The Daily Stoic - You Are Not Alone | Pay Your Taxes

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

“Sometimes it can feel like you’re a solitary warrior. Certainly Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations reads like that at times. He feels like the last honest man. The last good man. The only one keeping the faith.”Ryan explains the struggle that we all share, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.This episode is also brought to you by stamps.com, a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere right from your computer. Send letters, ship packages, and pay a lot less with discounted rates from USPS, UPS, and more. There’s NO risk. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epipetus Markis, really a Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. 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 Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. You are not alone. Sometimes it can feel like you're a solitary warrior. Certainly Marcus Arelius' meditations reads like that at times. He feels like the last honest man, the last good man, the only one keeping the faith. We often feel that way about the cause we're fighting for. We feel that way about the trauma we carry from childhood, about our fears, that

it's just us against the world. But this is wrong. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world," James Baldwin wrote. But then you start reading and you realize as Baldwin did that books taught him that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive. And that's sort of the irony of meditations. The private diary intended for no one manages to appeal to the many. It becomes universal. Marcus's life and pain and loss were so unique and yet so relatable. If only other

emperors had written such a book or if anyone had, maybe he could have read it and felt a little less alone, comforted by that sense of sympathy of his timeless connections to such a diverse world. Well, it's not too late for us. Like James Baldwin, you gotta read to free yourself from the yoke of doom and gloom that finds its way around your neck when you think you're the only one that's ever worn it. You have to get outside yourself. You have to enter other people's minds and let them enter yours, which is something Marcus really is talks about.

You have to understand you're not alone. Your struggles are shared. There are people struggling even more than you are. Connect with them even if they're long dead. And if you can try to put some of your own thoughts out there Because it may just help someone else who needs it Pay your taxes Nothing will ever befall me that I will receive with gloom or bad disposition I will pay my taxes gladly now all the things which cause complaint or

dread are like the taxes of life, things which my dear Lucilius, you should never hope for exemption or seek escape. Sennaka moral letters 96 too. As your income taxes come due, you might be like many people complaining at what you have to fork over to the government. 40% of everything I make goes to these people. And for what? First off, taxes go to a lot of programs and services that you almost certainly take for granted. But second, you think that you're so special?

People have been complaining about their taxes for thousands of years. And now they're dead. Get over it. Third, this is a good problem to have. Far better than say making so little that there's nothing left over to pay the government or living in anarchy or having to pay for every basic service in a struggle against nature.

But more important, income taxes are not the only taxes you pay in life. They're just the financial form. Everything we do has a toll attached to it. Waiting around is a tax on traveling. Rumors in gossip are the taxes that come from acquiring a public persona. Disagreements and occasional frustration are the taxes placed even on the happiest of relationships. Theft is a tax on abundance and having things that other people want.

Stress and problems are tariffs that come attached to success and on and on and on. There are many forms of taxes in life. You can argue with them, you can go to great, but ultimately few tile lengths to evade them, or you can simply pay and enjoy the fruits of whatever you get to keep. You know, it's funny, we do this entry, as this is the entry from April 15th. We do this on daily stokes, Instagram every year. Mostly I just do it now to provoke the reaction

as I think it's funny, but everyone gets so upset. How dare you say that I should pay my taxes? Taxation is theft, screw the government, blah, blah, blah. It always reveals the sort of deranged libertarian streak, it deranged extreme libertarian streak, sorry, that can sometimes exist in a philosophy of stoicism, which is about resilience and independence.

But to me, it so misses the point. First off, because we're not just really talking about literal taxes. What's so interesting about Sena Kuz metaphor is he's saying that the taxes of life that everything has a tax on it, there's the part you get you want, and then the fee attached to it, the toll.

There, nothing is free is what he's saying. And I think that's really true. He says, I pay the taxes of life gladly. He wasn't saying, I gladly pay the emperor my tax, right? He's talking about a metaphorical tax. But the other tax is important here too. As we've seen over the last year in the pandemic, the cost of bad government is very high.

The cost of a society that doesn't invest in things like public health is very high. And we don't, we can, the regulatory state failed us in so many ways. So I'm not simply saying that the more taxes you pay, the better the system you get. But this idea that government is the enemy or that the state is the enemy would be preposterous to the Romans who were a preposterous to the Stoics who were active participants in public life who saw the country as something worth serving. And look, I'm not saying you should pay more taxes than you have to. I'm just saying we have an obligation to each other. We have an obligation to the less fortunate. And we also, and this is the most important, have a legal obligation that a legal inconvenience that is a function of modern society and to spend

your time bemoaning or whining or getting angry or getting into conspiracy theories about it is a waste of time. Find out what you owe in taxes. Try to minimize it where you don't necessarily where those taxes are unnecessarily high, you know, do whatever you need to do, and then move on with your life. You'd almost always be better, and I think this is Seneca's main point, instead of trying to avoid these little costs all the time, just live a life where you don't have to sweat something like that. Try to be successful, and I've tried to focus on the fact that in most cases complaints over taxes

are champagne problems. That's what the stoke is talking about. And that's what we're talking about today. So I hope today's entry didn't make you too upset, but if it did make you upset, well then, you need to work on your stovices. And of course, the reading practice we talk about in the Daily Stoic Read to Lead Challenge,

it's a great way to do this. We have all sorts of recommendations about rabbit holes to go down, topics to study, specific books to read that will help you not just feel less alone with the leadership challenges you're facing, but less alone as a human being in this crazy messed up world we're in. So check that out, dailystoic.com slash read to lead.

And of course, you get all our Stoic challenges for free. If you sign up for daily Stoic life at daily Stoic Life.com. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.