The Daily Stoic - We Must Push It Away | How To Stay Sane In An INSANE World

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

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designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com. We must push it away. It happens.

It shouldn't, but it does. A parent buries a child. A diagnosis upends a life overnight. A storm surge swallows a coastline whole. A family business built over decades burns to ashes in a single day. We stagger under the weight of these tragedies. We are jarred by circumstances we don't control. Marcus Aurelius was, as we've said, it was one misfortune after another for him, one bad break after another. Why him? What had he done

to deserve this? Why had the gods forsaken him? Meditations would have been a place for Marcus Aurelius to ask these questions, to pick apart the sheer odds and unlikeliness of the losses and setbacks that befell him. Yet he didn't. Instead, in the pages of Meditations, he tells himself not to delve too deeply into such things. He tried to remind himself that he wasn't in control, that he didn't get a choice, that things had always been like this. Perhaps he would have related to the most haunting song in Hamilton, where a broken Hamilton reels from the loss of his son and his reputation. What Marcus did was all any of us can do. He put one foot in front of the other. He focused on what he could be grateful for.

He gave others the grace he deserved but never received. This was how he pushed away, how he worked through the unimaginable. And the same will work for us. Hey just to thank you for being an awesome listener of the Daily Stoic Podcast, which I very much appreciate. We are offering a discount to anyone who wants to sign up for the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. We're gonna kick Spring of 2025 off

with 10 days of Stoic inspired challenges. Dailystoic.com slash spring with code DSPOD20 for the 2025 Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. I'll see you in there. It's one of the hardest things to do in the world. I think it's harder than running a marathon or writing a book or building a business. What's hard right now is to not be infected by what's happening around you. Tensions are high. There's political dysfunction that spills out on the street. There's misinformation and extremism. Nonsense. There's cruelty and meanness. I know it can feel like the world is going crazy, but all those things were true in ancient

Rome too. And yet in Marcus's private writings we see him constantly reminding himself to not lose his humanity, to not go crazy in response to the craziness. And so in today's video I want to share some stoic advice to help you do that. To stay good and focused and calm in a world of cruel and stubborn and obnoxious people because they will always be with us and we have to figure out how not to be like them. I think because of books like 1984, people think that the totalitarian regime they have to be worried about is the one that censors what they can and can't see.

Right? That's a little bit like Fahrenheit 451 too, like the government's coming into your home, taking your books and burning them. And certainly that is a bad thing and it does happen. And there are places all over the world where human beings are subjected to that kind of top-down tyranny.

And in the ancient world, some people thought ancient Rome was the country that did that and in some cases it did. But in the more ancient world, some people thought ancient Rome was the country that did that, and in some cases it did. But in the more modern world, most autocrats and authoritarians take a different tact. And this is something I talk about in my first book, Trust Me Online, which is instead of trying to suppress or control information, what they do is flood you with information. In fact, one of Trump's advisors talked about this. The opposition party is the media.

And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. I said, all we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things, they'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done, pang, bang, bang.

Instead of trying to tightly control the messaging, what they do is they overwhelm people with so much news, so much noise, so much contradictory stuff that it's really hard to keep your bearings. And this is true all over the world. It's also kind of a crisis public relations strategy that brands and celebrities engage with too. The Russians are probably the best at it though,

which is like they just bombard you with information about a person, about a country, about a thing, and you become confused, you become disoriented. And so this is where Stoicism is actually so important. Seneca talks about having a sense of the path that you're on and not being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. I think that's a helpful metaphor here. Being able to lock on to truth

and to not get distracted by every new piece of information, every new bit of noise, to not be bounced around by gossip and scandal, to not be outraged by every single outrage, because if that happens, you won't be able to be outraged by the truly outrageous things. And to understand that this is the game

that is being played on you. Orwell talking about these kind of tactics says that, to see what is right in front of your nose requires constant effort. And actually he says one of the purposes of keeping a journal is to like keep your bearings in a crazy, overwhelming, noisy world.

And so that's one of the things I do on my pages of my journal. I'm sitting down and reminding myself what's important, reminding myself what's true, reminding myself what my values are, reminding myself what my obligations and duties are. And then I'm reminding myself what aren't those things, what I'm going to let go, what I'm going to put aside for now. And to have this kind of media literacy combined with this stoic virtue of discipline and command over your own mind is really essential. And if you don't have it, you will be controlled and manipulated in the way that those totalitarian governments used to do it, but you won't even understand that that's what's happening to you.

