Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Maybe you can hear that.
I'm in my office and my kids are stomping around upstairs, making quite a bit of noise, so I will keep today's episode short because I want to get right into it. It's with one of my absolute favorite people to nerd out about philosophy, someone who has done a whole hell of a lot to bring practical philosophy of all different types, from all different schools to a huge audience, mostly through his column at the Atlantic and then through his best-selling books, including one he recently did with Oprah called Build the Life You Want. Arthur Brooks came out to the painted porch here in Basquiat. I think he's been on the podcast more than anyone else or at least close to.
He's close to being inducted into what the four-timer club or the five-timer club. I don't remember exactly, but I do remember this conversation because we talked about Socrates, we talked about Plato, we talked about the cynics, we talked about Nietzsche and what we can learn from these ancient philosophers about living a good life today. Arthur has a new book. It comes out on March 31st.
The reading of your life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And if you're feeling lost or struggling, you want to find purpose, which is what we're here to do. I think Arthur is a great resource in that regard. It's also going to be doing a free live workshop on March 27th.
You can listen to him talking with me, Wilson and Hoda Cobb, Chaconli Simon-Cinek, Andrew Yang, Maria Shiver, Dan Butner, and Chris Williamson. You can also grab his books here at the painted porch from Strength to Strength, Build the Life You Want, and his new book, The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Here is me, Arthur Brooks digging in on ancient philosophy. What I'm noticing about your columns, something from Ronk, but I feel like you are going through the philosophical schools one by one and saying, like, here's something from each one, which I think people don't do enough, right?
Because people are like, I'm a Buddhist, I'm a stoic, I'm a Christian, and you're just you kind of just stay in your lane. And obviously there's something about going really deep into one school philosophy. But what I like about the ancients is how familiar they were with all the other ancient schools. So I thought maybe we'd just kind of go through them.
And my favorite line from Seneca is he says he'll quote a bad author if the line is good. And he quotes Epicurus more than he quotes any of the stoics, which I always thought was really interesting, that he was not just familiar with his quote unquote opponents, but he really liked their ideas and you can engage with them. There's a lot to take from all different ways of thinking. Yes.
And when it comes to philosophy, by the way, it's the same thing with behavioral science. I can talk about the whole approach I've taken to this study of happiness for the past seven years. I started off by figuring out what was wrong with it. And then I rebuilt it in a particular way that required that I have more than passing familiarity across a bunch of different disciplines and then within the different disciplines as well.
Do you find that they're all saying really similar things though? Like at the core when they boil down that there are some essential truths that all the schools have? And no doubt that there is something behind it. There's a basic physics behind it.
But it's funny. It's kind of like what that's what the showman ever calls villa, which means will in English. And what that means is that that's the ultimate truth that you can't actually see. And so you can get at it.
You can get at it. This is the shadows on the cave wall for Plato, of course. That's what Hegel would call a Geist. That's the ultimate truth behind, which means ghost.
And for him that was kind of God in its way. But you can only get it through a glass darkly as Saint Paul put it. And so this is all this whole thing right? You just did it.
You just did it. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And those guys are any of those subjectivists who would say that actually there isn't that, but the reality comes to exist at the moment and at the point of your perception.
That's I don't think that's right. I think there is an underlying objective reality, but you only get it by coming at it from many different perspectives because when you're sitting only in your home, it's through a glass too darkly. Well, I've kind of likened it to a convergent evolution where like different animals have similar adaptations. You go, oh, it must have descended from a common ancestor.
Right. And it's like actually the common ancestor is just the need. Like it's helpful to have an opposed thumb. Another flying is a great way to escape from things that are trying to beat you.
And so different species, bats and birds and apes and different animals have similar things, but you can't actually trace it back to like one animal, one person figured it out and then everyone's a branch. Obviously, what's that line about where it's all table scraps from the Feast of Plato or whatever? Sometimes it's that. Right.
But a lot of times like we actually don't have much evidence of the Buddhists and the Western philosophers overlapping, at least when the ideas were being formed later, you're like, wow, it's very similar. That's kind of the point. That's the point. That's the point of the philosophical, then there's the market metaphor.
And the market metaphor is what Hayek talked about, which is called emergent order. Emergent order says you need lots and lots of people doing lots of different things in different ways in different places for different reasons. And then what will emerge is a wisdom. The wisdom emerges from the micro decisions of people all over the place.
The truth emerges as you see the similarities between different philosophers coming at it from different angles. The biology will actually produce certain phenomena on the basis of congruent need. Yeah. And so it's the same basic idea.
Sure. And that's what you have to be looking outside your tiny little worldview. Yeah, they're trying to navigate ships at sea and they're figuring out different ways of doing it. But there's only so many ways to do it.
