0:00 Do your emotions ever get you in trouble? Maybe somebody says something to you and it ruins your whole day. You end up making a big deal out of something that you don't care that much about. You're traveling or you have something coming up and your anxiety gets the best of you. Maybe your jealousy gets the best of you. Maybe your frustration gets the best of you. You know, people get stoic philosophy totally wrong. They think it's about being emotionless and it's not at all. But if is about. And there's a line attributed to the Stoic philosopher Cato about this, where he says it's about looking at everything in the calm and mild light of philosophy. Stoicism is the even keel. It's not being whipsawed by your emotions in either direction. It also makes room for the important emotions, love, contentment, contentment. connection, joy,
0:46 and peace. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode, because the Stoics have 2,500 years of strategies for mastering our emotions so they don't master us. Why would you be angry with the world? As if the world would notice, as if the world would care. That's Marcus Aurelius quoting the Greek playwright Euripides. A quote from 2000 years ago, a play from 2400 years ago. But the truth of it remains the same. We get so upset, we get so angry, we get so worked up about things, we take things personally. But nature is fundamentally impersonal. The world doesn't care. The world
1:35 is not singling you out. The world did not ask for your opinion. What we have to cultivate, the Stoics say, is a proper sense of perspective. We have to understand where we fit in the big scheme of things, which is to say that we are very, very tiny and insignificant in the big scheme of things. And when we add resentment and bitterness, when we add expectation or entitlement, when we take things personally, we are only punishing ourselves. The world doesn't care. The world isn't noticing. What we have to get better at is accommodating ourselves, adapting ourselves, finding the good in things. But when we take things personally, when we let them get to us, when we feel singled out, the only person who is taking note of that is us. You don't have to make it work. They did something to you, they cost you
2:23 something, they screwed something up. And it's annoying, it's frustrating, it sucks, no question, but you don't have to make it worse. This is something the ancient Stoics talk about a lot. The event, the comment that someone makes, the injury, whatever, that's one thing. But then the decision to be angry about it, to be bitter about it, to focus on what's unfair about it, by responding impulsively, by being like the person who injured you, you are adding to the injury. You're piling costs on top of the cost. This is what the Buddhists would call the second arrow. Why? Like, why do we do that? You don't control what happened. You don't control that it happened, but you control how you respond to what happens. You control the story you tell yourself
3:10 about it. You control how much you ruminate on it. You control whether you elevate your heart rate about this. You control whether you let it ruin your mood. You control whether you let it ruin your life. Whenever you find yourself getting angry, whenever you find yourself getting really worried, getting jealous, when you are hoping things go a really specific way, this is probably evidence the great stoic philosopher Epictetus says that you're focused on something outside your control. You are looking outside yourself. When you're focused on what's up to you, you're not thinking about how things are going to go. You're not thinking about other people. You're not worried. You're not praying. You're not pining. You're just focused on what you have to do. You are preoccupied with the parts of it that are up to you, which is how it should be. Yeah, it was
3:59 offensive. Yeah, it was stupid. Yeah, it was unexpected. They didn't need to do that. They didn't need to say that. It didn't need to go this way. And so what are you gonna do about it? Well, the Stoics would say, how about nothing? At least at first, how about you do nothing? Because that's what wise people do. That's what happy and successful people do. They wait a second. Pause and reflect. This is the advice that a stoic teacher of the Emperor Augustus gives him as a young man. He says that anytime he gets upset, he should count all the letters of the alphabet before he does anything, right? We pause and reflect because only fools fly off the handle. Only the inexperienced go with their first impression. The wise pause and reflect. They put it up for review. They think about it. They
4:47 don't hit send on the email. They don't go with their instinct. They consider their opinions. They consider the consequences. They take a minute. Whenever you feel angry, whenever you feel upset, whenever something has you excited, that's when you should pause and reflect. It's not that the Stoics never got angry. It's that as leaders, they tried not to make decisions based on that anger. There's a great essay that Seneca writes called "On Anger" and he's talking about how the leader, the emperor, is the person who can least afford to make decisions while angry. We know this about Lincoln. Lincoln would write these letters and then put them in his desk drawer and not send them. A couple generations later, Truman famously gets himself in trouble a handful of times, sending things, writing things that he shouldn't have said in the heat of the moment.
