How To Actually Be Happier In 2024 (According to the Stoics)

Mark celus says that ambition is tying your well-being to what other people say and do but he says sanity is tying it to your own action try to want everything to happen the way that it will happen very little is needed for the happy life it's all within yourself there's this image that the Stokes were unfeeling and unfun that they sort of shove everything down that they're joyless which which couldn't be further from the truth when people think of sto ISM I think the last thing they think is happiness I think to the stoics happiness was also the removal of destructive emotions things like Envy or fear or avarice or aggression or ambition I'm Ryan Holliday I've not only written now 10 books about sto philosophy but I'm a real human being for whom happiness is important Aristotle talks about happiness as udim or human flourishing and I think that's the place that stoicism is trying to get you and so in today's episode we're going to talk about some stoic strategies for happiness doesn't mean exude exuberant excitement and pleasure that's not what the stoic thought of Happiness as we're going to talk about strategies for stoic happiness what that looked like for stoics what is the number one source of our unhappiness it's focusing on things that we don't control it's we're worried about this we're anxious about that we're hoping that this will happen or that that won't happen we basically take our chance at happiness and we hand it over to random events and this is where the key essentially the premise of stoicism comes in epicus says the chief task in life is to separate things into two buckets what's in my control and what's not in my control and he says the only way to happiness is to cease worrying about things which are beyond my power of control so when you narrow your focus from the things that everyone thinks about from the things that everyone worries about from all the things that are outside your grasp and you decide to focus instead on what's up to me you you have a a much better chance of being happy Vol said the most important choice you make each day is to be in a good mood your mood is something you control if you decide hey I'm going to be in a good mood today you have a much better chance being happy than the person who wakes up and says well I hope everything goes right today and if I get everything that I want and if nothing bad happens and if everyone's nice to me then I can be happy then I can have fun that is not a recipe for day-to-day Dependable happiness but look for the stoics ultimately what's in our control is our thoughts and our actions everything else is up to someone else Marcus a says you have power over your mind not events he says realize this and you will find strength but I would say realize this and also you will find happiness not just resilience not just the ability to muddle through but to say again I control my mood I control what I'm going to do about this I control this little window of stuff today and I'm just going to crush it there that's where I'm going to focus and because I'm focused there I know I can make myself [Music] happy and what I think is one of the best passages in all of meditations but certainly the most illustrative Marcus really says the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good and I think if we were shortening that to a mantra we'd say good character acts for the common good or good character Good Deeds meaning that you work on yourself of course that's a huge part of stoicism but it's also about what you do for others whether you're being a positive Difference Maker in the world Mark cus refers to the common good something like 80 times in meditations and so it's really important that we don't see stoicism as this simply this interior philosophy it's about perfecting the self or working on the self so one can make a bigger difference in the world that's the motto that I think you want to try to live by every single day you want to say to yourself in every situation what am I doing for [Music] others if you want more Tranquility more happiness marcusa says you have to do less you have to say no more when you eliminate the inessential the sto say you get this double benefit doing the essential things better that word less that's been my word of the year for my wife and I less stuff less commitments less travel less drama less wasted time our goal is to eliminate the inessential things so we can do the essential things better and so should [Music] you people think money will make them happy which of course it doesn't although up to a point money can contribute to your happiness but generally people think if I'm wealthier I will be happier well I'll tell you how you can become wealthier right now it's by wanting less stuff by needing less senica says poverty is not being poor poverty is wanting more now he's not being flip he's not trying to say that some struggling mother on on welfare does not have it hard what he's saying is that there are rich people who are very poor and they're poor because they're comp comparing themselves to other people he says they're poor because they're greedy because they're insatiable because they think when they get a million more dollars or a billion more dollars or maybe has nothing to do with money maybe it's when they win another Super Bowl when they get this other thing then they will be happy right so they Again by focusing on something they don't control by something that's in the future they they've deprived themselves of Happiness right now so your wants and your happiness are in attention with each other so if you can decide to be grateful and satisfied and good with what you have now you have a certain amount of wealth and you have something to be happy for mark C says look we we want all this other stuff but we forget that if we lost what we had right now we'd be sad also if we didn't have it but someone gave it to us we'd be grateful right so I think wanting less and being grateful for what you have is a great way to produce happiness now epic says wealth is not having many possessions it's having few want and again what do you control right you control the want part of things more than you control how much you have you can't base your happiness on external approval because the STS would say it is firmly outside our dichotomy of control it's not up to us Mark CIA says that ambition is tying your well-being to what other people say and do meaning you don't control it meaning they can take it away from you they can reject you they can deprive you of it but he says sanity is tying it to your own action you have to have the internal compass that says to yourself I'm doing good work what I'm doing matters this is the right thing this is Success you have to Define that for yourself you can't let other people do it cuz then you've handed over your happiness your wealth everything to somebody else the central idea of stoicism is that adversity is unavoidable it is a fact of life the future is uncertain actually the future is certain things are going to go wrong things are going to be different difficult you're going to face challenges that's what the stoics knew firsthand that was the central fact of existence to them there's nothing we could do to make it go away they said but we could prepare ourselves we could strengthen ourselves we could be ready for that to happen epic said the whole