The Daily Stoic - This is What It Means To Be Indifferent | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

The Stoics spoke about being indifferent, disinterested. Have no interest in what makes no difference, Marcus Aurelius said. That’s the image of the Stoic. Unconcerned with what’s happening around them–no preferences, no emotion, good with whatever.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ 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 Facebook See 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. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks. Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners.

But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy we're all trying to follow. 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. This is what it means to be indifferent.

The Stoic spoke about being indifferent, disinterested. Have no interest in what makes no difference, Marcus really said. That's the image of the Stoic, unconcerned with what's happening around them. No preference, no emotion, good with whatever. There is a time and a place for that. But as we saw in practice and detailed in lives of the Stoics, in real life life, the Stokes were still human beings. They had friends and dreams and loves and tastes. While Stoicism, the abstract philosophy spoke of indifference to everything with virtue, in real life, the Stokes obviously preferred being comfortable to uncomfortable, liked to being

disliked, rich than poor, healthy than sick. Senna could call this preferred indifference, and he was strong enough to work with whatever life gave him, but if asked, of course, he had some preferences. It's like that wonderful line from Walt Whitman in his poem, I sing the body electric, whom himself enjoyed the stillings. All things pleased the soul he wrote, but these things pleased the soul well. So it can go for you.

You don't have to make yourself into a joyless robot. You don't have to crush every hope or preference inside you. It's not realistic anyway. The key is to be able to find the good and everything. Yes, there are still some things better than others. Don't make yourself dependent on getting what you want. Don't beat yourself up for wanting what you want. Does that make sense?

Nathan, it looks like you're talking to us from quite a podcast in studio. Yes, this is my COVID closet. The kid, the kid's got the home office, and so I'm literally in a little closet here. So yes, hi, thank you for doing this. So when you referred to this as office hours, I was thinking back to my college days and I was that kid who would go and take advantage of office hours, I would talk to the professors like, why did I get an A-minus, not an A-minus, one like to dissect. And so I was thinking about that. And, you know, the ideas of stoicism,

how do you measure it? I think that's really my question. You know, how do you know if you're being more courageous, if you're having more temperance, justice, wisdom, and all the little drop downs from that? Because it's, on one hand, it seems like, you know, if you'll just, you just kind of look at your life and say, oh, you're getting better at it.

But, you know, I was reading something of yours recently to talk about like, look at this as practice. And, you know, any practice, you know, sports, music, whatever, you usually have a lot of good feedback. But with the concepts of stoicism, it's just, for me, at least a lot harder to know, like, am I doing this right? Like, and not that there's a right or wrong way necessarily,

but do you know what I mean? Like, how do we know? For on the right track. No, it's tricky and I'm growing. I can't tell if it's something important or if it's sort of something that's just a byproduct of how we've come to see education that our first impulse is, you know,

how do I score this? How do I measure it? You know, is that a result? Is that how education is supposed to be done? Or is that what happens when you have an educational system designed to teach at scale for an industrial society slash world, right? So I don't know what I would say

that the best metric would be, although it probably loops back to what we were talking about earlier, is it visible in your actions? Are you losing your temper less? Are you kinder? Are you doing more things for other people? Is fear or anxiety less prevalent in your life? Now are these things you can measure like on an Apple watch? Probably not, but maybe part of Stoicism is developing that sort of internal sense for what's working and what's not working. There's a letter that Sennaka writes to Lucilleus, where he says, like, how do I know that I'm making progress?

And he says, because I'm becoming a friend to myself, meaning that he feels less shitty about himself and he's less hard on himself, and he's more aware of himself, right? And more loving towards himself. So the other thing I would say is, is just because the stills are sort of rigorous

and there's a self-discipline and they were driven, I'm not sure also that necessarily translates as a still needs to get an A and then is mad at themselves that they got an A-mine-us, right? I think part of it is this idea of like, no, no, I feel better. I feel better because I've abandoned all standards and I'm just resigned no, I feel better. Like, not, I feel better because I've abandoned all standards and I'm just resigned, but I feel better because like,

I'm encouraging myself and I'm getting better, you know, who I know that I'm meant to be. Yeah. That's good. Thank you. Awesome. Yeah. Let's do, let's see here.