And it turns out to come up with kind of similar innovations. That's right. And that's why academics are often so radically wrong, also unbelievably smart, is because we are trained when we get our PhDs not to do that, precisely to not do that. And so you can be just like as great as you could possibly be to try to be right, but going in the wrong direction.
You're getting better and better and better at walking 180 degrees off the roof. Sure. And but you're a specialist in X. Yeah.
And so that's the fullness of your domain. You're not going, well, what if there's something totally the opposite of X or in a totally different discipline or domain, you have ton of vision. Exactly. And so I started my career over on the basis of not doing that seven years ago.
Let's start with some schools. We start with Socrates and bring wisdom down from the heavens. What do you think Socrates has to teach your average person about life? Where would we start?
So the average person can learn from Socrates the basic idea of humility that your knowledge that your enlightenment will come when you're not blocking that truth with yourself. Yeah. When you're not standing in the way with your own shadow of the truth. That's a, that's a socratic idea that I, the only thing I know is that I don't know anything that concept.
Yeah. And of course, a contradiction in terms, but it's a beautiful contradiction in terms because when you basically say, I don't know, man, then what you can do, what you're actually doing. So what Socrates would say, if you bring it forward to what a modern semi modern psychologist, William James, the father of modern psychology is that Socrates helps us go from the me self to the I self, the me self is that which I'm thinking about myself and my rightness. The I self is that which I'm just looking at the world learning.
Right. And that's humility. He's going around asking questions, not making statements. Plus he's actually not reflecting on his own brilliance and rightness.
Yeah. He's, it's sort of a non defensive understanding of the world. It's an openness to the rest of the world. A beautiful kind of outward focus on actually trying to learn things.
One of the things I've been taking pains to point out about Socrates, though, is it's easy to see him as this intellectual figure. Like he's, he's your academic. He's living off the, the largesse of the success of Athens. He's, you know, walking around in his toga.
Life must have been simpler and easier than, but I think you point out, no, he's in the middle of a great power conflict. He serves in a war. He lives through the time of the 30 tyrants, like not everyone likes him. He lives in Athens as Athens is going through incredible turmoil and like we think of it as classical antiquity.
Right. He's in an advanced time in human history. And, and it was scary and uncertain and not the past. Yeah.
And that's because we weigh in, and after any one of these phenomena, we have what's called, what you have in your own life, what we all have is something else I'll just call fading affect bias. Fading affect bias is that what you look back on prayer times, strip out the discomfort from those times and only, and only enjoy the learning that one got. Yes. And so fading affect bias in your own life is for everybody watching us right now is that they went to college when they were 18 years old and they were incredibly lonely and unhappy and calling mom every single day.
So come pick me up, I hate it. And then they go back for their tenure reunion and 20 year reunion for college. And they're seeing their friends that I met in their first semester of college. That's fading affect bias because they learned a lot and made great relationships and the discomfort of the moment wasn't there.
The discomfort that was Socrates's own life is stripped away and is completely irrelevant, even though it was the most important thing to him. He had a shitty marriage. Yeah. Like that's one of the things you hear about all the time.
And everyone knew it was like Socrates did not make a great marriage. Yes. They did not get along and part of what allowed him, he saw that even that though as a kind of a philosophical practice. Right.
And indeed, you know, there are things that each of us deal with all the time. You know, we have children and soon enough you're going to have teenagers and let me tell you that you're fun. Yeah. And these are difficult things that occupy most of your brain space.
Yeah. The current difficulties and you know, it's a mess. Yeah. Your life is an actual mess.
Mm hmm. But the things that you're doing that will be passed on are not the current mess. It's the salient truth that you'll be able to uncover from time to time. And that's what people remember about Ryan Holloway.
And that's a lot of what you'll remember about these years for yourself as well. Yes. Okay. So Plato comes from Socrates.
Right. What do you think Plato's main teaching for people is? There's so much. Sure.
I mean, there's so much. Yeah. For me, as we were talking about a little bit earlier, this is the first time that we start to see there's a truth. There's a transcendent truth.
Yeah. But we're changing all the time. The changes are kind of a distraction from the ultimate truth, but there's an ultimate truth that underlies all of this stuff. And a lot of people, by the way, are true are true Platonists.
They're true Platonists because they believe that change is extraneous and the unchanging is actually the reality. And that's a very, very platonic ideal of what's going on. And that's the whole idea that came to, you know, all the way up to the 19th century existentialist philosophers and even absurdists who said there's an underlying truth. I mean, Hegel, Schopenhauer, et cetera, they believe that too.
And they were highly Platonists in this way. And you mentioned the cave. The algorithm is one of Plato's most interesting concepts, which is the idea that there is this truth, but most of us are looking at shadows. We're chained in a cave, you said, and we can sort of see out on the outer parts of the cave being reflected and we see these shadows.
We don't know what they are. It's a reality. Yes. And all we get is the shadows and we have to do the best that we can with the shadows to figure out what's going on.
