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Welcome to the daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world. None of these things change. You walk the streets of Pompeii and you see the little stands that sold hot and cold food for busy people to scarf down lunch. You walk up to the top of the hill and you find the nicer houses. You find that the owners of the nicer houses, tired of the street noise, banned vehicle traffic. You find people had creatively decorated to adjust for a small space. You find that the stores jockeyed to be close to the busiest intersections. You find artists and vandals had put up graffiti in public spaces. In short, you see nearly all of the trends and inclinations of any modern city. Because for all of the centuries, people don't really change. In fact, nothing really changes. It's extra interesting then that Marcus Aurelius would make an observation about the time of Vespasian. Since it ended only months before Pompey ended the age of Vespasian, he writes, people doing the exact same things. Marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power. There are many more things we could add to this list, and we have. Over the years, for centuries, people have decided to take the scenic route. They've talked baby talk to their dog. They've arrived late, anxiously. They've stayed up late reading or talking. They were short with their children that gossiped about a mutual friend. They fretted about their parents. They got caught up in a project and forgot to eat lunch. They caught a vain look in the mirror. They pinched fat on their belly. They got in arguments, they got a song stuck in their head. This is what we all do and always have done. This is what it is to be human. Some of it good, some of it better to resist. But it's the rhythm of life, the bleeding of eras, one into the other. No change, just repetition. Just foolishness and greatness all side by side. So the next time you feel exasperated, annoyed, joyful or curious, remember countless generations before you felt exactly the same way. We are all participants in this ancient, eternal human dance. Different eras, same steps.
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He wasn't just naturally wise, naturally courageous, naturally disciplined. It was an effort for him, as it is for all of us. Fight to be the person. Philosophy tried to make you this guy, Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world. Now, you might think that his life was easy, that he had it made. In fact, Marc Aurelius experiences incredible difficulty and adversity from the get go. Power and responsibility is foist upon him. It's not something that he expected or wanted. And then he finds himself in this job that he knows tends to corrupt. And he probably also had some inclination of how difficult the job would be. He experiences historic floods, a devastating plague, many years of warfare. He's betrayed by one of his generals in an attempted coup. He buries multiple children. I mean, this guy did not have an easy life, despite the privileges that he was lucky enough to enjoy. Marcus Aurelius knew that he had a lot of power, but he still faced the fundamental human reality that many things were outside of his control that were not in his power. And that's why he so took to Stoic philosophy, is ultimately just like you or I, trying to navigate a difficult, unpredictable world populated by difficult, uncontrollable other people. And that's what he's doing in his meditations, writing advice to himself, trying to uphold these Stoic principles in the difficult crucible that he found himself in. I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about Stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to everyone from the NBA to the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. So in today's episode, I want to give you some rules for life from the great Marcus Aurelius. We do ourselves a disservice when we make historical figures into more than what they are, when we forget that they were human beings doing the absolute best that they could. They weren't made that way. They became that way. One of the passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. It's important we realize that he was doing precisely that, fighting to be Marcus Aurelius. He wasn't just naturally this guy. He wasn't naturally wise, naturally courageous, naturally. Just naturally disciplined. It was an effort for him, as it is for all of us. It was a daily struggle. In fact, that's what Meditations was. It's the log, the historical record of Marcus Aurelius fighting to be what he wanted to be. Inevitably, invariably, like all of us, not actually getting there. The vast majority of the time, that's what we're trying to do. We're all trying to fight to be what we're capable of being. We're fighting who we know we want to be. We fight to be the person that philosophy tries to make us what Journaling is fundamentally, is putting your thoughts up for review. Meditation is a form of that. I think going for walks is a way to do where you're having to sit with those thoughts a little bit. The Socratic method is this. And as you play that out, you realize not on as sound a footing as your emotional sense would have you believe, you think about how important it would be for someone like Marcus Aurelius to be doing that in Meditations. Whatever he wants, he can do. Like, there's a moment where Hadrian, his predecessor, gets angry and he just grabs a pen and just stabs it in the eye of a secretary. No consequences. You can't get impeached. You can do whatever you want. And so Mark is trying to not be like that, but knowing that he could be Tiberius or Nero or Adrian, you can do whatever you want. I think the journaling practice of Meditations, the notes to himself, is the process by which he filters out the intrusive thoughts or the destructive urges. And we all need that. Yeah. Marcus Aurelius was a guy who met his fair share of jerks. But he said, you know what you're supposed to do when you meet a jerk? You say to yourself, is a world without shamelessness, without jerks and possible. He says, no, then this is one of those people. They are playing that role. And when you can start to see people, even the frustrating, annoying, obnoxious people that you meet in your life, as playing a role assigned to them, a role that someone has to do, that there is no version of the earth where they're not annoying, obnoxious, awful people. And you can accept them, you can tolerate them. You can also understand they are in a minority. It was inevitable that eventually you would bump up against one of these people. And now you have. It's no more, no less than that. Don't be overheard complaining. Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. He says, not even to yourself. I love that distinction. It's not only not like whining publicly, but not whining to yourself, not pitying yourself. Because the point is, it never makes a difference. It's funny when I've talked about this before, people go, oh, but what about protest? Taking an action is not a complaint. Complaining is when you think that emoting about simply speaking, about simply letting your displeasure be known, when you confuse that with actually being doing something about your problem, you have to ask yourself in every moment, in every instance, every inquiry, every opportunity, every thought, Marcus Aurelius says you have to ask yourself, is this essential? Because most of what we do and say isn't essential. It's unnecessary. It's superfluous. It's silly, it's ridiculous, it's superficial. It's not something we need to do and you have to eliminate it. When you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing essential things better. Do less to do more, do less better. And when we eliminate these things, when we say no to things, when we pair things up, it doesn't feel like much in and of itself, because it isn't. But it adds up in a big way. It makes us leaner. It makes us more efficient. It gives us the double benefit of doing the things we are going to do that much better.
