Your Obligation Remains The Same | Why Did You Choose Stoicism?

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1:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:14Ryan Holiday: Today, as the dust settles on the U.S. election, you may find yourself glued to the TV screen or refreshing your social media feed. Even if you feel some relief, the truth is that none of us know how this will shake out. What does it all mean? You are not wrong to think about this, but you are mistaken if you think that what has happened or what will happen or who was elected changes anything. This is not to argue that elections don't matter. They absolutely do, as we have said many times. It's just that as a Stoic, nothing in an election changes what is asked or obligated of you. It doesn't matter if a tyrant or a philosopher king comes to power.

1:54Ryan Holiday: It doesn't matter if you yourself are the person who comes to power. You are still expected to be good. You are still expected to be a person of virtue. Whatever anyone does or says for my part, I am bound to the good, Mark Sreelius writes in meditations. In the same way, an emerald or gold or purple might always proclaim whatever anyone does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors. Whatever happens in life, in world events, in politics, our job is our job, our duty is our duty. How can anything stop you, Marcus asks elsewhere in meditations. How does this stop you from acting with courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom?

2:34Ryan Holiday: So it went for Helvidius, a senator who we profile on Lives of the Stoics, when the emperor Vespasian tried to stop him from criticizing him. It is in your power not to allow me to be a member of the Senate, Helvidius replied, but so long as I am, I must go in and I must say what I think right. But if you do, Vespasian replied, I shall put you to death. You will do your part, Helvidius said with immense courage, and I will do mine. Our job today is the same as it's always been, and this is true tomorrow too. Our job is to be good, to be wise, to stand up for what's right, to resist what is wrong and evil.

3:13Ryan Holiday: Nothing changes that. Nothing exempts us from that. Nothing prevents us from doing that. The consequences and the costs and the stakes can change, but the obligation remains. The duty remains. So do it. Like a stoic.

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5:50Basically, my question is around the why. As I was starting my Stoicism journey, I struggled a lot with the discipline. I liked the idea of it, but I didn't have this driving passion. And so that's when I looked into the why, the Simon Sinek talk about finding your why. Yeah. I was recently acquainted with a special force operator and they live life like it's their last because it could be. And it was quite a life-changing, refreshing thing. A lot of us spend hundreds of dollars to have the same perspective and like life that they live, you know, without the PTSD, obviously. So I, through lots of practice, kind of figured out what my why was, which was peace.

6:30I want peace. Yeah. I want peace. And I was curious to know if you actually have a why, why you started Storzes and what was your why in pursuing this philosophy? Yeah. I do agree having a why makes the discipline easier or clearer. And I think the more sort of bigger the why is, the less the why is about you, the more motivating it ultimately can be. My personal sort of study of Stoicism is, I think, very much connected with why a lot of people come to it, Wanting to sort of, you know, be at peace, as you said, be calm, not be sort of roiled by forces inside and out to be directed, to be productive, to be, you know, all the sort of kind of self-mastery elements of it.

7:19And I think it's had a huge benefit in my life in that way. Now, my sort of writing and speaking about stoicism, I feel like my why there is I'm paying forward this thing that was sort of gifted to me, that I was, you know, had a chance exposure to 20 years ago, that sort of opened my eyes, that lit me up to this stuff. I just was so excited and intrigued by it. And I do feel like one of the gifts of what I get to do is sort of to create that experience for other people. So that's like a big one for me is like, how am I paying forward this thing that I didn't invent, that, you know, was created thousands of years ago, but chanced into my life?

8:06And how do I pay that forward to other people? So that's sort of the why of Daily Stoic and the work that I do. Hey, Ryan, my name's Logan. It's great to finally meet you. I've been a longtime fan behind the screen for years now. But kind of piggybacking off of the insightful gentleman that just spoke was, I wondered if you had a specific moment in which you decided to dive into this, or was it more of this magnanimous desire to contribute to your peers and those around you? No, I mean, I read it as a 19-year-old, and it just kind of blew my mind. I was interested in it and I loved it and I was fascinated by it.

8:41And it set in motion, you know, this sort of process by which I was reading about it and talking to people about it. I had no idea it would go in the direction that it did. You know, things look clear and obvious in retrospect, but in the moment you're just sort of following your interests or following what excites you. I mean, it was many years between, you know, sort of my first exposure to the Stoics and the first book that I wrote about the Stoics, which I thought was probably going to be a one-off. This month is the 10-year anniversary of both the Daily Stoic book and Daily Stoic sort of website, the newsletter.

9:16When I started that newsletter, you know, I had no idea, you know, 10 years later, it would go out to a million people all over the world every day. I don't think I could have possibly anticipated it, but I think, you know, you're just sort of following what excites you and is interesting to you and challenging to you and, you know, sort of cumulatively over a long period of time that can turn into something really cool. Hi, Ryan. I wanted to ask whether there were any philosophers or philosophies outside of the Stoics, outside the classical world and outside of kind of the European tradition that you found particularly provocative or compelling.

