Taking Wisdom From The Lives Of The Stoics | Ryan Holiday | Modern Wisdom Podcast 226

can you explain why stoicism is having such modern day popularity at the moment it's not like i'm seeing tons of people turning to taoism or confucianism but stoicism is like the hot new girl in school at the moment yeah i don't i don't know exactly why that is it's been an interesting journey i mean i've been writing about stoicism for almost 15 years so i i even in my own time writing about it i've seen some sort of peaks and valleys but i i i think ultimately it comes down to stoicism as a philosophy designed both around and for dealing with adversity so i don't think it should surprise us that that it it it tends to pop back up when you know things are difficult i mean marcus aurelius is writing meditations during the antonine plague so the idea that you know it would have something to teach us during you know the covid19 pandemic i don't think should be that surprising [Music] you're totally right it does read very modern why is it that stoicism reads like it was written two weeks ago and not two millennia ago well even even when you think about how marcus aurelius is writing so he's writing during the antonine plague but but his book meditations it translates he was writing in greek uh instead of the less formal latin and and he was writing it the title of it translates to himself right so he was writing his book to himself it wasn't ever intended for publication and and even seneca's writing was probably the most accessible of the stoics you know a good chunk of it survives to us in the form of letters he was writing to his friend letters of a stoic letters from a stoic it's really seneca writing to his friend lucillus and so if if we can think of the literary implications of that that instead of trying to sort of get down this brilliant theory or to perfectly craft their words in such a way that it's accessible and and i that's what i love about the stokes is that again it's not a collection of theories it's just you know real people talking about real problems and and as it happens the problems of the ancient world although unique in many ways we're not that different than the problems we have today like people are people we get jealous we you know we have urges you know we have ambitions we make mistakes you know people are people i understand that yeah i did some research in the time that most of the stoics were alive the entire global population was somewhere between 150 and 330 million people so at most it was like the same as today's population of the united states given that there's so many more people alive today why why aren't we finding an epictetus in every country have all of the struggles of how to live been worked out or is no one asking the right questions anymore no i mean what's interesting yeah you're right that that's the global population but you know a a very large chunk of even that population rest rested inside the roman empire you know you you can you can uh you can make this you go oh the stoics were dead white guys but what's to me so fascinating is is just how diverse you know they were obviously there were some female strokes but you know seneca is from spain there were stoics from modern-day turkey and iraq and you know greece and all over the the the roman world so i don't think it's that uh you know why haven't we covered you know uncovered any more stoics um i think it's more like you know the stoics are basically saying that that history is this sort of loop on repeat and so if if we get the sense that what was happening in the ancient world is is the same as what's happening today and that it's the same thing over and over again it sort of helps explain why it doesn't feel like there's any this some new exciting voice i mean you have epictetus who's a slave who has his legs broken who's clapped in irons and then you know in nineteen 1964 1965 james stockdale shot down over vietnam a fan of epictetus he actually is repeating epictetus to himself as he's you know heading down into this camp has his leg broken you know is clapton irons comes to a lot of the same conclusions as epictetus did so in in that sense like uh you know i think it sort of confirms the idea that that you know again people are people in history is history what was the unique insight that we had in ancient rome and ancient athens well i mean i think that the core premise of stoicism is basically look we don't control the world around us but we control how we respond and and that that seems very common sensical but if you actually look at how most people go through their lives we spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on stuff that's not on our control and i i did this this morning i got off the call i was on a conference call with someone i got off and you know the first thing i did was call this other person we complained about how ridiculous the other person was being and it's like what a colossal waste of of both of our times you know instead of focusing on what we're going to do about it you know we did the easier thing which is try to blame or whine or you know it's it's uh just like people wake up and they're upset that it's raining you know and the stokes would say it's raining what do you you know what are you gonna do about it new book lives of the stoics the art of living from zeno to marcus aurelius why did you write this well i i've written a lot about stoicism and i've written a lot about what the stoics have said i've tried to illustrate these ideas in the past through you know through stories from sports and and history and war and business but but i really wanted to and and there it hasn't existed and so that's why i decided to do it the actual stoics themselves have always been kind of a mystery they're they're you know they they were not super famous in their own time so a lot of conflicting sources and sort of all you know there's a little bit here and a little bit there and so what i wanted to do is create as as i've you know been lucky enough to help popularize stoicism people go oh but who were these people and so i wanted to write a book that really puts like sort of uh you know not faces to the name but but puts events to the name and the face and and you know at the core of it stoicism is supposed to be a philosophy that you do not something you say and so i i was also really fascinated with and i remain fascinated with especially with someone like seneca you know is it is it actually possible to live up to this standard and how does a human you know fair trying to actually live by these teachings you know it says something about where philosophy is today that you know does anyone care what the life of a harvard you know philosophy professor looks like no because we've kind of made this this this allowance that philosophy is the theory and then the person's life is irrelevant but in the ancient world that was just not how it was yeah i totally get that man the the