You Must Go Toward The Oxygen | 10 Stoic Stories That Will Leave You Speechless

0:28Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? This message comes from Capital One. With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2 % cash back on every purchase and get big purchasing power so your business can spend more and earn more. Steven, Brandon, and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud, reinvested their 2 % cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus Terms Apply.

1:04Welcome 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.

1:30You must go towards the oxygen. The way ahead looks difficult. It is filled with obstacles and challenges. Yet we know we can't go backwards. We know we can't stay where we are. So what do we do? We go forward. In the famous passage in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks talks about how what's thrown on top of a fire is fuel for the fire. That's how we should be, he says, converting what comes to us into heat and flame. What's strange about that language, though, is that it's sort of passive. It's expecting life to simply provide us fuel, saying we just sit back and accept it. That's not really how fire, powerful fires anyway, work.

2:13There's another interesting passage in John Vallant's new book, Fire Weather, about the 2016 fire in Fort McMurray, Canada. A fire so intense it registered to climatologists on the scale of a nuclear explosion. The flames appeared as a wave bending over him, he writes of one man fleeing the fire. It wasn't an illusion. fires like flowers, like so many living things, lean towards energy, because that's where the unburnt oxygen is. So it's being pulled, drawn, if you will, forward by the oxygen. Putting aside the tragedy of that particular fire, it's important that we incorporate this imagery into Marcus's metaphor.

2:58When we say amor fati, when we say the obstacle is the way, we're not just talking about sitting there being provided with fuel. We're talking about surging forward, pulling ourselves towards the oxygen, going toward the fuel, towards the next thing, never stopping, using all of it. We seek out energy and we create energy in the process. We don't wait. We don't stop. We are not passive. We become unstoppable. That's my Amor Fati coin, which we've talked about before. But to me, that's what Amor Fati is. Yeah, it's not good or bad, but you can choose actually to see it as good. You can embrace it.

3:38You can be in it. You can make something of it. Not merely to bear it, as Nietzsche said, but to love it. And I love this little coin. I carry it with me everywhere. You can check that out at store.dailystoic.com.

4:01Nothing is more encouraging than seeing the virtues we admire embodied in the people around us. Mark Sturulus was always searching for and recording these examples of goodness, embodiments of this stoic virtue of justice. That's what I talk a lot about in the new book, Right Thing Right Now, which is about good character and good values, and most importantly, good deeds. I want to talk about the wonderful goodness of many of the Stoics and the people that I talk about in Right Thing right now, and people that I've talked to here on this podcast that embody those ideas also. So let's get into it.

4:39Nobody's born a saint. Even the people that we admire so much that we look up to, they weren't born that way. They became that way. And they're flawed and contained within them all the flaws that we contain within us. There's this story about Gandhi. he steals some money from his brother when he's a kid. And he's overwhelmed with guilt and shame, and he finally confesses to his father about it. His father was then sort of on his deathbed, and he writes this horrible letter where he's whipping himself and piling on himself about it, and his father sort of grabs the letter. He sits up in bed, and he reads it, and when he finishes, he just tears it apart.

5:16And this moment of forgiveness, of grace, it shapes Gandhi for the rest of his life. He would still be struggling with guilt and shame over other things that he'd done, but this moment of his father forgiving him, it shapes him. And I think he never forgets the humanness of both his father and himself in that moment. You know, he would say, I'm not a saint trying to be a politician. He said, I'm a politician trying to be a saint. The point is, it's about the striving to be better than we are that makes us great. When you see someone who's cool under pressure, when you see someone who's generous, when you see someone who forgives, when you see someone who doesn't have a big ego, don't tell yourself, oh, they're just naturally better than me.

5:55They were born that way. That's letting yourself off the hook. And it's also unfair to them because it's ignoring all the work that goes into it, how they're striving to be that way. If you take Marcus Aurelius as this perfectly formed philosopher, king, God among men you're missing that he was writing in meditations the purpose of him writing meditations was to be the person he was aspiring to be it was it was an act of he was challenging himself he was chiding himself he was working on himself and so we don't want to see these people as being born that way because they weren't they were working at it and there was people in their life whether it's Gandhi's father for Marcus it's Antoninus or his philosophy teacher Rusticus who shaped and inspired and helped him become who he was meant to be.