point of philosophy is to get to a place where whatever happens you're able to say this is what I train for so the Stokes were always challenging themselves mentally physically spiritually they were seeking out difficult experiences trying to to to get out of their comfort zone to prepare for what could happen there was a stoic his name was cipus and he's supposedly one of the only people to ever die of laughter do you believe that's possible I think cipus had a heart attack or was doing whatever synthetic drug was around then and had a good old laugh that that tipped it off you've never laughed so hard you thought you could die no the joke is like the joke partly survives to us so apparently he was like sitting on his front porch and a donkey walks up and he starts eating out of the garden and the person you know rushes up to get their donkey and he says um does your donkey want some wine to wash down those figs and then he starts laughing at his own joke and he laughs so hard that he kills over and dies so it's kind of the ultimate like you had to be there cuz it makes no sense okay cryus I know what happened okay cuz that joke is bad yes that's a that's not he died of embarrassment that's not a joke is what that is first of all let me tell you what's happening in CIP is Life okay everything is okay everything is so but this is actually my favorite emotion though okay everything in his life has just exploded and then crumbled to Rubble MH and it it was that moment you know when everything seems like it it's just the worst and and you have that realization that I'm just going to sit here and and just there there's nothing to be done anymore it's all rubble and you're sitting in in just the grief of it all and then something silly happens and you know like TI it's like when you laugh after crying a ton or or or you know you're sitting in your house it's been destroyed by a tornado and something silly happens and everyone laughs when you're laughing in the in the hospital room after somebody's just died or like all this terrible stuff has happened and then one more terrible thing happens and you just start laughing man at the absurdity of it exactly what happened to him and it was just the dumbest thing somebody maybe right before that had had choked on some one of somebody he love choked on wine and died and he goes you want some wine with that fig and died from from all the major emotions hitting him at once I think that's what happened cuz that's a really bad the straw that breaks the camel's back yes okay yes all right that's an interesting Theory I hadn't I hadn't thought of that theory but it is my favorite emotion is laughter in the the midst of Despair and actually there's a thing from Seno where he's talking about like life is ter he basically says life is terrible you can cry about it or you can laugh at it like take your pick yeah it is pretty beautiful and cruel all the time don't try to get everything to happen the way you want it to happen the Stokes would say try to want everything to happen the way that it will happen epic TI who said this what he meant is that stronger your expectations your desires things to be a certain way the more likely you are to be disappointed this actually intersects with Eastern philosophy and Buddhist talk about willful will when you have expectations when you have demands when you have needs you're likely to be disappointed if you can live in accordance with nature The Stokes would say if you can accept things as they are if you can make yourself in sync with the logos you're much more likely to be happy and you're much less likely to be disappointed talking about wanting less the other path to happiness related to this is the idea of simplification Marcus real says ask yourself is this essential because most of what we want and do and say and and get tied up in is not essential we Chase things we don't want we Chase things we don't actually care about we we make life so much more complicated than it needs to be when the stoics talk about living in accordance with nature I think part of what they're saying it's it's not like literal nature but it it is commenting on how unnatural and complicated and busy and frenetic most of our lives are and when you simplify when you remove stuff you get closer to kind of who you're meant to be and how you're meant to be I think the pandemic was so powerful in this Regard in in March of 2020 when life shut down and suddenly we weren't traveling we weren't going to meetings we weren't as busy as we have been our whole lives we looked around I mean my wife and I looked around our farm and we're like I don't think we've ever been here at this time of year and truly notice how wonderful it was so we found these wild blackberry bushes in our backyard we watched more sunsets in a row than we'd ever seen I I found out at one point that I'd spent 500 consecutive nights in a row with my children and I could not have comprehended just how profoundly significant that was that simplification that presence that routine was to my happiness so by simplifying by removing all the extraneous the inessential things I was reminded of the power and the importance of the essential things if you want more happiness in your life start by removing complexity particularly unnecessary complexity very little is needed for the happy life Marcus aurelus says it's all within yourself nobody is more unhappy than the person who's never gone through adversity sakica says he says because they've never been permitted to prove themselves that's something I try to remind myself when stuff gets hard when I run into a bunch of obstacles in a row when it doesn't turn out the way that I want it to go I'm going hey this is an opportunity this is a chance for me to practice the virtues that's what the stoic say the obstacles the way it's a chance to practice virtue to practice Excellence but more importantly it's a chance for me to prove myself if only to myself yes of course I would have liked it to go the way that I wanted it and I might feel a little unhappy that it's not that way but I'd be more unhappy if I never got this chance if I didn't get this practice if I didn't get these reps with things not being the way that I wanted them to be so I embrace that opportunity I do the practice willingly I take the rep and I get better for it and ultimately happier for it when I wrote The Daily Stoke 8 years ago I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going the book was 366 meditations but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email I thought maybe a few people would sign up couldn't have even comprehended a future in which 34 of a million people would get the this email every single day and would for almost a decade if you want to get the email if you want to be part of a community that is the largest group of stoics ever assembled in human history I'd love for you to join us you can sign up and get the email totally for free no spam you can unsubscribe whenever you want at Daily stoic.com [Music]

Channel: Daily Stoic

Views: 134,015

Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday Stoicism, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday Interview, Ryan Holiday Stoic, Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic, Stoicism TED talk, marcus aurelius, marcus aurelius meditations, ryan holiday podcast

Id: iS-pn9r7p_M

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023