← 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. You can't forget what you don't put off. You didn't mean to lie. You didn't mean to be late. You didn't mean not to do it. It's just that, well, you forgot, as we almost always do. We plan to do it. We mean to do it. We just tell ourselves that we'll do it tomorrow. The problem, as the Stoics remind us, is that we don't control tomorrow. Stuff can come up. We can get an unexpected email. We get bad news from a friend. We wake up to a sick child. Even when things don't come up, distraction does. We delay, we drift. We fail to do what we genuinely intended to do. We do what Seneca warned that fools are always getting ready to start. We forget the solution, then do it now. You can't forget what you don't put off. You can't procrastinate something that's already done. You don't have to make excuses or apologize. If you just get started now. Well, here we are, well into a new year, and it's worth taking some stock. Who do you want to be this year? What changes do you want to make? How could you be better? That's where today's sponsor comes in. And it's where something I have been doing myself now, I guess since college, which is working on myself with a therapist. And although I used to when I lived in la, drive an hour in traffic to sit down in someone's office for an hour, now I do it on the phone, I do it while I'm walking, I do it in the car. I do my therapy online. And BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. And I'm not the only one. More than 6 million people have gotten help through BetterHelp. It's just easier to keep the appointment. It's less of an imposition. Cheaper, it's more efficient. And I honestly find it easier to just get into the stuff you're there to get into when I do it remotely. BetterHelp will match you with a therapist based on your preferences. You can easily switch at any time at no extra cost. You can click the link in the description below, or you can just go to betterhelp.com dailystoak to get 10% off your first month of therapy. As you know, AI is everywhere. You're probably using a handful of different AI tools in your life, you know, day to day. Now but how many of us are stopping and asking should I be asking this to AI? I think about that all the time. Do I want to give it my personal information? Do I want to upload this thing that I worked on that I own the copyright to? I don't know. Right? Got work stuff, personal questions, late night thoughts, medical issues. We're sharing a lot with AI, maybe even more than we realized. And that's where DuckDuckGo comes in, because they just built Duck AI for folks who want to keep their conversations with AI tools private. You go to Duck AI and you can chat privately with the same AIs that you're already using, whether that's ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. And it protects your info from hackers, from scammers and data hungry companies. It's a win win. Plus it's from DuckDuckGo, the company known for protecting your data, not collecting it. No signups, no subscriptions, no learning curve. Just visit Duck AI and start chatting. If you want to use AI without giving up your privacy, visit Duck AI Stoic today. That's d a private way to chat with AI from DuckDuckGo, where AI is always optional and private. Today's entry from the Daily Stoic Disintegration these things don't go together. You must be a unified human being, either good or bad. You must diligently work either on your own reasoning or on things outside of your control. Take great care with the inside and not what's inside, which is to say, stand with the philosopher or else with the mob. Epictetus Discourses 3:15 we are all complicated people. We have multiple sides to ourselves, conflicting wants and desires and fears. The outside world is no less confusing and contradictory. If we're not careful, all of these forces, pushing and pulling will eventually tear us apart. We can't live as both Jekyll and Hyde. Not for long anyway. We have a choice to stand with the philosopher and focus strenuously on the inside, or to behave like a leader of a mob, becoming whatever the crowd needs at a given moment. If we do not focus on our internal integration, on self awareness, we risk external disintegration. Obviously you're listening to me, so you can't see it, but in the book I have disintegration. The dis in parentheses. One word, but there's the parentheses. And the reason I do that? It's actually something I talk about in Intro, my first book. Trust Me, I'm lying. And if you've read Trust Me, I'm lying or you've heard of it. It might seem very different than what I talk about here at Daily Stoker. If you see a video of me and then you contrast it with the somewhat ominous, maybe even evil cover of Trust Me, I'm Lying, it might seem as difficult to reconcile, and indeed it is. And I talk about this in the intro of the book. I was, of course, familiar with stoicism when I wrote that book. I was, of course, studying stoic philosophy before I even got into marketing. And, you know, I read Marcus Ruiz many times in those years that I worked for those controversial clients. Was it hypocrisy? Was I a bad person? I mean, I don't get to say that, but what I think about it, and as I reflected on it when I wrote that book, is that I was not integrated. I had these two different parts of myself that were very. Not aligned. Does that make sense? Like, it's funny, we use the word disintegration to mean, like, comes apart, right? But really, what it would mean dis and integrated means not integrated. And that's what I was. I was not integrated. I had these different spheres. I had this part of me that really liked philosophy, that really believed in these ideas, and Stoicism was trying to apply them in my life. And then I had my actual occupation and day job where I was pulling these marketing stunts and living, I don't want to say an unphilosophical life, but certainly not a life fully in accordance with the philosophical ideas. I don't think I was making the world a better place. That's partly why I wrote the book, partly why I changed. The philosophy helped me get there. But for a long time, these things were compartmentalized. They were not integrated. And so I think that's what Epictetus is talking about. He says, you must be a unified human being. You can't be these different things. Seneca was not a unified human being. He was a brilliant artist and a ruthless power broker. He was a philosopher who also coveted wealth and status and influence, who wanted to be on the inside of things. And that disintegration, some would call hypocrisy, I would just say was. Was not the integration he needed. And he got closer to that integration as he got older. He ultimately leaves Neuro service and dedicates the last few years of his life to getting there. And that's where I think a lot of his best work is from. But that lack of integration is a problem for all of us, right? You say you love your spouse, that your family's really important. And then you spend all your time at the office, or maybe you have an affair or, you know, you say you care about the environment, but then look at some of your personal decisions, right? You claim to be a good person, but then look at how you treat people who are close to you. Right? Hypocrisy is one thing, but I think it's often that we have trouble just applying what we believe or applying it fully, or seeing in fact that the way that we're acting, which feels normal or appropriate or necessary given our profession, is actually not in accordance with our values or as the Stokes would say, not in accordance with nature, not who we're supposed to be, what we're capable of being. So this integration is the work that we need to do, both in studying the philosophy. Maybe it's going to therapy, maybe a relationship helps you get there, maybe just long conversations, a lot of self awareness. I think ultimately, not to reference another one of my books, but it's our busyness, our franticness, our yearning or, or push for things that keeps us so busy and preoccupied that we don't notice the disintegration. I think that's largely what it was for me. I was just trying to get ahead, doing cool things as they came up. I was young, had a million things going on, didn't want to let certain people down. And so that. That lack of awareness about my disintegration was largely rooted in just not having the time, not having the space to reflect, not having literally a minute to do it. And I think part of the reason we keep ourselves busy is so we don't have to do that. Because when we do it, it's painful. When we do it, it demands change. So I'm urging you, I guess, to take a little time to think about whether you're integrated, to think about where you're not a unified person, to think about where you're focusing on things outside your control because inevitably it will tear you apart. It does not end well, and it can make you do things that you're ashamed of or embarrassed by or later regret or have trouble explaining, all of which are true for me to a certain degree and true for, I think, anyone. As you get older and wiser and better, I'm wishing you much integration and the stillness required to get to that integration. I encourage you to do that work. 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.