are bad but far away are rarely targets for our rage, but the people who are mostly good, who on the whole have helped and loved us many more times than they've hurt us, they're the ones who get the brunt of it. Let's not be angry at good people, Seneca writes in his essay on anger. Today, when you find yourself getting upset with someone you love, remind yourself that their positive traits far outweigh whatever is bothering you in the moment.

8:09Remind yourself that yelling doesn't make your kids hear you better. Remind yourself that they probably know that they messed up and probably feel bad enough already. Remind yourself how small they are. Remind yourself how good they are. The fact that we can get mad at someone because they love us enough to put up with it or because they're kids and they have to live with it and us, it's not an excuse. We should try not to get upset with anyone. But if we're going to get mad, let's make sure that our object of frustration is a target of offense, not of opportunity. I just think about, yeah, the shit I put up with from people I care so much less about than my kids, than my wife, and how upside down that is.

8:54That's what today's message is about. That's what Seneca was talking about. You know they're good. You know they mean well. You know they're trying. You know that you want your relationship with them to last. You know that that's the most important thing is how they feel about you and how they understand that you feel about them. And yet, you're going to make this thing more important. And that's a shame. It shouldn't be this way. We got to stop doing that. Again, this isn't to say you should flip it upside down, go get mad at everyone. It's just saying, hey, remember who you're talking to. Remember how important they are to you.

9:30Just because they will put up with it, just because they have to put up with it is not an excuse. And the Stoics clearly struggled with this. Mark Sturlus talks about being tolerant with others, even though he was strict with himself. He had to work a lot with his stepbrother. Again, think of it kind of as a challenge, right? He thanks the gods, right, for the fact that he had the kind of brother he did, whose character challenged me to improve my own, whose love and affection enriched my life, right? He rose to the challenge. His brother was very different. His brother had flaws. His brother caused problems.

10:08But Marcus there is talking about how he used that as a chance to manage his temper, to manage his emotions. And we've got to do that with our family, with our spouses, with our kids. Don't get mad at good people. Treat them well. Get that temper under check. Think about how you're talking to them. Think about your tone. Think about how often you're just saying the same crap over and over again and what kind of message that is sending. That's today's message. That's what The Daily Dad is full of, just like The Daily Stoic is. If you like the leather-bound edition of The Daily Stoic, this is made by the same bindery there in the UK.

10:44Really proud of it. Again, that sound, I just love it. I've got this brown one sitting on my desk. The Daily Dad, 366 meditations on parenting, love and raising great kids. If you want one that'll really stand the test of time, you can grab that at store.dailydad.com. I'll link to it in today's show notes, and I'll leave you to it.

11:08Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com slash email.

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