Steven. All right, Ryan. How's do, let's see here, Steven. All right, Ryan, how are you? Hi. I have so many questions, but I will start with actually something that Maria Vargas was talking about earlier with mentoring. And I just wanted to say that I did your new year, new, new challenge back in January,

and the Slack community there turned out for me to be a wonderful mentor. So if she wants mentorship, you know, and it was all in that kind of informal relationship building kind of way learning together, but that's a great, I would highly recommend engaging in Slack community for mentorship opportunities. And the question really is like do you have any tips or advice on how we can really leverage that slack community for whatever this challenge is about to throw at us? Yeah, I do love the idea of accountability partners. So maybe you develop a goal or a practice or a thing you're going to work on and find someone and I've seen people do this in the channel over the years as we've done them. The idea of like, okay, we're going to check in with

each other once a week. Like I've talked about this. I'm in a sort of a mastermind group of a bunch of authors and we meet one for about one weekend a year. We all go to a, we rent a house, we all get together and we just sort of check in with each other on what's working, what's not working. We sort of critique each other's work from afar. We solve problems for each other. But the idea of having someone, you know, like in alcohol, it's anonymous, you have a sponsor. The idea of an accountability partner.

So choosing someone you kind of check in with each other, see how you're doing. I think that would be, that might be a way to do it as well. Thank you. Go. Let's do what we got here. Let's do the other Ryan here. Ryan's Siwald. Yes. Hi. I can. Great name. Thanks, you too. And yeah, you're not very often someone in Texas pronounced. This is my last name right. I get C-Walled usually.

So thank you. Appreciate it. All right. But my question for you was about something I saw in the reading today. You said you can't control the disasters that life throws at you, but how you respond to them with courage or cowardice or not at all is entirely up to you. And obviously in the case, I forgot exactly who it was talking about, but disaster struck them and they had to respond to it. Sure, but what can you do? Like you make the mistake that causes the disaster and you have to like write the mistake and move forward because even at

young age 22, I looked back and I'm like, wow, like I did that wrong. Like I heard someone doing that and I don't really know how to dig myself out of the hole that I kind of put myself into. Well, I would argue that that's probably more the rule than the exception. I would say most disasters are not visited upon us by the outside world. We invite them in, right, or we make them sort of unforced, as they say in sports. Most errors are unforced errors, not done by the brilliance of your opponent. So, you know, we tell the story in today's email about Xeno and the shipwreck. He washed up in Athens, he loses everything. So we don't know enough details about this specific event.

So we can't, you know, get too granular about it, but would it change anything if the shipwreck was his fault? You know, if he had been drunk or, you know, if he had rejected the advice, if they said, hey, no, there's a storm coming, don't go. And he said, oh, I can handle it. Many lost everything. You know, it changes it in the sense that there might be a more specific lesson for him

to learn. But the result, him losing everything and washing up in Athens and having to reimagine or rewrite the future of his life remains the same. So I think no matter what happens, whether it's our fault or not, this idea that you can't go backwards, you can't stand the same spot,

all you can do is move forward. It brings you back to the same point. So I think we can go two ways. Sometimes we can be in denial about whether it's our faults and as a result of that denial, you know, refuse the opportunity to move forward. And then in other times, we're so consumed by the fact that it was our fault, that we were guilty, you know, that we made the mistake that we didn't have to, that we dwell on it, and we beat ourselves up about it. And the result is also that we failed

to move forward. So I think what we're really talking about is how do you move forward, how do you focus on what you do next? Awesome, thank you. Jill, what have you got for us? So my question goes back, probably a question, discussing the idea of somebody brought up Slack, mentors. So I always feel a tour now, go a little like, count new

board, you know, get off everything and it does feel very peaceful. But then, especially in, you know, the time of a pandemic, then I start to think, I'm living in my own world, right? But also, you know, stoicism is, you know, you should be out in the larger community. Sure. question is, well, is the internet a community in that sense? So I guess my question to you is mainly, you know, what role does the internet play in this in this grand scheme? Well, I'm glad to ask that. So I'm interviewing Cal again for the podcast on

Thursday, maybe. So I will ask him this, I will ask him this very question. But I, I agree. I think it's been tricky in the pandemic because on the one hand, a lot of important social interaction or community has, you know, been, if not impossible, then severely constrained. And then that can draw you towards these online tools, this connectedness, which is good. But then it's also at your fingertips and it can be overwhelming. So I think there's a tension between it.

