The Daily Stoic - How Do You Not See This? | Be Stingy With Time

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

"You consider yourself a programmatic thinker, a political realist, a student of history, a righter of wrongs, a teller of truths. The world is going to hell and you know how to fix it. But maybe you’ve become blind to the way your decisions, your actions, your beliefs are contributing—not to any sort of solution, but rather to the very thing you’re bemoaning. Maybe you’re the problem."Ryan describes why we should be wary of the absolute certainty that we know what is right and wrong, and reads this week's meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.This episode is brought to you by Optimize, the membership that guides you on the path to living right. Optimize offers services like Philosopher Notes, six-page condensed reviews of insightful nonfiction books like Epictetus’s Discourses, Ryan’s The Obstacle Is the Way, and more. Members also get access to 101 video Master Classes, each one an intensive taught by experts about a particular topic. Visit optimize.me/dailystoic and get your first fourteen days free, plus 10% off your membership with discount code STOIC.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target. The new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. on music or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 happened to be doing. So let's get into it. I wanted to tell you about someone today who's a friend of mine, who's show I've been on many times, and as it happens is my neighbor out here in the country in Texas. I'm talking about today's sponsor Optimize. Optimize is created by Brian Johnson and entrepreneur after you create and sold his first two companies decided to dive deep in how to live the best life. And that's what

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with discount code stoke. Brian's great. Check it out. How do you not see this? In his notes on the state of Virginia, the always curious Thomas Jefferson mused over the differences between Roman and American slavery. In institution, he both criticized and actively participated in.

We should not forget, he said, just how horrendously cruel Roman slavery was. There are stories of Roman aristocrats feeding slaves to their pet eels. There were laws that dictated if a master was killed, all the slaves were put to death, so as to discourage or deter potential murder plots that were at their hearts, land, and property grabs. It was believed that female and male slaves were kept separate so they could not procreate and burden their masters with the care of a child. Old and injured slaves were similarly sold off as soon as they stopped being useful, just as one might sell a horse

that could no longer be ridden, a practice of which Cato the elder, the grandfather of the great Stoic was guilty, and Jefferson was fully aware. But what's most instructive about Jefferson's thinking for our purpose is his interest in the talent of Roman slaves. Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, he writes, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled to in science in so much as to be

especially employed as tutors to their master's children, epic teedits, terrants, and fadres were all slaves. Jefferson's interest in this enslaved talent pool from antiquity sits at the heart of how he managed to rationalize the horrors of chattel slavery here in America, in hundreds of years of slavery in the colonies, which despite his self-interested protestations was probably worse than Roman slavery, there had been no black epictetus. This was proof to Jefferson's mind that there was something fundamentally lesser about blacks as a population, as a race of people, which therefore made the American form of slavery less bad than the Roman kind.

You don't have to be a genius to see how stupid this logic was. First off, there was a freed slave named Phyllis Wheatley, who had produced beautiful poetry as good as any white poet of the era. Secondly, there's a pretty good reason why there wasn't a bunch of philosopher-writers emerging from slavery. In Jefferson's time and beyond, it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write. It was slaves who taught the Stoics their philosophy in Rome and Athens 2000 years ago, but in America slaves were forbidden not only from teaching, but from being educated. Thomas Jefferson's own beliefs, his own policies created precisely the situation he then used

to rationalize the abhorrent status quo. This should be a cautionary tale for us today. You consider yourself a pragmatic thinker, a political realist, a student of history, a writer of wrongs, a teller of truths. The world is going to hell and you know how to fix it. But maybe you've become blind to the way your decisions, your actions, your beliefs are contributing not to any sort of solution, but rather to the very thing you are bemoaning, maybe you are the problem. You look at people who are not as successful as you,

people who are struggling, people who have messed up and you wonder why they can't get it together. What you're deliberately not seeing is the boot that you have put on their necks. What you are ignoring is all the advantages you have been given. You are not special. They are not inferior. You just started this race we call life at different points on the track. And if you can't see that, then you are the problem. Be stingy with time. One of the most common sayings we hear is that life is short, and it is, but as Seneca remarked, it's also plenty long if you know how to use it. The first step to that? Not giving so much of it away to other people.

