The Daily Stoic - What Has It Stolen From You? | Ask DS

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

We are the creators of our anxiety. Which means we can also be the ones to do something about it. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius put it like this: “Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.” To serve as a reminder of this, we have created the Daily Stoic Anxiety Medallion. Grab your own at the Daily Stoic Store!✉️ 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. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as

you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. What has it stolen from you? You left way earlier than you should have because you got nervous and stressed before your flight. You were a mess the whole trip because you were worried something might go wrong while you were gone. You spent the

whole last couple months dreading, convincing yourself that the news you were waiting for would be horrible. And how did it end up going? You missed time with your family, spending it instead sitting at your gate for no reason. You missed the vacation, the time with friends, because you were not present. You built up this whole scenario in your head and it turned out to be nothing. Anxiety. Just think about how much it's stolen from you, how much you missed because of it. A few times that it turned out to be right, sure, sometimes there is traffic, sometimes alertness and vigilance pay off. But for the most part, as Seneca reminds us, we suffer more in imagination than reality. And as a result, we do suffer in reality.

He who suffers before it is necessary, Seneca wrote, suffers more than is necessary. Being trapped in the tunnel of anxiety, unable to think straight, emotions speeding like a runaway train. It is a crippling experience. But fortunately, the Stoics had an answer to freeing ourselves from stress and worry almost 2000 years ago. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius put it like this, Today, I escaped my anxiety, he says, or no, I discarded it because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside.

What Marcus understood was that anxiety comes from inside the house. We are the creators of our anxiety, which means we can do something about it. We can stay in the present moment and not get lost in the past or the future. We can remind ourselves that we are not our emotions, that as Epictetus said, it's not events that upset us, but our opinions about them. We can zoom out and take the bird's eye view or Plato's view as Marcus called it, reflecting from a larger perspective

and recognizing how small our lives are in the grand scheme of the universe. You could argue that Stoic philosophy is basically a set of tools designed to help us combat our anxiety and worries, to help us focus on what we control. Which is actually why I've been working hard on this thing here at Daily Stoic I got on my desk.

It's a powerful little device to bring that lesson, that perspective from the Stoics on anxiety and worry. You can carry everywhere you go. It's, I don't know if you've seen like our memento mori coin, which is supposed to be a reminder of mortality. This one is much more explicit. It's got this cool hole in the middle.

On the front, it says the Greek phrase for, is this in my control? Is this up to me? And then on the back, it has those quotes from Seneca and Marcus that I was talking about, about how we don't escape our anxiety, we discard it because it's within us.

And that when we suffer before it's necessary, we suffer more than is necessary. There's this cool hole in the center. As I've been recording it the whole time, I've been spinning it between my fingers. My kids are, let's say neurodivergent, if you will. We have these like little fidgets, just little toys they can play with

to sort of get out their nervous energy. Well, that's what this is. And it's also got this cool snake on the front representing the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, which is sort of what we're doing when we're feeling anxious. But the idea is like, I wanted a reminder

of how much time am I spending consumed by anxiety? 10 minutes, 30 minutes, three hours, all day. And what if I cut just a little bit of that in half? What if I prevent that spiral from happening? How much happier and healthier would I be? And that's the idea of the Daily Stoic Anxiety Coin, fidget, whatever you wanna call it. And we're launching it today.

You can check it out. I'll link to a photo of it in the description. And it's really awesome. You can grab it, dailystoic.com slash anxiety, and check it out. I think you'll really like this one. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am just in the closet of my house trying to put away the suitcases.

There's a funny joke that I have in writing right now. Truman was asked what he did the first day after coming home from being president. And he said, I took my suitcases up to the attic. So I just got back from Sydney and it was amazing. I spoke to 2000 people in Sydney, almost 2000 people in Melbourne. One of the coolest experiences I ever had, there were these beautiful venues.

I don't get to talk to like you guys that much. I normally, when I'm doing my talks, it's like, and you've heard them here on the podcast before, usually it's to like a corporate audience or a conference or, you know, like some specific group, like a sports team that brought me out. I don't usually get to like sell tickets and meet fans who've read the book. So it was an amazing experience.

I'm still coming down from it, but then the realities of what Truman's talking about, you gotta put the suitcases away and go back to your regular life. And this is the first little Q and A episode that I am recording since getting back. And I wanted to bring you, you weren't able to travel all the way across the oceans

if you don't happen to live in Australia. I wanted to bring you some of the questions that they asked in the audience at the event. So I'm gonna bring you that. And if you wanna ask me a question, I'm going back on tour in November. I'm gonna be in Vancouver and Toronto, London, Rotterdam and Dublin.

I'm super excited. And I hope you come, you can grab tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour. You can get all the ticketing stuff there. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And then maybe you'll hear yourself on a future episode of the Daily Soap Podcast when I do the Q&A.

I know we're doing like a VIP Q&A beforehand, or if you've got like sort of privatey questions you don't wanna ask in front of a huge audience, we can do that there. And then there'll be a Q&A at the end of the talk as well. So come see me in London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto in November. I'll link to those, ryanholliday.net slash tour.

