The Daily Stoic - Life Is About What We Can Do For Each Other

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

“Why are we here? It’s an impossible question to answer, I suppose. Of course, on a fundamental evolutionary level, we’re here to pass along our genes. This is why we strive for success. This is why we lust for sex. This is what keeps the species going. But equally encoded in that evolutionary software and in our culture is another purpose, another less selfish drive: The drive for meaning. Merely to subsist, to persist—what kind of existence is that?”Ryan reads his recent article about the responsibility of service that life demands from us all.This episode is brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.This episode is also brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.***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 @DailyStoic: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 Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic each weekday We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics Something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage Justice temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers.

We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey there listeners,

while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Codopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some

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Hey everyone, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic. The last month or so, I've been working at a vaccine clinic here in rural Texas, right, right outside Austin, and it's been a pretty incredible experience, especially after such a where this massive thing was happening, and unless you were a doctor or a politician or an academic with certain expertise, there's very little that you could actually do to help people or help yourself, right? We sort of had to trust that leadership

would take care of things. You could keep your family safe, which obviously we talked a lot about here. There were sort of little duties you could have as a citizen, but this wasn't like a war where you know, the average person could could could enlist or, you know, serve in the Armed Forces in some way. There was just so much disempowerment, and we talked a lot here about a lifetime, dead time, using that time. Again, all of that taken care of, but it really wasn't until recently that there was much of an opportunity for me to do much. We've raised money here at Daily Stoic. I've tried to keep my employees safe. I've tried to keep my families safe,

tried to do stuff for friends and neighbors. But again, there was little I could do. But what the stoke focuses on again is what we can do within the constraints of the situation we had. And then, so when it became possible first to work at a phone bank and then to work at this vaccine clinics or helping people come in, helping them fill out paperwork, showing them where to park, all these little seemingly menial tasks,

but contribute to a big thing. We've vaccinated tens of thousands of people here in this little community. It's been deeply fulfilling. And I remember, and I am gonna touch on this a little bit in today's episode, but I was sitting there, you know, waiting to wheel someone out in a wheelchair. They were waiting for their, the 15 minute observation period

after they got their vaccine. And I got an email from a friend of mine, chair, they were waiting for their 15-minute observation period after they got their vaccine. And I got an email from a friend of mine, a really smart guy or really nice guy who was like a gas that I was doing this and a gas that I would get a vaccine. And that sort of inspired this article plus a nice email I got from my friend, James Altature. So today we're going gonna talk about a really important stoic idea and that is about what we can

and must do for other people. So this article went out to my email list on Wednesday, you may have already heard it, but it got such a great response. I wanted to read it here again to you. What is the most important thing to do? Why are we here? here again to you. Why are we here? It's an impossible question to answer, I suppose.

On a fundamental evolutionary level, we're here to pass along our genes. That's why we strive for success. This is why we lust for sex. This is what keeps our species going. But equally encoded in the evolutionary software and in our culture is another purpose. Another less selfish drive, the drive for meaning merely to subsist, to persist. What kind of existence is that? Indeed, the greatest achievements in human history are not selfish ones. It's art that speaks to what it means to be alive, that gives people hope or insight. It's a scientific breakthrough that makes things better for everyone. Was the invention of the rule of law. It was the notion that government exists with the consent of the people. It's the collective sacrifices.

It's the tackling of hard problems together. It's the idea that we are here for each other, that we are here to make things better for others for the next generation that makes life meaningful and worth living, because in doing so, we find happiness and respect for ourselves. The fruit of this life, Marcus Aurelius wrote is good character and acts for the common good.

On Easter my friend James Altature sent me a verse from the Gospel of Mark, which reads, become great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. There was a time in my life that would have made zero sense to me. The language is repugnant in that sense. Servant, slave, give your life, you know, no thanks. But as I've gotten older, the logic is clear to me. And perhaps this came from from having kids, which we talked about in the Daily Dad podcast, from discovering the emptiness

of accomplishments. And I just did a YouTube video about this. You can check out at dailystoweth.com.s. YouTube. Maybe it was that it took a while for the wisdom to sink in, or maybe it was a byproduct of bearing witness to the rampant selfishness, needless cruelty, and displaced rage that has consumed large swaths of our society over the last year, especially. I suspect in a perverse way, the ugliness of that prolonged moment from COVID-19 to our racial reckoning will turn out to be a gift for all of us, because it is a compelling cautionary tale of how easily one's life can go very differently, because these people are not just

ignorant and unattractive, but punishing by their own way of living. If you've ever talked to a selfish or deranged person who has been radicalized by politics or untethered by conspiracy theories or found yourself related by blood or friendship to folks who have been infected with this virus, it sobers you up real quick. It breaks your heart too. It didn't have to go this way, and yet so quickly and easily it did for so many.

