The Daily Stoic - You Gotta Start Sometime | What Young Men Get Wrong About Stoicism

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

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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 audio book 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. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening. And I hope you enjoy.

You gotta start sometime. You could wait for the perfect moment. You could wait for things to get clear. You could wait, as we've all been saying for years now, for things to go back to normal. Or you could get started. You could stop being the fool, the one that Seneca talks about, the one who is always getting ready. You could start demanding, as Epictetus instructed, the best for yourself.

"'You could stop lying. "'It's the biggest lie in the world,' he said in a Daily Stoke video. "'You could stop telling yourself "'I'll do it in the morning.' "'Do it now, get started, begun is half done. "'Do it now,' Tempus fugit memento mori. "'You can't know when you're going to get another chance.

The time that passes the opportunities you pass on, they are as good as dead. You are a little bit more dead. So don't do it later. Do it now. Today. Look, there's a reason that stoicism is particularly attractive to young men. I totally get it because I was once one of those young men. And there's no one who will give them the guidance that they desperately need and crave. There's no one that says, hey, here's how you live a good and meaningful life, but also a challenging life. Here's how you do what you were put here to do. And by the way, you were put here to do something.

You're not worthless. You're not a piece of shit. Society is not discarding you. You have value. You can make a positive difference. And in fact, society needs you and it needs you to do those things. When I got Mark Shrevely's Meditations,

when this book landed on the table of my college apartment, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I described it as a quake book, a book that shook everything that I thought I knew about the world. And here you have like this guy that I'd heard about in movies or in the History Channel. The most powerful man in the world

was writing notes to himself about how to be a badass, how to be great. And that's what stoicism was for me and what it opened up in me. And I think what I got the most out of stoicism early was all the things that it could do for me, right? How to master my emotions, how to push myself physically, how to put up with people's obnoxiousness

and hypocrisy and bullshit. And by the way, there was a lot of that in Marcus's time, but there's a ton of it in our time. I don't think it should surprise us then though, that grifters and demagogues would step in to fill this space. What you see people doing, whether it's Andrew Tate or whoever, is they pervert the ideas in Stoicism.

They take some of these core ideas and they mix it with notions of masculinity, other cultural traditions. When you're speaking to people who feel misunderstood or even mistreated, it's easy to direct them towards a kind of a resentiment. It can even be channeled into what you might call kind of a modern day no nothing-ism or what you might call anti-woke-ism. a reaction against extremes or misguided, even well-meaning cultural forces, what these young men and then the grifters who are taking advantage of them, what they're missing about Stoicism

is this place that society has always gotten Stoicism wrong. There's a huge difference between lowercase Stoicism and uppercase Stoicism. Lowercase Stoicism is all the stereotypes of stoicism. Has no emotion, invulnerable, repressed. That's not what stoicism is. The stoics weren't emotionless. There is a part of stoicism that's about being

less emotional, particularly destructive emotions. So the stoics were not repressed emotionless robots. And if you think that's what stoicism is gonna help you do, you're doing it wrong. Like I think about someone like Andrew Tate, if he thinks stoicism is this a way to not have to feel human emotions about the women that he's exploiting, that he is taking advantage of,

and I would say victimizing, like that's not what fucking stoicism is at all and in fact what I think one of the best quotes from Marx through this he says the point of life is good character and acts for the common good so if you think that this sort of emotionless stoic is getting to a place where you can just do whatever you want and not have to care about the consequences of those actions and other people, again, you're getting it extremely wrong. When I think of Stoicism as this self-help philosophy,

that seems to be about indifference to other people, or it seems to be a toolkit for being simply better at business negotiations, or being a get-rich-quick scheme, or Stoicism as a prosperity gospel, or Stoicism as a way to turn away from what's happening in the world. And this is emphatically, the last part, is emphatically what the stoics were not doing. Seneca would say the difference between the Epicureans and the stoics was the Epicureans

retreated into the garden to pursue individual self-development and self-fulfillment. And he said they only got involved in politics and public life if they had to. And he said the Stoics, on the other hand, got involved in politics and public life unless something prevented them. So every once in a while I'll say something political in one of these videos or I'll talk about some social issue in our time, and people will go, what do you think Seneca would think about you talking about politics on the Daily Stoke? And I'd go, he'd probably not be surprised,

given that his day job was as one of the most powerful politicians in Rome. One of the things I talk about in the afterward of right thing right now is that like, I get it. I get where this sort of initial infatuation, understanding this entry point to Stoicism is, because I had the same way. I could not have written a book

about the stoic virtue of justice early on in my pursuit and understanding of the philosophy. But the thing about Stoicism is that as you study it, it is working on you. You can't escape the fact that Mark Sturris talks about the common good like 80 times in meditations. He talks about doing the right thing. He talks about justice dozens of other times

and all these really important ideas over and over and over again. For a guy that had unlimited power, he never lost his compassion and his empathy and his love for his fellow human beings. He saw himself as a true cosmopolitan, a person of the world, not just a member of a race and tribe only caring about people who were related to him or looked like him or lived in his country.

He tried to have this broader sense. In fact, that's what the Stokes said, that there were these circles, right? There's the circle of us, the circle of our family, circle of people who live near us, people who live in the same country as us, the same city as us. And then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it ultimately includes all living things. The purpose of Stoke philosophy, the irrational purpose was to pull these outer rings inward, to really care about other people and to try to make the world better for them, sometimes, especially even at the cost

of one's own interests. This is the kind of Stoicism that we have to be focused on. Life is short, we have to be good and we should try to do good. We should love and be loved, should do the right thing because it's the right thing and we should resist to do good. We should love and be loved. We should do the right thing because it's the right thing. And we should resist that hardness of heart that can so easily come from a philosophy

that is so focused on being in command of oneself and mastering one's emotions. Every day, totally free, we send out the daily Stoic email. It's the largest community of Stoics ever assembled in human history. And just one Stoic idea, one ancient lesson to chew on every single day. I'd love to have you join us.

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