In a time of dysfunction, in a time of conflict and division amidst chaos and disinformation and misinformation, when cruelty and meanness are widely accepted, when the system is falling apart and it looks like the center may not hold, your main job, the most important thing you can do is don't become a lunatic, right? Don't let it infect you. Don't let crazy people make you crazy. Don't let assholes turn you into an asshole.

Think of the Rome that Marcus Aurelius lived in. Think of Seneca under Nero. These would have been crazy times. These were dark times. Chrysippus, one of the early Stoics said, look, if I wanted to be part of the mob, I never would have studied philosophy. I never would have become a philosopher. The point is you have to stand apart. You have to not get sucked in. You can't let it break you. You can't let it make you despair. You can't let it make you crazy.

You can't let it make you abandon your principles. You don't control what's going on out there, but you control who you are in here. You control who you are in this world. And the idea is to not let it affect you, to not let it make you crazy, to not let it make you worse. And that's the first step to making it better. I just had this kind of nasty encounter with someone where they did something, you know, that was rude and entitled and disrespectful, not so much to me, but to someone I cared

about. And I think earlier in my life, it would have made me very angry. I would have gotten very upset. It would have been a big confrontation. There were emails flying around and recriminations and demanding an apology. I was working on a Daily Stoic email and it just sort of came to me, you know, this person can't be anything other than they are. This is who they are.

This is what they do. And first off, it was sort of on me not to have been fully prepared for something like this to happen. But second, they're not gonna change. There's a line in Meditations where Mark Zerullo says, you know, you can hold your breath till they're blue in the face.

They're just gonna keep on doing it. And it can be painful to have to accept that about certain people or that certain types of people have to exist, but it's true. There've always been people like this, there will always be people like that. This person is always going to be some version of this. Maybe they can improve a little bit here or there at the margins, but this is who they are. And the less I can take that personally, the less I can let it sort of eat at my brain or just frustrate my sense of justice with the world, the better. Because I just need to focus on how I cannot be like that. I just need to focus on how I can raise my kids to not be like that. The thing happened, they acted the way that they did. Am I gonna throw good money after bad

and spend a bunch of time and energy arguing and fighting and whatever to get them to understand something that probably fundamentally they're never gonna understand? No. So this is, I think, a really key stoic idea. We accept, we move on. If holding your breath until you were blue in the face

made them change, then sure, maybe the stoics would say it's a good idea. But since it's not, it's just gonna involve you giving yourself brain damage or killing yourself. So accept it, move on, focus on people who are not like that, and most importantly,

focus on not being like that yourself. One thing that's never changed about the world is how much of it's out of our control. Two thousand years ago it was largely out of the control of all the Stoics. Even Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, most things are not in his control. When we have a way we'd like things to go, we know they might not go that way. What does that create? That creates anxiety. And so for thousands of years the Stoics have been dealing with this thing that you and I are still dealing with today.

We get nervous, we worry, we have anxiety, we have fears and dread. Mark Surillis in Meditations talks about how he had a good day because he escaped anxiety. And then he actually corrects himself because, actually no, I didn't escape it. I discarded it because it was within me. He's realizing that he is the common variable

in all the situations that cause him anxiety, just as you are. Anxiety is within us, so we wanna work on it and think about it so it doesn't rule our lives or ruin our lives. It's easy to get swept away, to get carried away, to get worked up. There are forces that have always been howling

and blowing at people. Today it's the news and social media, but in the past it was the frenzy of the mob or public opinion, floor of the Colosseum. Our job, the task of Stoicism, is to help us keep that even keel. Marcus Aurelius says, to be like the rocks that the waves crash over,

eventually the sea falls still around. Our task, the purpose of Stoicism, is to help us slow down, to act with some restraint, to be able to reflect, to put every impression or opinion to the test, as Epictetus said, to not get swept away, to not be buffeted by forces beyond our control, to keep our bearings, to keep our values, to keep from losing our minds when everyone else around us is losing theirs. One of the things that Epictetus said was that if we wish to improve, we have to be content to be seen as clueless or out of the loop on some matters.

