The Daily Stoic - You Must Return Again and Again | If You Want To Be Steady

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

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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. So for this tour I was just doing in Europe, we had I think four days in London and I was with my kids, my wife and my in-laws. So we knew we didn't want to stay in a hotel. We'd spend a fortune. We'd be cramped. So we booked an Airbnb and it was awesome. As it happens, the Airbnb we stayed in was like this super historic building. I think it was where like the first meeting of the Red Cross or the Salvation Army ever was. It was awesome. That's why I love staying in Airbnbs.

To stay in a cool place, you get a sense of what the place is actually like. You're coming home to your house, not to the lobby of a hotel every night. It just made it easier to coordinate everything and get a sense of what the city is like. When I spent last summer in LA, we used an Airbnb also. So you may have read something that I wrote while staying in an Airbnb. Airbnb has the flexibility in size and location that work for your family and you can always find awesome stuff. You click on guest favorites to narrow your search down. Travel is always stressful. It's always hard to be away from home. But if you're going to do it, do it right. And that's why you should check out Airbnb.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. You must return again and again. By the way, today is the last day to get the Daily Stoic ebook for just $2.99.

That's as cheap as it'll ever be. I used to say that people didn't always believe me how we do it. $1.99 the first week of January every year. And now it's $2.99 because that's inflation and that's what they discount eBooks to. Anyways, you can grab that. I'll link to it in today's show notes or just go to wherever you get your eBooks. But if you want a leather edition or a signed edition, you can find that at store.dailystoic.com. So Marcus Aurelius read Epictetus a lot.

And we know this because meditation is proof of it. Almost every page has some direct quote or an allusion to the teachings of Epictetus. And we also find upon deeper inspection, references to the work of Panaitius, Chrysippus, the plays of Euripides, Zeno, Socrates, and countless other philosophers. So how does someone develop a recall like that?

How did Marcus Aurelius become so wise? Not just on the page, but in life? Through repetition and practice. Marcus Aurelius never refers to Seneca, but it's clear that he internalized a piece of advice from that stoic too. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their work," Seneca wrote,

if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Again and again, the Stoics poured over the same texts so that the ideas could take firm hold, so that they could be absorbed, so it could become muscle memory infused into their DNA. For a Stoic, once is not enough. It's about reading and rereading, writing and journaling, discussing, reflecting and

experiencing it too. Marcus Ruiz did this so much that it became almost a vice at one point in meditations. He has to command himself to put down his books and get back to living. When I published The Daily Stoic back in 2016, which as I said is 299 is an ebook right now, I had of course no idea that it would go on to sell millions of copies and spend hundreds of cumulative weeks on the bestseller list. But one of the things I'm most proud of is the way

that it's most often not on the top selling list on Amazon, but the most read books on Amazon, meaning that people are picking it up and using it each day. Selling a book is not that much of an accomplishment, honestly, certainly I don't mind, but that's not what it's about. It's about creating something that sticks with people,

that becomes part of their lives. That's what Stoicism is supposed to be. And I think the book tapped into that now timeless stoic practice of reading and rereading of people never stepping in the same river twice. Of course, the Daily Stoic Journal did the same and the Daily Stoic Page a Day calendar did the same because I see the pictures on social media,

people with their desks and the calendar there, or they're posting it on social media or whatever. The idea is that you're supposed to engage and reengage and interact and re-interact. And so if you want these ideas to take firm hold of your mind this year, you have to do more than skim. Stoicism isn't something you have read, it is something you are reading.

It's not about reading a book and finishing, it's not about getting the gist of it as Marcus to write it. It's about making sure you're finding finishing. It's not about getting the gist of it as Marcus to write it. It's about making sure you're finding ways to engage with it each day. And then it's about lingering and digesting it until it takes hold, never to be dislodged. And as I said, tomorrow's gonna be the last day

that you can get the Daily Stoke ebook for just 2.99. The leather edition obviously is available all year round. I'll sign your copy or you can get a clothbound edition. The page a day calendar is another way to just have it. It's all the quotes from the book. I have one on my desk. I also like the sort of memento mori of tearing off a page each day.