armchair philosophizing unfortunately appears to be a little bit of a curse especially in the modern world everyone has that friend that loves to talk a good game he loves to always be honoured talking about their plans this is what i've got coming up and then never ever uh gets skin in the game and actually goes and does it certainly i'd agree reading about the ancient stoics in real life seems to give some extra depth to them and the historical context do you think that sort of helps us to understand some of the lessons that they taught by understanding that broader environment i i think so and look i think there's another part it's not just like hey you can talk to the game but did you live it but also like if you live a boring sheltered you know false life you know uh how could you possibly understand what the world is and possibly teach or explain anything to people who uh are out doing those things right so um you know t lawrence talks about this where he he he's saying like no to to translate the odyssey you have to have actually traveled you have to have led men into battle you know you have to have experienced some of the deprivations that odysseus went through and so i think one of the things that's most compelling to me about the stoics even when they were somewhat hypocritical even when they fell short there's not a there's not a single stoic in the book that did not live an interesting life right and and and that's that's not just me choosing who i wanted to put in i mean there were a few boring stoics that you know um or only boring only what's boring as far as what we know about them that i didn't include but but for the most part every one of them was a soldier or a diplomat or a you know an artist or a world leader or um a business person or you know what's what i love about the stokes is that they were there when it was happening right they were there as rome was being overthrown and the republic transitions into you know an empire they were there at the assassination of julius caesar they were at they were at octavian who succeeds uh julius caesar's you know right hand they were literally advising him and then this goes all the way on down to marcus aurelius who was literally running the known world and being a philosopher you know so i again i just contrast this to you know i get the purpose of academic tenure but i i somewhat reject the idea that someone who has job security for life can tell me a person who does not have that how the world works that's a great point i have to say i'm quite wistful for the ancient world when reading this book it seems like ancient athens and rome would have been a wonderful place to have lived as an aspiring philosopher for instance you got that story of clianthes getting a round of applause from the crowd around him because he wasn't phased by an insult from some playwright on stage which just seems like the opposite of the pop mob culture that we've got now or other things like like the prominent sort of master slave relationships to me would just be prime tools for identifying themes in human behavior how much do you think that the culture of the ancient world helped to foster this environment of where philosophers could learn and thrive is there anything else you know you've got these plagues going on you've got the overtaking of different countries and falls of the roman empire that must have must have been a beautiful breeding ground for it yeah i mean look i'm i'm endlessly fascinated with greece and rome and and and like you know i can go to rome or greece and imagine myself there and and i i love it and then and then i also have to remind myself like as bad as things are in this moment like they would kill to be alive today you know like like covet 19 is is absolutely nothing compared to the antonine plate which killed millions of people it lasted for 15 years you know it it it caused all sorts of civil unrest it was a disaster of epic proportions and and like i think that's one of the problems too with history like when we read history we go oh i would have been you know a senator you know alongside julius caesar and maybe i would have i would have helped in the assassination or you know i would have i would have no like at best we would have been like a slave like epictetus you know like the vast the vast vast vast majority of people led you know brutish brutus sorry brutish and short and nasty lives you know they were the litter carriers and they were the they were you know they were digging horrible minds and and uh you know dying of the plague or you know they were they were being sold into slavery or you know thrown against a wall of barbarians in some horrible war um or just you know died from getting their finger cut because we didn't have antibiotics to fight infections you know like it i i do as much as i am fascinated by the ancient world i i try also to to sort of feel grateful for the incredible like you know sort of pleasures and gifts and and luxuries that we have today you're right we can romanticize all we want about the ancient world but it's been cleaned up since then so i spent my birthday this year uh at the stowapo like i actually was there like birthplace of stoicism beautiful it's i'm sure that you have seen it and it's beautiful and clean and it is wonderful the weather was great and i went for a coffee and you're totally right looking at it in this very rose tinted glasses uh view is nothing like what the world would have been then um i mean it's like why did they have the plague why did these diseases spread it's because people [ __ ] in the streets and and they were you know like uh you know that it was it was like actually i opened stillness uh you know stillness is the key with this sort of story that seneca writes in one of his letters you know he's sitting in this sort of apartment in rome and he's trying to write and he's just describing like the worst noise you can imagine right like noise that would make new york city seem quiet and so that's the other thing is like yeah when we walk these city streets there they're they're empty and cleaned up and and and and preserved and you see these ruins what you don't you don't get this you don't get the sense of the grime and the dirt and the and the the animals and the you know like the the the just i mean just imagine f like if the population of rome is 50 million and 5 million people dying like just imagine one in 10 million people dying uh we're having trouble in the united states like they're having to bring in freezer trucks for the bodies from from the coronavirus pandemic imagine imagine what they had to do then and actually that's one of uh i don't know if you've had donald robertson on but he wrote this great book about marcus aurelius recently uh and and he describes and i i rely on it in lives of the stokes but he sort of in rome during the antonine plague they thought that incense could ward off the the the spread of the plague and so rome was this