The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: The Stoic Response to Getting Your House Burgled, and more

Episode Date: January 18, 2020

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystowach.com. Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stowach Thanks. You guys send me your questions to info at dailystowach.com. You're pressing questions about stoicism, about markets, really. It's about Seneca, about

me, about reading, whatever it is. You ask the questions. I do my best to answer. We put it up on the podcast on Saturdays and then on the YouTube channel as well. Got some cool questions for you. Send them in at info at dailystoke.com.. We've got more for next week. Chris' question is how the Stoke's talk about ignoring praise and jeers of doing what's right, but how would a Stoke response to someone who ignores the praise or jeers, but they're doing it to do the wrong thing? Isn't this a way to sort of be unethical?

I think that's a great question. You know, I think at the core of stoicism is the belief in virtue, the idea of doing the right thing. That's hard to define. I feel like if there's a failing in the Stokes, there is no Stoke 10 commandments where it's like very clear what the Stokes things you should and shouldn't do. It's almost just sort of expected that we're to know what virtue is. But there is an argument to be made that like what Stoicism could do is just make you a better sociopath. Like by removing your fears, your worries, caring what other people think it's just making you worse. And obviously that's not what the Stokes intended.

There are certainly people, you know, we see people in the pickup community or, you know, there have been not good people in history and there are not good people now who are reading these, you know, sort of ideas and they're not using it to be better. But I think this is where the reading in stoicism really becomes important because when you truly read Marcus Aurelis, he's not just saying, you know, ignore the praise in tears so you can do whatever you want, the way that a previous emperor like Nero or Tiberius acted, he's saying, don't listen to them so you can, you know, do what's good for the, like, all of Rome. So he's like, don't

care about appearances, so that way you're not distracted or tempted by money. He's like, don't care about impressing people, so you don't need to be like fooling around with beautiful women. He's trying to use this to get him closer to his moral code, to be closer to living in accordance with nature as the Stoics say. He's trying to use this idea of pushing aside the crowd, the mob, as they call it in Rome, so he could focus on what he knew was true, what he knew was good, what he believed was ethical,

what, you know, as he says, what's bad for the hive, is bad for the bee, what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee, what's bad for the bee is bad for the hive. The, he's, he's thinking fundamentally about the common good, about serving the common good, about being of service, about helping people. And so he's not using that to, to be more selfish.

He's, he's actually trying to, to, to not be distracted or misled by the very human impulse of wanting sort of short-term approval, wanting to impress other people, wanting status or money or fame or legacy or recognition or credit. He says, don't think about people's cheers or cheers, just do the right thing. He's saying, do the right thing because it's the right thing, whether it's helping somebody saying, help someone because you want to do it

because they need it. He says, don't think about the third thing which is getting credit for it. So fundamentally to me, what that idea of ignoring praise and criticism is about just not caring about credit, not caring about recognition, not caring about recognition, but instead focusing all that energy on

doing the right thing for the right reasons. So no email then, he said, I know you went to Budapest recently and you visited some Stoic sites, like what did you see, what did you like there? So I was in, I gave a talk in Bucharest, which was really quite never been to Romania. And then believe it or not, my Romanian publisher, they are called Seneca Publishing.

They have a stoicism-themed cafe called the Seneca Anticafe in Bucharest, which I thought was amazing, and really cool, definitely check it out. And then, so I went from Bucharest to Budapest where I gave a TEDx talk and it occurred to me as I never really been to Budapest. I've been so fried. I was on book tour. I was like, isn't that like a Marcus Aurelius Budapest connection? And I was like, oh yeah, he spent like years of his life there. I think it's a Quinn-come. I'm terrible at pronouncing these words, but there was a Roman military camp outside Budapest on the Danube River, and that's where Marcus really spent like several months, they think he actually wrote

a large chunk of meditations there. And so you could walk the streets of this Roman town, and it's just incredible. You can, there is a public bath from a thermal underground spring that you can visit. It was closed when I was there, so I had to go to a different one that was only dating back to the 1600s. But you can take a steam bath in a hot spring

that is the same water that Marcus Relius may have used 2000 years ago. I just thought that was absolutely incredible. I know you're not supposed to, but I picked up a rock while I was there, and I keep it on my desk now. But it's just amazing. There's a small museum there. There's Roman ruins. You don't think of the Roman Empire stretching as far as Hungary.

You don't think you would see ruins of a Roman aqueduct next to a freeway in Budapest, but you can. I do think when we're traveling, the idea of seeking out some of these sites and walking through them and just imagining what was here, imagining our connection to the people that were here, realizing that people are going to walk through the ruins of our cities 2,000 years from now and experience a similar thing is a very stoic, it's a very meditative practice, it's very soothing and sort of rejuvenating but also humbling at the same time. So it was really awesome and I'm glad I got to do it. Rob wrote in with some not fun news, he said his house got

broken into and he wanted to know about over coming something like that. How do you bounce back from that? You don't feel good about it. So first up, I would say, sorry, like I've been there in 2013. I just bought my first house and I also bought an engagement ring for my wife, which I did not tell her about. And I put it in a safe in our downstairs closet.

And we went out of town. There were some Airbnb renters in our house, and we got a call from them that while they were out, someone had broken into the house, they'd stolen everything. They trashed our couches, they'd torn things off the wall, they'd broken windows, and they were in it long enough that they busted open the safe and stole the engagement ring that I was planning to propose to my wife with. So that was, you know, let's just say that was not fun. And that was not how I was planning to tell my wife that that's what we were doing. So the truth is, the source of say, like shit happens, life is rough.

And I think one of the things I took from that was, like, it's easy to get feel really soft, feel really protected, get kind of in a bubble of your own experience and just expect the life to be kind and amazing and everything you want. I think one of the things you realize from reading Marcus Aurelius is like, this guy had everything and life was still hard. I mean, to go to your point about getting broken into,

there's a story from Epictetus about a thief breaking into his house and stealing a lamp. And what he takes from that, and I think this is the second thing, he goes like, look, you can only lose what you have. He says, tomorrow I'm gonna go out and buy a cheaper lamp,

and that way I'm not gonna be as paranoid about it. So that was one of the things I took from the experience was, like, not only had I got a little soft, a little vulnerable, I wasn't careful, but I also set myself up to be too attached to material items. And so I wanted to learn from the experience, be a little less attached, be a little less in my bubble. And then, you know, it ended up being like, this is a story that my wife and I have.

It's an experience actually are wedding announcement. We got selected, it was in the New York Times. And we got to tell that story. And that wouldn't have happened had we had just like an ordinary getting engaged experience. And so like how can you use this? That's what the obstacle is the way,

the impediment to action, advances action. As Mark said, everything that happens presents us an opportunity to practice a different virtue. That's what we wanna do. That's what I'd urge you to think about. I'm really sorry that this happened. I wish everyone was nice. I wish we could leave our doors unlocked,

but that's not the reality we live in. And that's unfortunate. But you'll be more successful toughening yourself up than you will hoping that nothing bad ever happens. So at the very least, if you come out of this a little stronger, a little wiser, a little more careful, and a little more aware that our possessions are a federal and could be taken from us, I think you'll be better. So that's another episode of Ask Daily Stoic.

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