The Daily Stoic - What Do You Commemorate? | No One Said It'd Be Easy

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

“As a historian, we have to look unflinchingly at the past, looking at the record of events as they happened. But commemoration—what we choose to celebrate and honor—is something different.” - General Ty Seidule🎙️ General Ty Seidule On Our Responsibility To Study, Understand And Grapple With History🎟 Order tickets to Ryan's tour dates at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. I've been writing books for a long time now and one of the things I've noticed is how every year, every book that I do, I'm just here in New York putting right thing right now out. What a bigger percentage of my audience is listening to them in audiobooks, specifically on Audible. I've had people had me sign their phones, sign their phone case because they're like I've listened to all your audiobooks here and my sons they love audiobooks we've been doing it in the car to get them off their screens because audible helps your imagination soar. It helps you

read efficiently, find time to read when maybe you can't have a physical book in front of you and then it also lets you discover new kinds of books, re-listen to books you've already read from exciting new narrators. You can explore bestsellers, new releases. My new book is up, plus thousands of included audio books and originals, all with an Audible membership.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audio book for free. You'll get right thing right now, totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. ["The Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator,

and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. What do you commemorate? The Romans did some terrible things. They conquered and they pillaged, they enslaved, they executed and persecuted. And the Stokes were more than just implicated in this.

They were active participants. Rusticus, the beloved teacher of Marcus Aurelius, the one that introduced him personally to the writings of Epictetus, was the persecutor of Justin Martyr, sentencing him to a cruel and terrible death. Seneca was an enabler of Nero. They all owned enormous estates, tended by slaves. And these are unpleasant things to think about. These injustices may have been commonplace then, but that doesn't excuse them.

They were still injustices, as the Stoics often acknowledged in their writings. Yet these contradictions and cruelties are not what we talk about most of the time here at Daily Stoic. Is that a cop-out? In a recent and all-time best episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, we talked to General Ty Sedgely, a former professor at West Point and a retired United States Army general. In the episode, talking of his work to rename and in some cases remove honors that the Army has bestowed on various figures of the Confederacy, General Sedgely makes a distinction between history and commemoration. As a historian, he said, we have to look unflinchingly at the past, looking at the record of events

as they happened. But commemoration, what we choose to celebrate and honor, is something different. One cannot deny the history of slavery and its ubiquitous and essential role in the history of America. One cannot deny the Civil War happened. One cannot deny the complexity of history, the complicated reasons people made the decisions they made, or the context they made them in. But when it comes to commemoration, the monuments and statues we put up, the stories we tell our children, we must be more selective. And this point transfers over to the Stoics. As students of history, we have to look at the whole scope of Greece and Rome,

looking at the good and the bad, taking in and understanding all of it. And then as people trying to cultivate virtue in our actual lives, we have to, as Epictetus said, choose what handle to grab. our actual lives, we have to, as Epictetus said, choose what handle to grab. We have to choose who to grab from, from the Romans. Caesar, who started a civil war, or Cato, who died trying to preserve the Republic. We have to commemorate the values they stood for even when they personally fell short. We have to celebrate what they did right, which was a lot, not just write them off because they also did wrong. We have to make sure that when we look at Marcus Aurelius we are celebrating him not for his power and his victories but for his private struggles. His struggles to be good and decent, moral and just,

to transcend the limitations of his time. We can't do myth-making, but we can still be inspired. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. This is the July 5th entry in the Daily Stoic. I am holding a cloth bound edition here. As it happens, this one has a 30% off Target sticker because that's where I got it. The book was for a brief time available at Target. I don't know if it still is. I hope you had a good 4th of July. Let me read you a little entry from Seneca's Letters 76. No one said it would be easy. Good people, Seneca writes, will do what they find honorable to do even if it requires hard work. They'll do it even if it causes

them injury. They'll do it even if it will bring danger. Again, they won't do what they find base even if it brings wealth, pleasure, or power. Nothing will deter them from what is honorable and nothing will lure them from what is base. If doing good was easy, everyone would do it. And if doing bad wasn't tempting or attractive, nobody would do it. And if doing bad wasn't tempting or attractive, nobody would do it. The same goes for your duty. If anyone could do it,

it would have been assigned to someone else, but instead was assigned to you. And thankfully you are not like everyone. You are not afraid of doing what is hard. You can resist superficially attractive rewards. I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago and something I said, I was talking about how sort of hard the industry had been ravaged that these folks were in.

And I talked about the last couple of years and how hard it had been. And I said, it's good, it's good that it's hard. Look, if everyone could do this thing, selling a house or assessing risk for insurance, if it's speeding the market, if it's delivering things from across the world, like if everyone could do the thing, everyone would do it.

And the fact that it's hard is what creates the margins of a business. Do I wish writing books was easier? Sure, but if it was easier, I'd have more competition. The fact that it's hard, that it's a battle against yourself and it's a battle against all these other things, that's what deters people. That's what makes doing it worthwhile,

not just like creates meaning and fulfillment in it, but it's what makes it success like lucrative in that sense. Again, if everyone could do it, it would whittle everything down until it's a commodity, until it's replaceable, until everyone has it, right? It becomes generic. So it's good that it's hard, but that doesn't mean that it's not hard.

It is hard. And no one said it would be easy. I am thinking of something else though, as I'm thinking about this Seneca quote. He has some somewhere else, he says something like, think about all the risks and the hard things people will do to be a little bit more famous, a little bit more important, make a little bit more money, whatever. And then think about

the excuses we make for why we don't have time to read or like why we can't do these other more virtuous things, right? We're willing to bear incredible burdens, force our way through intense adversity when there's something financially in it for us. But being a good person or improving in other ways, then we say it's hard or then we make excuses, then we don't do it. And I think that's interesting too, right? Again, it's supposed to be hard. It's gonna be hard.

It's not gonna be easy. But this is what makes it special. Look, if everyone was honest and principled, Cato wouldn't impress us as a politician. If power didn't corrupt, Marcus Aurelius being a philosopher king, who gives a shit, right? It's hard, but because it's hard, it becomes rare.

And because it's rare, it is valuable. And that's just something I try to tell myself working on this book right now. It's good that it's hard or someone else would have written this book, right? It's good nobody else saw the potential in this thing or they would have gotten there first. It's good that it's hard or someone else would have written this book, right? It's good nobody else saw the potential in this thing, or they would have gotten there first. It's good that it's hard.

Nobody said it'd be easy. It's good that it's hard. Provided you do it anyway. I'm heading over to Australia in a couple weeks. I'm going to be in Sydney on July 31st. I'm going to be in Melbourne on August 1st. Then in November, I'm doing Vancouver and Toronto, London, Dublin, Rotterdam, all awesome cities I'm really excited to go to. If you want

to come to those talks, they're open to the public and you can grab those tickets at ryanholiday.net. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. 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. How much do you really us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey?