You Don’t Get a Choice | Circumstances Have No care For Our Feelings

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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.

3:05You don't get a choice. After everything that's happened in the last few years, we're tired. After everything that's happened in your life, after everything that's gone wrong the last couple of weeks, you think to yourself, I can't handle one more thing going wrong. Certainly Marcus Aurelius would have related to that sentiment. Floods and plagues and wars, a troubled son, personal health issues. Haven't I given enough? We have Marcus Aurelius say in a recent Daily Stoic video. The thing is, life doesn't care, has no time for your questions. It pays no mind to your limits. I don't think I'm up for this, the novelist John Gregory Dunn said to his wife as they left the hospital after rushing to check on their daughter, who had just been admitted.

3:50He was down about his career. He wasn't feeling great about his own health. He was sick about his only child. He was worried it would be a long and hard road ahead for them. Joan Didion, his steely, stoic wife, responded with something we can imagine Marcus Aurelius reminding himself of in meditations. You don't get a choice, she says. Fortune behaves as she pleases, the Stoics said. Life disposes. It decides. The only thing we get a choice in is how we respond.

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5:39Circumstances have no care for our feelings. This is the February 23rd entry in the Daily Stoic. 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. This is the hardcover printed in. Let's see here. Printed in the United States of America. It says 13. So this is a pretty old one because we've been through many other printings. We've got the Leatherbound and the Daily Stoic store as well. Today's quote, I don't know how many weeks in a row this is Marcus Aurelius, but I love it because he's my man. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 738. You shouldn't give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don't care at all.

6:28Actually, I like the Hayes translation a lot too. I've got it from memory. It's seared in my mind from my first reading, I think. He says, and why should we feel anger at the world as if the world would notice? A significant chunk of Marks Riehlis' meditations is made up of short quotes and passages from other writers. This is because Marcus wasn't necessarily trying to produce an original work. Instead, he was practicing, reminding himself here and there of important lessons. And sometimes these lessons were things he had read. This particular quote is special because it comes from a play by Euripides, which, except for a handful of quoted fragments like this, is lost to us.

7:13From what we can gather about the play, the hero comes to doubt the existence of the gods. But in this line, he is saying, why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take these things personally? After all, external events are not sentient beings. They cannot respond to our shouts and cries, and neither can the mostly indifferent gods. That's what Marcus was reminding himself of here. Circumstances are incapable of considering or caring about your feelings, your anxiety, your excitement. They don't care about your reaction. They are not people. So stop acting like getting worked up is having an impact on a given situation because the situation doesn't care at all.

8:00A couple of things jump out to me here. Number one, it's worth noting just how cool that is. There's a line in meditations from a play that if Marcus Aurelius had not written down, had not been such a fan, had not jotted it down in his diary, we would not have it. It would be totally lost to us. It's interesting to think of Marcus as this literary conservator, this savior of ancient texts, but he is. We know about that line because he wrote it down because it jumped out to him. He liked it. Maybe he didn't get it perfect. We can't compare it against the original. That's pretty amazing, isn't it?

8:41And then something else I found out about this, I forget why it jumped out at me, but I thought, like who was Euripides to Marcus? Because I knew Euripides is a, it's a Greek playwright and Marcus is Roman.

9:00Greece was the powerhouse, then Rome supplants it. But I was like, how far, you know, kind of all blurs together, right? BC, AD, there's all the ancient world, how far from And it jumped out at me. So anyway, so I looked, you know, when does Euripides die? When does Marcus die? They're separated by centuries, not like one or two, but like five or six. And in fact, I remember looking it up. Euripides was further from Marcus Aurelius than Shakespeare is from us. So first off, just the credibleness of like how great work can last. So it seems weird that we're reading Marcus 2 ,000 years later, how we got so good at preserving things.

9:47But even in the ancient world, they had ancient texts and history. And they marveled at great lines and quotes and that they preserved them for centuries. That's just so freaking cool. So Marcus is thinking of Euripides the way that we think of Shakespeare today. Although you do get the sense that it didn't seem so ancient from them because life maybe hadn't changed as much. Right? Like Euripides and Marcus obviously lived in very different worlds and Euripides would have had his mind blown by Marcus's world. And Marcus would have thought he was living in the future, right? Which he was. But I do think there'd be more culture shock if you fast forward it to today or transported any of those two to today.

10:38I didn't actually see the whole movie, but the most recent Indiana Jones, you know, I think it's Archimedes sort of marveling at this airplane that Harrison Ford crashes and he somehow goes back in time. Literally, my only understanding of the movie is watching it on the screen next to me on an airplane. But that's what I understood was happening. Maybe I'm totally wrong. But anyways, the other big thing, the actual wisdom of the quote here is incredible. He's right. You know, the pandemic was awful and frustrating, but it didn't care about us. The virus was indifferent to us. It didn't give a shit about us.

11:13It didn't give a shit about our plans. It didn't give a shit about people we loved. Didn't give a shit about anything because it's not capable of doing that. And understanding that so much of the world is that way. I do love the idea Marx realized later in meditations talks about not treating inhumanity the way it treats human beings. So not letting the impersonal, awful, cruelty, overwhelmingness of the world make you into that kind of person. but it is understanding that being angry at objective events, being angry at the march of time, being angry at natural disasters, being angry at cancer, being angry at mortality, being angry at these things that are frustrating, tragic and painful and all these things.

12:00It doesn't change anything. And so why waste that extra energy? It's not making a difference. You can shout at the gods, but they will not be moved. And I think that's the lesson that Marcus is trying to pass on, or that Marcus noted from Euripides, preserved it all those centuries later. And then all these centuries later, still, here we are talking about it. That's the power of a great quote. That's the power of writing things down. It's beautiful. I'll talk to you soon.

12:49Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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