You Can’t Get Your Dawns Back | Ask DS

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1:03Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some 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. Thank you for listening, and we hope this is of use to you.

1:44You can't get your dawns back. It feels like you have time. You're young. You're healthy. The future is bright, but it will not always feel this way, because those things will not always be true. Seneca knew this. That's why he wrote his famous essay on the shortness of life. We have our favorite edition of that here in the Painted Porch. I'll link to that. This is why he had admonished his friend Lucilius to be intentional, to protect his time, and to keep death always in mind. It's not that life is short, he writes. It's that we waste a lot of it. We watch our money, we protect our property, yet we fritter away the most valuable of our resources, the most finite of them, the one thing we can never get back that they aren't making any more of.

2:22The time that passes, Seneca writes, belongs to death. It's gone forever, never to return. Once a dawn happens, it is gone to you forever. Once a day ends, it's done for you for all time. Act accordingly. Protect your calendar accordingly. Say no accordingly. Do it now, before it's too late. You might have seen me when I do my talks or a lot of times when I'm filming, I have this ring on my finger. Sometimes it's on the left, sometimes it's on the right. I might fiddle with it. But it's the Memento Mori ring. We have this awesome jeweler in Brooklyn who makes them all by hand. And it's got the same thing that's on the Memento Mori coin, if that's more your style, or the necklace.

3:05It's the hourglass, the skull, and the flower, life, death, time. And on the back, it says, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. That's the power of this line from the Stoics, from Mark Sturilius, that life is very short. Don't waste it. Be here now. Take advantage of it. Don't act as if you'll live forever, because you won't. You can't get your dawns back. It doesn't work that way. Anyways, you can grab all those at stuart.dailystoic.com. I'll link to those in today's show notes. And I hope this message stays with you today.

3:50Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm always really excited when I get to go to a place I've never been before. So I've been to Sydney, I guess, three times, but I'd never been anywhere else in Australia. So when the dates came up and I got to go to Melbourne to do a talk, I was really, really excited. And I sold out Melbourne Town Hall, which was an incredible experience. Today's episode, I'm going to bring you some of those questions that they got to ask me. It was a really awesome and cool experience. And I'm going to be in London, Dublin, Toronto, Vancouver, and Rotterdam in November.

4:30So if you want to come and ask me a question, you can do that. Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour. But in the meantime, here are some folks in Melbourne asking and answering your Stoic questions. G'day, thank you so much. Yes. Love that Stoic era tour. Love some of your other books as well. Perennial Seller, Conspiracy, Trust Me, I'm Lying. When's your next non-Stoic book coming out? I got to finish this series first. I don't know what I'm going to do next. I have some idea. I always try to have the next one lined up. So having these four in a row has kept me pretty busy. But I'm going to do some more non-stoic stuff in the future for sure.

5:15Hey, Ren, thank you so much for your talk today. Of course. Stoicism is, I believe it is like, it is as much as domesticating your emotions as well as freeing your own biases against any kind of decisions that you have to make. Yes. So how has stoicism helped you free your own biases? And like, how would you recommend us like kind of look at it to kind of free our own biases when judging some things? Yes, that's a great question. Yeah. To me, stoicism is about seeing things stripped of our judgments, of our assumptions, of our predilections, our prejudices, all these things. trying to see them from different perspectives, from different angles, including yourself.

6:05I mean, to me, one of the benefits of journaling is that you get a time capsule or a time-step version of yourself. So you can see what you thought in this moment, what you were worried about. One of the journals that I love, I have this journal, it's called a one-line-a-day journal. And it's five lines. And every day for five years, you write what you're thinking about or what you're working on or what you're dealing with in that moment. So the first year is cool, the second year is kind of cool, but by three and four and five, you can see the patterns or the things that keep happening over and over again.

6:40And I often find, you know, I'm over committed or I'm worried about this or I'm anxious about this, but with the perspective of a year's distance or two years distance, how silly and small some of these things seem. So that's a big one for me. How often have I lost my temper, gotten anxious, been concerned about something, and then how did that age over time and usually not well? And I try to take that wisdom or that perspective and give myself the benefit of it or the color of it in the present moment. And the better I'm able to do that, the better the decisions I make and the better my just overall happiness.

7:21Welcome to Melbourne, Ryan. Two-fold question. How's Robert Greene going after his recent health issues and also I love the way you apply stoic principles to popular culture and modern life. I wonder if you could make a comment on Ted Lasso as a stoicist. Sure. Robert is doing good. Better. We did a couple sort of live conversations last year that was really fun to do. But I think it's been really hard. It was fascinating and inspiring to watch someone who sort of talked about resiliency and grit and pushing through things, as he has always done to me, go through something so challenging, a stroke, having to sort of rebuild his life and figure out how to do stuff again, to watch him have to actually apply that and to not give up, to not despair, to not be broken by it.

8:17it's been sort of profoundly moving and inspiring to me. I know he's having a hard time with all of it, but he's just chugging away on this book. Also, I so admire about Robert. Like, I work on books for a year or two years, and Robert is, I think, like, seven years in on this book that he's doing, and he's working on it every day. It's not like he's procrastinating, but he just does these amazing, wonderful things. So I think he's doing better, and I'll tell him you inquired. I thought Ted Lasso was a wonderful show. I think that's a form of stoicism, too. I think, again, we see stoicism as this kind of harsh philosophy, this sort of, you know, grit your teeth and bear it, stuff it down.

9:02But what I loved about the show and what I think is great about it is there's a kind of emotional vulnerability and empathy and softness to it, but still built around the idea of persevering and growing and doing what you're, you know, put here to do. So I do think rounding out the philosophy, sort of showing it as something other than, you know, just enduring the awfulness of life is an important sort of perspective we have to have on the philosophy. Hi. Hi. So I read your book, like, Obstacles Away about eight years ago and it changed my life. Very young, impressionable age. my first introduction to stoicism, and I love the idea of teaching this to my son.

9:50So one parent to another, do you have any sort of wisdom or insight on passing this on to our next generation? Yeah, my kids do not like hearing about stoicism from me, as you can imagine. The other day, my son said to me, he said, Dad, what do you think the worst book in our bookstore is, other than yours.

10:17He's a bully, actually. No, I worked on a book with him, actually, called The Boy Who Would Be King. That's sort of a fable about the life of Marcus Aurelius. And I think telling it in the form of a story and these sort of little exchanges has been great because I can, as we experience things, I can call back to this sort of character he's familiar with. So I do think stories are a way that we sort of teach these lessons, which is, by the way, how they were taught in the ancient world. I mean, one of the cute things in meditation is Mark Sturilius is quoting like Aesop's fables that he obviously remembers from his own childhood.

11:01And the timelessness of those wisdom or those ideas. My son is actually obsessed right now with this podcast called Greek-ing out, and it's all about the Greek myths, which we've been listening to. So I try to find indirect ways to deliver the ideas. And then, of course, the most important thing is, like, actually modelling them, which I am not as good at, but I am trying. Welcome to Melbourne, first of all. Ah! I was just wondering what advice you'd have for a younger person that, you know, loves their friends and family but perhaps finds it difficult at times to fit in and sort of things like that because of different beliefs and goals I guess you could say as well.

11:51There's a passage in Epictetus about precisely this. He's talking about a difficult sibling and he says every situation has two handles. You can choose the one of sort of arguing and fighting or you can remember that you love them, you care about them, that you had all these shared experiences, you know, all these. And he says, you got to choose which handle you're going to grab each situation by. And I do think it's important that we see the Stoics as human beings. Cato was seen as probably the most heroic and superhuman of the Stoics, but he has a brother who's very not stoic. And we're told that he sort of looked the other way, that he just loved him as who he was.

12:44And he tried to make, tried to see the good in him. He tried to appreciate him. There's actually, I'll give you another one. There's Mark Cerritos talking about this in the beginning of Meditations Again. He has a brother, but it's kind of an odd arrangement. So before Hadrian chooses this succession plan, he had attempted to adopt another person who died. And that man had a son. And so this kind of spare heir is around. And Marcus has a choice when he becomes emperor. What do you do with this extra emperor? And Marcus makes the extraordinary decision to appoint this person who he is not legally or genetically related to, he anoints him his co-emperor.

13:41And he says in meditations in book one, he basically says of his stepbrother, maybe it's not in here later, he basically says what he loved about his stepbrother who was very different than him and not everyone appreciated. He says he loved the way that his character challenged Marcus Aurelius to improve his own. And sometimes family can do this, right? They can show us what we don't want to be. They can show us the flaws or the predilections that we share. And they can show us the costs or the dangers of indulging those very things. So the point is, I agree, family can be difficult and frustrating.

14:25They are also the only family we've got. and we can be made better by how we decide to treat and respond to them.

14:41Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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