The Daily Stoic - It’s An Extraordinary Thing Indeed | Our Duty To Learn

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

📚 Get a copy of Marcus Aurelius Meditations at The Painted Porch Bookshop✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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 Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic, 365 meditations on wisdom, perseverance in the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author

and collaborator, Steve Enhancelman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus Marks, Relius, Seneca, then some analysis for me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery'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. Marcus really said that if you ever found anything better in life than courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, those four stoke virtues that it must be an extraordinary thing indeed. Which raises the question, is there anything better? Well, here's one pretty extraordinary thing. Love. Sure, you could argue that love fits within the virtue of justice, but it's notable how much the Stoics speak about it. Haccato said, justice, but it's notable how much the stills speak about it. Hakato said, I can teach you a love potion made without any drugs, herbs, or special spell.

And it's this, if you would be loved, love. Marcus really, some self says in meditations that he learned from his teacher, Sextus, that the key to life was to be free of passion, full of love. Indeed, there is almost no situation in which hatred helps, but almost every situation is made better by love. Love is something that transforms us. Pure love, careless of all other things, kindles the soul, Seneca said. It makes us selfless. It inspires us to be better. In the end, the Beatles wrote, the love you take is equal to the love you make. And the love is the thing that gives us meaning.

Love may not be better than the Four Virtues, but it's certainly their equal. It emboldens courage and inspires discipline. It strengthens justice. It gives purpose to wisdom. And it is an extraordinary thing, indeed. Our duty to learn this is today's entry July 7th in the Daily Stoic, and I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman.

You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store, over a million copies of the Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best cellos. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition

at store.dailystoke.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. This is what you should teach me. How to be like Odysseus, Seneca writes in moral letters 88, seven. How to love my country, wife, and father, and how even after suffering a shipwreck, I might keep sailing on course to those honorable ends.

And I write, many school teachers teach the Odyssey all wrong. They teach the dates. They debate whether Homer was really an author or not, whether he was blind. They explain the oral tradition. They tell students what a side cop is is or how the Trojan Force worked. Seneca's advice to someone studying the classics is to forget all that, the dates, the names, the places they don't matter. What matters is the moral.

If you get everything else wrong from the Odyssey, but you're left understanding the importance of perseverance, the dangers of hubris, the risks of temptation and distraction. Well, then you really learned something. We're not trying to ace tests or impress teachers here. We are reading and studying to live to be good human beings, always and forever. Of course, there's an entertainment element to something like the Odyssey or really any great book. That's why it survived for thousands of years as a text. There's literary value as well. You'd study it as a writer. And by the way, my favorite translation of the Odyssey is this one by Emily Wilson, who's also Senaqa's biographer. If you haven't read the greatest empire by Emily Wilson, you absolutely should.

And you should read her new-ish translation of the Odyssey, which I quite, quite enjoyed, and actually carry both of them in the bookstore. It struck me at one point like how crazy it is that like, it was one of our best-selling titles for a while, because I was recommending it really hard after I read it. And it's like the best-selling book in this brand new bookstore is a book that's thousands of years old. That's what great art can do, right? It's perennial. It stands the test of time. All of which is to say, I also love how perennial Senaqa's example is, right? Like, I'm sure you remember the pedanticness and the boringness with which you dissected texts in English class or whatever in high school.

It's like quizzes. What year did this happen? And what is the name of so-and-so's father in insert novel, right? They're trying to test whether you read it or not as if just reading it is the accomplishment. No, you have to internalize the ideas, the lessons that the author was trying to teach you to understand it and translate it into insights as a human being, not recite trivia from it.

And sadly, that's what so much mediocre education focuses on. They get us to memorize things. I think this is funny too. This is like the knock on kids who have been raised in this digital era about how they don't remember things. They can just Google it. What matters is that they remember the gist of the insight, not like the dates and places, screw that, right?

Like, does it actually matter to you in a tangible way whether Napoleon was a real person or a literary character, right? Like, does it actually matter to you in a tangible way, whether Napoleon was a real person or a literary character? Right? No. The insights that you can learn from his life, the strategic lessons, of course, even if they were fictional would obviously the fact that they are real makes them more worthy of study. But my point is, like, you don't study Franco-Pression battles unless you're, you know, going to become a general or something. You study them to learn about hubris, to learn about salarity and hustle, to learn about creativity and courage, right? To also learn about overreach and stupidity and the power of alliances, right?

We study history to learn those things. to learn those things. But again, what you mispronounce precipice, or sometimes I'll refer to epithetists as a Roman slave, and someone will give me an angry email. I've actually used Greek. It's like, okay, but he lived in Rome and was owned by a Roman. I think we're getting into a rather pointless conversation. What matters is what you learn from epictetus and his example, right?

I bet if you'd asked Stockdale, if you said, oh, you know, the Romans live epictetus, he wouldn't even be like, oh, I think he's Greek, right? No, what he took from epictetus was the power of the courage and the fortitude and the strength and the lessons, and that's what he applied there in the Hanleyhulam. That's why we're studying the stokes, and that's how we learn it. This is how I try to teach my kids. This is what I try to study.

The trivia is not important, right? The trivia is not important. What matters is internalizing the moral lessons. Epicurus would say that vain is the word of the philosopher, it does not heal the suffering of man. I would say vain are most facts that you're not going to apply and use not even in your work, but to be a better human being. That's the purpose of this study. That's the purpose of this philosophy. That's what I try to talk about here on this podcast. And it's a wonderful

reminder. Again, from a really smart person, Seneca was brilliant. He knew lots of facts. He knew all those things about the Odyssey. But what he really wanted to learn how to do what the study of his life was, was how to be like Odysseus. Although I think when you read Emily Wilson's translations, you're also reminded how not to be like Odysseus, because I saw in her translation

that he was much more of a flawed character than perhaps I'd felt early on in my readings of that wonderful poem slash play. And again, is it a play? Is it a poem? Who gives a shit? What matters is what you do with it, and I do urge you to read it and read it for the right reasons and read all the things that you read for the right reasons just to become better human being in the world.

It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. You built this momentum-mory calendar for Dio Sto, to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks. Are you gonna let those weeks slip by or are you going to seize them?

The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall in every single single week that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoke.com slash M M calendar. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen 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. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Duma

or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them.

It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App.