The Daily Stoic - You Can Let This Make You Miserable, Or Come To Terms With It | Ask DS

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

It doesn't matter how important you are. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how used to getting your way you are, or how much you have planned and prepared.A single driver can decide to slow down lanes of traffic and lines of cars. A single bureaucrat can decide not to accept your paperwork, not to approve your application. One person with a grudge can tie you up in months, or years of lawsuits–one lawyer can bleed you more than you ever thought possible. One jerk can pass a virus to you and your family...or worse.We just have to learn to accept that we are not in control.---And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions about the role that ignoring negativity plays in living happily, how we can inspire others to expand their minds, and how he defines success in relation to the Stoic virtues.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. We're 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 happen to be someone there recording, but thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you. You can let this make you miserable or you can come to terms with it. It doesn't matter how important you are, it doesn't matter how much money you have, it doesn't matter how used to getting your own way you are, how much you have planned or prepared. A single driver can slow down lanes of traffic or lines of cars. A single bureaucrat can decide not to accept your paperwork, not to approve your application. One person with a grudge can tie you up in months or years of lawsuits.

One lawyer can bleed you for more than you ever thought possible. One jerk can pass a virus to you and your family or worse. There's an old story about a powerful politician who asked for an extra pad of butter from their waiter at a banquet. Sorry, the waiter said one pad per person. Indignant, the politician began to rant and rave going on about how if only the waiter knew who he was dealing with. Well, do you know who I am the waiter replied?

No, the politician responded. I'm the guy with the butter, he said. Marcus Realis has a cryptic illusion to a customs officer, a toll booth operator, and meditations, suggesting that even he and his powerful entourage occasionally felt these very human choke points. They are timeless. They may not be distributed evenly or equally, but they are universal. No one avoids them all. No one can fight them all. We just have to learn how to accept that we are not in control, that we must, from time to time, or most of the time, experience the consequences of other people's decisions.

Their whims, their vices, their mistakes, their egos. We can let this make us miserable or we can come to terms with it. We can rail against the world, be angry at the causes of all of this, or we could remember what Mark has said that the world won't at the causes of all of this, or we could remember what Marcus said that the world won't notice or care. And there is no reason to add frustration on top of frustration. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonder East Podcast Business Wars. And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stare down family drama

and financial disasters. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Regardless to really, the real, like I see a theme running behind us to us is objectivity versus subjectivity, and particularly in terms of controlling what you can control and controlling your reactions. And the line that struck me from today's email is what you were saying about what somebody

actually says versus what you hear where the problem is, they want the actual problem there. So I'm just wondering, what kind of strategies or tips do you have for situations like that? Yeah, I think we had an email a few years back from that was about a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg where someone was asking about her secret to 50 years of marriage or whatever. And she said that her mother or mother-in-law had told her when she got married. She said, you know,

in a long marriage, it helps to be a little bit deaf. And meaning that what I take that to mean, and I think it pertains in the wider scope to stoicism, if you want to be happy, if you want to be undisturbed, part of this is about just ignoring some of the things that are happening around you. If you've got two sort of fine of an antenna, you're gonna pick up a lot of stuff that inevitably is going to upset you,

make you angry. And I think, so for me, this is like sort of about my news. I would say this is your news diet. This is, you know, sort of, who do you spend time with? Where do you live? You know, sort of shaping the world view that you have to the degree that that is in your control goes a long way towards, you know, being conducive to happiness or serenity or peace.

Perfect. Perfect. That's a great answer. Is there any books you can recommend on that topic? I like the Count Newport book, Digital Minimalism. I think that's great. Let me see about information diet. What would I like?

I don't know. It's kind of one of those things where I'm not sure if there's like a book that teaches you how to do. Yeah, I don't have, I don't have a great recommendation, but let me think more about that. But I do like that mantra, sort of garbage in, garbage out, you know, sort of how you shape your world, what your influences are, what brings, what you bring into your life determines how happy you're going to be. Okay, great. Thank you so much. Hello. Hi. So exciting. Well, I'm completely on the stoic. So thank you so much for everything. Of course. I'm a little very lady with the previous questions. So I lead a very big team and I also teach, so I have tons of students and a lot of them

are very fixed mindset. Right. So I, you know, from the learnings of today's, like, you know, we can only, we should only focus on what we can control. I completely understand the concept, but how can I help others to walk the path of stop being so fixed mindset when you want

to explore creativity, right? And you need to be in a more creative space. Yeah, so obviously the Carol's rec book, Growth Mindset is fantastic. I think Growth Mindset is one, I think the concept itself is helpful, right? Just to understand that there's such a thing as a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset.

