Podcast Summary: The Daily Stoic – “The Day Control Was Taken From Us”

Host: Ryan Holiday
Guests: Chloe Dalton (author, “Raising Hare”), Susan Straight (novelist)
Date: March 11, 2026

Episode Overview

This reflective episode of The Daily Stoic marks the six-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic’s declaration as a global emergency. Host Ryan Holiday explores the collective and personal impact of that period—how life slowed, routines changed, and priorities were reassessed. Featuring author Chloe Dalton, whose pandemic experience raising a wild hare in the English countryside became the subject of her award-winning book “Raising Hare,” and a moving segment with novelist Susan Straight, this episode explores the themes of loss, change, resilience, and the lessons learned when control is taken from us.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Remembering the Disruption: The March 2020 “Pause”

• Reflection on Pandemic Beginnings

  • Ryan recalls the uncanny feeling of life stopping: “All I have to do is say those words and people start laughing because it just takes them back... March of 2020.” (03:43)
  • The pandemic was both unprecedented and historically familiar—drawing parallels to Marcus Aurelius living through the Antonine Plague.

• Personal Impact

  • “I remember going and picking my son up for school, thinking, I don’t know when I’m going to do this again.” (03:56)
  • Life felt as if “a watch that broke—the time of that break is so significant you just leave it there.” (04:19)

2. Lessons in Slowing Down and Paying Attention

• Chloe Dalton’s Experience

  • During lockdown, Dalton found herself attending closely to the hare she unexpectedly adopted—her focus shifted to the animal’s survival and nature’s rhythms.
  • Dalton reads from her book: “Relief and awareness of my good fortune warred inside me with a deep restlessness and anxiety about the future... A baby hare had no place in any scenario we had discussed.” (06:08)
  • Nature became her anchor: “In a year in the countryside, you see these patterns repeating themselves... the grimness of winter giving way to spring... things dying have their place.” (10:19)

• Attention to Natural Rhythms

  • The enforced stillness allowed appreciation of the changing seasons and the realization of city life’s artificial sense of time: “Living in the city... everyone is moving at the same kind of speed... you don’t notice the passage of time.” (10:49)

3. Reassessing Values: Place, Community, and Meaning

• Re-encountering Stability and Roots
  • Dalton notes: “We’ve been encouraged to think that success means leaving all that behind... But I did realize there’s a lot of dignity and meaning in a life rooted in one place and one community.” (12:21)
  • Rural living and connection to “a patch of land” became more valued during the “narrowing” of life in the pandemic.

4. The Animal Perspective: Instinct, Presence, and Simplicity

• Learning from Animals
  • Stephen reflects: “My donkey doesn’t know there’s a pandemic... they’re just living their life in the present moment.” (27:31)
  • Dalton: “I would watch the hare, and everything would slow down. My attention would focus. I would open my senses because I’d be trying to understand a creature with which I had no common language.” (21:21)
  • “Unfortunately, we can’t all go and lie off in the grass and be hares. But, you know, we are animals at the end of the day, even though we live like we’re not.” (26:55)

5. The Pandemic as a Break and an Opportunity for Renewal

• Time for ‘Sabbatical’ Living

  • Stephen compares the forced pause to Churchill’s “Wilderness Years”—a break that, while difficult, is restorative and even preparatory for the future. (30:55)
  • Dalton: “I had a chance to live differently, live quietly, think deeply... discover there was a voice bubbling away inside me that I hadn’t ever listened to. The hare gave me that.” (31:37)

• Habit Change Comes from Necessity

  • “If it’s our choice and you study how you want to improve your life, you never really get round to it. But something comes along and makes you realize that your habits aren’t as set in stone as you thought.” (24:18)

6. Returning to “Normal”—and What Gets Lost

• Relapse into Busyness
  • Chloe: “We all got sober and then we all relapsed... now it’s fighting to get back to some of those good things from that period and maintain them.” (25:33)
  • The urge to speed up, embrace new technologies (like AI), and fear being left behind threatens to erase the lessons learned during the enforced pause. (25:59)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On nostalgia for lockdown:

  • “It is weird to be nostalgic for such a terrible thing, but... things got very quiet and very calm. It’s kind of like we all got sober for a brief period of time.”
    — Stephen Hanselman (08:47)

• On slowing down:

  • “My sense of the passage of time was very warped by living in the city... in the countryside, you see these patterns repeating themselves.”
    — Chloe Dalton (10:19)

• On returning to “normal”:

  • “I would, if we’d had this conversation before I had the hare in my life, have told you that I loved absolutely everything about the way I lived... I just feel so grateful that circumstances meant I had no choice but to change my habits.”
    — Chloe Dalton (24:18)

• On control and unpredictability:

  • “We feel as if we can control things and have power if only we eat the right foods and do the right thing... I had Covid three times because I kept taking care of people who were old and they didn’t get Covid. Yes, I was vaccinated. I got Covid. I’m just saying the thing about this is I’m not even writing for us to mourn the lost. I’m writing for those of us who are still here to just think about what we survived in a beautiful way.”
    — Susan Straight (43:22)

Important Timestamps

• 03:43 — Ryan Holiday reflects on the start of the pandemic and the significance of the “broken watch” moment.
• 06:08 — Excerpt from Chloe Dalton’s “Raising Hare” about her life slowing and taking in a wild animal.
• 08:47 — Stephen Hanselman on the strange nostalgia for the quietness of early pandemic days.
• 10:19 — Chloe Dalton on noticing natural cycles and the passage of time in the countryside.
• 12:21 — Insights into the value of living rooted in one place and community.
• 21:21 — Dalton describes the meditative effect of watching the hare and slowing down.
• 25:33 — The hosts discuss societal “relapse” into business post-pandemic.
• 30:55 — Exploring the pandemic as a restorative break.
• 38:34 — Susan Straight discusses why she chose to memorialize the pandemic era in her new novel and pushes back on overly positive or political retellings.
• 43:22 — Straight shares deeply personal losses and the importance of remembering the realities of COVID-19.

Episode Takeaways

• The pandemic universally forced a reckoning with what does and does not matter, offering an unexpected opportunity for reflection, habit change, and connection with nature and community.
• Extended pauses—whether chosen or enforced—can yield profound personal growth and creative renewal.
• Returning to “normal” has meant the loss of some hard-won clarity and pace; it requires conscious effort to retain these gifts.
• Stories and literature help us memorialize, process, and hold onto the individual and collective experiences of tumultuous times.

Further Reading Recommended by the Episode

• “Raising Hare” by Chloe Dalton
• “Sacrament” by Susan Straight

Final Reflection

Ryan urges listeners to take time to look back on March 2020, examine what has changed, and consider deliberately revisiting the pause and perspective gained during the pandemic—“we don’t need a global crisis to do that; it should be built into our lives.” (44:47)