And the Daily Stoic Journal, if you're thinking about starting a journaling habit this year, that can be great too. I'll link to all that, or you can just go to store.dailystoic.com. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. Today is January 10th and we are reading from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Today's entry entry is If You Want to Be Steady, and we get it from Epictetus' Discourses.

The essence of good, Epictetus says, is a certain kind of reasoned choice, just as the essence of evil is another kind. What about externals, then? They are only the raw materials for our reasoned choice, which finds its own good and evil in working with them. How will it find good? Not by marveling at the material. For if judgments about the material are straight, that makes our choices good, but those judgments are twisted. Our choices turn bad. That's Epictetus' Discourses 1-9. The Stoic seeks steadiness, stability, and tranquility—traits that most of us aspire to but seem to experience only fleetingly. How do they accomplish this elusive goal?

Well, it's not luck. It's not by eliminating outside influences or running away to quiet and solitude. Instead, it's about filtering the outside world through the straightener of our judgment. That's what our reason can do. It can take the crooked, the confusing and the overwhelming nature of external events and make them orderly. However, if our judgments are crooked because we don't use our reason, then

everything that follows will be crooked and we will lose our ability to steady ourselves in the chaos and the rush of life. You want to be steady. If you want clarity, proper judgment is the way. I would argue that stoicism is going to be uniquely suited to this moment that we are in. Not just 2025, but the next four years, the next several years. We have clearly chaos, dysfunction. We have angry, disturbed people.

We have propaganda, misinformation. We have just plain too much information, right? These are crazy times. And the challenge of crazy times is to not be made crazy by them. I'm not saying there's any way you can escape what's happening in the worlds. We are at the mercy of events in that way, just as Epictetus was. Epictetus couldn't convince Nero to not be crazy. He couldn't convince Nero's successor not to exile all the philosophers.

He couldn't tame the weather or human irrationality any more than any of us can. But his point was that if you have good judgment, if you are in command of yourself, of your reason choice, your ability to interpret and understand what's happening around you, you can at least not be made crazy by what's happening around you. You can have clarity inside this chaos, even if that clarity is just an understanding of how chaotic and dysfunctional and screwed up the moment around you is.

You know, a stoic doesn't stick their head in the sand. They don't run away from it. They don't also put on rose colored glasses and say everything is awesome, but they do have the ability to sift through bullshit, to get to the essence, to know what's important and what's not important, what's true and what's not true, what's designed to rile them up and what's actually outrageous. And, you know, justice dictates that they stand up against and speak out against.

You know, it's not just this geopolitical stuff. It's what's happening in the market. It's your neighbor bought a new car or the other parents at your kid's school dress and act a certain way or prioritize a certain thing. And the ability to not get caught up in that, to not have your priorities screwed or warped by that. That's what we're talking about.

That's what this is. This sense of the path that you're on, as Seneca talked about, and not being distracted by it, not just the paths that crisscross yours, but also the sirens that try to tempt you from that path, that try to corrupt you, break you, degrade you. That's what we have to cultivate

as we go into this new year. That's what I'm trying to cultivate. I'm thinking about my inputs, sure, but I'm also thinking about how I filter those inputs, my sense of values, reminding myself what's important, reminding myself who I am. I do this in the pages of my journal, do it in conversations with my wife,

I do it on this podcast, I do it in my writing. Who am I? What am I focusing on? What's important? What is good? What is true? What's important? What is good? What is true? What is not? What is wrong?

What is evil? You gotta have clarity about that. That's what we need to go into this new year with. That's what you need to go into this new year with. And that's what we're trying to do here at Daily Stoic. That's what we do in the pages of the Daily Stoic. That's what we do in the pages of the Daily Sto. That's what we do in the pages of the Daily Stoke Journal. Also, I'll end it there.

I wish you a good day and I'll talk to you again soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystic.com slash email. 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

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