9:51Okay, that's kind of two things there. I would say many outside the Stoics are interesting to me, including Epicureanism, which is much closer to Stoicism than people think. Obviously, Aristotle is interesting, and Plato is interesting, and Socrates is interesting. Diogenes is really interesting. I'm fascinated with all the sort of pre-Socratic and then post-Socratic philosophers. And I think the Stoics would urge us to read widely. One of the interesting things that Gregory Hayes points out in his intro to Meditations is that nowhere does Marx really say that he is a Stoic. He certainly studies and speaks a lot about philosophy, but would he have ascribed to a singular school?

10:33We don't know. Can't ask him. But we can take a page from Seneca who quotes Epicurus, probably more than any other philosopher. So in the Western tradition, we have read very widely and sort of talk about all of them in the books. Outside the Western tradition, I'm still exploring and reading. You know, obviously in my book about stillness, I drew a lot from the Eastern tradition, which I think has a bunch of interesting stuff there from Confucius to the Bhagavad Gita. What I love is when you find different philosophical schools sort of circling around the same ideas, even though they have no real connection.

11:20Like if they came to the same idea independently, That's really interesting to me and really of value. So I'm always trying to read and always taking recommendations and then trying to pay those forward when they when they excite me as well. Hello, Ryan. How would you go about approaching introducing stoicism to somebody who seems to cause themselves a lot of suffering without having any real sense of awareness around it? Or perhaps at moments of breakthrough, they revert back to a victim mindset that inhibits them from having the agency and hence less suffering? That's a good question. Well, I'm supposed to do a thing tomorrow where I have to explain stoicism to a group of five-year-olds.

12:00So I've been thinking about this. You know, to me, the core idea in stoicism is that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens, that things outside us are objective, but our opinions about them are not, right? Epictetus says, it's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things. And I think when you talk to someone who's sort of always either causing problems for themselves or always feels like they are dealing with problems, I think one of the things we can help them do is step back and get them to see not so much how much these problems are their own creation, like it's their own fault, but how much the problem is based on their perception of there being a problem, right?

12:47That person insulted me, you know, I've been humiliated, I'm ruined. And like, these are not objective facts. These are interpretations. These are stories we're telling ourselves about something that happened. And I think what the Stoics are trying to get us to see is that who's telling us that story? Sometimes it's society, sometimes it's other people, but a lot of times it's us. This is a totally self-contained thing here. And we have decided to see it this way, which means we also have the ability to see it this way. And if we see it this way, if we tell ourselves this story, does it change how we respond to it?

13:26It doesn't change the thing itself, but it chooses, it changes how we might respond to it. And to me, that is like the core function of Stoic philosophy. Thank you. I still have to figure out how I'm going to explain that to children, but hello. Hello, Ryan. Yeah, I've been following you for a while. Great fan. I want to change a little bit, talk about death, Memento Mori. Okay. You've interviewed a lot of people. you know, been working on this death thing as well. What tools would you find useful for someone who's lost someone close, son, daughter, brother, whatever? I think sometimes people hear the Stoics talking about memento mori, that life is short.

14:10You know, they hear the Stoics talking about mastering your emotions. So they take that to mean, well, a Stoic would just shrug off, you know, loss or pain or be unsympathetic to someone who is struggling with those things. And we know this is not the case for many reasons, but the most obvious is that Seneca writes three essays that are called his consolations series. One of the consolations is to his mother after she's been exiled. She's basically mourning, you know, potentially the permanent loss of her son. And then he writes two essays to grieving children. One as a spouse, one as a child, someone who just lost someone.

14:50And I think what's interesting about these essays is how patient and kind and understanding Seneca is. And he's sort of walking them through, just as I think Stoicism does best, of what the assumptions underlying so much of the pain or the emotion they're feeling. In this constellation, he's writing to a daughter who's mourning her father, you know, she's talking about how every time she thinks of her father, you know, she bursts into tears, she feels all this pain. And he says, you know, is that what your father would want? Like, obviously your father would want you to remember him, but would your father want his memory to be so painful to you that you break into tears every time you think about him?

15:32No, of course not. And so he's helping her sort of walk through how to think about this. He's He's not saying that we just sort of quench our emotions, that we feel nothing, that we turn it all off. He's just like, how do you kind of think through this? And I think that's what the Stoics help is. I've turned many people onto these essays over the years. I reread them myself whenever, you know, I have lost someone. I think to me what Stoicism is is not you feel nothing, but you try to go, hey, is me being debilitated by this thing? Is that who I want to be? Is that who they would want me to be?

16:08Is that making anything better? Is it making me feel any better? And I just find those essays to be, you know, some of the most beautiful things I've ever read in my life. They're very powerful. But certainly the Stoics would not, you know, just tell them to deal with it. And in fact, we have another story about Marcus Aurelius. We have a lot of stories about Marcus Aurelius crying. I think it's worth pointing out. The supposedly Stoic emperor was not emotionless by any means. And he's brought news that one of his teachers has died and he breaks into tears. And another, perhaps a Stoic in the emperor's court, you know, tries to sort of chide him for doing this.

16:49And Antoninus steps in and says, you know, let the boy be human for once. And so I think stoicism is about sort of processing the emotion, understanding the emotion, and then ideally moving forward as opposed to being, you know, paralyzed or overrun by the emotion to the, you know, sort of point of degrading your quality of life. That's kind of how I think about it.

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