5:34 We don't really have any examples of Marcus Aurelius doing that, but we do have horrible stories about his predecessor Hadrian doing things when he was pissed off, things that he came immediately to regret things that stained his legacy. So the Stoics are saying it's okay to be angry. You have this thing that's pissing you off. Just don't make decisions. Just don't take actions based on that anger. Try to pause, try to reflect, let things calm down. And then in the cool light of morning, the day after, after you've taken the walk, whatever, then decide what you need to do. When we lose our temper, inevitably, who does it seem to be with? It's not the stranger, it's not the asshole who's a bad driver, it's not the colleague at work, it's our family, it's the people close to us. We'll stomach some pretty rude behavior from people we don't know, but God forbid your son leaves his shoes where you
6:23 told him not to put them. You'll be patient with your assistant when you have to repeat yourself, but if your spouse says what? God help them. Seems like a paradox, but really it's the problem of proximity. Precisely because the people are closest to us, we have more encounters, more interactions with them. The people who are bad are far away from us, but the people who are close to us, they live with us. It's strange, like, the people who are mostly good, who love us, who put up with us, are the ones who get our frustration. And it shouldn't be that way. Let us not be angry with good people, Seneca reminds us. You have to remind yourself that yelling, getting upset, it doesn't make you feel better, and it certainly doesn't make your relationships better. Remind yourself how small your kids are. Remind yourself what your spouse has to put up with. The fact that we can get mad at
7:11 someone, the fact that they'll put up with it, the fact that in some cases they don't have a choice, that's not an excuse. We should try not to get upset with anyone, the Stoics would say, but if we're gonna get mad, let's make sure the object of our frustration is a target of offense, not opportunity. We think we solve our problems with some genius solution with some creative out of the box new idea. And maybe sometimes we do. But most of the time we solve problems, we get over obstacles, step by step by step. In meditations, Mark Cerullo says you assemble your life action by action, step by step. And it's the The benefit of doing it that way is that no one can stop you from doing that little individual piece, that small thing in front of you. What the Stoics realized
7:56 is that the small thing is not so small. Actually, Zeno says just this, he says, "Well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing." Yeah, you've got this big project you've got to finish. You've got this huge deficit to get yourself out of. How do you do it? It's not by some magical solution. It's not by some silver bullet. It's by doing the next right thing and the next right thing and the next right thing. It's by doing it step by step, action by action, no one can stop you from that, except for yourself. The purpose of philosophy is not about getting to some magical place of enlightenment. It's not about these epiphanies, these life-changing transformative moments. That's not how it works. Seneca writing to his friend Lucilius talks about how, look, if you can just acquire one thing a day, so something that makes you a little stronger, makes you a little wiser, less focused on things
8:45 that are outside your control, as long as you can inch your way towards truth, He says that's what it's about. So today, let's think about what have we acquired? What's something we've learned? What's something we've added to our quiver or our toolkit? That's what the path to wisdom is. It's step by step. Starting over is hard. Starting at zero is hard. hard. I just started my next book. And one of the things you learn as an author is that every book starts with a blank page. Your last book won't help you write your next one. At Amazon, they say that it's always day one, right? You're always starting afresh. And it is. It's a little demoralizing. I'm also in the process of putting the final touches, the final edits on my last book. And the difference between those pages and these pages, the one that
9:33 I'm just starting, I mean, they're not even in the same ballpark as each other. They don't even look like they were written by the same person. But that's one of the things you have to remember that every finished thing starts as this thing. You're always starting a fresher, always starting with a blank page. But if you show up, if you do the work, if you do what you're supposed to every day, if you trust the process, you will get from there to here so yeah it can be a little overwhelming it can be a bit demoralizing but it's also exciting it's also exhilarating the whole project is there before me and that's the part of it that you should love anyway doing the edits polishing something making something one percent better that's not the fun part that's not what makes you want to become a writer what makes you want to become a writer or an entrepreneur or a director
10:22 is is the the creative act creating something from nothing that's what lights you up but it is also the hardest thing I'm pretty good with my money. I don't live outside my means, but I have one very expensive habit. A habit that if I'm not careful will cost me everything. It's the habit of anxiety. It's cost me so much. It costs me experiences. It takes me out of the moment. It makes me rush through things. What I'm talking about is anxiety and nothing in my life costs me more than it. Nothing has taken me out of more moments. Nothing has caused more fights. Nothing has stressed me out more. Nothing has ruined more perfect moments. Right? Anxiety, it robs us of the
11:09 present. Seneca says, "He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary." That's why I say anxiety has cost me so much. It has caused me so much unnecessary suffering. Look, sometimes the anxiety turns out to be correct. Sometimes the thing I'm worried about comes to pass. but far more often than not, it doesn't. And even when it does, you know what it did first? It made me suffer early. It made me suffer extra. Mark Strelitz reminds us that the anxiety is within us. We can discard it. Things don't cause it. We add it on top of things. So you've got to get rid of this habit. There's a tension in Stoicism. So on the one hand, Seneca says we should Imagine all the things that could possibly happen. This is premeditatio malorum. It says the unexpected blow lands heaviest. If you're just
11:56 naively going through the world expecting everything to be wonderful, never considering that this might happen or that might happen, you're going to be caught off guard and it's going to rattle you and hurt you worse than if you had some ability to anticipate this. At the same time, he says, "He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary." He was talking about the way that we can sort of spiral and catastrophize. So it's important when we think about this premeditatio malorum, the stoic idea of anticipating and considering what might happen, it's not to torture ourselves. It's not just to go down this spiral of negativity and and doomerism. It's to think proactively. I'll give you an example. Napoleon said that three times a day a general should say to themselves, what if the enemy appeared over here? What if the enemy appeared over here? What if the enemy appeared over here? He wasn't saying that he just wanted his generals to be really anxious and worried all the time. He was having
12:45 them run through thought exercises. If this happens, I'll do this. If this happens, I'll do this. If this happens, I'll do this. So when we think about this stoic practice, it's not just... for generalized anxiety or worry. It's constructive. Okay, if this happens, here's what I'm going to do. If this happens, here's what I'm going to do. It's focusing on how we might respond to this. So it should actually be empowering in some way as opposed to disempowering and scary and alarming. You're thinking, here are the constructive things I can do about these hypotheticals. And I believe that I have agency and power to solve this scenario if it were to happen. Whenever you're anxious, whenever you're worried, whenever you're stressed out, whenever you're doubting, you know what you're doing? You're extrapolating. And the ancient Stoics would say that extrapolation is the enemy. Marcus Aurelius
13:33 tried to remind himself when his kids got sick, he said, My kid is sick. I don't need to tell myself they're going to die from it. He says you can't let your life be crushed by your imagination as a whole. You can't picture every bad thing that could possibly happen. You have to stick with what's in front of you. You have to stick with what is in your control. The anxiety is not being caused by the external thing, the Stokes would say. The anxiety is within us. We are the common variable between all the things that worry us, between all the things that upset us, between all the things that convince us the world is ending. We are the common variable. We are bringing ourselves, our opinions, we are projecting our feelings onto objective events. So stop doing that. Stop extrapolating. Focus on what's in front of you. Stick with idea and action and utterance, the Stoics say. That is
14:20 plenty to keep you busy. Whenever Epictetus saw someone who was in the throes of anxiety, he tried to think about what they were after. He said, if a person isn't wanting something outside of their control, they'd have no reason to be upset, no reason to worry. I think that that's an interesting way of thinking about anxiety, right? Usually the cause is never the thing itself. It's our desire, our expectation, our concern that things need to go a certain way or we're not going to be okay. Like as a parent, what do you want? You want the world to always be okay and nothing to ever go wrong for your kids, which of course is not something you can ever possibly make happen. When you're traveling, what do you want? You want to get there on time. You want nothing to go wrong. But again, not
15:05 only is that not possible, we know that things go wrong and most flights are delayed. For a nervous investor, right? You only want positive returns. You want things to go well. And that's not going to happen either. The market goes up and down. Having goals is fine. Having standards is fine. But getting worked up, getting excited, biting your nails, torturing yourself because you need it to go that way. is a recipe for misery. If you can cut free of the impressions that cling to the mind, Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, free of the future and the past, you can make yourself, he says, like a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness. Now that's an ideal. I don't get there all that often. But when I am there, when I've stopped trying to make things go a certain way, when I can practice acceptance, I am