There was a great Huffington Post headline a few years ago that captured the impotence one feels trying to discuss basic human rights or compassion or restraint to some people. It reads, I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people. I have found myself thinking that same thing time and time again over the last year too, whether it was after watching something on the news or talking to a neighbor or even writing and speaking to my own audience about the pandemic, the social justice and race conversations that have exploded over the summer and the 2020 election and now vaccines. Watching friends say things like, I can't wait for things to go back to normal when social

media makes it quite clear literally nothing about their habits or social life was impacted by a devastating pandemic that spreads in enclosed places and disproportionately affects the elderly and the vulnerable. Watching members of my own family seek to rationalize something like George Floyd's death because he might have been on drugs, might have had a criminal record or that very few people are killed by the police each year. Stuck in my head is an exchange I had with a woman who took profane exception to me referring to the murderers of a mod

Arbery as hillbillies. Shockingly she seemed more upset by this than video of a man being chased down and shot like a dog in the street. Just last week a very accomplished friend sent me a note explaining his resistance to the COVID-19 vaccines, which by the way mark an incredible collective human accomplishment on par with landing on the moon. Why should I a perfectly healthy adult in a safe age bracket have to risk myself by taking some new vaccine? He said to me, you know, the plight term for this is vaccine hesitancy and I've seen it in the clinic, but I think it's more correct to

call it an abdication of duty, particularly in the case of this person. It's a rejection of our collective purpose. I'd love a chance to go back and try to explain this to my grandfather and great grandfather who fought in World War One and World War Two. Oh, they're worried about the possibility of side effects, despite overwhelmingly available information to the contrary, and yes, this is true even with the recent news about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. They're wondering why they should have to take a tiny risk when they're otherwise healthy and could otherwise just go about their life just fine. I'm sure that the generations who lived not only through Typhus, the great influenza and polio, but had to cross the Atlantic to fight in someone else's war would totally understand. Do you know what the data

said about landing at Normandy? I can imagine my grandfather saying, it said we were all probably going to die, and it wasn't even certain that the invasion would work. Now you might say that it's unfair for me to compare the pandemic to World War 2 and it's true. It is. It took the full might of an axis of industrial powers and four years of war to kill 400,000 Americans. It took COVID-19 just 10 months. And by the way, it's a lie to say that these were all old people. A full 105,000 people under the age of 65 have perished from COVID-19 in the U.S. alone. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle and we're the host of Wunderys 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 feuds 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 Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. There were certainly isolationists in America in 1918 and 1941, but by and large people got it.

The idea of ransoming oneself for the many, as Jesus said, was common, more than six million people volunteered to serve in the Second World War. That's nearly 40% of the entire fighting force, and the average service length was three years. And that's what happens when a generation of men and women and children get to work for a common cause. And they accomplished something incredible as a consequence, something far more impressive than any of them did as individuals

when those fortunate enough to survive came back home and went about their ordinary lives. But for the last 12 months in the same country that melted down its jewelry for the war effort a generation or two ago has been having serious discussions about whether we have any obligations to people who sit vulnerably in nursing homes. Look, I get it. It sucks to have your life and your business disrupted to lose opportunities you worked your whole life for. I make my living flying around

giving talks to large groups indoors. The last 12 months were quite anxious for me economically. It was stranger still having to turn down offers to speak to groups that had no business getting together during the second and third surges of the pandemic, but it was obviously the right thing to do. I also happened to have dropped my life savings into opening a small bookstore in this town I live in in Texas,

