The Daily Stoic - Are You Responsible? | Practice True Joy

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcast. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between

FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Pre-order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital editions wherever you get your books. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoics illustrated with stories from history, current events and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with to journal about whatever it is you're happy to be doing. So let's get into it. Are you responsible? Somebody should do something about that. You've probably said some version of that, we all have.

The world would be better if. You probably said some version of that too, we all have. We all know what the world needs. We see the gaps, the problems, the injustices. And then, well, we wait for someone else to do it, to make the changes, because it's their job. That's the institution's duty, because it's too big, too complex, too much to do ourselves,

because we're not responsible, right? Someone else is responsible for this. The phrase, I am not responsible, has become a standard response in our society to complaints of a job poorly done, Admiral Rickover once said. This response is a semantic error though, he says, because generally what a person means

is I cannot be held legally liable. Yet from a moral error though, he says, because generally what a person means is, I cannot be held legally liable. Yet from a moral or ethical point of view, the person who declaims responsibility is correct, he says. By taking this out, he is truly not responsible. He is irresponsible. The single most important practice in stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we can change

and what we can't, what we have influence over and what we do not. Too often, as we talked about recently, this practice is wielded to turn Stoicism into a selfish philosophy. But the Stoics were deeply concerned with our collective struggle with the fate of the world, what we owe one another,

how our individual actions impacted the whole. In fact, that's one of the reasons we work so hard on self-improvement and self-growth, not for individual glory or vanity, but so that we are more capable and more willing to help those who need it and to serve our fellow humans. We see that in examples like Admiral Rickover, Martin Luther King Jr., Emmeline Pankhurst,

Harry S. Truman, and Marcus Rulius. These are all stories and individuals I talk about in Right Thing Right Now, good values, good character, and good deeds. Their examples show us how it's possible to take responsibility, then fill in the gaps, solve the problems, combat the injustices of the world. Because justice isn't something we find,

it isn't something that's given to us, it's something we create, each of us, brick by brick, all together. And that is the aim of the new book, right thing right now, is to show you that we're all capable of creating a better world for ourselves and others. And it starts by developing that moral code

to show you how good values and sticking to them gives us relief and tranquility. How the smallest of gestures can impact the world for the better to show you in an age of conflict and division that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice if, and only if we make that happen. And I know it can be annoying or tough to preorder books. You've probably got a huge big stack of things you're meaning to get to.

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Practice true joy. This is this week's meditation from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living. There is no audio book of this journal, so the weekly podcast episode is the only way to hear this sort of weekly meditation that we do inside the journal. And it's always been weird for me.

I don't know if I should call the journal that I wrote a book. It's 20,000 words. It's got writing in it. Is it a journal? Is it a book? In any case, here is today's meditation. The Stoics held joy to be one of the good passions, worthy of practice in everyday life. But Stoic joy isn't about the delights of the senses or material pleasures.

To Marcus Aurelius, joy was being kind to others. To Seneca, it was freedom from fear or suffering and death. Let's laugh with Democritus, as Seneca says, and engage in our proper human work with joy. So consider making your study of philosophy this week around the idea of where you might find joy and what good you might find to do with it. And here's Mark Sebelius on meditations. Joy for human beings lies in proper human work, and proper human work consists in acts of kindness to other human beings, disdain for the stirring of the senses, and identifying trustworthy impressions, and

contemplating the natural order in all that happens in keeping with it. Then we have Seneca in his moral letters. He says, trust me, real joy is a serious thing. Do you think that someone can, in the charming expression, blithely dismiss death with an easy disposition, or swing open the door to poverty keeping pleasures in check, or meditate on the endurance of suffering. The one who is comfortable with turning these thoughts over is truly full of joy, but hardly cheerful. It's exactly such a joy that I would wish for you to possess, for it will never truly run dry once you've laid claim to its source." And finally we have Seneca in On Tranquility of Mind. He says,

Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public. Democritus laughed. One saw the whole as a parade of miseries, the other of follies. And so we shall take a lighter view of things and bear them with an easy spirit, for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it." There is this sense, right, that the Stoics are joyless, that the Stoics are humorless, that the Stoics don't appreciate existence, that they're just here beasts of burden, unfeeling, and ready to face death with with barely a whimper. But I think there's first off too much humor in the Stoics, whether it's

Marcus Aurelius or Seneca or of course Chrysippus, who allegedly died laughing at some inside joke whose meaning barely even survives to us. I just don't think that the Stoics were without joy. You could look at Seneca's enormous parties, you know, he famously has like 300 ivory tables as hypocrisy, or it could be an insight to a side of the Stoics that perhaps doesn't appear in their writing very much, but clearly was a big part of their existence, which was, you know, socializing and connecting and having fun with people. But I think what the Stoics, what Seneca most of all is trying to say here is that joy is not hedonism, it's not just pure happiness and lightness.

The joy comes from that place of resilience, from removing the unnecessary disturbances that cause misery. And probably define stoic joy as the absence of misery that a lot of people experience, whether it's fear or anger or jealousy or anxiety. Instead of joy is drinking, joy is luxury, joy is parties. I think for the Stokes it was joy was the absence of the longing for those things or anything that made you unhappy. But then we have to add in Marcus Aurelius's wrinkleinkle which I think Marcus truly found, although he seems to be an introverted quiet person who loved his books, he clearly found joy in being of service, helping people, of making the world better. And we have to see that as

a key part of our role. You know, as an introvert myself I do empathize with that expression that hell is other people, that life is easier when you focus on your stuff. But this is also its own form of misery, ultimately, because it makes you lonely, it deprives you of purpose, it deprives you of connection. The Stoics did celebrate joy.

They did believe it was an important passion, an important part of life. They just would have disagreed with the Epicureans who seemed to find joy in external things, external pleasures, external experiences. I think for the Stoics, joy was something deeper. It was a way of living, it was a way of thinking, it was a deeper emanation of self-sufficiency, but also connection, a locking in on one's purpose, doing the work that one is put here to do.

When Marcus really says the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good, I think he's also talking about what gives him joy and what makes him happy in this life. And I hope you find the same thing. Seek out joy. Certainly don't disdain joy, and certainly don him happy in this life. And I hope you find the same thing. Seek out joy. Certainly don't disdain joy and certainly don't think that this philosophy is about not experiencing the joy. I wish you much happiness and joy. You deserve it. My life is better when I have it,

and it's something that I that I actually actively have to work on and so do you. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on wondery.com slash survey. Once upon a beat, remember those stories and fables that would capture your imagination and you couldn't wait to see how they would unfold?

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