15:53 happier. I am more at peace. By the way, if you want some Stoic wisdom every single morning, sign up for the Daily Stoic email. It's totally free, no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time. It's got Stoic insights just like we're talking about here delivered directly to your inbox. Just click the link right here or go to dailystoic.com slash email. You're never going to be able to escape pain. There's no avoiding it. It is an inevitable part of life, right? Life is hard. Life challenges us. It throws stuff at us that we didn't expect, that we didn't want, that we didn't ask for. It demands change. It demands acceptance. And this is nothing new. This is how it
16:39 has always been, probably more so in the past than now. Marcus Aurelius lives through a plague and through famine and through civil war. Epictetus spends the first 30 years of his life in slavery. Life is fucking hard. There have always been power struggles and corruption. There has always been Murphy's Law and difficulty and injustice. And so if a perfect world without suffering cannot exist, then the question is, how are you going to toughen yourself up to be able to deal with it? How are you going to make it through? And how are you going to derive meaning from it? It's one thing to get up there and perform. It's one thing to show your kids a wonderful day. It's one thing to make the sale. It's one thing to put in a full day's work. It's another thing to do it after a wrenching custody
17:29 dispute. It's another thing to do it after a cancer diagnosis. It's another thing to do it when you're grieving. It's another to do it when you're filled with shame. It's another to do it when you feel, you know, terribly alone. Stoicism is not the absence of emotions. We know that. It's not about stuffing it down. It's not about pretending it doesn't exist. We have incredibly thoughtful works from the Stoics on grief, on love, on laughter. They made beautiful works of art. They raised families. They did all the things that are part of the full human experience. But they also did it with broken hearts. You know you're good when you can do it with a broken heart. That's what Taylor Swift says. Because we have responsibilities. There's a show to put on. There are obligations. We have duties to fulfill. Stoicism is doing it despite
18:16 not wanting to, despite the overwhelming feelings, despite the grief, despite the heartache, despite the frustrations and the legitimate grievances. We can imagine Marcus Aurelius trying to hit his marks even when he was tired, even when he had health issues, even when just after returning from another funeral for one of his children. But he did it. He did it anyway. Lights, camera, bitch, smile, even when you want to die. That's the idea. That's what a stoic does. They do it anyway, even when it's hard, even when they don't think they can. The key to life, I've realized, is you do things that are hard, that are unpleasant while you're doing them, but that have rewards later. And you try to avoid the things that are easy now or pleasurable now, but have pain later, have regret later. One of the Stoics, Musonius Rufus said, you know,
19:02 when you do something difficult, the labor passes quickly, but the pride endures. And then he said, when you do something shameful for pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures. Like this run I just went on, it was like straight up a mountain. It was not so fun while I was doing it, but I'm going to be glad later. I'm actually, I might not be glad later today, but I'll be glad tomorrow. I'll be glad a week from now. I'll be glad a month from now. And then the The things that feel good in the moment, but that have the hangover, that have the shame, that have the, oh, that was a shortcut, I shouldn't have done that. Those are the things that we try to avoid. I've gone on a lot of unpleasant runs, but I've always been glad afterward. I've done some things that were pleasant, that were fun, that felt good in the moment, and now I kick myself, why did I do that? I shouldn't have done that. You have to count in the hangover. You have to count in the regret. You have to
19:47 count in the embarrassment or the shame. This is all part of the equation. It's not just about how it feels now. It's how you're going to feel about it later. It's not just that we suffer more in imagination than we do in reality, as Seneca says. It's that we add suffering, right? So we're dreading this thing that might happen. And indeed, it might happen. But by thinking about it, walking ourselves through it, going over it over and over and over again, living in it right now as if it will happen. You know what we're doing? We're adding suffering on top. What we're effectively doing is borrowing that suffering. We're like, I want to deal with it now. I want to sit in it now. I want to feel it for longer. So we have to remember that this use of our creativity, the way we're thinking about the thing over and over again, we're living in it. We're actually just adding suffering on top of the thing that may or may not actually even happen.
