The Daily Stoic - This Was Marcus Aurelius’s Biggest Weakness

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Ryan talks about the importance of taming your temper.The Stoics have some of the smartest and most applicable insights about getting your anger contained. For a high level introduction to some of those insights, check out this article: Anger Management: 8 Strategies Backed By Two Thousand Years of Practice. Or if you really want to get serious about conquering your anger, sign up for our course: Taming Your Temper: The 11-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Anger. 11 days of challenges, exercises, video lessons, and bonus tools based on Stoic philosophy and aimed at helping you deal with your anger in a constructive manner. Learn more here: https://dailystoic.com/angerSign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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 Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. 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. on music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of histories, greatest men and women.

For more, you can visit us at dailystowup.com. This was Marcus Aurelius' biggest weakness. Over and over again, Marcus Aurelius talks about it in meditations. He reminds himself not to let frustrating people implicate him in their ugliness. He warns himself against seeking revenge. He meditates on where the world's angriest people have ended up. Dead, soon enough, like everyone else he writes. He tries to replace rage, which he describes as unmannedly with love and justice, which he believed for the highest goods.

And so what does it mean that he returns to this theme so often? Is it that Marcus was the perfect stoic, that he was lecturing us on the contrary? The curbing of anger is such a strong theme in the book. His translator, Robyn Waterfield writes, his new translation of the annotated edition, I carry at the painting porch. It's fantastic, you should read it. The curbing of anger is such a strong theme in the book he writes that we can safely conclude that Marcus had a short temper.

Remember, Meditations was for Marcus' own use. He wasn't lecturing you directly. He was lecturing himself first. He was talking about what he struggled with most. We have no idea how bad Marcus' anger problem was, but it's quite clear that for him, as it is for most of us, anger was a problem. Never made things better. It only made them worse.

It was a source of stress and regret and it caused him and other people pain. So he worked on it a lot. He thought about it a lot. He developed strategies to help combat it. He tried to hold himself accountable and at the very least, he did a better job than his predecessor, Hadrian,

at winning that fight, which is why we admire Marcus Aurelius and anyone who is serious about their self-improvement. It's not about perfection, it's about earnest and hard one practice. This idea that just because you don't have an anger problem doesn't mean anger isn't a problem, I think is how the Stokes think about it. Seneca writes his famous essay on anger, Marx Aurelius clearly struggles with temper.

Of all the themes, perhaps other than death, the Stokes talk about temper the most, which is why we built our came in the temper course here at Daily Stoke. It's a two-week course on the best Stoke thinking exercises, practices, insights on how to excise anger from your life, how to get a little bit better at calming yourself in those stressful, difficult, frustrating situations. I hope you can check it out. You can check it out at dailystoke.com slash temper. It's a great course. We've had thousands of people go through it now. And if you're thinking about signing up for daily stoke life, just know that if you sign up for daily stoke life, now you get tamer temper and all the stoke courses totally for free. So you can sign up there at dailystokelife.com.

of course is totally for free. So you can sign up there at dailystokelife.com. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, check it out at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

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