6:42And the same is true for us. There's an amazing story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller who wrote Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. They're at the party of this billionaire. Vonnegut is teasing Heller and he says, this billionaire whose house we're at, he made more money this week than your book will make it its entire life. And Heller says, but I have something that he doesn't have. Vonnegut says, what's that? And Heller says, I have some idea of what enough is. He says, I have enough. This idea of enough is so powerful. Seneca, who quotes Epicurus, says, if you don't regard what you have as enough, you will never be happy, even if you rule the entire world.

7:19Enough is never enough, the Epicureans and the Stoics say, for the person who enough is too little. And if you can get to a place of enough, what I have is good, everything else is extra, then everything you get is a bonus and the rest of your life is amazing. But if you tell yourself you'll only be happy if, if I'll feel better when, you'll never get there. The finish line will move, I promise you. Enough is enough. In the Roman tradition, it was much more common if you didn't have a son, you would adopt a son. The emperor Hadrian is old, probably gay, does not have any children. He sees something in Marcus.

7:57Marcus is young, but he sort of starts mentoring this boy. They actually go like hunting together Hadrian realizes he's too young to name him emperor. So he selects a man named Antoninus Pius, who's the great politician of the time, and makes him emperor on condition that he adopt Marcus Aurelius. The thinking was Antoninus Pius would live for like five years, and then Marcus would be king. He lives for like 19 years. So Marcus has like a 20-year apprenticeship in being the emperor under a man who could have killed him, who could have been corrupted by power, but is this incredible example. And that's why at the beginning of Meditations, Marcus has like a two-page thank you letter to Antoninus, his adopted stepfather.

8:46The talk I just gave at the Naval Academy, I ended with this story about Jimmy Carter. So Jimmy Carter goes to the Naval Academy in 46, he graduates in 46. and so he wants to be on nuclear submarines. So he ends up, at that time, all the candidates are interviewed by Admiral Hyman Rickover, who's sort of the head of this program. He does it for years and years and years. And so it's this interview process. It's the best of the best. You know, it's the most competitive slot. And so it's sort of, it's a long interview. They talk about books and they talk about physics. They talk about history. And then finally Rickover goes, you know, how did you do in your class at the Naval Academy?

9:25And Carter's like, you know, great. You know, I was like 32 out of, you know, 400, whatever. He's thinking about rank. And I started talking about his grades and how great he did. And Rickover just goes, but did you always do your best? And he's, of course, you know, your instinct is, yeah, of course. Right. And then he's like, thinks about it. And he's like, well, you know, he's thinking about all the times he didn't do his best. Right. Like all, you know, classes that he phoned in or, you know, He could have gone and done extra PT, doesn't. And he goes, you know what? No, I didn't always do my best.

9:58And then Rickover goes, why not? And then he just gets up and leaves. And that question sort of haunts Jimmy Carter for the rest of his life. Like his campaign biography when he runs for his first office is called Why Not the Best? Like, why didn't you do your best? And so, yeah, I think people who are really great, and people don't always think of him as a great president. He actually was a great president and was a much better ex-president. Like without question, the best person ever to have been president. Like, I mean, up until a couple of years ago, he was still building houses for Habitat for Humanity.

10:31He's cured all these diseases. He's brokered all these peace treaties and stuff. A great human being. But really great people are not actually thinking about, here's my list of accomplishments. They're like, I always did the best I could do in the situation that I was in. I didn't, I didn't quit, you know, three laps in. Like I went until I fucking fell over, you know, like that to me, it's like, did you do your best? Yes or no. Yeah. And I think, I think with that, at least for me, I don't know if there's ever truly a hundred percent because throughout that, if it's something hard, you're going to have the, you're going to have the false step here and there.