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The Stoics believe that we can dye events with our own color, that we can take what happens and turn it into our own benefit. That this idea of whether something is unfortunate or fortunate is a choice. We get to decide. We decide what it means for us. That's the choice. And so Marcus in Meditations, he says, our actions can be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions because we can accommodate and adapt. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. The situation can be terrible, it can be not your choice at all. It could be the exact opposite of what you want. And yet it's still a chance to practice virtue. No one's saying it's going to be to the financial benefit of the company. No one's going to say you're all going to look at it and go, those were the golden years. But you do have the opportunity to practice virtue, to be your best self in every situation. All the external factors are not in your control. Who you are in those situations, that is in your control. There's a pretty amazing story about Marc, really. It's pretty late in life. He's seen leaving his palace in Rome and he's carrying these tablets and a friend says, where are you going? He says, I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher, to learn that which I do not yet know. The friend marvels. He says, here's the most powerful man in the world, even as an old age, picking up his books and going to school. I think that's in effect what Marcus is. He remains a student. It's his notebook, it's his exercise book, it's his workbook. He's doing work on himself even as an old man. And the fruits of that come down to us. It's just so wonderful to think of Marcus even as an old man, maybe some of the lines in here he learned from sexist the philosopher. He thanks sexist philosopher in book one, the Debts and Lessons chapter. So the idea for Marcus was that you always stay a student. Famously is betrayed by his best friend. He thinks Marcus is sick and near death. And so this guy named Avidius Cassius goes, I'm the emperor now. But Marcus wasn't dead. And so puts him in this horrible position. Obviously, you can't allow this, but he doesn't want to fight a war over. And he basically says this is the final chapter in the obstacles away, the idea that even this is an opportunity. And he says, like, I want to show history how civil strife can be dealt with. He tries to give Cassius a chance to come to his senses. Eventually he has to take the Roman army out in battle, deal with it. And then he weeps when someone kills Cassius because it deprives him of the opportunity of forgiving him. And he orders the Senate, he says, do not execute a single person for this. Do not let my name be stained in blood. Which is maybe impractical, maybe too philosophical, but there is a beauty to that. He talks about forgiveness in meditation, but then he has to actually apply it in his life. This is a print I have from one of my favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius. I have it on the wall. We sell it in the daily Stokes service. Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, be one. And I think arguably, Marcus Aurelius's greatest contributions to philosophy are not what he wrote in this book. Right. What Marcus's greatest contributions to philosophy is how he lived. That even if he had never written a philosophical work, that he'd still be seen as a kind of philosopher king because he embodied the ideas, he lived them. He demonstrated that a king, an emperor, a person of power, influence or wealth, could be good and decent, could do the right thing, could be everything that people expected of him. And that's just, to me, the most important thing we can take from Marcus Aurelius. And it is inevitable that we will fall short. Marcus did I do? Everyone does. Antoninus Pius probably did, too, which is why in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says to pick yourself back up when you fall. But he also says to celebrate the fact that you're a human being. What matters, he says, is that you come back to the rhythm of it. We're going to be jarred by circumstances. We're going to be messed up. We're going to slip on our diet, on our New Year's resolution on the progress we were making. That's okay. What matters is that you get back up. What matters is that more often than not you stick to it. That you always come back home to it. Every day I send out one stoic, inspired email totally for free. Almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com email. Love to see you there.
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