Being miserly about our time is a powerful exercise, which can keep us from squandering this non-renewable resource. What in your life consumes a lot of time for no good purpose? What amusements and desires consume our time without giving us any good return? As you review this list, make a commitment to do something about it. Life is short after all, and you don't have much time to spare. We're all the geniuses of history to focus on a single theme. They could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with the neighbor could mean hell to pay, yet we easily let others

encroach on our lives. Worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passers-by, but how many do each of us hand out our lives were tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing with which we should be the toughest of Meisers, that's Seneca on the shortness of life. It is not at all that we have too short a time to live, but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long, and it's given insufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well. But when it's poured down

the drain of luxury and neglect, when it's employed to no good end, we're finally driven to see that it is passed by before. We've even recognized it passing. And so it is, we don't receive a short life. We make it so that's Santa on the shortness of life. If you haven't read Santa because on the shortness of life, it's really incredible. I read that when I was probably 20 years old and it shaped a lot of my thinking, but I don't know about you. I think one of the great benefits of this pandemic is that it's kind of been a radical lifestyle experiment. Like, what does life look like with fewer meetings, fewer trips, fewer, you know, commutes? You realize, oh man, I was, I thought I was productive,

but in fact, I was wasting incredible amounts of time. You know, I think what's been weird for me is that I've been more productive, but my days are shorter. I get to work quickly because there's no commute or there's less of a commute if I do go to my office. There's no phone calls, there's fewer emails, and I just get right into it,

and I've been wrapping up a lot of my days like early in the afternoon. For most, almost every day in the summer, I was home by like two o'clock at the latest in the pool with my kids. And just where did that time come from? It's that I was wasting it before at meetings or coffee meetings, or I didn't need

to be traveling as much as I did. And I thought I was telling myself I was, you know, efficient and that I was getting a good deal, you know, traveling to go to this thing or take advantage of this opportunity, but I was, I was spending something that actually I prefer to have, which is time, time at home, time to write, time with myself. And so I think if we can take from the last several months a real insight into

what our lives probably should look closer to, then some good will come out of this. Although it's so tempting, right? For the first few months, everyone knows much stricter, everyone knows much smarter. And so we were kind of all in the same boat, right? So nobody was asking, so it was easy to be more disciplined. But now as the world opens up,

whether it should be opening up or not is really not what we're talking about. But as people do feel more comfortable doing things that the risk profile on really hasn't changed. In fact, with the surgeon caseloads for the fall, the idea that people are now putting on events or doing indoor dining, et cetera, it's crazy to me. But the point is, like, I found, it was like, oh, man, how great is it? I haven't had a coffee meeting.

I haven't had to go do a lunch. I haven't had to do an in-person meeting in months and months and months. But it was really that I hadn't even been asked to do those things that allowed me to be so disciplined. And so I think all of us, it's like this is the experiment, that this is the crash course. But now as the world sort of becomes normal,

as things sort of settle into a status quo, then it's going to be really important that you learn how to protect and enforce these boundaries. As Sena Kovasang, we're tight-fisted with property, with money, but then when people ask for our time, we're not even asked for our time when social media tries to grab at our time, for instance. We readily give it up. We just don't have ask for a time when when social media tries to grab at our time, for instance, we readily give it up. We just don't have the same defenses. We're not as strong as we should be in those areas.

But you know, you can always go earn more money. You could always buy more property. You can never get more time. Time once it's gone through the hour. hourglass can't be put back, right? Senaqa says that when time passes, we die. Death is not the thing in the future. He's saying, death is now. Death is the 30 minutes you spent having the conversation you didn't want to have, but you were too polite to get up and leave. I would say one last thing. As disciplined as I try to be, right, I try to, you know, have a limited number of things in my calendar

I don't agree to do things I don't want to do I don't agree to every podcast interview that comes in my way Etc etc etc I also try to be super respectful of other people's time It can't just be that you're miserly with your time just in the way that someone who's you know very tight-fisted with money Can't also then go expect money from other people, right? You can't be like, oh, I'm cheap, and then expect other people to pick up the tab. That's not how that works. You can't be frugal with your own time in life, but then be a real jerk about what you impose

on or demand of other people. Does that make sense? So this is a really important week. Let's be diligent with our time this week. Let's protect ourselves. Let's not give up the thing that we can never give back. It's really important. You've only been given this one life, shepherd it wisely, protect it, and use that time to live, use that time to be with your family, do the work that you actually want to be doing to have the existence that you want to have. And I'll cut this off here so it's not to take up

any more of your time, but I do appreciate all the time that you guys give us here at Daily Stoic. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps and tell a friend. apps. It really helps and tell a friend.

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