this this smell of like putrid bodies and incense and then you can imagine the heat with and no air conditioning and ventilation i mean it would have been the stench would have been overwhelming and so you know it's it's fascinating and endlessly you know intriguing but i think we we we have to remember and this is something i try to remind myself too you know when people say oh aren't you picking and choosing from the philosophy i mean these are people that did not understand biology these are people that had no understanding of psychology you know these like in some respects they were so far ahead of their time and then in other respects were were you know primitive really and and so it's a it's just a a unique situation to be sure wasn't it aristotle that thought the only purpose of the brain was to get rid of heat out of the body i mean seneca in one of his things he's you know he's sort of uh he you know he goes into this big defense on on on bloodletting like on how you you know you cure diseases by you know cutting people open and letting them bleed which which was stupid then but but like people continued to do for another 1800 or so years right like when you just when you realize like how i think that's the other thing we have trouble just even wrapping around wrapping our heads around how new found a lot of the progress that we have like we don't as human beings we don't often sells give often give ourselves credit for just how recently we've pulled ourselves out of this muck so to speak i agree so we're going to play a game it's top of the top of the pops ryan holidays stoic philosopher edition okay what i want you to do is give us your top three favorite characters featured in the book and a lesson or a story from each which explains why you're such a fan of them all right um i'll give you i'll give you so marcus aurelius is my favorite of course uh which should i go in from top to bottom or bottom to top oh uh oh well yeah let's go let's we'll work reverse we'll work in reverse okay um so so for if we're going from from reverse uh so let's start with zeno the founder of stoicism uh again uh for people who don't think this is modern i mean he's a merchant and he's leading a convoy of ships filled with dye and he suffers a shipwreck in a storm and loses everything and you might think this is the worst thing that ever happened to him but in fact the disaster is what leads him to athens where he discovers philosophy and then ends up founding stoicism and his quip about this was you know fortune uh gave me a great fortune by you know destroying my fortune or he says you know i suffered a great uh you know a great gift by this shipwreck his point being the worst thing that ever happened to him was actually the best thing that ever happened to him and so you know i think it's quite fitting that stoicism would be founded you know in a moment of extreme adversity and as a writer you know i love the idea that he's introduced to philosophy in a bookstore in athens so cool um yeah it's amazing so the the next one would be rutilius rufus who is uh you know not a particularly well-known stoic um but but someone i ended up wanting to focus on he's a like sort of an administrator he's like the equivalent of a governor uh in united states terms uh but but maybe actually more of it he he's he's the governor of a colony right so this would be uh you know he's he's uh often one of the far-flung provinces and he begins to institute a whole bunch of reforms and these reforms are designed to prevent the romans from you know essentially looting the provinces right you know obviously this is this is the history of the sort of the british empire right it's like you know these far-flung outpostings the business people come in and they they they sort of bring home enormous fortunes but at the grave expense of the the people there and so rotilia starts to institute just some like pretty basic you know reforms nothing radical um but but you can imagine even this tiny bit of fair dealing is cutting into the profits of the you know the robber barons making their fortunes there and so that uh and and i think this this uh has some similarities to our uh you know our moment today so so what do they do they bring him up on charges of corruption right he's sort of trumped up charges of of corruption he's forced to defend himself but he refuses he's he knows he's totally innocent he knows as a complete farce so he refuses to offer even one uh you know one word in his own defense uh sort of just stoically takes the the injustice and so at the end the pronouncement is that his property is to be confiscated and he is to be exiled and the one bit of clemency or mercy that the judge offers uh is that he can choose where he will go into exile and so he chooses to go back to the colony that he had been uh been been accused of stealing from and that colony knowing that he is innocent uh receives him with open arms and offers him honorary citizenship and he actually never returns to rome and so i just i love the idea of kind of the last honest man uh you know the the even in times of corruption endemic corruption and crime and and avarice you have sort of one stoic figure sort of above the fray doing the right thing um and and and and you know we have this idea that you'll be rewarded for doing the right thing and unfortunately that's not often how it goes and then the final uh one i would do i would do marcus i realized just because he's my favorite and i think sort of the penultimate example of stoicism but in the darkest days of the antonine plague uh you know there there's uh tribes have rev rebelled at the border uh there's an invasion uh there you know it's it's as bad as it can get rome is is essentially bankrupt uh and and what does marcus do i mean we know what people with absolute power do is they they make it somebody else's problem right they they invade someone or they plunder something or they you know they kick the can down the road or they levy high you know unpayable taxes whatever it is marcus instead goes through the palace and selects the finest of the imperial treasures and he sells them on the lawn of the palace paying down rome's debt with the treasures that he has no use for could you imagine um donald trump doing a car boot sale on the front lawn of the white house just selling a pen here's a pen here's a daughter do you want a daughter i've got a daughter to give away it's it's it's so funny because like in in a sense trump is the opposite of marcus aurelius in literally every way and it's like not only can you not imagine him doing that he's doing all the things that i said you know what do people with power do right people with power don't take responsibility people with power you know force the suffering upon you know the most vulnerable in society because they have the you know the least amount of influence right they they uh they run up huge bills that somebody else has to pay they they suffer well