I think even that concept teaches you something, I love this idea of agency, right? What, how do you believe that you have agency or no? And it might be, that might be a weird concept coming from the Stoics because so much of what the Stokes talk about is sort of resigning. There's the idea of acquiescence or ascent, you know, sort of how do you ascent

to the things that are outside of your control. And so yes, the Stokes did believe that there was some areas of life that were fixed, but I think they were very, very focused on where they did have agency and sort of using that agency to the best of their ability. And I feel like it's impossible to be a creative person or an artist or a creator of any kind if you don't have belief in agency because otherwise one, what is the point?

But two, how do you actually do the thing? It's all about taking the raw materials that exist around you or that you've been given and deciding to make use of them in some way. That you have as constrained as you are, even if you were an artist in the Soviet Union, believing that you have agency over these characters on the page and that you're gonna make something of that.

To me, I think one of the alarming trends of today's world is, as we focus on these things which do exist, systemic injustices, systemic problems, history, the sort of intersecting forms of oppression or what have you. All this stuff exists, but it also runs right into the other trend of, we've never had more agency or freedom than we do right now. And so, are you focused on where you don't have agency or are you focused on where you do have agency?

To me, that's the defining question both of an individual's life but also of a creator's life. Very cool. Thank you so much. Of course. I decided to focus on the strategies for success. And I stumbled on being the wrong thing. Because I was like going like one I was thinking about.

So two ideas that stem my question for today is for you, I'm really actually. Okay. So I was reminded of Seneca when he got eggs out, but he got sent back. Yeah. Everybody thinks he's a hypocrite. Like, why did you teach Nero? Because he ended up killing him. Sure. Like to dive into context, like what I think, why he did that? Because it started with his own conviction is because I believe his

reference for God, why he got exiled back, not exiled back, but returned back is, God gave him that freedom. And so that was my first idea. And then the second idea was the Matthew McConaughey, selfish, selfish, your selfish conviction kind of like stems that, that outer like consensus. So my question is based on your own experiences, what is your definition of success living by these stored virtues? Yeah, I did an article a few months back where I sort of said that my definition of

success is autonomy, like how much sort of control do I have over the direction of my own life. So, so, Sennaka and I might disagree there and that he seemed to sort of see success as sort of being at the center of things, right? I would argue that Sennaka's best contributions came not working for Nero, but the writing that he did in the period of exile. But I also understand that different people have different columns and it may well have been that that he felt like

look what I'd personally rather do is you know stay here and write and be a philosopher but if I don't take this job somebody else worse will do it right and I think that's that's sort of what kept Seneca going probably longer than he should have some sense of like almost a sort of an obligation or that he was almost trapped by it. When I think about success, I think about am I doing what I feel like I was meant to do or am I doing it or doing things in a way that is because it's how everyone else is doing it, right? So to me, the idea of that autonomy is not just like, hey, am I in control of my schedule or not,

but it's like how in control of my own destiny am I, right? So like, I wanna be able to write, but I also wanna be able to write the books that I want to write. So let's say I was selling five times as many books, but I had much less control over what those was in those books because a publisher decided or because the market decided or the trends decided, I would view that as actually being less successful than I am now. But I do think whether it's Seneca or Mark's real is, there is this sense, and maybe it's a distinctly Roman idea.

Maybe it's actually very inspiring that they were sort of taken in, their life was taken in a direction that perhaps they didn't want to go, but they felt obligated to go for the sake of the common good. Do you know what I mean? And that's why they call it public service, right? It's service. You're in service is something larger than oneself.

And to a certain degree, Seneca did that to another degree, when you really get into it, it looks like he was also sort of enriching himself. So it's hard to know why he was doing it. Cool. But great question. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon

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