11:15And like the, you know, the debate in your head about quitting and whatever. And there might be a bit of wasted, I don't know if it's wasted time, but not productive time in that moment. But like, if you just keep, I think your best is dealing with that and seeing through that. Sure. You know, so it's not like you're a hundred percent optimal performance at all times or whatever. It's, but it's, it's just not, I mean, it really is just not quitting in a sense. But yeah, I mean, that's absolutely, I think that's in common with pretty much anybody that does anything at a high level. It must have been one of the greatest parties of all time.

11:57In San Francisco, all the beats were there. Kerouac and Ginsburg, I'm sure there was drugs. I'm sure there was music. It's like one of those legendary literary music scene moments that, you know, we think they don't make anymore. But at that party, there was a young poet. Her name was Diane DiPrima. And she's there. She's enjoying the scene. She's an aspiring writer. And she gets up to leave around like nine or ten o 'clock. And then Kerouac, who comes off as a real asshole in this story, he says, where are you going? And she says, I have to go relieve my babysitter. and Kerouac says, if you don't forget about that babysitter, you'll never make it as a writer.

12:38He was saying that she had to be selfish, she had to think about her career, she had to you know live the artist's life to make it and being a diligent mother or parent was a distraction from that. So I think it's to Prima's credit that she's able to look at this at that point, sort of literary god, and look at him and say, no, I'm gonna keep my word to the babysitter, that it actually takes the same discipline to keep her word to the babysitter that it does to keep her word to herself if she says i'm going to get up at this time and write if i'm going to do this many pages if i'm going to read this book i have to be able to be honest i i have to be able to keep my word to myself also so this idea of being a flake of just doing whatever was easy or whatever was the most fun she saw it as a violation not just of her role as an artist, but also a violation of her role as a parent and her moral code.

13:31And so we could think of this idea of keeping our word to ourself and to others as a matter of both discipline, which it is, but also a matter of justice. We see how these two stoic virtues intersect with each other. As a writer, if you tell yourself, this is what I'm going to do, you got to do it. As a parent, if you say, I'm going to be there at this time, this is what you got to do. If you tell someone that you'll support them. You'll be a part of something. You'll show up somewhere. Even if you'd rather not, even if it feels like a distraction, you got to do it. You got to keep your word to yourself and others.

14:02And that's what the virtue of justice is. Justice isn't just what happens in the law court. There's no law court that says, oh, you got to be home by a certain time. But justice, the stoic idea is about the words we keep to us, is about the promises we keep to ourselves. And they have to be sacrosanct. the assassination of julius caesar right we all we talk about is brutus who does it yeah but brutus's wife is named portia and she's cato's daughter the other famous guy and so she's the one that actually is like her husband is afraid he can do he can't do it i he's not sure but she's the one she's like you gotta do this right like and and but again we we celebrate the dude and not the other person behind the whole the story this is in shakespeare's play but it's also in blue dark but um he he's thinking about doing it but he doesn't want to tell his wife and and she finds out that he's thinking about it and and she realizes that he doesn't want to tell her because he's afraid she would break under torture right so so she stabs herself in the leg uh and then binds the wound and then uh just sort of endures it all and she's trying to prove to him that like Look, I can take pain better than you can.

15:22My all-time favorite Mark Aurelius story comes at the depths of the Antonine Plague. It's ravaged Rome. That's not even the only crisis that happens in his reign. There's a flood, there's a coup, there's an invasion. He's just besieged on all sides. And so Rome's treasury is depleted. Things look very bleak. It's not clear even that the empire can continue. And so what does Marcus Aurelius do? He leads a two-month sale of the palace furnishings. He sells his robes and his jewels. His wife sells their furniture. They sell down the palace furnishings to raise money. The idea being that the leader takes the hit first, that the leader eats last as the expression goes.

