You Don’t Have To Do This To Yourself | Looking Out For Each Other

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

0:56You don't have to do this to yourself. There is so much to worry about. There is so much to be stressed about. There is so much to consider. So much you have to figure out. Or so you think. But do you, actually? Like, do you have to be anxious and alarmed and miserable and hopeless? Or is that a choice? We've touched on this in a few Daily Stoic emails and episodes over the years. First, that often our worries, that part of us that catastrophizes, is a bad use of our creativity. As Marcus Aurelius reminds himself, we don't have to imagine everything that could or might happen torturing ourselves with terrifying potential outcomes.

1:39Our anxiety medallion is actually a great tool for this. That's why I carry it with me. And second, although the Stoics did believe in the idea that we needed to look inward, they didn't say anything about that interior life being tumultuous and turbulent. Too many of us, as we've said recently, live in our heads and as a result live in a bad neighborhood. We can be present. We can be happy. We can be confident. We can be positive. We can do this even though the world feels and indeed looks like it is falling apart. What we have in front of us is enough to focus on. We don't need to extrapolate.

2:15We can cross the next bridge when we come to it. We don't need to beat ourselves up. Fortune will take care of that for us. For now, let's just be here. Let's do what we can. Let's stay good and stay hopeful. Let's not be sucked in or corrupted by the cruelty and darkness around us. Let's focus on the things within our control, make a difference where we can. Let's do the right thing right now and let that be enough.

2:53Thanks 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. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation 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.

3:38We 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. Toyota 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.

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5:58Looking out for each other. This is the October 6th entry in the Daily Stoic. It is in keeping with nature to show our friends affection and to celebrate their advancement as if it was our own. For if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us. Seneca's Moral Letters 109. Watching other people succeed is one of the toughest things to do, especially when we are not doing well ourselves. In our hunter-gatherer minds, we suspect that life is a zero-sum game, that for someone to have more means that we might end up with less. But like all parts of philosophy, empathy, and selflessness are a matter of practice.

6:42As Seneca observed, it's possible to learn to rejoice in all their successes and be moved by their very failure. This is what a virtuous person does. They teach themselves to actively cheer for other people, even in cases where it might have come at their own expense to put aside jealousy and possessiveness. You can do that too. I was actually just talking to someone I work with. We were talking about the sort of pettiness of writers groups. And I said, they're all kind of frenemies, right? They see it as a zero-sum game. And I said, there's a joke I heard about academia that the reason the knives are so sharp is because the pie is so small.

7:23If you think of the pie as finite, if you think about life as zero-sum, it inherently makes everyone your enemy, right? It means you're having to get what's yours, which means you're having to get it from them or get it before them, as opposed to seeing it how it actually is, how the Stoics want us to see it, which is a collective, a whole, an infinite game. I've had to do work, especially as a competitive person, to understand that the success of another writer has nothing to do with me. It doesn't come at my expense. It helps me. More people reading is good, right? More people talking about Stoicism is good.

8:03I'm sure there are people that see the success of my books as being somehow limiting to them or unfair or undeserved. Meanwhile, they're benefiting from the rising tide that's lifting all the boats, right? You got to think about how you look at it, but you have to practice this. Robert Greene, in his book, The Laws of Human Nature, he talks about the difference between schadenfreude, like wishing bad things on other people, and mittenfreude. I'm probably pronouncing this horribly wrong. This is also a day we broke out in the daily laws, which I was lucky enough to work on. If you haven't read, you should.

8:41We carry it in the painted porch. Anyways, there's another awesome daily book out there. I remember Robert going, is that going to be a problem with your book? And I was like, no, this is amazing. More people reading something every day is good for the world and probably good for the category too. Anyways, there's also a section of this in the Daily Laws. But Mittenfroid is the active wishing of success or goodwill towards people. I heard love once defined as willing the good of the other, like wanting good for the other, wishing them happiness, wishing them success. as an author wishing you the biggest first week sales you could possibly have.

9:20I want that for you. It doesn't come at my expense. And even if it did, who am I to root against you? I'm going to do my best. I'm going to put out my best work. I'm going to go into this already knowing that I'm playing with house money, that I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and expectations, that I've written something I'm proud of, that I think deserves to be read, that I have faith in the long term will do what it needs to do. So there's no pettiness in me. There's no need for you to do poorly. I just wish everyone success. Are there moments where I get caught with a pang of jealousy where I might say something that, you know, if I played it back to myself later, I'd be like, that's not a good look?

10:04Of course, this is something you have to work on. It's like ego. In fact, it's rooted in ego. So it's something you have to constantly sweep away and push away. But it gets you to a place where you are happier and you are better. It's not just by wishing other people good. You're making them happy. Theodore Roosevelt is right. Comparison is the thief of joy. Joseph Epstein is right when he said that of all the deadly sins, envy is the only one that's no fun. Living that way sucks. It punishes you most of all. Meanwhile, not being petty, not wanting to hold other people back, being happy, generally celebrating all the things that are good things that are happening to other people and not seeing them as somehow bad for you.

10:48Well, this is a much happier and much more wonderful way to live. And I wish that for you.

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