20:35 Odysseus leaves Troy after 10 years of war. Does he have any idea what lies ahead? Does he have any idea what the gods have in store for him? 10 more years of obstacles and difficulties, 10 long years of travel, that he would come so close to the shores of his homeland, of his queen, of his young son, and then at the last minute he'd be blown back again. He'd face storms and temptations, a Cyclops, deadly whirlpools, a six-headed monster that he'd be held captive, that he'd suffer the wrath Poseidon? Could he have known in those dark moments that as he was suffering
21:21 back home in Ithaca where I am now that his rivals were circling trying to take his kingdom and his wife? It's unimaginable. How did he get through it? How did he make it home despite it all? The Odyssey is a story about perseverance. Persistence was Odysseus in the Trojan War, right? Trying everything until he finally gets something that works, until he chances upon the idea of the Trojan horse. But ten years of trials and tribulations, of disappointments and mistakes without giving in, having to check your bearings every day, not just not inching closer to home, but getting further away, knowing
22:07 that back at home there are all these problems laying in wait for you, enduring all of that, enduring the punishments of the gods, doing everything it takes to make it back home. There's obviously at some point when persistence bleeds in to perseverance. Persistence is hammering away at some difficult problem. Perseverance is something larger, something deeper, something more profound. It's the long game. It's not what happens in round one, but round... after round after round, as you're burying people, as you're getting older, as you're getting more and more exhausted, that to me is the primary message of the Odyssey. Because life isn't about one obstacle. Life is about obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And that's what Homer is showing us about
22:57 Odysseus, that we are all on our own. own kind of Odyssey. Persistence is an action. Perseverance is a kind of will. One is energy. One is endurance. It's the famous line in the Tennyson poem, "Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive to seek to seek, to find, and not to yield. Not yielding. That's what endurance is. I think about this famous summary of the teachings of Epictetus. He says, "Persist and resist." Right? That's what Odysseus is doing in the Odyssey. People are too soft these days. We give up too easily. We tell ourselves that something is impossible because it's hard, because it's taking
23:43 a long time, because vested interests are working against us. But Odysseus doesn't do this. He's stout-hearted. He's He's intense. He never gives up. He's always looking for a way forward. He's willing to put up with setbacks that last for years. But even when he's retreating, even when he is blown wildly off course, there's always the final direction that he's never losing sight of. And that determination, that perseverance, that's what the Odyssey is about. And ultimately, that's what Stoicism is about. If you think stoicism is emotionlessness, you're getting it wrong. It wasn't about emotionlessness. It was about having less emotion, less anger, less fear, less greed, less lust,
24:32 less ego. Marcus Rilas in Meditations says it's about being free of the passions, but full of love, love for the present moment, love for other people, love for the hand that fate deals you because you're going to turn it into something because you're glad to be alive because you feel gratitude in the present moment. Stoicism is not being an emotionless robot. It's being driven less by your destructive emotions and embracing the good emotions that allow you to be what philosophy wants you to be. Slavery was a tragic reality of Roman life. But Seneca points out that slavery wasn't only a legal status. He says, "Show me a man who isn't a slave." He says, "One is slave to sex, the other to ambition, the other to power, the other to
25:20 recognition, the other to their job." And he says, "That's actually the most shameful form of slavery, the self-imposed, the self-inflicted slavery." The slavery we have to our habits, to our urges, to our desires, to what other people pressure us to do. If you're a slave and not by choice, that's not your fault. But if you choose to be a slave, the Stoics say, that's the most shameful thing of all. It can be good if you make it good. Around the 4th century BC there's an Athenian merchant and he suffers a shipwreck. He loses everything in the shipwreck. No one would say that that's good. No one would say that that's positive. But Zeno would say that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck because it drove him to philosophy. He chose for it to mark a new chapter in his