And thanks to everyone. If you weren't in Sydney, thanks so much for coming. Truly highlight of my life. I loved it there. It was an awesome experience and enjoy. So you said that you can see that the world is probably becoming more crazy. Yeah.

So you've looked back into the past and maybe also why things didn't work out for certain innovations in societies. So when you look into where we are right now, do you see some parallels that might mean we have to watch out for certain things and do you maybe see some differences which means maybe we are better off this time and maybe we will figure it out? Maybe we have better off this time and maybe we'll figure it out. Yeah, look, Mark Sewell is in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so in one sense I want to be like, oh, this is scary, this is real, so it could happen, civilizations don't last forever. Then again, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire took hundreds and hundreds of years. You could argue that the Pope is still the Emperor of Rome. He has the same title, Clash of Maximus, that Mark Suess has, right? So this idea that this moment we're in

is the pivotal moment that everything matters, that can be a way of, I think, working ourselves up into a state of anxiety and worry. I'm not saying I'm attacking the world of that. Of course it does, and there are definitely alarming things that are happening. But I try to step back and see a longer-term view, and I try to put myself, what do I control?

Or if it's important for me to do, how can I not be a part of the bad stuff that's happening, and how can I be a part of the solution? Good stuff. I mean, the Stokes were definitely cognizant of the way it was easy then and now to be caught up in trends or fens or, you know, frenzies. My crisis was where the Stoke-Lutzer said, I wanted to be part of the model and not become a philosopher. And so Stoicism has to be able to cultivate, again, an ability of straight-foot character that doesn't let us be caught in the excesses or the evils of the moment that we happen

to be in. And I think the Stoics, see this whole group of Stoics called the Stoic Opposition, that were just like a perennial thorn in the side of the tyr emperors. So to me, it's not just that it's not in the variant hall, they also have a sense of what's in front of them that they have to invoke something, they can make a difference. And that's kind of how I think about it. Whether these are the end times or not is a question for either people hundreds of years from now.

What's a question that will come up with its own answer in the morning when you're having a real night? Hi Ryan, I've been a fan of yours since 13 and I wrote an email years ago and you replied with some advice that changed my life so thank you for that. Thanks, I made you feel very old. My quick question relates to the idea that stoicism can encourage passiveness or extinguishes

the fire of life. What stoic strategies or supplements do we use to counter that? Yeah, I'm never going to copy that because, okay, something happens, the world is a certain way. To change it or respond to it, you first have to accept that it happened what it is, right? And so in the stones talk about the art of act in essence or the idea of ascent, and not A-S-C-E-M-T, but A-S-S-E-N-T, acceptance.

That's what they're saying. You first have to accept things as they are, you have to accept the facts on the ground. If you are in denial of them, or you are focused on how unfair they are, or what's wrong they are, or how annoying it is, or how you warned everyone that it was gonna happen this way, but what you're not doing is focusing on the part of it

is in your control, which is the response, which is what happens next. So that, yes, there is a lot of resignation and acceptance in the stoics and in the stoic writings, but I see that as like the first part of the sentence and then there's an and, right? And that's step one. And step two is, well now what am I gonna do about it?

My question's about ego and seeing it in other people that have maybe wanting to help. So you can work on yourself constantly. But as you write in parallel, who am I to judge someone else? So have you ever encountered that situation? Do you have a solution for that? Yeah, yeah.

The interesting thing about ego is although it masquerades or sometimes appears as strength, people up close see how easy it is to manipulate, right? To direct because the person's vulnerability is how they see themselves or how they want things to be. I'll give you a funny example on some writing about this thing I'm doing now. The intelligence agents who are responsible for briefing Donald Trump when he was president,

the presidential gay individual, he collected the most important things that the most important person in the world needs to know. He's so egotistical and fragile, he's not interested in all these things that are happening. But they found this, the more they made it about him, the more they put his name in it, the more responsive he was to things. And I bring this up because we don't think about how vulnerable ego makes us and how people who understand or see that ego enough, how they manipulate and wrap us and use the information they give us

to our own purposes. So I guess what I'm saying is that, that's another reason we have to be careful about, you know, that's the fragility that it creates with us. But when we think about ego, if someone has it, we want to help them like, without, without, without, without trying to manipulate them. I think where you have to start is just remembering that no ebiquististical person has ever been convinced of anything when they were challenged head on, in or about that thing that they are egotistical about, right? So it requires some creativity or fluidity. You got to go around, right? You got to convince them that it was their idea all along. And so when we think about ego, we want to think about,

it seems so transparent in the people, in the vulnerabilities it creates, and I just think it's imperative that we go, okay, how am I managing up and telling my boss what they want to hear, sandwiching this bad news in between some good news or some compliments or whatever, right? And we go, so silly.

Think about how people are doing that to us. That's the real lesson we should take from that. Not to become paranoid, but to become, oh, okay, I can see how this is holding me back as the CEO and boss, the parent. This is holding me back from getting what I say I want, which is truth, information, honesty, right? Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it.

We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. 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. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring

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