The Daily Stoic - Did You Get Your Bonus? | Ask DS

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Here’s a way to feel good every single day, no matter what happens. A way to appreciate even a day stuck in the airport or putting out fires.It’s an exercise from Seneca.A person who wraps up each day as if it were the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening, Seneca believed, has a super power when they wake up.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions during a Q&A sessions after his Stoicism 101 lecture. Topics covered include how Marcus could overlook Commodus's derangement, why the Stoics were ahead on some social issues but behind on others, and how the Stoics quantify the progress of their work.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcasts early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with daily Stoic life members

or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happen to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. Here's a good way to feel good every single day, no matter what happens. A way to appreciate a day stuck in the airport or putting out fires.

It's an exercise from Senekat. He said that a person who wraps up each day as if it was the end of their life, who meditates on their mortality in the evening has a superpower when they wake up. When a man has said, I have lived, Seneca wrote, then every morning he arises is a bonus.

And you know how it feels when you're playing with house money or when your vacation is extended, in a word better. You feel lighter, nicer, you appreciate everything, you are present. All the trivial concerns and short-term anxieties go away. Because for a second, you realize how little they matter. Well, that's how you ought to live, going to bed, having lived a full day, appreciating that you may not make it. Appreciating that you may not get the privilege of waking up tomorrow. And if you do wake up, which we hope for all of you,

it will be impossible not to see every second the next 24 hours as a bonus, because they are. 24 hours as a bonus because they are. Life can get you down. I'm no stranger to that. When I find things are piling up, I'm struggling to deal with something. Obviously, I use my journal, obviously, I turn to stochism, but I also turn to my therapist, which I've had for a long time, and has helped me through a bunch of stuff. And because I'm so busy and I live out in the country, I do therapy remote, so I don't have to drive somewhere. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. Toxbase makes it easy to find a therapist that you like. It's convenient.

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Let's do some of these questions that have come in. What should we do first? All right, there's one from Maureen about markets overlooking Commodus' derangement. Maureen about markets overlooking comedices through arrangement and sort of the complexity of that question. It is very complex, right? Because on the one hand, almost all the emperors before Marcus, like five in a row, do not have a male error. So they're able to choose their hair. They're able to choose who succeeds them. And that was something that Marcus didn't have the luxury of doing.

That's one way to think about it and to make some sort of excuse for it. It doesn't fully excuse him, though, because, you know, confidence is clearly unfit, right? For at least from what we know historically, and the way he's portrayed in Gladiator probably understates how awful he actually was. If you, there, if you can read some of the pages in Gibbons to climb and follow the Roman Emperor Empire, and you just see that communist is just unimaginably bad. To Marcus's defense, I'd offer a couple things. So number one, he doesn't choose communist. Marcus loses something like six children before adulthood.

So imagine you're in this difficult position where you have to give a job, you have to give a job to your son and it's the most difficult job in the world. So, and millions of lives are dependent on it. So you try to pick which son is right for it. And so you pick a son and you're grooming him for it and then he dies. And so you pick a son and you're grooming him for it, and then he dies.

And then you have twin boys, and you think, oh, maybe you'll have two emperors take my place, just as Hadrian set up for me in Lucius Varis. And then both of them die. And then you think, well, maybe my son and Lucius Varis's son can rule together. And then again, one of them dies. So imagine just all this horrendous death

and what that would do to your own judgment and what that would do to your own family. I think that part of it is never fully been explored. It's not like Mark has really had one kid and that kid turned out to be a real shithead. It's more complicated than that, right? And I think, as I was writing lives of the Stokes, I just really tried to wrap my head around

how devastatingly difficult that would be. And there's this, let me see if I can find this really fast. There's a really crazy passage in, oh, here it is. Okay, so notebook 11, 33 and 34. Okay, so this is notebook 11, 33. He says, it's crazy to look for figs and winter. And it's no less crazy for someone to look for his child when it's no longer possible.

And then notebook 1134, he says, Epithetus used to say that when you kiss your child, you should silently tell it, tomorrow you will die. But that's an inauspicious thing to say. No, he says it's not at all inauspicious, but it expresses a natural process. Otherwise, it would be inauspicious to talk of wheat being harvested.