26:09 life. He went through the door that life opened for him. He would create stoicism out of this disaster. It was good because he made it good. He turned it into something. This is what the Stoics mean when they say that the obstacle is the way. They're not saying it's wonderful that you were robbed. They're not saying it's wonderful that your spouse cheated on you. It's not wonderful that there was a hurricane or a fire or a natural disaster. None of this is good in that sense, but it can be good if you choose to make good out of it. That's what stoicism is. We don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. We have the ability to make this thing good with the response that we take, with the action that we take. When we think of the Stoics, we don't think joy. We don't think happiness. But they were happy people. They were joyful people.
26:55 They just thought that joy was to be found in something different than happiness. so much of modern society. They didn't think it was on beach vacations. They didn't think it was in any form of pleasure. Marx really says joy lies in doing human actions. And the most human of action, he said, was kindness to others. If you want to be joyful, if you want to experience joy, do nice things for other people. That's where it's at. Look, travel is wonderful. Vacations are wonderful. I'm just here in Nashville right now. But you know what's better than vacations? What's better than traveling to some exotic location. It's having a life that you like that you're not trying to run away from. I know you want to get away from it all, Marx really says in meditations. He was just like us in that way. He says, you want to go out to the countryside or you want to go to the beach? He says, but actually what you need is inside you right now. He says you
27:42 can go on a retreat, you can go on a vacation inside your own soul whenever you choose. I think the idea is you can cultivate peace and serenity and stillness and presence and joy in your day-to-day life. And in fact, if your day-to-day life doesn't have those things, you're probably not doing it right. Seneca, quoting Epicurus, said we all flee ourselves, right? That's what travel is. We think we're going to find it out there we think we're going to get away from it on the other side of this or that but we bring ourselves with us so the work is is in trying to cultivate peace and serenity and focus and clarity and happiness and joy and contentment with what we have where we are if you want to be happier if you want to be wiser if you want to be less stressed if you want to be better You should spend more time alone. This was the best
28:28 proof, Seneca famously said, of a well-ordered mind: its ability to spend time in its own company. If you have to constantly be stimulated, if you constantly have to be around other people, if you are running from meeting to meeting, obligation to obligation, if two seconds of quiet time means you pull out your phone so you can get sucked into some spite on social media, Look at you right now, you're scrolling videos on social media when you could be sitting quietly alone. If you can't do this, eventually your mind is going to break under the stress. You're going to miss opportunities. You're going to fail to see things that someone who is a bit more reflective, a bit more disciplined, that they were able to see. Spend more time alone this year. It is the secret to greatness. If you want more tranquility, more happiness, Marcus
29:13 Aurelius says you have to do less. you have to say no more. When you eliminate the inessential, the Stoics say, you get this double benefit of 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 together. So should you. You care about yourself more than other people. You're self-interested as all people are by definition. And yet, Mark Strelitz points out, care about other people's opinions more than our own. We care if they like what we wear, if they like what we say, if they think we're good or bad or whatever. It's insane. Trust your opinion. Develop your own internal compass, your own internal sense of whether you're doing a good job or a bad job, whether you were successful or not. You can't
30:01 outsource it to the crowd. Remember, the crowd is the mob. The mob is irrational. You can't let them determine any of it.