I think that's right and more important than ever. Obviously, your job in a democracy is to be an informed citizen and the Stoics expected us to participate in public affairs. And yet, if you are following every story, every bit of breaking news, you're going to get eaten alive. You're going to lose the bead. You're going to lose the thread, you're going to go crazy. And so one of the really powerful things you can do in this noisy, busy world where a lot of people are trying to manipulate, trying to get access to what we call the empire between your ears, is to put aside social media, to put aside breaking news, to put aside even YouTube videos, and to pick up a book, pick up an old book.

There's something here about a book that's 2000 years old, or a book about an era of history that is similar to your own, but without the partisan implications. So you're able to see what's happening now through the lens of 100 years of history, or 200 years of history. I would urge people to read psychology and history

and biography and biography and social science and also read fiction. The Greek plays, the Greek tragedies teach us a lot about the people on the world stage right now. They teach us a lot about ourselves and our own flaws and foibles. You got to get out of this hellscape of noise and chatter and get to information that's designed to have a chatter and get to information that's designed to have a long half-life that's designed to have truth in it. You know, they say if you're not paying for it,

you're the product that's being sold. That's partly true. Like when I'm writing a book, I'm trying to make something that's worth paying for and worth spending many, many hours with that's designed to hold up over a long period of time. And most of what you see on YouTube, most of what you see on social media,

most of which is scrolling across your television screen right now is the opposite of that. It's gonna be rendered incorrect by the next breaking story or the next development, or it's all speculation to begin with. During the pandemic, I read John M. Barrie's The Great Influenza. I read a book about the race to invent the polio vaccine,

and that showed me a lot about the science and the trajectories of viruses and pandemics. Showed me mistakes that were gonna be made, and then it showed me the sort of larger timeless trends. If you wanna understand what's happening politically right now, read All the King's Men, and it can Happen Here, two novels that actually get more to the essence of what's happening than a long piece in The New Yorker or on some substack you subscribe to. Read Mike Duncan's The Storm Before the Storm, which is about the time of Cato and Caesar

and Cicero and that will help you understand what's happening politically right now. Read Jeffrey Rosen and Tom Ricks, who wrote these books called First Principles and The Pursuit of Happiness about how stoic philosophy influenced the founders and how it's integrated into the American system of government.

I interviewed those people. You can watch the videos I have on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel as well. The point is you want to ground what's happening, the understanding of what's happening right now in the larger context, the deeper truth. You want to get out of what Robert Greene would call tactical hell and get into what he calls strategic heaven or what we might sort of colloquially refer to as being philosophical. Is a world without dishonest people possible? Is a world without annoying people possible? Marks really asked

himself this question in his journal 2000 years ago, and he says, look, the answer is, of course, no, he says, so when you meet one of those people go, look, this was statistically bound to happen. This is one of those people, they're a percentage of the whole, and we can apply this same exercise. Look, is a world where everyone likes you possible? Is a world without delayed planes possible? Are you going to hit every green light? No, of course not. So this is one of them. Just accept it. This is one of them. It was statistically bound to happen. Don't get worked up about it. Don't take it

personally. And certainly don't be surprised. It was bound to happen. Look, things are going to go sideways. People are going to say things. People are going to do things. There are definitely going to be problems in life. Things that you don't want to happen are going to happen. That is how it goes. But remember the Stoics say it can only harm you if it harms your character, if it changes

who you are, if it makes you vindictive or resentful or lazy or entitled, if it makes you worse as a person then you have been harmed. But people don't have the power to make us worse as human beings. That's something we control, that's within us. So who we are in response to what happens, that's where the harm can come from, but it's also where the benefit can come from. It can only harm you if it harms your character That's the essence of stoic philosophy You can only harm you if it harms your character and we decide whether this thing degrades us or improves us

We decide if we harm our character in response to what has happened to us So the famous passage from Marcus really is where he's talking about how the obstacle is the way. Do you know what kind of obstacles he's talking about? He's not talking about natural disasters. He's not talking about losing your arm. He's not talking about any of that. He's talking about people.

