The Daily Stoic - There Needs To Be Outlets | Keeping “The News” In Check

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

🎓 Inspired by these last few difficult years, we’ve assembled the best Stoic wisdom into an actionable course—Slay Your Stress: A Daily Stoic Challenge. The new 20-day challenge, which includes 6 new days, is designed to equip you with the strategies and mindsets needed to reclaim your life from the negative effects of stress and anxiety. This will be a live course. Beginning on July 26, all participants will move through the course together at the same pace. Registration is open and will be for five more days. Registration will close tonight at MIDNIGHT. Sign up for Slay Your Stress Now.✉️ 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 the Daily Stoke Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes, 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 stoke, 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. 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. There needs to be outlets. Where at the end of our ropes were exhausted, stressed, and scared everyone is. Three years of a pandemic, political dysfunction and polarization, a brutal war in Ukraine,

coups and assassinations unfolding all over the globe, things have never been so hot or intense. Even the actual temperature is getting hotter. Should it surprise us then that a group of mothers and Massachusetts have been organizing small outdoor get-togethers just to scream, just to shout all their anxieties and fears out into the void? It seems a little crazy, but it's also perfectly sane. We've all been through so much,

but even if the last couple years have been totally normal, it doesn't take much to imagine yourself getting a lot of relief from something as cathartic as screaming the top ear lungs. Certainly it's better than shouting at a coworker on Zoom or venting your frustration at your kids or the person who just cut you off in traffic. The point is the accumulated stress and difficulty of life is like a toxic sludge that needs to be disposed of.

We need an outlet for it. Scratch that as human beings here in 2022, we need outlets plural. We need ways to channel that energy, that stress, that exhaustion, that existential dread when we wake up wondering, is this ever going to get better? Like Marcus turning to his journal or Seneca taking cold plunges, some even think his brutal plays were a creative outlet. Or Cricippus going up for a long distance run,

Epititus lifting weights, Cato going for a meandering walk around Rome, we need our own version of that simple, restorative practice. As we said before, stress is a fact, but being stressed is a choice. And choosing not to find outlets to process and manage that stress, that's on you. And of course, I also suggest you check out our slay, your stress challenge that we're doing at Daily Stoic. It's 12 days of Stoic wisdom inspired to help you conquer

your anxiety, your worry, your fears inspired to help you conquer your anxiety, your worry, your fears, your frustrations, your depression, all the things that stoke still with, that we deal with here in modern life, that stoke wisdom and stoke philosophy is designed to help us conquer. You can check it out. It's something I've been working on using myself. We've melded in some of the, the best insights from modern psychiatry and psychology. We've looked at characters from history and literature.

We've put together what are a number of invaluable actionable strategies that will help you manage your stress, get perspective, stop sweating the smallest stuff, feel some peace, feel good about yourself, and of course do what you need to do. And there's just 24 hours left to sign up for this challenge. We'd love to have you. Registration will close tonight at midnight. I hope you join us. Sign up at dailysteroic.com slash stress. Keeping the news in check.

Even the ancient news felt inundated with gossip and news. This week you will face a barrage like they couldn't have imagined. From texts, calls, emails to the incessant grind of the 24-7 news machine. Instead of responding to every status update, every urgent call or the latest trending in Cindi area news story, take a moment to remember the three ways that the Stokes used to keep their focus on their purpose and duty in the present moment. Number one, step away from the noise. Two, remember that no news can throw you off the purpose of your present choices. Three, don't add something negative or positive to what's being reported.

This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoke Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living by yours truly and my colleague, Stephen Hanselman, who I also wrote the Daily Stoke with, you can actually get signed copies of the Daily Stoke Journal in the Daily Stoke store at store.dailystoke.com. Or, we've got copies here at the Payneed Porch, my bookstore and fast-trip Texas. Always pivolate people ask me to sign them all the time. Anyways, check out the Daily Stoke Journal. I'm on my fourth year of doing it.

You might like it as well. But here's two quotes from Marcus and one from Epictetus to guide you this week. Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good and stop bouncing around. But when you do, keep in mind the other mistake, to be so distracted by getting control that you wear yourself out and lose a purpose by which you can direct your thoughts and impulses. That's meditations 27. Epic Titus' Discourses 3-8 says, whenever disturbing news is delivered to you, bear in mind that no news can be relevant to your reason choice.

Can anyone break news to you that your assumptions or desires are wrong no way, but they can tell you someone died. But even so, what is that to you? And then Marks realizes Meditations eight, four, nine. He says, don't tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. It's been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you. This is the report.

The report wasn't that you've been harmed. I see that my son is sick, but not that his life is at risk. So always stay within your first impressions and don't add them to your head. This way, nothing can happen to you. Look, I think the number one secret to a good productive routine and personal happiness is to limit your news consumption. Obviously I'm biased as an author, but read books. Don't watch the news. Read thoughtful perennial analysis. Don't follow speculative news reports. Limit your news consumption. And like, honestly, if you do feel like you

need the distraction, you need like a palakunzer, don't pull up CNN, pull up ESPN, like read about sports or something, right? Read celebrity gossip. Don't read the latest divisive piece of news. I'm not saying that it's not important to be informed. Of course, it's important to be informed. I would just argue that following the infinite news machine is how one becomes informed. I think, as I've said before, the great influenza, a book that I read at the beginning of the pandemic, taught me much more about how to spend the last 15 months than, you know, any breaking news story because the news news story's never really changed anything. It's like, hey, this thing is real. Here's the scientific advice. Take it seriously. Wait for it to be over, right? The latest report is only adding to what we already know for the

most part. So step back. Don't consume so much news. Couple recommendations on this. Obviously, one, my book Trust Me in Long is about how the news manipulates you. But it's a great book by Daniel Boersten called The Image that I suggest people read. There's also Neil Postman's amusing ourselves to death. These are two eye-opening books that will give you a sense of why you should consume as little news as possible and how manipulative it is and how harmful it is.

And then the other book which inspired my book, Trust Me I'm Lying, if you read the jungle as a kid in high school or whatever, Epton Sinclair's exposé of the meatpacking industry, then I strongly suggest you read his book, The Brass Check, which is actually an exposé of the news industry around the same time. And sadly almost nothing has changed. I'm not saying that reporters aren't good people. I'm not saying that they don't do an important public service. I'm not saying I read no news. I'm just saying, look, the most viral emotion is anger. Should it surprise us that the news perpetually makes us angry, right? Should

it surprise us that news is always breaking, but never fully arrives, that they're always speculating. No, it's an enormous beast trying to capture as much attention as possible to then sell that attention to advertisers. You are the product that's being sold and you consume this free news. Gotta understand that. Listen to podcasts. Podcasts are great conversations.

Even this, like I'm recording this, but it has no real date on it. It should be relevant forever. So I'm not as incentivized to rile you up the way that your news is. So I think it's interesting that even 2000 years ago, the Stokes were struggling with it. They'd be appalled at what our information diet is today. So step back, give yourself some space.

Don't follow breaking news. Don't let it change who you are, don't let it rattle your equilibrium. Just keep doing you read books, study real wisdom and information that will make you smarter and able to respond to what's happening in the world and make you a better, more informed citizen. It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Mementomori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is.

You built this Mementomori calendar for Dio Stoke 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, and every 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 and calendar.

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 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 Cotopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty.

So, if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet.