The Daily Stoic - You Can’t Get Your Dawns Back | Ask DS

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Once a dawn happens, it is gone to you forever. Once a day ends, it’s done for you for all time. Act accordingly. Protect your time accordingly.Ask DS:When will Ryan’s next non-Stoic book come out?How has Stoicism helped Ryan free his own biases?What does Ryan think about Ted Lasso as a Stoic?Does Ryan have any insight on passing along Stoic principles to the next generation?What is Ryan’s advice to someone who loves their friends and family but struggles to fit in due to different beliefs?🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour📚 Pick up a copy of On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It by Seneca at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com⏳ Get your own Memento Mori Premium Signet Ring to wear as a reminder that you can't get your dawns back | https://store.dailystoic.com/🪙 Designed with the intention of carrying them in your pocket, our Memento Mori Medallion is a literal and inescapable reminder that “you could leave life right now.”Check it out at https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️ 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. You can't get your dawns back. It feels like you have time.

You're young, you're healthy. The future is bright. But it will not always feel this way because those things will not always be true. Seneca knew this. That's why he wrote his famous essay on the shortness of life. We have our favorite edition of that here in the painted porch. I'll link to that. This is why he had admonished his friend Lucilius to be intentional, to protect his time, and

to keep death always in mind. It's not that life is short, he writes, it's that we waste a lot of it. We watch our money, we protect our property, yet we fritter away the most valuable of our resources, the most finite of them, the one thing we can never get back that they aren't making any more of. The time that passes, Seneca writes, belongs to death.

It's gone forever and ever to return. Once a dawn happens, it is gone to you forever. Once a day ends, it's done for you for all time. Act accordingly, protect your calendar accordingly. Say no accordingly. Do it now, before it's too late. You might've seen me when I do my talks or a lot of times when I'm filming,

I have this ring on my finger. Sometimes it's on the left, sometimes it's on the right. I fiddle with it. But it's the memento mori ring. We have this awesome jeweler in Brooklyn who makes them all by hand. And it's got the same thing that's on the memento mori coin. If that's more your style or the necklace, it's the hourglass, the skull, and the flower, life, death, time. And on the back it says, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think. That's the power of this line from the Stoics, from Mark Ceruleus, that life is very short. Don't waste it. Be here now. Take advantage of it. Don't act as if you'll live forever, because you won't.

You can't get your dawns back. It doesn't work that way. Anyways, you can grab all those at steward.dailystewarke.com. I'll link to those in today's show notes. And I hope this message stays with you today. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I'm always really excited when I get to go to a place I've never been before. So I've been to Sydney, I guess three times, but I'd never been anywhere else in Australia.

So when the dates came up and I got to go to Melbourne to do a talk, I was really, really excited. And I sold out Melbourne Town Hall, which was an incredible experience. Today's episode, I'm going to bring you some of those questions that they got to ask me. It was a really awesome and cool experience. And I'm going to be in London, Dublin, Toronto, Vancouver, and Rotterdam in November. So if you wanna come and ask me a question, you can do that. Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour. But in the meantime, here are some folks in Melbourne asking and answering your stoic questions.

G'day, thank you so much. Yes. Love that stoic ears tour. Love some of your other books as well, Perennial Seller, Conspiracy, Trust Me I'm Lying. When's your next non-stoic book coming out? I got to finish this series first. I don't know what I'm going to do next. I have some idea. I always try to have the next one lined up.

So having these four in a row has kept me pretty busy. But I'm going to do some more non-stoic stuff in the future, for sure. Hey, Ryan. Thank you so much for your talk today. Of course. Stoicism is, I believe it is as much as domesticating your emotions as well as

freeing your own biases against any kind of decisions that you have to make. So how has Stoicism helped you free your own biases and how would you recommend us look at it to free our own biases when judging some things? Yes, that's a great question. To me, Stoicism is about seeing things stripped of our judgments, of our assumptions, of our predilections, our prejudices, all these things,

trying to see them from different perspectives, from different angles, including yourself. I mean, to me, one of the benefits of journaling is that you get a time capsule or a time stamp version of yourself. So you can see what you thought in this moment, what you were worried about. One of the journals that I love, I have this journal,

it's called a one line a day journal. And it's five lines and every day for five years, you write what you're thinking about or what you're working on or what you're dealing with in that moment. So the first year is cool, the second year is kind of cool, but by three and four and five,

you can see the patterns or the things that keep happening over and over again. And I often find, you know, I'm over-committed or I'm worried about this or I'm anxious about this, but with the perspective of a year's distance or two years distance, how silly and small some of these things seem. So that's a big one for me.

How often have I lost my temper, gotten anxious, been concerned about something, and then how did that age over time and usually not well? And I try to take that wisdom or that perspective and give myself the benefit of it or the color of it in the present moment. And the better I'm able to do that, the better the decisions I make and the better my just overall happiness. Welcome to Melbourne, Ryan.

Two-fold question. How's Robert Greene going after his recent health issues? And also, I love the way you apply stoic principles to popular culture and modern life. I wonder if you could make a comment on Ted Lasso as a stoicist. Sure. Robert is doing good.