He's talking about assholes. He's talking about jerks. He's saying that people are our proper occupation. So they actually can't impede us. They can't get in our way. They can't actually cause us trouble because all the things they do are opportunities for us. Opportunities for us to practice virtue, courage, and discipline, and justice, and wisdom. We can have intentions and people can cause problems and disruptions. They can get in the way of what we are trying to do. But they present us new opportunities to try new things.

Let's try to see these frustrating, annoying, obnoxious people in our lives, not as problems or frustrations or even obnoxious at all, but actually as opportunities, opportunities for us to be kind, opportunities for us to be patient, opportunities for us to be creative, opportunities for us to teach

and opportunities for us to learn. That's what Mark Strelius means when he says the obstacle is the way. It's pretty demoralizing. It's not just that we seem to live in a society where people are getting away with doing horrible things, scandals, offensive remarks, incompetence. It's not just that they're getting away with it, it's seemingly like part of a career strategy. They're being promoted for it. They're being nominated to high office. They are being entrusted with responsibilities. They're being given second chances that, quite frankly, they don't deserve.

And it can sort of make you question, well, should I be like that? Is that how it's supposed to work these days? And the Stoic answer to that is no, not at all. The early Stoics talked a lot about standing out even when it cost them. They were people who tried to go against the grain. Agrippinus could have gone along to get along in Nero's reign, but he said, no, I'm going to be the bright thread that makes the garment more beautiful by being sort of uniquely myself. Chrysippus, one of the early Stoics, talked about how the whole point of philosophy is to not be part of the rabble or the mob. It's to be above that. It's to reach a higher plane of consciousness and awareness, to hold yourself to a higher standard,

both cognitively and ethically. And so ultimately what these other people are getting away with, what these other people are doing, how they're behaving, it doesn't change the standards we have to hold ourselves to. It doesn't change our obligations. It doesn't make it any less wrong,

any less awful, any less stupid. Now we have to insist on the standards we've always tried to hold ourselves to. We have to do what's right because it's right. And we have to understand that in the long run, it's mostly a bad strategy. The Stoics weren't saying like, hey, the reason not to treat people poorly or to indulge all these whims and urges and passions was that karma would come and get you or that you would go to hell when you die. They were saying that that was a hellish way to live.

And when you actually drill down on these people, when you actually look at them, yeah, sure, they might be making good amount of money, they might be in some position of power, but it is a hellish existence. They're not getting away with anything. You wouldn't actually want to be them. You might want some of the things that they have, some of the accolades that they've managed

to pile up, but you wouldn't trade your life for theirs. You wouldn't want to live inside their brain. How does this thing stop you? This thing that you're worried about, this thing that you don't want to happen, this thing that you're convinced is an awful development. Marcus Aurelius says, how does it stop you from acting with courage and temperance and justice and wisdom?

How does it prevent you from doing what you need to do, what you're supposed to do? In fact, in the Stoics say the obstacle is the way, what they're saying is that this situation, this thing you wouldn't choose to happen, that you didn't want to happen, that shouldn't have happened, it is an opportunity to act with courage and temperance and justice and wisdom. It's always an opportunity. Again, it might not be something you chose, it might not be something you want, it might not be something that's fair, it might not be something that's good, but it is nevertheless an opportunity

for you to act with virtue, for you to act with courage and temperance and justice and wisdom. People don't seem to understand this one really important thing. It's that you have a superpower. You have the power, Marcus really says, to have no opinion. He says remember events, things are not asking to be judged by you. You don't have to have an opinion about this, he says. You can just see it as it is. You can think nothing of it. You don't have to label it. You don't have to put it in categories. You don't have to say it's fair or unfair, positive or negative, smart or dumb. Just accept it as it is. The Stoics try to see the world as objective. Try not to insert opinions or

judgments on top of things because this is the path to peace, it's the path to wisdom. And of course, being agnostic in this way allows you to get to work doing what you need to do rather than wasting your time labeling, judging, and having opinions about stuff that is not up to you. Every day I send out one Stic inspired email totally for free. Almost a million people all over the world. You want to take your stoicism journey to the next level.

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Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey. I'm Indra Varma and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on the spies who invaded suburbia. The illegals weren't just blending in. They were the embodiment of the American dream. Nine-to-five jobs, dropping the kids off at soccer practice, and just the right amount

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