you know they don't suffer well they they eat well well everyone suffers so on and so forth and so yeah i think you know marcus aurelius in that plague is sort of the a paragon of of what leadership in turbulent times is supposed to look like i love that man i really do which stoic do you think struggled the most with living their work stoicism as you've said it's a philosophy of action it's one that you don't just learn you have to live it is there someone who is particularly defeated by vices in real life well sure i mean i talk about a stoic named diotimus who sort of is guilty of this kind of literary crime but but and and so there's some failures like that but i think seneca is kind of the ultimate example of the tension of a worldly philosophy because here you have this guy who writes these beautiful letters about virtue and about courage and about moderation and then you know he works for nero he's nero's top advisor and you know he throws these gatsby-esque parties and he's one of the richest men in rome and so it's this question of you know is he a massive hypocrite or is it more complicated than that you know uh is he working for nero because you know he doesn't believe any of the things that he's written about or is it that you know he feels that in working for nero he is containing nero's worst impulses you know so much of this is obviously unknowable but i think seneca of all the stoics raises the most interesting questions yeah you mentioned that apart from epictetus most of the stoics were rich or famous or powerful why were rich men talking about resilience is it just armchair philosophizing about problems that they had the luxury not to encounter i mean uh maybe a little bit i mean look even the richest man in rome would have had to be far more resilient than probably your average person in two days yeah you're right i mean like if marcus aurelius wanted to read at night that was a big operation that that involves torches and slaves and you know unrolling scrolls of writing and you know like open the kindle up and crack on yeah i mean warren buffett has talked about this he's like look like a poor person today is warm during the winter and cold during the summer you know that's something that louis xiv couldn't have said right um so so i think resilience was a real fact of life and and as rich as they were most of them were at the whims of uh you know of a seneca is working for nero but he's you know he's he's riding the tigers back there i mean ultimately he's killed by nero right so these are capricious uncertain chaotic times even for the rich and privileged um so i think that's part of it um i think the other part of it is you know uh the when the stoics are talking about resiliency that or freedom even you know they're talking about that not just literally but also figuratively so you know epictetus is watching these incredibly rich people in nero service you know kissing the feet of this madman and you know forced to put on elaborate parties and events like it was a it's not that it was a grind in the way that working in a you know in a diamond mine is a grind but it was a grind in that you know uh nobody was actually free to be who they wanted to be so they're you know it was privileged relatively but also you know uh by no means an easy life i mean look at the sycophantic inner circle that adolf hitler had of course sure and that and that same thing that is the that is the norm not the exception for absolute rulers yeah yeah it's i the thing that strikes me is so interesting about stoicism are these universal truths about how to live a good life right the fact that kind of the same as mathematics there's this knowledge which is to be discovered somehow and there's this universal thread that ties all humans together and the fact that you can go from a pre-christ era where as you say there's people dying in the streets and we think that trapanning will help to relieve a headache or that the brain is getting rid of heat out of the body all the way up to the 21st century where we're consuming the world news in immediate time and flying off into space and yet the challenges that we face are still the same ones well what i'm what i'm fascinated by is seneca and jesus are born in the same year in different provinces of the same empire and are walking around for a good chunk of their lives you know in the same planet in the same universe i mean seneca's brother is in the bible so the idea that you know that that that this wisdom is somehow just the word of god it's it's what i love is like you know there are quotes that come out of marcus realist that you sound like they should be in the bible just as there's just as there's quote you know ecclesiastes and marcus really sound very similar at times and but by the same token there are also things that confucius said centuries before marcus or stoicism was was you know was was even a thought and and that sounds really similar so you know i think i sort of liken it because i i did end up exploring this in in my book on stillness but but i think what it is is like when you're responding to the same fundamental problems there's only so many solutions right and and i sort of liken it from an evolutionary standpoint like we're just evolving similar adaptations we might come from different ancestors but but you know flying makes sense right or an opposable thumb makes sense or eyesight it makes sense right and you could see why from different sources you could get somewhere close to the same outcome we've been asking these questions for a long time and yeah i think the lindy effect which everyone who's listening should be familiar with but if you're not it's the uh lifespan of a non-perishable good so for instance an idea and the presumption is that newer is always better i think a lot of people in the modern era get seduced by that right you have the the the newest this thing i think the newest iphone is different but has uh trickled down to well this book is more recent therefore it should be better but the classics of the classics for a reason i can't remember who it was it might be i might even be quoting you back to yourself here but that you would sooner read the hundred best books a thousand times than read a hundred thousand books that that quote's definitely not me but i agree with take it right take it you can have that one that'll be yours well no i i mean look i think about that because look when i when i set out you know almost 10 years ago now to write my first book on stoicism and i i was actually just i had uh my editor at portfolio penguin on my podcast and i was like what did you think when i came to you with this book proposal about a book about you know an obscure school of ancient philosophy and she was like honestly your marketing books had done well and so we were thinking well maybe he'll just get this out of his it won't do well and then he'll go back to his other stuff and and the reason why i knew better and i knew