The Daily Stoic - Late Is Better Than Never | Robert Greene's Favorite Stoic Lessons

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

What new information could there have possibly been for Seneca, in 62 AD, when he finally broke with Nero? Nero had been deranged for years (as detailed in James Romm’s excellent book Dying Every Day). He had been blood thirsty for years, unfit for leadership since almost the beginning. Seneca knew better from the beginning–the man was a philosopher and historian and could not have been deceived for long.We can sit here and judge. We can shake our heads in bafflement. But we really shouldn’t.---And in todays Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan shares some of his favorite Stoic lessons passed on by his mentor, Robert Greene. You can watch the full video at youtube.com/watch?v=uhKrwkTp8as.✉️ 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 Podcast 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. Late is better than never. What new information could there possibly have been for Senaqa in 62 AD when he finally broke with Nero. Nero had been deranged for years as detailed in James Rahm's excellent book dying every day. He had been bloodthirsty for years, unfit for leadership since almost

the beginning. In Sennaqa knew better from the beginning, he was, the man was a philosopher as historian and it could not have been deceived for long. So we can sit here in judge, we can shake our heads in bafflement. But we really shouldn't. The fact that Seneca eventually worked up the courage to participate in a conspiracy against Nero shouldn't be dismissed as too little too late, because later it's better than never. Because not everyone did come around. In fact, most people never do than or now. When we are wrong, when we've had our blinders on, when we've been implicated in something even complicit in it, it's so terribly, terribly hard to change our minds.

It is hard to admit air, hard are still to admit guilt, and the heart is still to take steps, to rectify it. Instead of condemning those who have the fortitude, the awareness, the conscience, even the desperate motivation of last minute self-preservation, we should celebrate it. We should make soft landings for them,

so as to encourage future folks. We should, as Mark's really tried to do, should forgive. We should sympathize and realize how easily we could be in their positions. We should take note of their example and make sure that we are learning from it in our own lives. Judgment is easy, changing is hard, hard enough that late is still better than never.

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. It's affordable. By doing everything online, Toxbase makes getting the help you want easy and affordable. So, why wait? And Toxbase can help with any specific challenge you might be facing. That's why it's the number one online therapy platform with license therapists and over 40 specialties. It's secure

and private and in network with most major insurers. As a listener of this podcast, you can get 80 bucks off your first month with Talkspace when you go to Talkspace.com slash Stoic. To match with a license therapist today, go to Talkspace.com slash Stoic to get 80 bucks off your first month and show your support for the daily Stoic, that's Talkspace.com slash Stoic. We tend to think of philosophers as people who lived a really long time ago, right? They've got these unpronounceable names

and they talk about these big abstract ideas, but in fact, they're brilliant wise philosophers walking among us right now. In fact, no one has taught me more about applying stoic wisdom to your actual life than the one in only robbercree, who I think is one of our great living philosophers and thinkers whose works will be read hundreds and hundreds of years from now. I'm Ryan Holliday. I've written books about stoic philosophy. I've been able to speak about it to the NBA, the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders, but almost every step of my career,

I've been following in the footsteps of Robert Greene, who has been my mentor, who I was lucky enough to be a research assistant for, and Robert has over the years, and many conversations expressed to me the essence of stoic philosophy. And although Robert's books are controversial and sometimes poorly understood,

in fact no one has taught me more about Stodew philosophy than Robert Greene. Robert himself once showed me his copy of Marcus Aurelius, which had tons of little notes in the corner. So he's been a practitioner of Stodew philosophy for many years. And in today's episode, I want to give you some more Stodewic wisdom from the one in only Robert Green. Realistic outlook on life. Charcoalite, get rid of all the bullshit, all the things that you learned in university, all the bad ideas that you got from your parents, all the bad ideas that you get from your peers, and you're able to look at the world relatively objectively, and I mean relatively.

And it doesn't mean that life becomes this kind of boring at the world relatively objectively, and I mean relatively, and it doesn't mean that life becomes this boring, gray world of just, it actually becomes more exciting and fulfilling. And so I learned that the hard way with that kind of realistic attitude, which I was forced through a lot of battles, is really, really what allowed me to write the 48 laws of power.

And the second thing was the power of daily practice, of habits. Now I've been meditating for about 11, exactly 11 years. Now every single day, I don't miss a single day. But this one day I make sure the next day I do two times. And the habit of doing it every day is just very fulfilling. It's because something hasn't forwarded to it.

And it's really helped have a profound effect upon me. doing it every day is just very fulfilling. Because something hasn't forward to it, it's really helped have a profound effect upon me. But habits of work and discipline where every day you attack something is where the power of our brain operates massively. We so intellectualize and verbalize things, but life is a feeling inside your body. It's an energy, it's a force.

How could you ever put the words that would describe what it's like? It's inevitable. It's inevitable, but you know it when it's like leaving you, but that feeling is like. So there was another woman who I've, or she wrote a great book about her stroke called Stroke of Inside Jill Bolte. She became a neuroscientist. She had a much worse stroke and she literally felt all of the life draining out of her body, inch by inch by inch, as like as death was passing

through her. I had a little bit of that and I also felt that this kind of force that is being alive is like being drained out of me. It wasn't as strong as that because my stroke wasn't as bad, but I did connect to the feeling of life and the feeling of death because I had the feeling of death in my body as I described earlier, the sense of my bones kind of shriveling and melting and getting soft and kind of everything that makes you alive, kind of leaving your body. So it makes you aware that there's a physical physicality to being alive, to being conscious, and to that you carry your death within you. I love this quote and I read it at the beginning of the pandemic and it's been helpful to me. I think it kind of connects what you're talking about

in the sublime book. Mark's Reaus in Meditations, he says he learns from one of his mentors. That the key to happiness is to be free of passion but full of love. What does that mean to you? I'm not quite sure. I don't know if I can you help me a little bit, and then I'll riff. I was taking it as meaning like, you're not angry, you're not jealous, you're not frustrated. Like the passions, the sort of negative emotions as the stuff is on that.

So love isn't a passion. But love is some sort of deeper emotion, some better way to go through the world. That of all the passions, that was the one that was okay. Okay, so love is a passion. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's something that, you know, I believe very much so, and it is kind of touching

upon the sublime. But all the other passions are very inward moving, right? They're about you. They're about your anger, they're about your frustration. And all the other passions are very inward moving, right? They're about you. They're about your anger, they're about your frustration. Yes, you could be angry because some people are doing some really fucked up things to you at some point, right? So it's not completely you, but the emotion is geared towards how you feel and you want

to get retribution if someone's hurt you, you want revenge, you know? So it's all very kind of self-centered. But love is the one emotion that forces you outside of yourself. True love, because there can be fake love, where you really it's just a form of narcissism, where you want people to give you the attention, try and feed the image you have of yourself. But true love, the ability to get outside of yourself, and to feel what other people are feeling, but true love, the ability to get outside of yourself and to feel what

other people are feeling, which is empathy. An empathy, which is a word I'm afraid it's overused and I'm getting a little tired of it, I wish we could find a better word, but it's a major theme in the sublime because the idea is the highest mental power that we humans have, the source really of our intelligence is what they call theory of mind, that we are able to place ourselves in the bodies and the minds of other people. It what's made us to supreme social animal, right? It's worth thinking about what someone else is thinking. Yeah, and it's not only just for love, it's also for fighting your opponent, et cetera, and for dealing any kind of social situation. But it's the source of all of our intelligence, right?

It's the source of our science. A great scientist, like at Einstein, is thinking inside the very subjects he's trying to get into, right? And that's where his metaphors and analogies often come from, because he's able to think about it. Oh, this is like this. Right. Yeah. So, that's the source of our power.

And so, high level empathy where you're able to think inside of other people to kind of imagine what they are going through, what their feelings are, is to me the highest passion of all, which is a form of love and it is extremely sublime. I'm actually not as secure and certain of myself as people think I am. Whenever I hold a belief or I'm writing a book, I always start with the premise that I'm probably wrong, that I'm actually quite ignorant,

that my idea is pretty stupid. And I look at the evidence on the other side and I examine it and I try and convince myself that my initial idea was right. And if it isn't, then I change it. But it's very painful because you want desperately to hold on to those beliefs that you had initially. So the number one thing about reality is confronting yourself, the fact that you are a limited human being with a limited cognitive abilities, you are emotion based, and so your relationship to the world is usually through thick layers of illusions that come from the media, that

come from your childhood, that come from your culture that you live in, and that you have to cut through those layers, but you have to confront yourself and see yourself as the source of them. One of the things in our nature that's extremely powerful is our ability to get inside the perspective of others and get inside their world. But empathy is a really hard thing to write about because it's not something you can quantify. We're such a culture that loves data and quantifying things. You can't really write a book about empathy in any kind of realistic practical way because it's a feeling, it's a visceral emotion, it has to be a feeling.

And we have this power because as primates for hundreds of thousands of years we lived without the ability of language in our earliest ancestors and we had to understand each other without being able to speak words. We're incredibly attuned to the emotions and moods of people around us and I know in my life I practice empathy on a very deep level. So when I go, I'm out in the world, and I'm in the store or something, or wherever I'm on the street, and I see someone,

I go through this process where I go, what is it like to be that person? What is it like to be them, to feel like them? You know, what is it like to grow up in that house? I imagine a background for them. And I use my imagination to get inside their world. And sometimes I get this sort of shutter, this feeling, like I actually can be them, that I actually can feel what it's like to be in their world.

Now, obviously, I'm probably inaccurate, but I get closer to it than if I'm sitting there judging and criticizing them. And so I've been doing this for probably my whole life because it's kind of what a writer does. A writer has to get into other people's skin. So you might say, well, Robert, it's easy for you because that's who you are. You were born that way. But I wasn't born that way.

It's a skill you develop practicing it endlessly, using your imagination to get inside the worlds of other people. It's obviously a little bit harder to cross gender and ethnic lines and socioeconomic lines, but it's certainly not impossible. And I know I've done it on several times. Occasions, so it's an incredibly valuable tool that each and every one of you is born

with, but that you don't use it. It's like a tool in your box that just lies there and just gathers rust. And so I know it's hard to talk about and write about in a practical way, but I did my best to sink into it and explain to you how you can develop this extremely critical tool. If I'm talking about how we have certain qualities that we have to accept and through accepting them, try and move past them. So I'm trying to tell you you feel envy, accept that, and now find a way to make envy useful. And I explain how you can start instead of feeling envy,

you can start feeling sorry for people who have less than you, you can start using your envy of powerful people to emulate them, etc. Well, death is the ultimate barrier for all of us, not just physically but psychologically. I maintain that human beings are messed up, screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death. It is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions, that we created the idea of an afterlife. And so it's like Montenia. I end the book with a quote from Montenia, and he says, the ability

to think about death and overcome the fear of death is the ultimate freedom. You're enslaved by this fear, you're not aware of it, it's controlling you. Overcoming is the ultimate freedom. I have to end the book on that. But the idea is, most people are going to say,, oh that's not me, as they say, for all of these chapters. Oh, other people, they're irrational not me. Yeah, oh, I'm not really afraid of death. I play video games and I'm always killing people and I watch movies and people are always dying because I'm not afraid of it. That's a cartoon version of death.

Our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death. Your death is something physical. It's going to happen to you. It's a very visceral thing. You are afraid of it. No matter how many video black ops games you play, you are still afraid of your own death. And that fear is creates what I call latent anxiety. It makes you fearful of a lot of things in life and you're not aware of it. It makes you cautious about failure. It makes you cautious about taking risks. So I'm trying to show you that your fear of death has infected you on many, many levels.

And so I compare it to this. I use the metaphor in the book. I don't use many metaphors, but this is one I use is that death is like this vast ocean that we stand on the shore of. Most animals are not aware of their mortality. We are the only species as far as we know that's aware that's mortality. And here you are on the shore of this immense vast ocean. You don't know what death is or what it's going to be, and you're afraid of it, and you turn your back to it.

And we humans have the ability to explore things to conquer our fear, and I want you instead of turning your back to actually enter that vast ocean and get and explore it. And I show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways. 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 with Wondery Plus in Apple

podcasts. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondery that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownauer, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking.

Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.

on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.