16:06Like, Marcus could have made this somebody else's problem. He could have denied that there was a problem. He could have kicked the can down the road. Instead, he stepped up and he did the hard thing. And he did the hard thing as a bit of demonstrative leadership. And to me, that's what I love about Stosis. It's an interior philosophy, but it's designed to shape your actions in the real world where the stakes are really high. Marcus Aurelius wasn't a philosopher. He was a leader who happened to be a philosopher. I have this story in the book that I'm writing now, The Justice One. Do you know the story of Bunkminster Fuller, the architect?

16:40So he's sort of failing as an architect. He's just been kicked out of Harvard. He's a drinking problem. He just buried one of his children. And he's staring out over Lake Michigan. And he's like, I'm just going to swim out there far enough until I drown. He's just going to kill himself. He's standing on the edge of it, just sort of contemplating what a loser he is, the mistakes that he's made, that it's sort of all over for him. And he hears his voice. And the voice basically says, how dare you? He's like, how dare you think this belongs to you? That's interesting. Not just because he had children, but he took the voice to me.

17:14It was like, you have potential. You have gifts. You have the potential to contribute to humanity. You have the obligation to - And you're fucking blowing it. Yeah, to contribute to humanity. And not just have you blown it up until this point, you're about to blow it all up, right? Like you're about to quit instead of realizing that potential. And that voice sort of brings him back from the edge. And he goes on to be this sort of fascinating, sort of influential character. And hopefully, you know, we'd say also sort of makes it right with his kids and his spouse and his family and is just also like a nice, decent human being.

17:48Maybe that's too much to ask. I don't know. But the idea is like it doesn't belong to you. I think anyone with gifts or potential or talent that comes with certain obligations.

18:01There's this amazing story about Ulysses S. Grant. You know, he goes to West Point as a young man. He's this promising young military officer. He serves honorably in the Mexican-American War. But then something goes wrong. Maybe it's the drink. Maybe he hates the army. But he basically ends up working for his dad, selling firewood by the side of the road. This is a big fall from West Point to selling firewood by the side of the road. And one of his old friends from West Point comes by one day, who's still in the army, well on his way, moving his way up through the ranks. And he's ashamed to see his friend doing this.

18:35And he says, good God, Grant, what are you doing? And Ulysses S. Grant just looks at him and he says, I'm solving the problem of poverty. Meaning that Grant doesn't care that he's doing a so-called menial job or that it's a humiliating occupation. All he cares about is that he's providing for his family, he's doing a good job, and he doesn't think that this says anything about him as a person. He knows that it doesn't say anything about him as a person. There's this great line from Marcus Aurelius, he says, to accept it without arrogance, to let it go. So it's crazy to think that just a few years later, Grant would be the head of an enormous army.

19:10And a few years after that, he'd be the president of the United States. But for the Stoic, there's this idea that comes from Mark Sturilus. He says to accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. Meaning you don't let the lowly position change who you are. And you don't let the high position change who you are either. None of it goes to your head. You know, none of it says anything about you as a person because you know who you are as a person. And that's what really matters.

19:36One of the best stories in all of Stoicism comes at the founding of Stoicism. Zeno, he's this successful merchant. He comes from a long family of merchants. And he suffers a shipwreck and he loses everything. He washes up in Athens. He has nothing. And there he discovers philosophy. That's how Stoicism starts. And so reflecting on this journey, this thing that he never would have wished happening, changing the entire course of his life and now history, we wouldn't be talking had he not gone through this. He says, I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck, meaning the worst thing that ever happened to him was actually the best thing that ever happened to him.

20:10And that's what a stoic says. We don't control what happens. Bad stuff is going to happen, but we control how we respond to it. We control what we turn it into. And whatever it is, whatever metaphorical shipwreck you're going through, you can make it a prosperous voyage if you think about it that way. I hope you like this video. I hope you subscribe. But what I really want you to subscribe to is our daily stoic email. one bit of stoic wisdom totally for free to the largest community of stoics ever in existence you can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email there's no spam you can unsubscribe at any time i love sending it i've sent it every day for the last six years and i hope to see you there 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.

20:59That'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 Super overcast to bring you a ad free version of Daily Stoic. We'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.

21:42And 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. Just 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.