So the point is here, Marcus is meditating on the unimaginable reality of losing children. Like he's probably writing that fresh off of a funeral, you can imagine. The idea being that Marcus is devastated by this loss. And I would suspect that this both clouds his judgment and puts him in an utterly impossible, impossible situation as a parent and leader. Jeff Belton wrote, my goal was not just to attend this great Zoom lecture, but also to maintain my tranquility

when people forget to mute themselves. Very true. So, yeah, I just, to me, that's one of the few sort of, where all markets are sort of defenses are dropped and you really see the real human being struggling with something. And I think that's where, I think that's where Mark is probably was when it came to commoners. There was another question I saw that was good, Billy. What was it? Yeah, Kyle. Kyle, I had one about how the stills were sort of ahead of their time in some aspects, like they're thinking about winning study in philosophy.

But other issues like slavery, they're assumed to be behind. But other issues like slavery, they're assumed to be bond. Yeah, to me, the lesson here, that the Stoics believe that, you know, both men and women should be taught philosophy is an indication of how progressive and ahead of their time, they were. At the same time, almost none of the Stoics, including epictetus, say anything about whether

a human should be able to own another human being. So they were very much a product of their times or sort of barbaric, even according to their times. To me, the lesson there is not, oh, were the Stokes hypocritical, how, where does this invalidate what they have to say? I think it's different. I think it's that we are exactly the same.

There are some things that our children and grandchildren will look at us and go, wow, they really got that right. They really helped move the ball forward. And then they'll look at other things that we accepted or declined to question. And wonder how we could have possibly gotten it so wrong and how we could ever possibly defend such an indefensible status quo, whether that's

and such an indefensible status quo, whether that's income inequality, whether that's sweatshops, perhaps that's our relationship with meat, in fact, reforming. There's gonna be so many things that the future is gonna find that we were just totally off about, that I think we wanna be careful

at how high we get on our horses about judging the past. To me, we should look at these figures as tragic figures who fell short in a lot of ways that we can then learn from. All right, what else have we got here? Is that Tanya. Hi. I'm really new to all this but I'm a long time Yogi teaching Yogi here in Austin. Oh yeah. Yeah. I was reading about creative output and they had it quantified into 20 to 70, 2010. So 70% of what you do is gonna be okay. 20% is gonna be really good. And then the 10% is gonna be really great,

which of course corresponds with Coach Pop in San Antonio talking about passing the ball to get a good, better, and then the best shot to really be successful. So I was wondering if the stories have some kind of guideline like that for quantifying our efforts, quantifying our output. As we write in our journals and have our self-conversation, well, how good was my day? Or did I miss the mark? Sure. I think one of the things I think about is it made this sort of pivoting from your question

a little bit. But I think like when am I most effective? And do I line up that time with the work that most needs to be done, right? So for me, I'm clearest in the morning and I'm most locked in in the morning and I've been least sort of distracted or jarred by interruptions in the morning. So that's when I try to spend time with my kids and when I try to do my writing. Then everything else, if I like, I wanna focus on the stuff that I don't like doing, the stuff that doesn't really matter, where quality control is less important.

I wanna do that later in the day when fatigue has set in or the stakes are lower, or I've already completed my important tasks. So when I think about, I don't think it's just about sort of outsourcing or delegating, it's also about how do you prioritize and organize stuff in your own life. I think there's a reason that a lot of CEOs,

for instance, work out early in the morning. It's because that's when they have time to do it. And they have the most control over their time and schedule, and they don't want to miss that opportunity. But this is a great question. I appreciate this. How do you rectify the 70% that's just average? I mean, not even average. I think that's probably just the reality of life.

I guess you could spend some time focusing on, if you can get it from 10% to 12%, you have a huge advantage over other people. If you can get the 20% from 20% to 25%, I mean, maybe that's a place to think about is just sort of chipping away at the margins, but I might just sort of take the ratio for granted and then focus on how I assign tasks

to those different buckets. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working during the

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