The Daily Stoic - It’s a Beautiful Tradition

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Some time around the year 141 CE, Junius Rusticus gave Marcus Aurelius a gift. “The remembrances of Epictetus,” as Marcus would refer most gratefully to the book Rusticus gave him, ���which he supplied me with out of his own library.”How well-worn this copy must have become! As Marcus would say, Rusticus had taught him to never be satisfied with just “getting the gist” of things he read, but encouraged him to read deeply, repeatedly, and forcefully. Considering how many times Marcus quotes Epictetus from memory in Meditations, it’s likely that he treated this copy of Discourses like a bible, returning to it time and time again. Perhaps it is even this book that Marcus was referring to when he half-seriously said he needed to ‘throw away [his] books’ because they were consuming all his attention. Certainly, it would have been one of the books Marcus was seen reading as the rest of Rome eagerly watched the gladiators fight.✉️ 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.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic's 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 happen to be doing. So let's get into it. It's a beautiful tradition.

Sometime around the year 140 AD, Junius Rousticus gave Marcus a really a gift. The remembrances of epictetus as Marcus would refer to this gift most gratefully, which Rousticus supplied me out of his own library. How well worn this copy must have become. As Marcus would say, Rousticus had taught him to never be satisfied with just getting the gist of things that he read, but encouraged him to read deeply, repeatedly, and forcefully. Considering how many times Marcus quotes Epictetus from Memory in Meditations, it's likely that he treated this copy of discourses like a Bible, returning to it time and time again. Perhaps this is even the book that Marcus was referring to half seriously when he said he needed

to throw away his books because they were consuming all his attention. Certainly, it would have been one of the books Marcus was seeing reading as the rest of Rome eagerly watched the gladiators fight below. We can imagine that Seneca's copies of Xeno and Clientes in Crecipice and Epicurus must have been similarly well-worn. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works. He advised Lucilius, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. A generation after that someone was introducing epictetus then no more than a slave to the

works of Musonius Rufus. You could go back further, sit in a bookstore and watch Zeno, washed out from a shipwreck being introduced to philosophy by way of the works of Socrates. More recently, before the Vietnam War, James Stockdale had almost that exact experience as Marcus when he was given a copy of Epic Titus by one of his professors at Stanford. Soon after, in a three-year span, Stockdale spent three seven-month missions in the waters off of Vietnam. He was flying in combat near daily. But on my bedside table, he said, no matter what carrier I was aboard were my epictetus

books. So for thousands of years, that's what the Stokes have been doing, how their books were intended to be used, to be kept at hand. And as it happens, this is the tradition that the Daily Stoic has been lucky enough to tap into. We thought it was pretty remarkable that despite more than 2,000 years of this Stoic tradition, no one had ever put the best of the Stoics in one book, let alone one that was easy to carry and read and study.

It's been incredible and humbling, I have to say, since its release in 2016. It's now sold millions of copies in more than 30 languages. It's spent more weeks on the bestseller list than any other book about Stoicism ever. And what I love the most is seeing that almost every week, it's one of the top 20 most red books on Amazon. Meeting people are picking it up every day.

And so, in celebration of that, every year, Amazon and my publisher and all the e-book vendors, they discount the Daily Stoic, the book, the 199 as an e-book. You can grab that right now, anywhere e-books are sold. And also, if you're more of a physical person, which I am, and yours is falling apart,

we have a really cool leather edition, which you can grab as well at store.dailysteoak.com. The point is, stoicism is designed to be a daily practice part of our daily routines. It's not a philosophy you read once and magically understand at the sole level. No, it's a lifelong pursuit that requires diligence and repetition and concentration. Pierre Hedot called this spiritual exercising. And that's one of the benefits of the page a day format. It's putting one important thing up for you to review, to have it hand to digest, not in passing that sporadically, but every single day over the course of a year, preferably year in and year out. And if Epic Titus is right, and it's something you're supposed to keep at hand at all times, that's why a collection

of greatest tits presented daily was so appealing. So here we are beginning 2024 and I hope you'll give a daily stoke a chance in print or as a discount in ebook or the leather edition and I hope you'll pick up journaling with the daily stoke journal or some other notebook and I hope you take your favorites and you make your own greatest tits in your own study plan of the stokes that you keep and carry with you wherever you go this year. Because if 2024 is anything like 2023, you're going to need it. I'll link to the 199 discounted copy of the Daily Stoic ebook here and you can grab everything else at store.dailystoic.com. Happy new year everyone. I'll talk to you soon. from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I just sold my first book and I've been working on it and I just needed a break, I needed to get away

and I needed to have some quiet time to write. And that was one of the first Airbnb's I ever started with and then when the book came out and did well, I bought my first house. I would rent that house out during South by Southwest and F1 and other events in Austin. Maybe you've been in a similar place. You've stayed in an Airbnb and you thought yourself,

this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. You could rent a spare bedroom, you could rent your whole place when you're away. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter or you're planning on going somewhere warmer while you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money towards the trip. Whether you use the extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out how much at this on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. The sphere of choice. If the first step is to discern what is or isn't in our control, the second step in Stoke

philosophy is to focus the energy on the things we have a choice about. The Stoke's viewed the soul as a sphere. That, when well-tuned, well-directed, was an invincible fortress against any trial or circumstance. Protected by our reason, this sphere of choice was like a sacred temple, and it is the only thing we truly possess in this life. We are the product of our choices, so it is essential that we choose well. This week, consider and reflect on the choices you have about your emotions, your actions, your beliefs, and your priorities. Keep this thought at the ready at daybreak, and through the day and night, there is only one path to happiness, and that is in giving up all that is outside your sphere of choice, regarding nothing else's your possession, surrendering all else to God, and fortune.