two months before the world shut down. Needless to say, it was a financial blood bath to sit here and not be able to open as expenses carried on nonetheless. But again, what was the alternative? Put my interest over somebody else's grandma or some cancer patient who is already facing high enough odds as it is. Externalize the consequences of actions I freely took and make society carry my weight. I think I'd rather get COVID than that. I love sports. I've missed all sorts of cool opportunities in the last year not being able to go and speak in various locker rooms. But I remain nevertheless appalled at the behavior of so many people in sports. Because as always, sports are a metaphor for life, whether it's coach Dan Mullin demanding that the stadium be packed for Florida home games, just days

before his team was devastated by a COVID outbreak, or just this month, the Rangers packing a stadium in the middle of the fourth surge of the virus. Was our governor concerned? No, he was throwing a tantrum about Major League Baseball, moving its all-star game due to a stupid law passed in another state. I don't want my son's athletic career negatively affected, said the parents of collegiate athletes, but this is my daughter's last year of academic eligibility. Okay, so we have a season of college sports and thousands and thousands of cases in the NCAA. And the athletes were mostly fine, of course, and it didn't turn out as bad as some people

predicted, but it's indisputable if we, and this would be proven if we had even basic contact tracing in this country, that we could link these cases to hundreds and hundreds of thousands more people in the community. Try going to talk to those people about negative consequences. And of course, look, nobody comes out and says, I don't care about other people. They say a bunch of other stuff instead. And I got these emails when I sent this out on Wednesday. They say stuff like the pandemic is overblown. They shrug and say, well, I guess we all have different risk tolerances. And again, you can have a different risk tolerance about how you invest your money.

You can't have a different risk tolerance about a pandemic or drinking and driving. They try to claim what they're really worried about is how this affects small businesses, or lonely people. They say, but this wedding is really important to my sister. They say my six-year-old deserves a party with their friends. COVID is not the only place that this indifference manifests either. Rather than wrestle with police brutality or the simmering rage of their black country, men and women, people say things like, but what about black on black crime?

They say, but what about all the property damage? They say, but what about Antifa? All of this is a way of dodging the reality of the choice in front of us. Can you subjugate your own interests if only temporarily for the sake of someone else, countless someone else's? Most of whom you will never even meet or know, can you serve them? Can you sacrifice for any of them? Can you hear what they're saying? Can you care? The religious stuff that I talked about at the beginning, maybe that turns you off a bit. I get it.

I myself am not a Christian, but I use this verse not only because it's beautiful, but because it seems that Christians have struggled more with the lesson at the core of the verse than almost any other group. The most vaccine hesitant group in America is Republicans and white evangelical Christians. There's a video I saw at the beginning of the pandemic of a woman explaining why her

faith made her exempt from COVID protocols. And if you didn't see the photo, there's a photo of an Easter service attended by our former president who quite nearly died of COVID indoors without a mask in sight, a year into a pandemic that's killed more Americans than every war the United States has ever fought, except for the Civil War, and we're giving the Civil War a run for its money. Hillel was once asked to explain the Bible in a short sentence. He stood on one foot and said, love thy neighbor as thyself, all the rest is commentary. I would argue that Hillel's answer is a great answer to the question,

what is the meaning of life as well? What we're here for is what we're able to do for each other. We're here to serve, we're here to help to have good character and do acts for the common good. That's not always easy. In fact, it's often quite hard. Did the pandemic or the racial events of the last year reveal the differences in privileges that some of us have absolutely? And this knowledge should increase our sense

of obligation. We are made for each other. We forget that at our peril. And we ignore that to our shame. forget that at our peril, and we ignore that to our shame. Look, if you haven't got vaccinated, you should, if you're hesitant, you should. If you have been vaccinated, go try to help convince people that you know in your life, volunteer at a clinic, try to help you make sure your employees get it, make sure the people you work for it, cover them,

help them, help your old neighbor who can't use a computer, navigate, signing up, whatever you can, try to make a difference. We're here for each other. Yes, you might save your own life, but in saving your own life, you prevent yourself from taking someone else's life or harming someone else, and you also make other people safer. And each person you help inoculate against this terrible virus, you know, ripples through the community the same way that selfishness can ripple through a community. So do a good turn.

This is what stoicism is about. As Mark has really said, the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good. Be safe, be smart, be well everyone. Music 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.

download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.