You Gotta Start Sometime | What Young Men Get Wrong About Stoicism

0:28Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? This message comes from Capital One. The Capital One VentureX Business Card has no preset spending limit, so the card's purchasing power can adapt to meet business needs. Plus, the card earns unlimited double miles on every purchase, so the more a business spends, the more miles earned. And when traveling, the VentureX Business Card grants access to over a thousand airport lounges. The VentureX Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureXBusiness.

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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

1:29You gotta start sometime. You could wait for the perfect moment. You could wait for things to get clear. You could wait, as we've all been saying for years now, for things to go back to normal. Or you could get started. You could stop being the fool, the one that Seneca talks about, the one who is always getting ready. You could start demanding, as Epictetus instructed, the best for yourself. You could stop lying. It's the biggest lie in the world, we said in a Daily Stoic video. Stop telling yourself I'll do it in the morning. Do it now. Get started. Begun is half done. Do it now. Tempest fugit memento mori.

2:07You can't know when you're going to get another chance. The time that passes the opportunities you pass on, they are as good as dead. You are a little bit more dead. So don't do it later. Do it now. Today.

2:29Look, there's a reason that stoicism is particularly attractive to young men. I totally get it because I was once one of those young men. And there's no one who will give them the guidance that they desperately need and crave. There's no one that says, hey, here's how you live a good and meaningful life, but also a challenging life. Here's how you do what you were put here to do. And by the way, you were put here to do something. You're not worthless. You're not a piece of shit. society is not discarding you. You have value. You can make a positive difference. And in fact, society needs you and it needs you to do those things.

3:09When I got Mark's Reelaces Meditations, when this book landed on the table of my college apartment, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I described it as a quake book, a book that shook everything that I thought I knew about the world. And here you have like this guy that I'd heard about in movies or in the History Channel, the most powerful man in the world was writing notes to himself about how to be a badass, how to be great. And that's what stoicism was for me and what it opened up in me. And I think what I got the most out of stoicism early was all the things that it could do for me, right? how to master my emotions, how to push myself physically, how to put up with people's obnoxiousness and hypocrisy and bullshit.

3:58And by the way, there was a lot of that in Marcus's time, but there's a ton of it in our time. I don't think it should surprise us then though, that grifters and demagogues would step in to fill this space. What you see people doing, whether it's Andrew Tate or whoever, is they pervert the ideas in Stoicism. They take some of these core ideas and they mix it with notions of masculinity, other cultural traditions. When you're speaking to people who feel misunderstood or even mistreated, it's easy to direct them towards a kind of a resentiment. It can even be channeled into what you might call kind of a a modern day know-nothingism or what you might call anti-wokeism that's like a reaction against extremes or misguided, even well-meaning cultural forces.

4:53What these young men and then the grifters who are taking advantage of them, what they're missing about stoicism is this place that society has always gotten stoicism wrong. There's a huge difference between lowercase stoicism and uppercase stoicism. Lowercase stoicism is all the stereotypes of stoicism. Has no emotion, invulnerable, repressed. That's not what stoicism is. The stoics weren't emotionless. There is a part of stoicism that's about being less emotional, particularly destructive emotions. So the stoics were not repressed, emotionless robots. And if you think that's what stoicism is going to help you do, you're doing it wrong.

5:34Like I think about someone like Andrew Tate, if he thinks stoicism is just a way to not have to feel human emotions about the women that he's exploiting, that he is taking advantage of, and I would say victimizing, like that's not what fucking stoicism is at all. And in fact, what I think one of the best quotes from Mark Sturowicz, he says, the point of life is good character and acts for the common good. So if you think of this sort of emotionless stoic is getting to a place where you can just do whatever you want and not have to care about the consequences of those actions on other people, again, you're getting it extremely wrong.

6:11When I think of stoicism as this self-help philosophy that seems to be about indifference to other people, or it seems to be a toolkit for being, you know, simply better at business negotiations or being a get rich quick scheme or Stoicism as a prosperity gospel or Stoicism as a way to turn away from what's happening in the world. And this is emphatically, the last part is emphatically what the Stoics were not doing. Seneca would say the difference between the Epicureans and the Stoics was the Epicureans retreated into the garden to pursue individual self-development and self-fulfillment. And he said they only got involved in politics and public life if they had to.

6:57And he said the Stoics, on the other hand, got involved in politics and public life unless something prevented them. So every once in a while, I'll say something political in one of these videos, or I'll talk about some social issue in our time. And people go, what do you think Seneca would think about you talking about politics on the Daily Stoic? And I go, he'd probably not be surprised given that his day job was as one of the most powerful politicians in Rome. One of the things I talk about in the afterward of right thing right now is that like, I get it. I get where this sort of initial infatuation, understanding this entry point to stoicism is, because I had the same way.

7:34I could not have written a book about the stoic virtue of justice early on in my pursuit and understanding of the philosophy. But the thing about stoicism is that as you study it, it is working on you. You can't escape the fact that Mark Stavridis talks about the common good like 80 times in meditations. He talks about doing the right thing. He talks about justice dozens of other times and all these really important ideas over and over and over again. For a guy that had unlimited power, he never lost his compassion and his empathy and his love for his fellow human beings. He saw himself as a true cosmopolitan, a person of the world, not just a member of a race and tribe, only caring about people who were related to him or looked like him or lived in his country.

8:24He tried to have this broader sense. In fact, that's what the Stoics said, that there were these circles, right? There's the circle of us and the circle of our family, the circle of people who live near us, people who live in the same country as us or the same city as us. And then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it ultimately includes all living things. The purpose of Stoic philosophy, the irrational purpose, was to pull these outer rings inward, to really care about other people and to try to make the world better for them, sometimes, especially even at the cost of one's own interest.

8:59This is the kind of Stoicism that we have to be focused on. Life is short. We have to be good and we should try to do good. We should love and be loved. We should do the right thing because it's the right thing. And we should resist that hardness of heart that can so easily come from a philosophy that is so focused on being in command of oneself and mastering one's emotions. Every day, totally free, we send out the daily Stoic email. It's the largest community of Stoics ever assembled in human history. And just one Stoic idea, one ancient lesson to chew on every single day. I'd love to have you join us.

9:35If you like our videos, I think you'll like the email. It's also a podcast version of it, too. You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email. Look, 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.

10:24We'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. And 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.

11:02Just 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.