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- [00:00]
A
As you know, it's the start of the new year. We all have our resolutions. We want to exercise more, we want to eat healthier. One of mine is I love running, but I want to do some other working out. I want to be a little stronger in 2026. Well, that's where today's sponsor comes in. Tonal provides the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer anytime at home. With one sleek system. It's designed to reduce your mental load, which, frankly, is part of the reason I don't work out. It's like running this simple. I'm just going to do it. I go this place, I turn around and then I come home, right? I don't have to think about how much weight I'm gonna lift, how many sets I'm gonna do, am I doing it right? Is my form right? With Tonal, there's none of that. There's no focusing on workout planning and there's no second guessing your form either. Tonal gives you real time coaching cues to dial in your form and help you lift safely and effectively. And they set the optimal weight for every move and adjust in 1 pound increments as you get stronger. So you're always challenged. And right now, Tonal is offering our listeners 200 bucks off their tonal purchase with promo code t. Go to Tonal.com and use promo code TDS for 200 bucks off your purchase. That's Tonal.com promo code TDS for $200 off. One of the things I try to do towards the end of the year, it's something my parents taught me, is like, things slow down. You finally can think about things for a minute. I want to pick something or someone to be consciously generous to. When we're out, we're traveling on Christmas Day. I love to tip big, but one of the things I love to do with my family is we pull up GiveWell and we find a highly effective charity and donate money to it, right? Sometimes when you're doing charitable donations, like, does it help? Does it make a difference? You donate to this fund or that fund. But one of the things that's so empowering about GiveWell is they put a number on the effectiveness, right? You know, that it's making a difference. Which is why over 150,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than two and a half billion dollars. And rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 300,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. Which is why when I'm thinking about making a charitable donation. I check GiveWell first. You can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free and thanks to the donors that sponsor that research. GiveWell doesn't take a cut of your tax deductible donation when you give it to one of the recommended funds. This is your first gift through GiveWell. You can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. And to claim your match, you just go to givewell.org and pick podcast and you enter the Daily Stoic at checkout. Make sure they know you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic to get your donation matched. GiveWell code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. So on Monday I had a talk. I was flying to Florida for a talk, but I took the kids to school. I worked at the office and then I picked them up from school. We went to Whole Foods, did our weekly grocery shopping as the boys and I do every week. And then I drove. We met at a parking lot near the airport. I handed my wife the kids and all the groceries and then I flew to Florida, flew home and then when I got back the next night, I made myself a sandwich from the groceries that I had just bought. And actually the week before I took them to Whole Foods for a weekly thing and I had a phone call I had to do. They played upstairs on the, on the playground. The Whole Foods headquarters here in Austin has a second story playground. They played on that while I did my phone call and then together we went and did all our grocery shopping. I love Whole Foods. I don't have to worry about what I'm feeding my kids. They, they love the, you know, the hot bar. That's what they love. They love getting macaroni. My son loves orange chicken. They love the sushi. There's. We love Whole Foods in our family and you should make Whole Foods your destination for all things wellness, including high quality organic options to help you make better choices. Their 365 brand has delicious and wallet friendly varieties of ready to eat salad kits, plus ready to heat rice and bean blends to pair with lean proteins. You can also save big on supplements and vitamins this month. Check out their high quality multivitamins, probiotics and protein powders for all your New Year's resolutions and goals. Shop all things wellness at Whole Foods. Market it. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I sound a little bit different because I am sick. Our whole family's basically been sick since Christmas, off and on. I think we went through flu B, then strep. My. My oldest actually had strep twice, and then now through flu A. So it's a little. It's a little rough, but maybe. Hopefully this is not symbolic of the. Of the year to come, but it is what it is and we will get through it. I want to read you something real fast. Imperfectionism is the outlook that understands this to be good news. It's not that facing finitude isn't painful. That's why the quest for control is so alluring. Confronting your non negotiable limitations means accepting that life entails tough choices and sacrifices, that regret is always a possibility, as is disappointing others, and that nothing you create in the world will ever measure up to the perfect standards in your head. But these truths are also the very things that liberate you to act and to experience resonance. That's a passage from Oliver Berkman's latest book, Meditation for Four Weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. You might know his other big bestseller, 4000 time management for Mortals. I've actually known Oliver for a long time. I was trying to remember. We had lunch or dinner. Was it in New York, Louisiana? I don't remember we met before, but he came out and did the podcast in person and it was lovely. It's been awesome to watch his books blow up. He was a columnist for many years at the Guardian. He had a weekly column called this Column Will Change youe Life. And he wrote a book before 4,000 weeks called the Happiness for People who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. And I think you're really gonna like this episode. I'm keeping the intro short today because I am running out of voice. So I'll let my conversation, which I recorded with Oliver not too long ago, do most of the talking. And if you haven't read 4,000 weeks or meditations for Mortals, you should. We've got signed copies at the Painted Porch. You can follow Oliver on Instagram and on Twitter. Oliver Berkman I remember with the antidote, which I have Here.
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B
Amazing. Oh, an old school edition.
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A
Yeah, we were trying to find. I was like, what does it look like? And so we went on Amazon to like see the COVID Been reissued since then. Yeah. And then I figured, so when, when did this come out?
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B
2012.
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A
But I remember and in your columns too, you were somewhat cynical slash skeptical of self help. Like I think you rightfully sort of were criticizing the excesses or the nonsense of it and the, you know, the manifestation side of it and the secret and whatever. And then it's been interesting with 4,000 weeks, which became like a bonafide hit. You're now one of those guys.
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B
True. Yeah.
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A
And I wondered what that feels like for you.
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B
I mean, I've definitely been on a journey from cynicism to sincerity. That is a real thing that happens as you get older. Apparently I'm learning. But it's curious because I don't think I pretend at any point in any of these books that I've sort of found the perfect solution to life and all you have to do is follow me. And I think that's also antithetical to the philosophy that I'm exploring anyway. But yeah, there is a certain sense of that. And one thing you learn or one thing I've found is that I have a very strong British desire to be self deprecating in response to anyone investing any kind of authority in me.
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A
Who, Me.
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B
Yeah, it's not actually that helpful for people to be like that. You don't want to become a cult leader.
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A
Right.
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B
But you also like taking on a little bit of. That is actually quite. It's helpful for people.
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A
You meet the people who are sort of true believers. And by true believers I mean true believers in themselves. Like they're able to get up and just pontificate about how someone should live their life and what they should. And you go like, first off, they're just. They just stole all this stuff from other people. They just like their real skill here is they're confident, shamelessness, their ability to. To sort of act like they invented any of this, even though the.
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B
Right.
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A
The Greeks invented it and the Romans invented it and the religious thinkers invented it, but they're just able to get up there and be like, this is me and of course you should follow me. And then there's the other part, and I've met a bunch of these people and. And I'm sure you have too, where they're sort of journalists who are writing skeptically about like. And then they wonder why people don't buy those books. Like Nobody cares enough about this space to read a book about the space and how the space isn't.
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B
Yes.
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A
Of value. Right, right, right. Yeah. Like.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I think about that when you read books, or it's like the paradox of this or whatever. And you're like. So you're just saying you haven't figured it out. Like. Like people don't read enough.
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B
Right.
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A
To. To read a book that's like. It's complicated. So there's this kind of middle ground that's pretty rare of like, hey, I'm writing this for myself, and I am as much a traveler on this road as you, but here's kind of what smarter people than me have said, and here's what's worked for me. And maybe it'll work for you.
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B
Yeah, no, totally. That's exactly. That's exactly it. Right. I've seen people say different things. One is like the idea of being. Maybe it was you. The idea of being like, one and a half steps ahead of the. Of the reader, and it wasn't me.
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A
But I like it.
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B
Kind of writing for people who absolutely have just as much intellectual capacity and sensitivity to reach all these conclusions themselves. But I've been lucky enough to spend a lot of time on it.
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A
Yes.
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B
And, you know.
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A
Well, you're good at explaining.
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B
Right. And I think I do have a. I think I do have a skill for synthesizing and explaining and things like that. So it's in that spirit that you're helping people. There's also a line that David Brooks quotes in one of his books. I should really say who originated the quote, but that's where I found it about how writers are like beggars telling other beggars where we have found bread. Which is also another really good idea here. It's like, there's a reason some of these things are eternal truths that crop up in eight different wisdom or spiritual traditions. And if you can sort of unpack them and find value in them and pass that on, you're just doing a bit more of that same. But the same thing, I guess.
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A
And I think, like, in the ancient world, it's not that the ideas were obvious enough, but they were new enough that the person coming up with them and writing them was often the same person.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And in our world, which is where we have an abundance of information, actually, the rare skill is not the rare skill, but a necessary skill. Slash trait is the ability to effectively communicate. Yeah. And take things that do work and are of value and make it clear that they do work and are of value to people who wouldn't ordinarily think that. Right. And so the writing as a skill is maybe what you bring to the table. I think it's what I bring to the table. It's like, I didn't invent any of this stuff, but I'm pretty good at putting it in a context or a framework that. That is of use.
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B
Yeah. I mean, you very evidently are. And I think that that's. I think. I think that that's probably true of me too. I mean, the. The thing that I always. You come back to as a guiding light is that it is ultimately like therapy for myself as well.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And if I'm ever sort of at a loss about what broad subject areas I should be focusing on or even just things like what to write this newsletter about.
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A
Yeah.
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B
The question to come back to always is like, what's the thing that's really been bugging me these last few weeks? Or that I feel like I had some insight about. And I'm perpetually amazed at how many people then reply saying, it's like, you're inside my head. Why did you come to this insight right now? And obviously there's a huge amount of self selection going on there in terms of who subscribes to things and who reads books. Who reads specific books. But it's kind of interesting as well that there is such thing as the zeitgeist, and there is such thing as particular forms of suffering that seem to be very widespread at any given moment and, and, and ways through them that seem to help.
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A
That's the weird thing about the daily stoke, because the daily stoic is attached to dates.
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B
Right.
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A
And then the email too, obviously goes out every day. But people are like, how did you know? Or they're like, they're like, did you think about this? Because, like, what's happening in October is usually this. And it's like I was literally thinking, like, how many do I have left to get to? 366, you know, and then I was like, this one's too similar to the one from three days ago, so let's just shuffle the deck a little. And it's like horoscopes, but in a good way. People see what they need to see.
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B
Right. And in forging that connection, they've done something really good for themselves. Right. Right. It reminds me of one of the arguments I've seen about dream analysis in psychotherapy, where there are, you know, there are people who believe that these are deep, important messages from the unconscious, and people who believe that it's random synaptic firings that have no meaning. But actually like taking a dream as if it might have something to tell you and journaling about it is a great thing to do utterly regardless of which one of those is true. Right. Even if it is random, because your interpretations are certainly not going to be random.
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A
Well, yeah, even like liter analysis of literature. Right. Like, you could be right, you could be wrong. The important thing is that you sat down and thought about what this means.
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B
Yes, exactly.
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A
And just like there's no answer to most of these like, Zen paradoxes either. Right. It's the thinking about them instead of letting your mind wander or think about 500 other things. That's actually the part of the Enlightenment. Nobody actually knows what the sound of one hand clapping is.
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B
Right. Those questions are designed to stop you short and make you actually be in reality and feel things and think things. Right, yeah. That relates to a much wider sort of thing that I'm always coming back to in my work. I think, which is, right, that this isn't all leading up to a specific endpoint where you get to sit back and relax and say, I've done all the inner work now, and now for the remaining. Whatever, how many years are left in my life, I can just be like plain sailing and not really have to engage. And you wouldn't want that anyway, because.
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A
I just did this book on wisdom and I was thinking. I was sort of saying, wisdom is kind of like the horizon. Like you think you're getting closer to it and it's always a little bit further away. And that struck me as true at first. And then I was thinking, but if I were to stand here and decide to walk towards the horizon and I walk for 30 minutes or an hour. Yeah. I didn't get any closer to the horizon, but if I look back, I'm further than where I was when I started. I've definitely covered ground.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
Right. And so the idea is not that, yeah, you arrive at. At any kind of enlightenment or wisdom or serenity, but you can certainly be better off than you were. You can have covered some ground. That's the idea.
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B
Totally. Yeah. I completely agree.
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A
I think sometimes people do think that because a book was published, you arrived somewhere, as opposed to the book being just an encapsulation of part of that journey. And by the way, you can backtrack and get hopelessly lost. All of these other things.
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B
Yeah. And that was also evident. And I got. I had sort of contact with a few people after 4,000 weeks, really began to Take off offering to help me put together specific kinds of courses. And I have done a bit of things like that. And I am interested in the general domain, but with one or two of these people, there was an implication in what they were proposing that we worked on together, that you could offer people the big ticket version of this that would somehow include like the secret that I left out of the book. And it's like, no, that is all that I had at the point that I finished writing that.
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A
Also, like you wrote a book about mortality. So this isn't like a simple small question. This is literally. I mean, Cicero said to philosophize is to learn how to die. So this is the whole point of it. Like, this is the whole point of life that psychedelics are aimed at and therapy is aimed at and religion is aimed at. And every philosopher who's ever lived has thought about. There's not like a six module course to figure it out. And I think that is a little bit of a difference. I do notice, like people who read a lot of self help and then people who don't is that sometimes self help people think that books are answers.
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B
Right.
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A
Whereas like people who maybe read literature and history and biography understand that a book is just a book. Like, I have read an embarrassing amount of books about the Civil War and every time I think I don't need to read anymore, I read another one and I go, I didn't even think about it. Like, you realize, like, oh, this isn't a thing that you have read about, it's a thing you are reading about.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
And if you want to take a course to learn more or to maybe go in deeper depths in some of the things. Sure. But again, to the different kinds of people, like the guru and the cult leader can get up there and go, I have the answers. And a more intellectually honest person isn't able to go much further than like, here's some stuff I've been thinking about.