differently is that this stuff had a 2 000 year track record you know or a 2 500 year track record almost so i think what the lindy effect helps you with and i it's a it's a concept i'm very familiar with and very fond of what the lindy effect does is essentially vet things for you so you know if i had come up with some totally new philosophy that was but at its core identical to stoicism you would have no idea it you know you'd be like you'd have to take my word for it right it's like you know i'm giving you these are the virtues is the stuff you know you'd have to hope that either i'd have to be a very seductive you know compelling writer or you know you'd have to be very gullible to to take that seriously but when i when i say hey look this isn't me this is me you know slightly updating or organized like my book uh the daily stoic is not me coming up with principles of stoicism it's just i said hey wouldn't it be convenient if there was a way to just read one quote from the stoics every day so the reason that book worked is that you know obviously there was some sort of organizational innovation there but uh the reason that book is sold a million copies is because uh it was vetted by millions of people for 2500 years and and and those weren't even ordinary people right like like marcus aurelius is stress testing these ideas at like the absolute testing point of the human experience like you know he's not like oh yeah this held up pretty well at my job at you know uh this toll booth or something right you know he's he's running an empire of 50 million people and he's given absolute power and so if the ideas don't work there and if they don't work in the laboratory of of epictetus experience you know uh we'd have we'd have known about that it's like the equivalent of evolution right the good it's a tim ferrissism the good [ __ ] sticks yeah and one of the things david perrell passed modern wisdom guest and good buddy he has this really interesting insight where he talks about the vast majority of the content that people now consume has been created within the last 24 hours it's like we have a society which is wrapped around being anti-lindy that's totally right and and i did a piece about this a while ago i said look like if if you want to if you want to understand what's happening in the world you got to stop watching the news and you got to start reading books like if you want to understand like the geopolitical jockeying between say america and china like you should study the jockeying between athens and sparta the ascendant empire and the declining empire you know if you want to understand you know russia today look at russia a thousand years ago and you'll it because people are people you know cultures or cultures and i think people are you know like for instance in in the united states we're having a reckoning over race and a lot of people are rushing out to buy these books by these gurus you know whether it's white fragility or whatever and it's like these are management consultants you know putting in our books to capitalize on a trend meanwhile you know ralph ellison's invisible man is one of the greatest novels ever written you know james baldwin is one of the greatest writers who ever lived um you know you can you can read frederick douglass you know you can you can go directly to the source in a lot of these instances uh and and learn so much more and most importantly it's stripped of the modern assumptions or biases or interpretations or speculation and and so like that's uh what i often tell people the role of my books are my books are to you know capture someone's interest and hopefully the next book they read after mine is something from the you know from the original canon and and uh and so like i i take almost as as much pride in how my books have done as i do you know why every every you know few months there's some trend piece about the sales of the of the ancient stoic techs and having you know seen i watch a lot of those sales come through my websites and links that i put out i know that what i'm ultimately doing with the real important contribution that i'm making is driving people to the classic text which is you know in a sense me paying forward the you know the break that i got when someone did that for me it's a shame that uh marcus aurelius can't get you on an affiliate deal you know that would be if you were the the lead magnet for marcus aurelius he'd be you'd be both be laughing it'd be brilliant i mean i i more think about i wish that someone that that i'd been on a track where i could have learned greek or latin and then done the translations myself you know um are you tempted by that i mean am i tempted in my 30s to learn greek or latin and and become a classic scholar not as much uh it's a fantasy sure what do you think the ancient stoics would be most and least proud of about modern society we're talking about how those ideas now map on to our ex experience today well you know i was i was uh i was been fascinated in writing a lot i think early on my writing about the stoics was primarily about the resiliency we talked about productivity about success about you know self-discipline but you know there's probably no concept that mark surely talks about more than justice you know he he refers to the idea of the common good something like 40 or 50 times in meditations and i was rereading uh one of the here let me see let me actually see if i can find it i'll read it it's pretty beautiful uh he's thinking sextus uh okay uh sorry he's thanking his brother severus who's not really his brother just a friend he says uh to love my family truth and justice it was through severus that i encountered thracia helvidius cato dion and brutus and conceived of the society of equal laws governed by equality of status and speech and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else and so obviously a bunch of those names are people i profile in lives but the the the idea that you know what marcus marcus's idea of justice and equality and freedom and a ruler that respects you know their subjects you know that was an idea only in its infancy just in you know thomas jefferson is writing about you know that all men are created equal but but it's only the subsequent generations that manage to get even remotely close to realizing that idea so i'd like to think that the stoics would be you know impressed and encouraged by our ability you know our ability to get from where they were to where we are now you know seneca talks about slavery and zeno talk about slavery and although they sort of accept it as a as a you know an assumption of their time they're by no means making the sort of defenses of slavery that even aristotle is making and so i'd like to think that from the the stoics would be impressed in with our sort of progress you know they'd probably be uh disappointed conversely with our you know that 60 of america is obese you know that uh you know what percentage of marriage is