Better, we did a couple sort of live conversations last year that was really fun to do. But I think it's been really hard. It was fascinating and inspiring to watch someone who sort of talked about resiliency and grit and pushing through things, as he has always done to me, go through something so challenging, a stroke, having to sort of rebuild his life

and figure out how to do stuff again, to watch him have to actually apply that and to not give up, to not despair, to not be broken by it. It's been sort of profoundly moving and inspiring to me. I know he's having a hard time with all of it, but he's just chugging away on this book. Also, I so admire about Robert. Like, I work on books for a year or two years, and Robert is, I think, like seven years in on this book that he's doing, and he's working on it every day.

It's not like he's procrastinating, but he just does these amazing, wonderful things. So, I think he's doing better, and I'll tell him you inquired. I thought Ted Lasso was a wonderful show. I think that's a form of stoicism, too. I think, again, we see stoicism as this kind of harsh philosophy, this sort of grit your teeth and bare it,

stuff it down. But what I loved about the show and what I think is great about it is there's a kind of emotional vulnerability and empathy and softness to it, but still built around the idea of persevering and growing and doing what you're, you know, put here to do. So I do think rounding out the philosophy, sort of showing it as something other than, you know, just enduring the awfulness of life is an important sort of perspective we have to have on the philosophy.

Hi. Hi. So, I read your book, like, Obstacles Away, about eight years ago and it changed my life. Very young, impressionable age, my first introduction to stoicism. And I love the idea of teaching this to my son. So one parent to another, do you have any sort of wisdom or insight on passing this onto our next generation? Yeah, my kids do not like hearing about stoicism

from me as you can imagine. The other day my son said to me, he said, Dad, what do you think the worst book in our bookstore is other than yours? The other day my son said to me, he said, Dad, what do you think the worst book in our bookstore is? Other than yours. He's a bully, actually. No, I worked on a book with him, actually, called The Boy Who Would Be King,

that's sort of a fable about the life of Marcus Aurelius. And I think telling it in the form of a story and these sort of little exchanges has been great because I can, as we experience things, I can call back to this sort of character he's familiar with. So I do think stories are a way that we sort of teach these lessons, which is,

by the way, how they were taught in the ancient world. I mean, one of the cute things in meditation is Mark Cerullis is quoting like Aesop's fables that he obviously remembers from his own childhood. And the timelessness of those wisdom or those ideas. My son is actually obsessed right now with this podcast called, um, uh, Greeking Out, and it's all about the Greek myths, which we've been listening to. So I try to find indirect ways to deliver the ideas. And then, of course, the most important thing is, like, actually modeling them, which I am not as good at,

but I am trying. Welcome to Melbourne, first of all. modeling them, which I am not as good at, but I am trying. Welcome to Melbourne, first of all. I was just wondering what advice you'd have for a younger person that loves their friends and family but perhaps finds it difficult at times to fit in and sort of things like that because of different beliefs and goals,

I guess you could say as well. There's a passage in Epictetus about precisely this. He's talking about a difficult sibling, and he says, every situation has two handles. You can choose the one of sort of arguing and fighting, or you can remember that you love them, you care about them, that you had all these shared experiences, you know, all the...and he says you got to choose which handle you're going to grab each situation by.

And I do think it's important that we see the Stoics as human beings. Cato was seen as probably the most heroic and superhuman of the Stoics, human beings. Cato was seen as probably the most heroic and superhuman of the Stoics, but he has a brother who's very not stoic and we're told that he sort of looked the other way, that he just loved him as who he was and he tried to make, tried to see the good in him. He tried to appreciate him. There's actually, I'll give you another one. There's Mark Cerrillo is talking about this in the beginning of meditations again.

He has a brother, but it's kind of an odd arrangement. So before Hadrian chooses this succession plan, he had attempted to adopt another person who died. That man had a son. And so this kind of spare heir is around. And Marcus has a choice when he becomes emperor. What do you do with this extra emperor? And Marcus makes the extraordinary decision

to appoint this person who he is not legally or genetically related to. He anoints him his co-emperor. And he says in meditations in book one, he basically says of his stepbrother, maybe it's not in here later, he basically says what he loved about his stepbrother, who was very different than him

and not everyone appreciated, he says he loved the way that his character challenged Marcus Aurelius to improve his own. And sometimes family can do this, right? They can show us what we don't wanna be. They can show us the flaws or the predilections that we share and they can show us the costs or the dangers of indulging those very things. So the point is I agree family can be difficult and frustrating. They are also the only family we've got and we can be made better

By how we decide to treat and respond to them 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 of 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. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast Against the Odds. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who live to tell the tale.

In our next season, it's July 6th, 1988, and workers are settling into the night shift aboard Piper Alpha, the world's largest offshore oil rig. Home to 226 men, the rig is stationed in the stormy North Sea off the coast of Scotland. At around 10pm, workers accidentally trigger a gas leak that leads to an explosion and a fire. As they wait to be rescued, the workers soon realize that Piper Alpha

has transformed into a death trap. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.