- [18:22]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. And this reminds me also of like this question of what is the role of techniques and methodologies and things. Because I think a lot about this because people really do want. And so do I, you know, like tricks and practices to help deepen their understanding or their productivity or whatever it might be. And yet there's a whole wing of self help that implies that the right collection of practices, like, is the answer. And if you can just get those ones and do those ones every day for the rest of your life, then everything's fine. It's incredibly clear to me. That the thing, firstly, the thing that matters are the sort of the principles or the perspective shifts, and then There are like 10,000 techniques you could come up with that would embody those things. So if you're making the argument, as I do in the new book, for a sort of less structured approach to organizing your time, so what does that mean in practice? Well, I can give you 10 different options, and you can come up with another 10 yourself. But the important thing is the point I'm making, and then also that even the set of principles is going to evolve through your life. Right? I mean, it's not going to be or be appropriate for different people at different times in their lives. It's not going to be completely timeless truths. Although maybe you disagree, because I feel like there is an element in the way that you write that perhaps you are getting down to the sort of handful of kind of claims about a meaningful life that really are universally and timelessly true as opposed to, you know, contingent.
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A
I see, like, this with people who want to be writers all the time. They want to know, like, what programs do you use? And, you know, like, what pen do you use? And, you know, like, a lot of it is just doing it, and the people who do it really well do it very differently than the other people that do it very well. And there's. There really is not much more to it than doing it, you know, and so sometimes people can kind of get obsessed with the tactics and myths that it's largely the principles or the strategies. But, yeah, like, when people ask me about Stoicism, they're like, what are the five Stoic exercises? And it's like, there's a number of things that the Stoics seem to talk about a lot that we could sort of pull out as strategies. But mostly they went to classes, talked to people about things, read books and wrote books.
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B
Right.
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A
Like, it's just a process of thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking. And like, even the. The other interesting thing is, like, knowing the principles and knowing the principles are very different things. Yeah, yeah, you know, like, absolutely. I've more or less known everything that the Stoics have said since I was 20 years old. But my relationship to them and my ability to sort of understand what they mean and get any sort of real relief or insight or direction from them has obviously evolved quite a bit. You know, it's the same thing. It's like, if you look at where I start, if you look at where I am, it's not that impressive. If you look at where I am compared to where I started, I've made some progress.
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B
Yeah, no, absolutely. I say something similar because it's like, yeah, I was like an anxious wreck at college. So the fact that I'm a little bit chilled out now ought to count for something.
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A
A couple of years ago, one of my wife's words for the year we try to think about a word that we're going to live by the next year. One of those words was systems. The idea was setting up better systems, putting systems in place that just make us better, more efficient, more effective, more responsible. And nowhere are systems more important than when it comes to your finances, right? Managing your money doesn't have to be a struggle. It can be automated, it can be accessible, it can be tracked. And that's where today's sponsor, Monarch comes in. Monarch is an all in one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. Brings your entire financial life from budgeting accounts, investments, net worth and future planning all together in one dashboard, your laptop or on your phone. And if you want to start the year off on the right foot financially and get 50% off your monarch subscription, you can With Code Stoic, Monarch helps you reach concrete, achievable goals you'll stick to for all 12 months of the year, not just January. And they've got some new AI tools that are built on Monarch Intelligence, which is designed to help you access authentic collective wisdom of certified financial planners and financial advisors 24,7 access to financial advice and insights personalized to you this new year achieve your financial goals for good. Monarch is the all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use code stoiconarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year with monarch.com code stoic support for this show comes from Fundrise. Look, investing in companies already in The S&P 500 can sometimes feel like you're being served someone else's leftovers. It could still be a good meal, but it's hard not to imagine what that food tasted like when it was fresh. You know, historically it's only VC investors and, you know, insiders and hedge fund managers and stuff who had access to the best companies in the world before the public did. One of the things you find out when you get money is that you know there's certain things that are available to you that weren't available to you before and aren't available to most people. Well, fundrise is completely upending that dynamic with a new venture capital product with just a $10 minimum investment. Fundrise's mission is to give everyone the access required to invest in the best tech and AI companies before they go public. Just visit fundrise.com dailystoke to check out Fundrise's venture portfolio and start investing in minutes. Obviously, all investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. And this is a paid advertisement. So how many days a week do you think you wake up feeling like you're behind? Because you talk about that a lot.
- [24:25]
B
Yeah, again, that's one of these these days things. So I think I feel this a lot less intensely than I did. And I think when I do wake up that way, I'm more likely to have the presence of mind to sort of see through that thought. Because a big part of what I'm trying to argue is there's something kind of. There's something mistaken about that idea, right? Not because you're actually really great and you can do all the things, but precisely because you can't. So that sort of feeling that there's a problem with you because you have not got your arms around infinity, that's not a sensible way to think about the relationship between a finite human and infinity. But to answer the question, no, I don't think I wake up feeling that way most mornings, but it definitely comes. And what helps me in those kind of situations is, well, I have this morning pages. That's the one thing that I religiously done for years now. And I've done it not because I've had great self discipline, but because it so obviously improves the quality of my day that I want to do it. And that will be the place where I will sort of metabolize that feeling if it's deep in me. I'm often fascinated by the fact that sometimes it seems you wake up early in the morning and that feels like the sort of wisest and calmest and most focused you'll ever be. And sometimes it's like whatever's happened in your sleep is like twisted you up in the wrong direction and you start from a sort of earlier stage of your psychological evolution.
- [25:54]
A
Would you ever wake up like, and you had a dream about your spouse and you're just like angry or they're angry with you? It's kind of like that. Clearly you got in some sort of emotional place or vibe that you have to do some real work to get out of, because the thing that you're upset about is not real. You're like, you just did this horrible thing to me in my mind and I know it's not real, but I still. I woke up. Feel it. Yeah. While I was asleep, it was real. And now I'm having the. And that. There's probably a metaphor in there where you're just like. You're having the impression, the feeling that whatever, but it's not actually true.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And so you made it up. So you have to kind of work yourself out of that. And I think you can do a, like a life version of that too. Like, you wake up and you're like, everything's shit, or I'm behind or like, like you can wake up in an emotional place that is not based on anything you've had time to experience.
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B
Right, right, right. Yeah, no, absolutely. But it's real for you in a sense, and so it needs your attention. Yeah.
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A
And you can, you can certainly make it real by how you treat people. Right. So. So it's like if you immediately pick a fight with your kids or you go straight to your inbox and you're. You decide to take this, that or the other personally, like the world will oblige you if that's how you want to feel today.