I like something like this where it's sort of like a two-week thing and there's some boundaries around it. Generally, I try to limit the access points that sort of random people have into my life. At the same time, I like to have really open channels with the people who are important to me or who I do get things out of. So does that make sense?

So maybe that's the balance. It's like, it's sort of closed off generally. But then you are also, you know, call text email me, you know, show up at my house. If, you know, anything happens, that's important to your group of people who are sort of in that circle. So maybe I think it's sort of about finding the balance between those two extremes. Yeah, that's helpful. Thanks. Yeah, I think so. That's what I was feeling like. Okay, I cut people off because we do depend on these tools.

So thank you. Yeah. Monica. Hello, everyone. I was going back to the whole. How do you kind of measure? This is a measure. But really a personal story

in like a moment for me where I realized that the practice was working for me. Me and my family, my kids were exposed to COVID during this time. And I normally probably would have gotten upset in how I felt like the information wasn't handled properly to, you know, relate to us what we were exposed to. But then I thought to myself, you know what, it happened. What can I do now going forward? There's no need to dwell on, you know, the past and what happened and, you know,

and going back and forth about that. And then I just sat there for like a few minutes and I was like like wow, this is a different response than you normally would have given. And I was like, that was my way of kind of measuring where I was at with this being in control of, you know, your emotions about what's happening to you in the world right now. So I just wanted to share that. I'm very glad you did because it brings up a couple things. So your point here about experiencing it being exposed to COVID, I would say maybe the way we really measure stoicism, whether we're making progress, it's less in the day to

day and more, where does it come, how does it come up in moments of crisis or, you know, moments of pressure or stress? Because that's really where it matters the most, right? If you're incredibly calm with the day-to-day nonsense, great, but can you be calm and controlled when a whole bunch of things are being thrown at you and your family is counting on you? So I think we really want to measure ourselves

in these important moments. And Monica, I had a similar experience. We ended up having to take my youngest son to the doctor for his routine checkup. And the next day, he woke up with being very sick. And so it was this alarming thing where we knew we were in a bubble. And then all of a sudden, that bubble gets burst. And so anyways, there's this window. We went to get the test.

This is when tests were not super common and so you know there was like three days between the test and the result. And I remember sort of trying to think of stoicism there where it's like if you've ever heard the example of Schrodinger's cat it's like this cat in a box and you can't see in the box and so is the cat alive or dead. I was thinking of that because it's like this cat in a box and you can't see in the box. And so is the cat alive or dead? That I was thinking of that because it's like we either have it or we don't have it, right? And the only thing that's that's uncertain is when the news will be delivered. And I remember thinking and I don't think I did a particularly great job. So it was a sort of an example that I

had to work on it more. But it was like, am I going to waste the next three days being anxious about something that's already decided, right? So the question is, is the news going to change the behavior in any way? Is it going to undo what's happened in any way? No. So really, the question is, how am I going to spend the next three days? Am I going to spend it biting my nails? Am I going to spend it miserable? Am I not going to play with my kids? Am I not going to get my work done? How am I going to use this time? So that was a great example of that was a great example of it for me. I'm really glad you shared this. The third thing I would say in response to what you're saying is this doesn't all have to be questions for me. If people want to share, if people want to share examples or their own experiences with the ideas, that can be just as valuable and I can learn as much from you guys as the

other way around. You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa. The Stoa, Poquila, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously we can all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we can fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic life. It's an awesome community you can talk about like today's episode you've talked about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using

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