ended in divorce and you know not they wouldn't be looking at these things from uh you know the perspective of like sin and the way that a christian you know if you if you pulled saint augustine from around the same time and brought him to today i think the stoics you know had this this key virtue of moderation and self-discipline and i think it's our abundance and our you know our our uh the bounty of the modern world that they would be disappointed in our inability to manage absolutely it's a naval ravicantism where he says that all of our problems in the modern world are problems of abundance and not scarcity yes it's bizarre that for almost all of our evolution we wanted more than we had so it's kind of not that surprising that when we have more than we need we're going to binge um i know the stoics were very anti-information overload as well weren't they and i think they'd probably have a lot to say about us spending five plus hours per day connected to the rest of the world through a device in our pocket yeah i mean marcus realized they'd probably say like look like i managed to run an empire of 50 million people you know through through couriers who the papyrus yeah exactly it was weeks after it had happened you know uh yeah the the idea that you need this real time breaking information when you're not a head of state or running a hedge fund you know and i obviously i talk about this in my first book my book on media but like you know what are you doing with this information you're not doing anything it's just trivia you know it's just uh it is trivia in the same way that you you know you don't need to eat that bag of cheetos you don't need to watch msnbc tonight but you do it because like i was thinking about this today like like uh why am i gonna watch the presidential debates like because i'm not a shitty person i already know who i'm going to vote for and uh why would i po like why would i consume this mediocre entertainment what do you disagree with about stoicism yeah it's a it's a good question um i mean look this i think the stoics have a somewhat conflicted on this idea of pre-determination for instance you know like uh they're they're i think i think the stoics because of the world that they lived in had a much had a very realistic uh pessimism about human agency right although marcus really does say if it's humanly possible you can do it so and so forth i find it illustrative that epithetis the slave doesn't say anything about slavery you know what i mean like even he doesn't question the moral legitimacy of slavery because it's so ingrained just seeing it as an immutable part of human life yeah yeah and and look right he's just sort of chosen for it and then and then he doesn't see like even as his son is drifting towards taking over and is sort of proving himself to be inept it like it doesn't occur to marcus aurelius that he can do anything about it you know so i think the human agency is something that i would i would probably ultimately disagree with on the stoics and but but i you know i credit that so that the progress we've made as a human species like you i don't think they quite believed in human dynamism in the in the benefits of a dynamic fluid society of a meritocracy you know these were things that you know in england you know they didn't even fully understand until you know probably the second world war right like we we just we we had some unquestioned beliefs about how society should be organized just as we have them today and are you know sort of struggling to wrap our heads around them but but i think that would certainly be a an area for improvement for them yeah for sure do you see stoicism as a spiritual practice i mean is it a religion no and i like that about it you know i like that the stoics aren't saying god you know said this is true therefore you should believe it but but i do think there is something deeply spiritual about it and i think i think honestly if you study anything enough it takes on a kind of a ritual and a and a profundity so i think you you get out of it what you put in it if you read it once it's not going to be a particularly spiritual experience but you know if it's something you really turn yourself over to i think you'll be immensely rewarded i like that i like the fact that if you dedicate your interest your curiosity to anything you know you find people who find gardening to be like almost spiritual you know it's like you're planting plants they're not even conscious physics can be spiritual you know what i mean uh and and and religion can be very unspiritual it can become rote and you know traditional and yeah it or you could do it for some you know evil reason too right so i think it's about what you bring to it and i think it's ultimately about how you practice it for sure speaking of the words practice which stoic practice do you find most useful in life i mean journaling certainly you know and and i have a somewhat expanded version of journaling i mean i journal but then to me writing about stoicism is even my books as a form of sort of journaling and discussion and and so i think you know the stoics were writers almost all of them were writers uh and it was a tradition that survives to us because of the writing so i think writing about it is a big one um probably memento mori is the is this the kind of the most profound uh for the stoics you know uh there's no theme probably that in the stoic works more prevalent than the reality and inevitability of death and that that's something i try to think a lot about as well yeah it's a great way to start the day isn't it um one of the yeah uh i wanted to ask i wanted to ask you this for a long time um i heard you speaking to greg mcewen about this recently past modern wisdom guest and wonderful guy um how do you balance the desire for excellence with not being too hard on yourself yeah it's uh it's tough i was thinking about this last night i've been burned out a little bit and i was like why am i you know why am i feeling this way and it's like oh wait first off it's a pandemic i have not had a break since march i've got two kids at home uh no child care and you know i'm two-thirds of the way through like my next book and it's like oh [ __ ] that's why i feel burned out i'm literally burning the candle at both ends right like like uh that's why i feel that way so i think part part of the way you have to do it you have to realize that like you're not a machine or if you are a machine you have to take care of it you know like you have to keep you have to you know keep it in in if to take good care of it um but but i think uh the the what i've really worked on more is just becoming more and more detached from results so like excellence like on this book excellence is like what does it look like on the page did i get there you know did i succeed within the you know the the bounds of what was conceivable for that project and like i mean i'm sure my publisher doesn't want to hear a bit