- [27:13]
B
Right. Because it's all the overlay that you're putting on things. Right. I mean, the back foot feeling is definitely something I write about a lot. But the other sort of side of that, it's the same point really, is just I used to have this sense and I occasionally will fall back into it these days of time, sort of these kind of tranches of time that I'm sort of moving through in my life so that I'm see if I can convey this properly. So like, I would be working and it would be my turn to do school pickup at 3:30. And then from 3:30 till like after dinner, I'm going to be focusing on parenting. And as 3:30 approaches, it's like this thing is moving towards you through the day. It's like in some sort of like James Bond movie or something. Right. The walls of the room are getting smaller and smaller and I would get more and more sort of stressed about the time running out and resentful of this thing that I have to do. But also, like most days, I really enjoy doing that thing. Certainly it's very, very high up in my values of what I want to give my life to. And it's just the fact of relating to time in this particular sort of finitude is a problem way that sort of defines that upcoming thing as something to bemoan. Because, yeah, somewhere in the back of my mind or in some pre unverbal part of my unconscious, there is this assumption that it shouldn't be the case that trade offs are involved.
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A
Yes. Yeah. You're just arguing with the reality that you can't do two things at the same time. Well, I think about that, and that's why I was saying the key is just to say no to things. Because it's like, okay, so if I get resentful when there's like, things in the calendar, but I also understand that, like, life is things you have to do. Did I eat up the patience that I have with that? Because I agreed to this call and this meeting and this thing that could have been an email. And then so, you know, I'm like, okay, this is my publisher. I gotta be nice, you know, or I gotta talk to the accountant about this thing. Or, you know, this person really wanted to just hop on the phone for three minutes, even though I. They've done this to me before. And it's never three minutes and it never actually needed to happen. And so I did all that. And then 3:30 comes along and I gotta pick up my kid. And now I'm like, what the fuck? Will anyone let me work? You know? And it's like, I should be polite and accommodating and patient with the one thing that I like doing and actually matters and is, by the way, totally my responsibility, which is, you know, picking them up from school and having fun together.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But before that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I've used it up on a bunch of trivial. And so it's like when I pull up my calendar and there's not much in it, I'm like, today is a great day, you know, and when it's. When it's. There's a bunch of things, I'm like, you know, and so part of it, I think, is just like, the decisions you made beforehand.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So you're not having to use, like, your Zen mastery of your emotions to deal with this situation that was.
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B
Right.
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A
You voluntarily put yourself into.
- [30:21]
B
Right. And I think what. Yes. I mean, what that brings up for me when I think about that is like, first of all, I think, like, isn't it crazy because. Because we are both in a situation, through great good fortune, where we really can decide to say no to lots of things that come in. And it's not gonna be calamitous and people are gonna understand, and yet maybe it's different for you, but the weird stuff from childhood of, like, I've sort of got to be obedient to these different and the way you can give basically everybody in the world some sort of strange quasi parental authority over you. Absolute disaster.
- [30:56]
A
There's this really fascinating exchange that Seneca talks where he tells this story about Alexander the Great. So Alexander the Great wants to conquer some territory, and he's been so successful that the leaders of that country come together and they call a meeting with him and they go like, look, if you don't attack us, we'll give you this part. And Seneca quotes Alexander going, like, I didn't come all the way across the world to take what the leftovers you're willing to give me. He's like, I'm going to take what I want and give you the leftovers. Now, obviously this is a brutal, horrendous idea, but Seneca is using it as a metaphor or analogy to go, this is how we have to think about philosophy and self improvement, et cetera. That you don't, like, commit yourself to all these professional goals and all these activities and all this stuff. And then you give the little bit left over to meditation, philosophy, reflection, quiet, stillness, whatever you want to call it. It's the other way around. That's the main thing. And then you can, if you have anything left over that you can spare, you can give it to this random phone call or whatever.
- [32:03]
B
Yeah.
- [32:03]
A
And so he's basically just saying that we have it precisely backwards. That and most people, myself included, have some dynamic version of this dynamic at home, which is like, you promise the bulk of your time to professional things and then you give your kids a little bit of leftover. The office is closed today. I can hang out with you or whatever, and then we go. But I do this all for my family. My family's my number one priority. And it's like, the calendar doesn't lie.
- [32:27]
B
It's the exact opposite revealed preference.
- [32:29]
A
Yes.
- [32:30]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I agree. And I struggle with it all the time.
- [32:34]
A
Of course.
- [32:34]
B
Yeah.
- [32:35]
A
And that's, that's what really struck me is that, like, I don't want to say no to something. It's bad even when I really don't want to do it. Like, I remember I was cc'd on some email once. Someone had asked someone I knew to do something and the guy just responded, hard pass. And I was like, wow. Like, I love it. You know, like, if I could ever do that, I would be so proud of myself. But he was not just, no, but just, like, not interested at all. But we, we find ourselves not wanting to be rude to these people. Yeah, but you'll be really rude to a nine year old, they have no say. Like, yeah, like the consequences for the nine year old is what they're going to think when they're a 39 year old. Yeah, that's a long way away. So you're not thinking about that, you know, so you're like, yeah, sure, I'll, I'll do this thing.
- [33:25]
B
Yeah. And I mean, I think I am better at saying no to things than I used to be, but it doesn't get easy. And again and again, I'm amazed by how okay people are with it in certain contexts because in certain contexts they were just having a go see if you were interested. I've even had a few contexts where, because of the stuff that I write about, where people sort of respond with relief because it's like, if you'd just done this, then I might not have been living your philosophy and I would.
- [33:52]
A
They were testing you. But they're like, they're like, actually Kissinger had this thing about, he was like, at early on in your career, you're, you're worried that you're boring people and then you get to a place of power, influence and they worry about boring you.
- [34:06]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:07]
A
And then like you get to a place, if you're lucky or if you've talked about these things, where then you say no to stuff and the people are like, I'm so proud of you. Well, I wish that if you had seen the ringer that you just put me through, you would, you would not be so proud and maybe you could have just not done this.
- [34:25]
B
I've not done it in the first place. Yeah, right.
- [34:27]
A
I had to Talk to like 6 people to get them to confirm that I shouldn't do, you know, like.
- [34:32]
B
Yeah. And then the other thing that never seems to get easier is the complete impossibility of properly judging how long anything will take anyway. Right. So there are plenty of occasions where I say yes to things. And I know all of this stuff about saying no and I'm like, right, but I'm taking a sober decision. This is 20 minutes of my life. And of course it isn't.
- [34:50]
A
Yeah, yeah, right, right. You agree, you think, oh, it's a one hour talk, but you gotta fly there the night before and then you gotta fly home. And so it's like, wait, that was a 36 hour commitment that I just did.
- [35:03]
B
There's a lot to be said. I mean, it's a well known thing, but there's a lot to be said for that question, for asking yourself whether you would, whether you'd be looking forward to it or say yes to it if it was happening tomorrow or today. When you're dealing with things that are a year or two out, I find that is very good for surfacing. Like, oh, no, I can exactly imagine the mindset I'm gonna be in the night before this thing. So. So maybe listen to that.
- [35:27]
A
Yeah. But it never. It. You can get better at it and you can create more barriers and rules and sort of systems, but it's always, it's. It's a difficult thing to do, right?
- [35:40]
B
And like just to get a little bit sort of maybe overwrought about it, I think it's difficult ultimately because it is a tiny little bit of facing mortality. Right? It's a tiny little bit of experiencing those awful truth of our limit.
