← The Daily Stoic
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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. In April 1960, the writer Richard Whelan was trying to meet with Diane Nash and the sit in students for a Time magazine cover story. These young students had suddenly become the focus of an immense amount of attention, not just from the press, but from the police and politicians and the rest of civil rights leaders. How were these kids going to upend years of stymied racial progress? How could they possibly challenge a system in which the police and the courts and elected leaders in public opinion were all against them? Could they win? It seemed very unlikely. Richard Whelan was stunned to find that he had trouble asking these students questions because they were not particularly interested in meeting with him. They were too busy. They did not have the time, even though he represented what was at the time one of the most important publications in the world. Finally, Diane and her team agreed they would see him at 6am before the morning strategy that started their day, Waylon could only marvel. 6am the only time they can meet with me is 6am they're going to win, aren't they? He said. Winners attack the day like that. It doesn't matter what their cause is. They win that discussion that Marcus Aurelius has with himself in meditations, the one we all must win. When the alarm goes off, yes, it is warmer under the covers, but we are not meant for that. We have a duty, our nature, justice demands something from us. It demands that we get up, that we get after it, that we wear ourselves doing it. It's what you must do if you want to win. About to head over and pick my kids up from school. And after I do, I know what they're going to ask. They're going to go, hey, can we go to Whole Foods? And I am going to say yes one, because then keeps them off their. But two, groceries are my responsibility in our household. And so yeah, we usually swing by the Whole Foods headquarters and we get all our groceries for the week. My wife has like a bazillion dietary restrictions. Sometimes that can be tough. But not at Whole Foods. They got everything even for Valentine's Day. They got miles of chocolate dipped strawberries that I think we're gonna get. They got gluten free stuff, they got dairy free stuff. They got basically everything. And I usually pick her up flowers while I am there too. If you're looking for something for someone for Valentine's Day this year, Whole Foods, it's got bouquets and arrangements. They've got succulents. Sometimes I'll just bring home a plant. She always appreciates it. The point is you can taste love all month at Whole Foods and maybe you'll see me there here at Austin. You know what has also been crazy? Cause it integrates with your Amazon account. When I pull up Amazon I can see all the stuff that I ordered, which is always good to remember. Pull up my little Amazon in store code, get all my products prime benefits. It's lovely. Anyways, I'm off to Whole Foods and you should too. We are just getting back from a trip so the fridge is empty and we were like oh man, we gotta go to the store we're gonna have for dinner tonight. And then I realized no no no wait. Hellofresh just came. So we took the hellofresh meals out and we got to work. We love hellofresh in our household cause the meals are simple. You can make em on a busy work night, you can do it on the weekend, you can do it when you get to the end of your groceries. They have more than a hundred recipes every week, which is especially at your home. Have allergies or preferences or they don't like to eat the same thing twice. You can always make just the right amount of food so everyone feels full and satisfied and there aren't a bunch of leftovers to deal with. And there's now three times the seafood for no upcharge. If you've got folks coming over for dinner, impress them with new grass fed steak ribeyes. My kids love steak. HelloFresh always has delicious options with seasonal produce like pears, apples and asparagus. When dinner tastes this good, nothing hits like home cooking. And we love home cooking with hellofresh and I think you'll love it. Just go to hellofresh.com stoic10fm to get 10 free meals and a free Zwilling knife which is $144 value on your third box. Offer valued while supplies last. Free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan Circumstances have no care for our feelings this is the February 23rd entry in the Daily Stoic360 66 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. Today's quote Marcus Aurelius Meditations 738 shouldn't give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don't care at all. Actually, I like the Hayes translation a lot too. I've got it from memory. It's seared in my mind from my first Reading, I think he says, and why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice. A significant chunk of Marcus Aurelius Meditations is made up of short quotes and passages from other writers. This is because Marcus wasn't necessarily trying to produce an original work. Instead, he was practicing, reminding himself here and there of important lessons. And sometimes these lessons were things he had read. This particular quote is special because it comes from a play by Euripides which, except for a handful of quoted fragments like this, is lost to us. From what we can gather about the play, the hero comes to doubt the existence of the gods. But in this line he is saying, why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take these things personally? After all, external events are not sentient beings. They cannot respond to our shouts and cries, and neither can the mostly indifferent gods. That's what Marcus was reminding himself of. Here. Circumstances are incapable of considering or about your feelings, your anxiety, your excitement. They don't care about your reaction. They are not people. So stop acting like getting worked up is having an impact on a given situation, because the situation doesn't care at all. A couple things jump out to me here. Number one, it's worth noting just how cool that is. There's a line in Meditations from a play that if Marcus Aurelius had not written down, had not been such a fan, had not jotted it down in his diary, we would not have it. It would be totally lost to us. It's interesting to think of Marcus as this literary conservator, this savior of ancient texts, but he is. We know about that line because he wrote it down, because it jumped out to him. He liked it. Maybe he didn't get it perfect. We can't compare it against the original. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? And then something else. I found out about this. I forget why it jumped out at me, but I thought, who was Euripides to Marcus? Because I knew Euripides is a Greek playwright and Marcus is Roman. Greece was the powerhouse then. Rome supplants it. But I was like, you know, it kind of all blurs together, right? BC AD there's all the ancient world, how far from. And it jumped out at me. So anyway, so I looked, you know, when does Euripides die? When does Marcus die? They're separated by centuries, not like one or two, but like five or six. And in fact, I remember looking it up. Euripides was further from Marcus Aurelius than Shakespeare is from us. So first off just the credibleness of, like, how great work can last. So it's. It seems weird that, you know, we're reading Marcus 2000 years later, like how we got to good at preserving things. But even in the ancient world, they had ancient texts and history and they marveled at, you know, great lines and quotes and that they preserved them for centuries. That's just so frigging cool. So Marcus is thinking of Euripides the way that we think of Shakespeare today. Although you do get the sense that it didn't seem so ancient from them because life maybe hadn't changed as much. Right. Like, Euripides and Marcus obviously lived in very different worlds. And Euripides would have had his mind blown by Marcus's world and Marcus would have thought he was living in the future. Right. Which he was. But I do think there'd be more culture shock if you fast forward it to today or transported any of those to today. I didn't actually see the whole movie, but the most recent Indiana Jones, I think it's Archimedes sort of marveling at this airplane that Harrison Ford crashes and he somehow goes back in time. Literally. My only understanding of the movie is watching it on the screen next to me on an airplane. But that's what I understood was happening. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but anyways, the other big thing, the actual wisdom of the quote here is incredible. He's right, you know, the pandemic was awful and frustrating, but it didn't care about us. The virus was indifferent to us. It didn't give a shit about us. It didn't give a shit about our plans. It didn't give a shit about people we loved. Didn't give a shit about anything because it's not capable of doing that. And understanding that so much of the world is that way. I do love the idea. Marx, Aurelius, later in Meditations, talks about not treating inhumanity the way it treats human beings. So not letting the impersonal, awful, cruelty, overwhelmingness of the world make you into that kind of person. But it is understanding that being angry at objective events, being angry at the march of time, being angry at natural disasters, being angry at cancer, being angry at mortality, being angry at these things that are frustrating, tragic and painful and all these things, it doesn't. Doesn't change anything. And so why waste that extra energy? It's not making a difference. You can shout at the gods, but they will not be moved. And I think that's the lesson that Marcus is trying to pass on or that Marcus noted from Euripides preserved it all those centuries later. And then all these centuries later, still here we are talking about it. That's the power of a great quote. That's the power of writing things down. It's beautiful. I'll talk to you soon. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. 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