Epic Titus discourses 4-4. Who then is invincible, the one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice? Epictetus discourses, 118. The soul is a sphere true to itself, and neither projects itself towards any external thing, nor does it collapse on itself, but instead radiates a light which it shows itself the truth of all things and truth in and of itself, Marcus Aurelius meditations, 11, 12. Well, here we are. We were talking about this last week. You know, you only have so many energy points. You only have so much, so many resources. How are you going to spend them? Are

you going to spend them on what's up to you? Are you going to spend them on what's not up to you? Are you going to emote about things and pretend that that makes a difference? Or are you going to spend your energy trying to do something about this thing that you found so upsetting? Right? So I think people think that stoicism is about resignation. It's not. It's about allocation, right? It's resigned to the things that make no difference, where you can make no difference. But it's very focused, intensely focused on the areas that you can make a difference, right? So you could despair about larger, you know, political trends in your country because

you're one person and you're, you know, at odds with the majority. But maybe you can make a difference with your family, with your community. You could run for a school board or mayor or something like that. What can you do as the individual? That's not to say the stokes aren't interested in collective action, but I'm just saying, I'm going to focus my energy where it's going to make a difference. And as a stokes, they be indifferent to the things where I can make no difference.

Where can you make a difference? I think it's tempting as a writer, right? Because our job as a writer is to have opinions about things. That's a really dangerous way to go through your life thinking that the world gives a shit about your opinion, right? And that having the opinion is the thing that matters. And it doesn't matter, right? What matters is what you do.

What are the actions, right? We ended the year with the idea from the Stokes about turning words into works. Well, what are you providing? Where, where are you putting your resources? And are you putting them towards where they have efficacy, right? So, a stoke is resigned in some sense to, look, I'm not going to get involved in that nonsense. I'm not going to waste time regretting the past either. What I'm going to try to do is move forward. What I'm going to try to do is move ahead. What I'm going to try to do to make some change where I can make some change in. And yeah, I'm going to be indifferent to the things where that's not true. And that's what we're talking about here, right? That's what the sphere of choice is about.

And it's an easy thing to forget. That's why Ep Epipetus is saying, keep it ready in the morning, think about it throughout the day, and think about it at night. You're saying there's one path to happiness. It's giving up the things that are outside your sphere of choice, focusing on what else is in your possession, surrendering everything else. So it's being zen about the things that are not up to you. But there's a kind of invincibility in that Zen, right? Because if it wasn't something that was up to me,

I'm not gonna get upset by it. Remember, Mark, you said, you don't have to have an opinion about this. You don't have to get upset. But you should be upset about your own choices. Why did I do that? Why didn't I do that? Why did I, you know, why did I make this mistake?

Why did I do this thing again that I told myself I was gonna to stop doing focus on you, focus on your choices, make good choices. That's how you exert control over the world. I remind myself, you see what's going on in the world and you can despair, you can feel sad or you can go, look, I've got two little kids in my house who I'm responsible for. The biggest multi-generational impact I can have is in raising them well. And then I go, and this is something Seneca failed, it's like Seneca

spent all these years beating his head against the wall trying to change Nero. He's affected far more people had far more impact in his writing, which he did control. So I go, okay, and look, I'm not going to yell at some person I know on social media for being silly and have the impact on one person, but I am gonna sit down and write about this or talk about this on the podcast in a way that can reach a lot of people, right? Let's stay in our lanes, let's do what we can do, let's try to make a difference where we can. And if we all do that, cumatively, that is collective action

and that does have a big impact. This is a short lesson today. It's a straightforward one, but it's so hard and that's why Sena Kassan, you gotta remind yourself constantly throughout the day, I'm gonna focus on what's in my sphere of choice. That's where I have impact. I'm gonna focus on allocating my energy properly,

not gonna waste it on regret, going to waste it on regret, not going to waste it on bitterness, on resentment, on anger, on fear, on worry, on hope. I'm going to focus on what I control, I'm going to make a difference there. That's what Astoe does. 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. Hey, I'm Michelle Beetle. And I'm Peter Rosenberg. early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Hey, I'm Michelle Beetle and I'm Peter Rosenberg.

Hey, Peter, tell the people about our new podcast. Right. It's called over the top and we cover the biggest topics in sports and pop culture using royal rumble rules. That means we'll start with two stories. Toss one out on its ass and dive into the other stories with ruthless aggression. Oh, but it never stops because every 90 seconds after that. While God, whose music is that, another story comes down to the ring. Rinse and repeat until we arrive at the one most important thing on planet Earth that week. Follow over the top on the Wendru app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Over the Top early and add free right now by joining Wondru Plus.

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