- [35:53]
A
But it is hard because you're like, okay, it's only an hour. And then you're like, but it's an hour, you know, and then if you thought about everything in that light, you'd be paralyzed.
- [36:03]
B
Also, sometimes people, like, I think people who haven't read 4,000 weeks, but who know the title and know what it, what it refers to. So I'm talking about like, you know, drive time, radio interviews who can't be expected to read, read any of the things that they're talking to people about.
- [36:19]
A
To be clear, I have read.
- [36:21]
B
I am not including you.
- [36:22]
A
Not only have I read it, I've read the galley.
- [36:24]
B
Certainly not including you in this and this. In a way, it's a fault of the titling. Right. You might assume that what followed from that is like, oh, my God, time is really short. We've got to think very, very self consciously about the limitations of time, all the time, and pack our lives with the most extraordinary and awe inspiring things we can. And I'm always at pains to be like, no, no, no, to the ext. I have gone through a perspective shift here. And to the extent that I can take the reader on that shift, it's relaxing. Ultimately, it's a relief because as long as you're thinking about that sort of, you know, exactly what am I doing with this hour of my life? Exactly what am I doing with that hour of my life? Even though you're doing it out of an understanding of the limits of your life, you're still doing it with that desire to somehow triumph over the finitude, rather than kind of falling completely into it and saying, like, you're so finite, such a large proportion of the things you're capable of thinking you might want to do. You're Never going to get to do. It's so not a fair fight from the very beginning that you get to kind of like, not fight that fight.
- [37:28]
A
Yeah. Memento mori should both create a sense of urgency and make you slow down.
- [37:34]
B
Right.
- [37:35]
A
Like the famous passage in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius is saying, as you tuck your child in at night, say to yourself, they may not make it to the morning. He's not like, so get bedtime done. You know, he's saying the exact opposite. Slow it down. This is the present is an eternity. Right. And the idea might be that life is short, so you can't afford to rush. And what are you rushing towards? You're rushing towards death. So slow it down.
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely.
- [38:05]
A
It's not working if it's making you more anxious.
- [38:08]
B
Right.
- [38:09]
A
Because that's a waste of time and energy and not in your control. Like, I think about that when, you know, you talk to people who are like, like they have terminal cancer. And so the doctors tell them it's like six months to a year. Well, I, I just think about, like, what are they thinking when the airplane lands. And then the, the pilot goes, sorry, folks, there's another plane at the gate and we're going to have to wait till they're just like 40 fucking minutes.
- [38:33]
B
What the fuck?
- [38:34]
A
You know, like, is that what they're thinking or is it probably more of a. These are 40 minutes.
- [38:39]
B
Right. And I mean, I, I, I feel like people have very different experiences of, of that being in that situation. Right. Some people sort of do go through the transformation and some people really don't. But if you do, I think, yeah, I can certainly imagine, I believe, a sense in which that's like, you know, that reality is as alive in the plane that's waiting for the, as filled with aliveness and potential as any other bit of reality. You're there. It's not fake life compared to something else. It may be less pleasant in all sorts of ways than once you're out of the plane, but.
- [39:12]
A
So, yeah, I try to remind myself when I take my kids, like on trips and stuff, I go like, this is part of the vacation, too. It doesn't start when we arrive at the guided tour.
- [39:22]
B
Yeah.
- [39:22]
A
Like the car ride to the airport, the time waiting at the airport, the time on the airplane, like, this is all part of the trip, so enjoy that, you know, and don't make that miserable or else you're putting a lot of pressure on the, the dinner reservation.
- [39:39]
B
Totally. And I'd be interested to talk about that idea of Urgency, actually, because I have a lot of trouble with the whole concept of urgency. And I've written newsletters in the past, basically provocatively entitled Against Urgency or whatever. And I think for me it's because urgency has always connoted this kind of idea that there are other people's agendas that I've got to serve and that things aren't okay until I've served them. And I always got really annoyed with that Eisenhower matrix, you know, urgent and important, because there's a category there which is urgent but not important. And I don't even know, like that's.
- [40:16]
A
Mostly shit from other people, right?
- [40:18]
B
But I don't even know what that is. How is it urgent then if it's not important? Right. It's like urgency should. But you're totally right, of course that Memento Mori is there to bring. Well, certainly a heightened awareness. Maybe that's not quite the same as urgency. But when I see like self help books that are based around the idea of cultivating a feeling of urgency in your life, I run a mile because I do not, I want to live without what I do.
- [40:43]
A
I don't think there's anything to be said for like Hustle. And I don't mean that like in the Hustle porn sense. I just mean of like Seneca's thing about, you know, people sort of. He says the one thing all fools have in common is they're always getting ready to start, right? So the just the like, hey, when are you going to do this?
- [40:58]
B
Right?
- [40:58]
A
You know, so I think there's. Or your warmup that you're going through is just a rationalized form of procrastination.
- [41:07]
B
Yeah, no, totally. And I think maybe this is all just semantics, right? Because I have experienced and written about that sense of like, okay, it's just time to plunge into this thing. It's time to stop readying. But for me, that has worked most effectively and especially in the recent years as a kind of letting go of something, right? Not as a kind of like clenching my muscles and like going, but as a letting go of the things that were standing, standing in the way of action. So there's that line from a Zen teacher who I, oh, Kosho Uchiyama, who says life unimpeded by anything manifests as pure activity. This idea that if you finally get rid of the blockages, it's just the doing. And I think I spent a lot of my life trying to sort of force feelings of urgency, push myself over the motivational hump and all this stuff. And for Me, anyway, that wasn't the way. The way has been to sort of see the inhibitions that are stopping me from just From. From doing the thing that I actually kind of, on some level, want to do already.
- [42:13]
A
Yeah. Most of the time, the urgency is leading you astray. Like, people need to understand, like, speed reading is a scam. And even if it. Even if it wasn't a scam, it's a stupid thing. It's like, do you know how much faster I could eat? You know, like, I could eat faster than I do.
- [42:29]
B
Yeah.
- [42:29]
A
That's not what eating is about.
- [42:31]
B
Right.
- [42:32]
A
You know, like, it's not. Not how many calories can you shovel down your throat in how little time? You know, Like, John Mullaney has this great joke about, like, the hot dog eating contest, and he's like, I never asked it to be fast. Like, what is what? Who introduced that? Like, how quickly can you do it? But, like, eating is a pleasurable activity. Right. So it should take however long it takes. It shouldn't take longer than. Than. I don't know. Needs to imply some sort of judgment, too. But it doesn't need to take. Take five hours to have lunch, but it also shouldn't take six minutes.
- [43:04]
B
Right.
- [43:04]
A
You know, and if you're enjoying the thing, why would you try to rush through it? Like, it's interesting that people who try to speed read, like, are they trying to. Yeah. Are they trying to rush through food? Are they trying to rush through time with their children? Do you rush through sex? Like, and a pleasurable activity is. Is. Is intended to be enjoyed and savored.
