The Daily Stoic - Just Put It On My Tab | The Enemy of Happiness

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Life was just one thing after another for Marcus Aurelius. The plague. The flooding. The wars. He did not meet with, “the good fortune he deserved,” one ancient historian noted, “as his whole reign was a series of troubles.”Anyone who has had a run of bad luck knows the feeling. It’s frustrating and annoying and sometimes deeply unfair, but there is also something freeing about it. Because after a certain point, you stop fighting and start accepting.---In todays Daily Stoic reading, Ryan explores how we can get out of the way of our own happiness by curbing our yearning.💪 Check out the Slay Your Stress Challenge to equip yourself with strategies, mantras and mindsets that you can fall back on to navigate the relentless ups and downs of life.✉️ 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 Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondering'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. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book 366 Meditations

on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Heart of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, I will give you a quick meditation from the Stokes with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. Just put it on my tab. Life was just one thing after another for Marcus Aurelius, the plague, the flooding, the wars. He did not meet with the good fortune he deserved one ancient historian noted as his whole reign was a series of troubles. Anyone who has had a run of bad luck knows the feeling. It's frustrating and annoying and sometimes deeply unfair.

There's also something freeing about it. Because after a certain point, you stop fighting and start accepting. We can imagine Marcus after the 50th piece of bad news, just saying, all right, put it on my tab. What was one more thing at that point? What did it even matter? He knew there was no use resenting, no use wishing. It was otherwise, no escaping, no denying,

just had to add it to the list. He had to accept it was pouring and he was in for a long wet night. He had to focus on a plan for what was to come next. It would do us good to borrow this attitude, particularly lately. We've had our own plagues, civil unrest, wars, economic downturns. And on top of this, our own personal issues, perhaps a divorced young children, trouble at work and injury or a diagnosis. While we should never accept injustice or give up hope, we do need to accept that it's time to buckle up. It's not going to be an easy ride. The bill is not going to be cheap. Somebody is going to have to pay it. And like Marcus Arelius

and our own lives, that person is us. So tell them to put it on your tab and start getting to work on it. And we just relaunched and re-did the Daily Stoke Stress Challenge, slay your stress. And I think this is kind of an idea there that applies. If you are stressed out, if you're overwhelmed, I think you'll like this course. You can sign up now at DailyStoke.com slash stress. There's three hours of interviews for me and a bunch of other awesome stuff. I think it's one of the best things we've done here at Daily Stoke. We launched it a couple of years ago.

We relaunched it in light of what's happening now with a bunch of new stuff and it could not be more fitting or timely. So check it out, daily stout. It's quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for that which we don't have. Happiness has all that it wants and resembles the well-fed. There wouldn't be hunger or thirst. That's epic. This is discourses 324. I'll be happy when I graduate, we tell ourselves. I'll be happy when I get this promotion. When this diet pays off. When I have the money that my parents never had.

Conditional happiness is what psychologists call this kind of thinking. Like the horizon you could walk for miles and miles and miles and never reach it, you'll never get any closer. Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario, as pleasurable as these activities might seem they ruin your chances at happiness here and now. So locate that yearning for more, for better, for someday and see it for what it is. The enemy of your contentment, choose it, or your happiness. As Ep Tita says, two are not compatible. That's a heavy one, I think. The idea that yearning is the enemy of happiness.

Sometimes I'll talk to really successful people who have like a lot of money and be like, what are you doing? Like, why don't you just relax or whatever? And I always find it fascinating when you hear that they have a number. So maybe they have a million dollars, but their number is 10 million dollars. Maybe they have 10 million dollars or their number is 100 million dollars. They've told themselves that when they get X, then they'll be okay, then they'll be good.

But they never get there. There's, from a different Zeno, there's this Zeno's paradox, the idea of like, if you're like walking from here to the other side of the room and you go halfway there and then halfway there and then halfway there and then halfway there, it'll never actually arrive, right?

Cause it's always half, there's always more, there's always some half left of the distance. But I think that's kind of what yearning is. We tell ourselves, oh, when I get this, when I get this, when I get this, but we never get there either because it's not actually something that a person can possess or because we move the goal posts.

Like all I wanna do is win a championship. and then you do it and then you're, oh, all I want to do is win back-to-back championships to prove it wasn't a fluke. And it's like, oh, but now I want to win it on a different team to prove that it wasn't a fluke there either. Whatever it is, right? We move the goalposts. That's the tricky thing about yearning is it never gets there. I think it's still this is the key, but there's a quote I love from Stephon's Waiig,

the novelist. And he says, in the history of conquerors, no conqueror has ever been surfated by conquests. Alexander the Great said, aren't we gonna conquer the world together? And his men said, no, we wanna go home. And the truth was he always would have found something new, something beyond it. Always would have kept pushing. And the result of that was he not only lost his life, but I think he lost a lot of happiness as well.

So contentment, and I've read a study many years ago that said like young people associate happiness with accomplishment, other people with contentment. I think they've learned something along the way. It's a hard one lesson, I'm sure. But we can, even if we can't fully internalize it or understand it or accept it now, we can try to approximate it,

we can try to incorporate some of it, we can fake it till we make it, which is that we don't need anything. We can be happy now. That doesn't mean that we don't keep trying. Of course we keep trying. Of course we keep doing it. But we try to do those things from a place of fullness,

from a place of, how do we be a nice extra as opposed to a place of yearning that I'll be happy if this, once this, after that. It doesn't happen, man, to myth. It's a shimmer, it's a mirage. You'll get there and you will realize it was a figment of your imagination, or at worst your mind will fool you so much. You'll get there and you will realize it was a figment of your imagination or worse your mind will fool you so much

You won't even realize you're there. It just feel like I just got to go a little bit further a little bit further a little bit further And you never arrive and at the cost comes your life and your happiness Look for people who don't want to do things, this is not a particularly important or tricky subject. For those of us who are ambitious, those of us who are driven, those of us who are talented, it's something we really have to wrestle with. So I'm wishing you the best you're enough as you are. Journey is the enemy of your happiness.

Remember that. And be safe, be well, everyone will talk soon. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo. Just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Keepa Bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag, love.

But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby this is Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind.

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