here but i really don't give a [ __ ] how it does do you know what i mean like it won't it won't affect it it could it could certainly affect the bottom line for me but it doesn't affect my day-to-day perceptions of myself or the project because like i know it's good i know what it does what that it's supposed to do and i know that for the people who will read it it will do that for them and so i think i you know this is something harder for me to understand in my career but like you really as you do get closer to mastery of something and and close can be relative i just mean as you get closer from you know complete hack to you know yeah um yeah as you get on as you get there you you become less obsessed with results or you become less obsessed with what other people define those results as it's far easier to transcend to fulfill our material desires than it is to transcend them is a quote that i've been thinking about a lot this year what does that mean so the fact that it's much easier for you to drive around in a bashed up pickup truck if your last car was a ferrari i think that there are i wonder whether ryan holiday the no times best-selling author would be able to be as uh equanimous about the success of his next book sure you know yeah no i i know exactly what you mean i think about this uh like with my parents like would my parents like my parents are proud and happy with my career if i was just as fulfilled and happy with it but was a starving artist would they be able to understand it the same way probably not and and i'm not sure i would be able to actually get there either right so yeah there's a there's a pla it's like when you win a super bowl you can go like it's it's not whether you win or lose it's how you play you know that that it's like it's much easier to get there at the same time one of the reasons you're able to get there is because now you know yeah you know what i mean like when when what's been weird for me is my books have been successful but but for a long time they were successful but without so they had the impact like i they were selling they were reaching people i was hearing the people that it reached and what they were able to do and yet some of the external markers of success were lagging indicators for me so like the obstacle is the way had sold probably 600 000 copies before it hit a single bestseller list right i it was i think stillness is the key was my ninth book maybe my tenth book i don't remember but the point is that was my first not just my first uh new that was my first new york times bestseller period under my own name i'd ghost written books that it did but that was like the first time my books hit the bestsellers and it debuted at number one which is great but then like two weeks later you know donald trump jr's book hit the best took the number one spot and and it was revealed that he cheated his way on the list right so like you i think what that was illustrated for me in a lot of ways one that you know critical or you know uh verifiable success external success in that sense is not the same as actual success and then also that actually getting those markers winning those awards or getting that recognition or whatever um it's a lot more anticlimactic than you would think right and that it doesn't doesn't really solve your problems it doesn't really so i think there's a jim carrey quote where he's like i wish everyone could be rich and famous so they realize that it doesn't mean anything now that's kind of like the ultimate privileged thing to say and like it's you know preposterous or whatever but it but there is an element of truth in it and that like when you actually get the things that you think you wanted you realize that they were never capable of giving you what you thought you wanted the sad fact is that it's so hard to internalize that lesson without having been like imagining the view of the mountain mindfully you're there you can feel the wind on your face but if you haven't gone to the top there's always that you know we hate open loops there's zeigarnik effect humans hate open loops and i think a lot of these um unfulfilled desires which is one of the reasons that i've been trying to advocate to my friends and everyone that listens for a long time to try and front load the discomfort and the socialized objective measures of success in life because as far as i'm concerned the sooner that you can do that and tick that box the sooner you can get onto what actually matters because over time you see your grandparents you know they don't care about the car that they drive they don't care about the brand of shoes that they wear so you know that's the trajectory that you're on everyone's on this same trajectory that's where you're going to end up because every grandparent kind of doesn't give a [ __ ] and it's kind of a little bit disgruntled and kind of just wants to spend time with the family that's where you're going to end up so front load the stuff that you can do and get it out the way no that's that's totally right when they do studies like old people tend to associate happiness with contentment young people with achievement and obviously you need a certain amount of achievement to be content or you know you you live under a bridge somewhere probably but but but yeah front loading is important and then and then i think where people can somewhat can be a little blase about it go oh you know you you only know that you're only saying it doesn't matter because yeah you have the success of being a number one bestseller so the reality is life is constantly teaching us that lesson it's like you know you thought hey if i can get the you know if i can get the the popular girl to go out with me then i'll feel good about myself i won't feel like a you know i won't feel like a loser and then you got it and it turned out actually she was awful and you know it wasn't that awesome yeah or whatever it is like you you are constantly being taught that lesson and then we plug our ears and close our eyes to the message so like you know they're i was saying about super bowl plenty of people have been there like they made it to the top of the mountain and they won a super bowl and it was anti-climactic and they didn't it didn't trigger self-awareness what it triggered in them was the idea that oh it's i have to win back-to-back super bowls right like oh no you're going in the wrong direction right because people will go oh i i if you do it once it doesn't feel good because it could be a fluke you have to you have to prove you know what i mean like the dose wasn't high enough yeah yeah the mind in in insidiously manages to always find a way to motivate us to go forward and we can understand why from an evolutionary standpoint this is is perfectly logical but from an individual standpoint wants to be happy it's a recipe for misery i don't know if you're familiar with robert wright's book why buddhism is true yeah yes i love his evolution books too he wrote a great book called the moral animal dude everyone that's listening there we go that's moral animal bingo for you today um i i must talk about that book every single podcast and thankfully you've brought it up on this one so i don't need to okay in that he talks about the um translation of life is suffering and the word is dukkha but some scholars can test that it's not suffering but unsatisfactoriness holy [ __ ] man when i read that i just thought it fits in so neatly with everything that we know about hedonic adaptation and the present self versus the remembering self like it was just i love when things fall together like that um i thought it was a really beautiful idea so i've got two quick things that i want to go through one of them relates to what we were just talking about and it's an idea i've been playing around with since a conversation i had a couple of weeks ago i'm a big fan of trying to lead a consciously designed life i want to step into my programming as much as possible i don't want to be constrained by societal norms or genetic predisposition or the way that i deal with past traumas or any of that i want to be as conscious as i can with the actions and the thoughts and the words that i do but i had a conversation with a guy called justin tosi he's a philosopher from the university of texas tech and he um advocated instinct a lot more he was like dude you you have to remember that your body does an awful lot correctly unconsciously and it actually gave a good counterpoint to this kind of um super consciously designed life riff that i've been on for probably the last 18 months and has given me a second's pause to think actually hang on should i have should i be consciously looking to design every single action that i can should i be second guessing all of my uh uh choices and virtues what do you think the the stoics would say about that what do you say well this is actually a big debate amongst the stoics and early on it's kind of a hard fork between zeno and clianthes and then one of the other early stokes a guy named aristo and you know the early stokes and some of the later stokes were really interested in like precepts like great quotes reminders this is what the writing was all about do this don't do that think about this think about that and he was like that's not how it works you have to do the reading do the work but he says the wise man knows you know that it it that a lot of this comes ultimately from a place of intuition and instinct um i i kind of am a you know split the difference kind of a thing i think like look if you're if you're constantly referring to some sort of rule book you know if you're a slave to like a set of constraints or systems you're probably you know not as fluid and and you know free-flowing as you ought to be at the same time you know some of our instincts are bad you know and so i i i think it's kind of a mix between the two i like making it kind of a muscle memory that you can rely on at the same time i think it's so easy to go astray that it's really important to have reminders like my desk and the walls of my office are covered in pictures and quotes and statues and and you know i carry these challenge coins in my pocket i i the reminders are really really helpful to me i get that i'm uh i'm just about to pull up one of my favorite quotes from uh confucius and it's um part of an article that i found through kyle eschenroder who is this wonderful writer i brought him on the podcast i loved i loved his okay kyle's just i mean what a guy um so he says in the early stages of training an aspiring confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts learn the precise angle at which to bow and learn the lengths of steps with which he is to enter a room his sitting mat must always be perfectly straight all of this rigor and restraint however is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated but nonetheless genuine form of spontaneity indeed the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort yeah that's right and i think that what is that term like sprezzatura or whatever it that the highest form is effortlessness and i think that that's where you're trying to get and that's that's what all the efforts are aimed at that sort of effortlessness final question what area are you hoping to improve on most over the next year that's a good question i think as always temper uh you know temper and uh you know i never i feel like i'm never proud that i've lost my temper i find that it i you know i get angry or more than i need not a lot i just i i you know things piss piss me off as they do i think you know to just to sort of be able to flow more naturally to things and not you know the stokes talk like why are you asking why you know it just it is what it is right i think getting there is a big one and then i think the thing i we're talking about effortlessness the thing i struggle with is and obviously that's why i wrote a book on it but you know the ability to not do is in some cases the hardest thing to do right and and you know i'll find myself you know things have been easy or clean or simple and then the next thing i know i'm in the middle of something and and when i really trace back how that happened you know i invited myself into that right i sought it out it didn't uh it's not like this thing dropped in my lap right and so i think one of the things i've taken from the pandemic is just how much less i need and how much simpler and better life is when there's less going on uh but but maintaining that is really difficult and it's like you cut out drinking and then the next thing you know you're smoking and then you cut out smoking you know whatever you know like uh it's sort of like whack-a-mole with the with our inability to sit quietly in a room alone life is unsatisfactoriness man that's sadly what it is uh ryan i've adored today thank you so much for coming on man lives of the stoics will be linked in the show notes below where else do you want to direct people dailystoic.com yeah and then we do an email every day about stoicism at daily stoic and then youtube videos at youtube.com daily stoic go and check them out linked in the show notes below ryan i uh i'm gonna have to get you back online whenever this next book book is out wherever you two thirds of the way through we're gonna have to get you back yeah and hopefully my internet connection will be better next time that would be wonderful for now man thank you so much i appreciate it

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 8,154

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, Joe rogan, True Geordie, chris williamson, Ryan holiday, stoics, stoicism, the lives of the stoics, zeno, aristotle, epicurous, marcus aurelius, philosophy, greece, athens, stoic advice, stoicism introduction, epictetus, the obstacle is the way, ego is the enemy, stillness is the key

Id: vn30PSUxGu0

Length: 61min 5sec (3665 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020