- [43:24]
B
Yeah.
- [43:25]
A
And so oftentimes the urgency is not just. And this is where the Memento Mori thing comes in. You're not just rushing through the activity. What is ultimately on the other side of the rushing? Like, what is the destination? The destination is you die and you don't do it anymore.
- [43:41]
B
Yeah.
- [43:41]
A
So it's more. You win.
- [43:43]
B
Right. So it's an awareness. I hadn't really thought about Memento Mori specifically and the ancient form of it in this context, but, like, it's the awareness of death that gives the possibility of a more fully present, more authentic experience. Right. And you know, Heidegger, just to veer off into another area that we really don't need to go talks about being towards death. Right. The context that death creates for everything that we do, if we're sufficiently aware of the fact.
- [44:15]
A
Yeah. And I think also, if you were to know you had six months or a year or 10 years, would you do a bunch of things faster. Is that the change you would make or would you probably just just not do certain things and definitely do a.
- [44:31]
B
Bunch of other things and do whatever you did with a kind of openness to kind of really being there in the doing?
- [44:38]
A
Because when the doctor tells you you have six months or 10 years even, that is just a microcosm of the larger thing that everyone else is in. You can still get hit by a bus, you can still get struck by lightning, you could still get murdered on a street corner. It could also turn out to be much worse than the diagnosis. Like there is this tendency to go, this is what they said, it's what I'm promised, so I get what I paid for and it's never up to you.
- [45:07]
B
Right. And like, where is the point between being given six months to live and being given like 50 years left to live, which if I'm incredibly lucky I might have? Like, why is that fine? And this is a like extraordinary.
- [45:19]
A
I mean it's always a terminal diagnosis, right?
- [45:21]
B
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. As a meditation teacher friend of mine once said, everything is palliative care when you think about it.
- [45:27]
A
Yes, yes, everything's palliative care and also everything is gender affirming care in some form or another too, as all these people spend their time getting angry at trans people.
- [45:39]
B
So many discussions we could. Directions that go off in.
- [45:41]
A
Yeah, just this morning, as I do every morning, I was taking the supplements that I take. And if you're not taking any supplements, well, January is a good time to think about doing that. Choosing the right supplements can be confusing because there's so many brands and you know, it's kind of a low trust category. It's not super regulated. The products are easy to make and the companies don't even have to say everything that's on their label. That's why we are happy to work with Momentous and why I take their supplements. They've become a high trust brand brand in a low trust category. They don't just meet the industry standard, they built the momentous standard, which is their commitment to doing things the right way, not the easy way. Momentous sources only the highest quality ingredients on the planet. Their whey protein comes from grass fed European dairy cows. Their creatine uses the purest form of creatine monohydrate. And nearly every formula is made with clinically backed, highly bioavailable nutrients with no fillers and no artificial sweeteners. My wife, like allergic to everything. She's very sensitive about what she puts in her body and when she doesn't. And she loves their stuff, too. If a product doesn't meet momentous standards, it doesn't hit the shelves. In a space where trust is rare, momentous is redefining what trust looks like. And right now, Momentous is offering our listeners up to 35% off your first order with promo code Daily Stoic. Head over to livemomentous.com and use promo code Daily Stoic for up to 35% off your first order. That's livemomentous.com promo code, Daily Stoic. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I actually just finished my online therapy session just a few minutes ago. The year's coming to an end. I guess I could have pushed it till January, but I thought, you know what? No. I want the holidays to go well. I want to be focused on what I should be focused on. I want to take care of myself. I want to get better. And that's where today's sponsor, BetterHelp, comes in. Therapy is a great way to get better. A unbiased perspective on your life. It's how you can get a weight off your shoulders. It's so you can focus on the future. It's so you can break old patterns and be who you want to be in 2026. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms. They've served more than 5 million people all over the world. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct. They are fully licensed in the US and they even do the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. If you aren't happy with your therapist, you can switch to a different one at any time from their recommendations. If you want to leave some stuff behind, leave it in the past, leave it in 2025. Well, BetterHelp can help you do that. And you can sign up right now for 10% off@betterhelp.com DailyStoicPod that's betterhelp.com DailyStoicpod God. So do you regularly meditate? Is that like a part of your practice? Or do you think about. You have a more expansive definition of what meditation is?
- [48:51]
B
I am definitely trying to tag onto the coattails of Marcus Aurelius here more than Buddha with the word, with the word meditations. Right. And I am definitely, yeah, I do have sort of sketchy, not particularly regular discipline and sitting practice. But I think that I can make the case that the morning pages that I write and certain other things that I do in my life are. I think they're sort of bona fide meditation in the sense that I mean the term. There's a tendency to call anything that you do my meditation. Right. But I think there are lots of things that involve sort of stepping away from or objectifying narratives that are in your mind. And. And one of those is to sort of leave be uninvolved with thoughts as they pass across your mental radar in meditation, or to focus or to keep returning to the breath when they distract you. But so I think is certain kinds of journaling, certain kinds of sort of therapeutic exercises and things like that. They have that same shape of, like, see these stories as not something that you're in and fully identified with, but as one of the things that you contain.
- [50:03]
A
Yeah, I don't meditate, but I take a lot of walks, and that's it for me.
- [50:09]
B
And what are you doing on this walk? So you.
- [50:10]
A
I mean, I'm walking my dog, and I'm looking around, and I'm trying to be present, and I'm trying to remind myself as I've been doing it lately. Like, this is pretty fucking wonderful. You know, the sun is going down and I'm walking my dog, and I'm just like. Like, I don't think Marcus Real has ever experienced this. You know, like, this is the best fucking thing of all time. And this is life. This is what it's all for. And I. I kind of try to do that. And one of the things. So, like, I. I live on this ranch, so we have a decent spread of property. And then I'm usually walking on this dirt road that the house is on. And, you know, most of my neighbors are like, there's a trailer here. There's a little old house here. And I just go, like, we're just, like, on the same street. Like, yeah. The best part of this is not that I own this part. The best part is the free part that I'm doing. And then I go like, the. My neighbor has more property, isn't doing the walk. And the neighborhood with the less is, you know, like, this is just. I just try to kind of think about stuff like that. I just kind of run through my head, like, what are the things I need to be reminded of? And then I, you know, I get back home and I try to hold on to that feeling until I get, you know, hit in the nuts by my son or something, and it immediately goes away. But, you know, you try to get into some kind of spiritual place of stillness or acceptance or gratitude or you know, perspective, and then it's all very fleeting, and then you go back to it again.
- [51:43]
B
I think there's a. Yeah, it resonates a lot with my own experiences. We live now in the North York moors in Northern England, and there's a sort of scale. It's not an American kind of scale to the landscape, but by UK standards as a scale to that landscape. But really, I think it's very, very helpful to feel relatively small within that landscape. There's something I find very. It's not even that I'm thinking logically, the thought, like, oh, the world is much bigger than my concerns. It's something much more physical and embodied. Just that sense of, like, okay, I'm just going about my business here, and I'm trying to do some good things in context of family, context of work. But there's this whole thing that's just, like, implacably carrying on. No matter what happens in politics, no matter what happens in the world at large. This sort of landscape is just like, there. And of course, actually, it's changing radically through the centuries and everything, but it has that sense of something more permanent, which is an old stoic meditation as well, isn't it?
- [52:45]
A
I think that there is something about Europe, though, where you're like, people have been walking on this exact road for 2000 years.
- [52:51]
B
And to your point about dirt roads and footpaths, like, a lot of the walking I'm doing is on public footpaths, where, like, I have an ancient historic right to walk through somebody else's farmyard because there's a public footpath there and they can't do anything about it, even though occasionally you get the impression they wish they could.
- [53:08]
A
Sure.
- [53:10]
B
And so there are all these kind of ways over the land, and then, like, churches dating back to the 5th, 6th century and all this stuff where. Yeah. And that sense of people having been there for a very long time is power, powerful sometimes lived and died and gone through all their.
- [53:27]
A
They're not famous people. Not. Not people whose name echoes down. Just random, nameless, faceless. There's a Taylor Swift song where she says the who's who of who's that? And you go, like, even, like, a bunch of them probably were famous.
- [53:43]
B
Yeah.
- [53:44]
A
And then. And there's a. There's a line in Meditations where Marcus Realis is, like, listing just, like, famous people that are, to him, not that famous anymore.
- [53:53]
B
Right.
- [53:53]
A
And then to us, it's like, there's 15 names, like, two of them talking about. Yeah. And you go, oh, right. That he's trying to remind himself that, like, I mean, if the movie Gladiator hadn't come out, how many people would even know his name? Right, right. Like, there. There is just the way in which all these people and names and things and full lives and not full lives just kind of fade into the rhythm of history and time and perspective. And you're part of that.
- [54:22]
B
Right. And it's really strange that that is so therapeutic and relaxing and good for at least for many people, maybe. I think there may be people who consider that to be a sort of world historic insult to their specialness. I don't know. But to me, that's what I need. Yeah.
- [54:39]
A
Take some of the pressure off.
- [54:40]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely.
- [54:43]
A
It doesn't mean that everything you're doing is meaningless. It just means. Means whatever it is is enough, I think.
- [54:50]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. It's helpful in the context of anxiety about world events as well. Right. There's this sense of. It's very, very easy to feel like the whole of history was leading up till now, and now everything is on a knife edge. And if it all goes in the wrong direction, then that's it for humanity. And, you know, there is a sector of the AI Duma crowd that wants to persuade us of that very claim. But putting that aside, there's something very important about the fact that, like, far worse has arisen and been gone through. It doesn't mean that it's not real suffering and real pain and real injustice in the moment that it's happening, but it's useful to have that in the back of your mind.
- [55:29]
A
Yeah. There's a story you tell in the book where this guy's out for a walk and he bumps into one of his friends who's weeping in the park, and he goes, what's wrong? And he was like, they fired on a mob in Crimea or something.
- [55:38]
B
Right.
- [55:39]
A
And you go, the timelessness of that, of just being made miserable by a thing that happened thousands of miles away, and the timelessness of this. Of the tension between it happened to human beings and therefore it's significant and my problem and it matters and I should care about it, and it would say something bad about me if I didn't care. And at the same time, if it's causing me to weep in a park, I'm probably flattering myself about its relationality to me and the contributive value of those two. Like, what I'm not doing is doing anything about it. I'm just feeling miserable.
- [56:16]
B
Yes. I think that's right. I think the actual person in that anecdote, who is the philosopher Simone Weil, was a very extraordinary person, and I think she was sort of almost like a kind of tuning fork for all human suffering. It was almost like her role in history to be one of those people who doesn't put up that boundary. The reason it's so educational for me, that anecdote, is because it's like, I know I couldn't do that, or like I know I'm not functioning well if that's how I get about the world at large. And it's obviously vastly more to the point now that we're so easily informed about the whole of the world's suffering, if we want to be, or if the algorithms want us to be.
- [56:54]
A
Something is happening shitty somewhere at every moment.
- [56:56]
B
Right. In the same way that there's the worst. Opinions are being expressed by people on any side of anything, and you will find them and then it will enrage you that that's what people are like. Yeah.
- [57:08]
A
If you want to be miserable, the Internet can help you with that.
- [57:12]
B
It certainly can. Yeah. Right.
- [57:15]
A
And it's not to say that you should be, you know, ignoring it. At the same time, you don't need to seek it out and you don't need to mainline it from the second you wake up in the morning.
- [57:27]
B
Right. And you don't need to feel bad about apportioning your attention. This is one of the points I'm really trying to drive home in that section is like, this whole idea that we have had for a long span of modern history, Right. That to be a good citizen means sort of pushing yourself to give more attention to the wider world outside your home than you might otherwise naturally do. And now, in sort of an attention economy, this is the opposite of the situation that we face. What you need to be able to do now is to actually be willing to say, this particular problem over there is totally real and it's totally awful, and I totally wish that it were. Things were made better, but it's not going to be my fight, because this one is. And I've got to choose. Got to pick my.
- [58:08]
A
I've got a man on. It's just not me.
- [58:10]
B
I've got a man on it. Yeah. Right. I got to pick my battles. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this circles around the sort of most classic, in my understanding, stoic notion of just the question of the sphere, of the sphere that you can control and the sphere that you can't control. Although I've always had A bit of trouble with the stoic version of that because it seems like there's a lot of claims made, at least in some iterations of it, about how much control you can exert over your own emotions.
- [58:36]
A
Well, and I mean, there's also some stuff that's kind of in the middle.
- [58:41]
B
Right.
- [58:41]
A
And then there's also what if you have clinical depression or what if you have a brain injury? It does change things. But what's interesting to me is stoicism is mostly famous for those circles. But the, the most interesting sort of illustration of circles in stoic philosophy comes from this guy named Heracles who said that, you know, you have this central circle which is you. This is how we're born. We're born selfish, self interest, et cetera. And then you have these concentric circles around you and those are your family, your friends, your neighbors, your fellow citizens, you know, fellow human beings, people who haven't been born. And it gets bigger and bigger. And that although people think of stoic philosophy as this selfish philosophy, it's actually, he says the work of it is about drawing those outer rings inward. So it's this kind of tension between only focusing on things that are in your control, but then also making sure that you're not utterly indifferent to everyone else.
- [59:36]
B
Right.
- [59:36]
A
And I think the problem is with your point about this attention economy. We have told ourselves a lie that knowing about stuff and feeling bad about it is helpful automatically to them and us. And so we have confused emoting about problems with being involved in the solution to said problem.
- [59:58]
B
Yeah.
- [59:59]
A
So like, it'd be better if you said I'm not going to think about it, but I am setting up this recurring donation.
- [60:05]
B
Right, Right.
- [60:05]
A
Or something. Right. Like I'm not going to give it my day to day unhappiness, but I am going to apportion a percentage of my earnings towards. Or I'm going to run for office. Or I'm. I'm going to. Here's. Here'. Here's my contribution to society or here's my contribution to things greater than myself. That's what I do. That's how I know I'm not making the world a worse place. But I'm not gonna go to bed weeping every night and wake up weeping every night and tell myself I'm a good person. Cause I'm so emotionally wrong.
- [60:39]
B
Right, Right. And that sense of like pseudo action, that emotion is action, or that it's hugely encouraged by the basic form of like social media interaction. Right.
- [60:48]
A
The idea that like, because they're monetizing your attention.
- [60:50]
B
Right, right. Putting something out there, sharing something, liking it, resharing it, whatever feels like an action. And it is an action within the space of the platform. But yeah, there's no reason to believe that is an action that affects, necessarily affects the issue that you're so upset.
- [61:05]
A
About and it is negatively affecting you or your other responsibilities.
- [61:09]
B
Yeah. While in subtle ways just polarizing everybody all to hell.
- [61:12]
A
So, yeah. Yeah. I do think talking about strategies though, like, I think this idea of waking up on the back foot is a very common, common, like very real problem. I'm curious if you have any changes you've made to address that.
- [61:27]
B
I don't want to get too sales pitchy here, but part of something that was really important for me in the new book was to sort of create a book that to whatever extent a book can do this could like be an active ingredient in this way. Right. So that if you do decide to read one short chapter a day for a month, which is my strong suggestion in the introduction, if someone decides to do that, that I think I'm sharing versions of this perspective shift that might sort of take a root in you somewhere and affect how you live through the next 24 hours in some small way. And I'm not going to claim that I read my own book over and over again. That would be weird. But I do do a similar thing with the reading that I choose to do first thing in the morning. I think the morning pages that I mentioned really helped me out a lot with that. And then, you know, in general, not so much to do with waking up on the back foot, but just that feeling of being on the back foot. All my sort of productivity and writing process as well has been on a long term evolution or shift. I don't know, from being very sort of programmed and scheduled to being more and more sort of intuition based. And this is where the Zen stuff has been so important to me. The more that you can feel that, and I'm not perfect at this, but the more that you can feel in any moment that you're just choosing to do one thing, it's the only thing in the world and you're focusing on that until you've finished it and that then you'll do another thing. And that that's all you ever possibly could do. And all life is. That's what causes that back foot feeling to sort of to lift. Right. Because literally all you can ever do is pick a thing and address yourself to it for a while and then pick another thing. And address yourself to that. And even people who are following incredibly rigid time boxing systems for their day are still actually doing that because they're still choosing in every moment to stick with the system that they set up. So once you can sort of feel your way into that sense that that's all you ever have to do, the next thing, or the next most necessary thing, as Carl Jung calls it, then it's almost on some level that's just incompatible with feeling like you're on the back foot. Because then it's like, yes, there are three different deadlines I was supposed to meet today and here I'm addressing myself to a one of them. What more do you want?
- [63:40]
A
Yeah, I try to say to myself like, either like, this is all I have to be doing, or like this is enough, not. And I try to push back against that feeling of like, but I have these 15 things or that I have. I have this looming thing coming up. It's like, this is the thing that I'm doing. So that's the thing that I'm doing.
- [64:01]
B
And I think something to beware of here, I've found I totally resonate with that is this how many productivity approaches and people's natural attempts to organize their lists and all the rest of it lead to this systematic practice of constantly reminding yourself of all the other things that you've got to do. Right. So the idea of visible lists and plans that just like endlessly reinforce to you all the things that you're failing to do in the moment that you may well be doing something really important and meaningful.
- [64:30]
A
You don't like to do lists?
- [64:31]
B
I've gone back and forth. But yeah, no, I don't. Not. I don't like trying to. I don't like to do lists as things too, to try to sort of control time via. Right. I think I'm not going to claim that I don't keep any reminder list of the things that I've committed to and things that I need to not forget. But I try more and more to make the decisions about what I will do in any given moment in a more intuitive way and then check back with that list to make sure that I'm not letting too many things fall off the radar. And then there are certain patterns that emerge.
- [65:06]
A
Right.
- [65:07]
B
So it's definitely the case that writing works much better for me in the early hours of the day than that you try to suddenly begin at 2:45 in the afternoon.
- [65:16]
A
No, that doesn't work.
- [65:17]
B
Right. But once upon a time, because I knew that I would Then create these very strict plans for when I was going to start and all this stuff. And it would ultimately for me be. It would backfire. It ultimately became that like my life was spent, well, I was going to say serving this rule, but actually it'd be failing to serve this rule and then feeling bad about it.
- [65:34]
A
The routine becomes this ritual and then not doing the ritual becomes sacrilegious. Instead of just being like, hey, more often than not I try to get my writing done in the morning.
- [65:43]
B
Right, exactly. And when you sort of shift into this somewhat more intuitive thing, the fear that comes up is that like if you just go with what you feel like you'll just waste all your time and there's maybe is a sort of stage on the journey where that has to happen. But when you get sort of deeper into that and you're really feeling what it is that feels like it needs doing in a given moment, then it just becomes quite natural. The thing you will want to do at 8 o' clock in the morning or 9 o' clock in the morning is the stuff that works best. Then you do need to control your calendar so that you haven't got five meetings planned between 8am and midday. Right. But once that space is cleared, I find it more and more effective to navigate by that sense of what feels like it needs doing right now.
- [66:31]
A
Yeah. Because the reward for success or self awareness or whatever, like knowing when you're best should not again be some form of anxiety or this prison that you have designed for yourself. And like I think especially if you're someone who is driven or a little bit compulsive, then you, you're like, all of a sudden you're like, I gotta flip this light switch 15 times before I go in the. Like you're just doing a work equivalent of that. Yes, yeah. And, and you feel bad if you don't do it. And the reward, I've noticed, it's like the reward is not feeling great.
- [67:05]
B
Right.
- [67:05]
A
The reward is just relief from the tension I ratcheted up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's not a good way to thing to build your life around.
- [67:14]
B
And the crazy part, I'm not going to say this happens often, but the crazy part of it is that actually sometimes you do have it in you to do some writing starting at 2:45 in the afternoon.
- [67:21]
A
Right. If you haven't made it in your head that it's impossible to do it.
- [67:24]
B
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
- [67:26]
A
You're stealing from yourself the ability to be spontaneous or flexible.
- [67:32]
B
Yeah. Right. So I have principles or sort of rules of thumb. Writing works best in the mornings. It's really good if I can touch into the real writing and ideas every day or, you know, five or six days a week. But they're not. Yeah. Once they become rules that I'm. That I am sort of the indentured servant of, that's when it all goes wrong. Yeah.
- [67:53]
A
Yeah. Are the rules serving you or you serving this system you've got? Right.
- [67:57]
B
It's all in the Bible. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath says Jesus Christ.
- [68:03]
A
There we go. You want to check out some books?
- [68:05]
B
Yeah, I'd love to.
- [68:06]
A
Let's do it. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode. Sam.