Right. And then we escape from the caves. Exactly right. But there is this truth, unchanging truth.
Yes. And all the dynamics and things of it are what confuse us. And we have to sort of triangulate across the images as best we can. Yeah.
And we discover what this truth is having left the cave. Right. Our obligation. The cave or cave is played.
Yeah, exactly. So Plato says you escape from the cave. You get some sense that, oh, what I was looking at before are only shadows. Right.
And as I understand it, he believes that then the role of the philosopher, the human being, is you're obligated to try to come back and communicate to the other people in the cave what those shadows were. Right. Your obligation is once you actually have greater enlightenment is to share that particular enlightenment, which goes forward into all sorts of schools that people aren't even aware of. Well, Buddha wrestles with this exact thing.
Well, this is super important. And so, you know, I've worked with Dalai Lama for the last 12 years. And the Dalai Lama says that you can't actually benefit from meditation until you stop trying to get the benefit from meditation. And I say, wow, he says, this is why I tell Westerners not to become Buddhist because they're doing it for the wrong reason.
I said, what's the wrong reason you're holding this? And he says, you want to meditate so you feel better. You need to meditate so the whole world will feel better. That's an incredibly platonic idea.
Yes. Right. The whole idea for you to find enlightenment is so that you can bring it to others. Yeah.
Buddha wrestles with, should I just continue to pursue my own enlightenment or should I teach enlightenment? Should I take on students? Right. And there is this kind of obligation.
And I think you could trace it to this idea in Plato, but in all this will is a thought that with insight and understanding and wisdom comes responsibility. Right. And the concept is what does the monastic life mean under the circumstances? And that's a really interesting medieval Christian idea actually from the time of Saint Benedict in the six, seven, eight centuries early on, but then into the middle ages of the scholastics.
You know, what are you supposed to do if you're actually monastic and the whole idea is teach other people like Saint Thomas Aquinas or are you supposed to actually just pray for other people? Yeah. And or are you supposed to be a pure contemplative? Right.
What is the right approach to that and Plato would have a strong view? When the Stoics and the Epicureans have this debate too, should we participate in public life or not? Right. And what does it mean to participate in public life?
Of course, of course. Yes, of course. So, it's the right approach to that. Because you are.
Yeah. Even though presumably you're not going to be in a public office. Yeah, I do. I do think the ancient's had a much more limited definition of public life because there were only so many ways to contribute running an enormous company that employs thousands of people might be making a far bigger difference than being a senator and also running.
Yeah. And yet you're a lot more in public life like Plato. You personally, you're doing a public intellectual gig. It's just that you have the means that the 780s idea is way, way, way beyond anything he could have imagined.
Yes. Yes. And although the irony is I have James Ramin here, you can write this book Plato in the tyrant. And Plato's four ways into politics are a cautionary tale against thought leaders and intellectuals sometimes participating in public life because you're, well, he was an easy mark, which is interesting.
Easy mark four. Dionysus, the tyrant, he goes to be a pysus, a king who is making pretensions about wanting to be a philosopher, but really wants to be a tyrant with a propaganda and a reputation. Yeah, exactly, and Plato is complicit in it in the way that many generations later, Seneca and Nero fall into the same. In other words, intellectuals are easy to roll.
Yes, yes, because you don't have the experience and you don't necessarily even understand you represent to the people in power and how you can be a tool for that. Okay, so what about the cynics? I find the cynics to be fascinating, Diogeny is being the most famous of them, but I feel like they have a lot to teach us in today's very materialistic world. To begin with, we don't understand them.
Yeah. Because we cast aspersions and people who are cynical. Yes. I mean, the whole idea of the skeptics and the cynics, different schools, of course, that there's something that's kind of suspect about the character.
You don't want to be a cynical person because you're just negative all the time. That's exactly getting it wrong. How do you characterize the school of cynicism? I say they're like the punk rockers of the philosopher, they are transgressive and radical, and they are, by taking it too far, actually providing us insights about sort of a moderate middle ground.
Like if everyone lived as Diogeny's lived, the world would be a horrible place. But if everyone lived according to ambition and trying to make as much money and get as much power and value all the wrong things, you also get a really bad society. And he's not the court gesture because that's almost too dismissive. But in, he's like the hippie, sort of like none of this matters, man.
And in certain things. I didn't even say it matters. He's saying this is stupid. So it's worse than what is.
Yeah. You know, it's making fun of your suit. Yeah. And your tie and your fancy car.
I mean, the famous story about Diogeny's that I love is, you know, he has very few possessions, but he walks up to the well and gets a cup of water. And a young boy runs up and gets water with his hands. And Diogeny's realizes that even here, having reduced what he thought his needs were to nothing, actually has one more that he can get rid of and he's not just a cup on the ground. A piece of work to measure me, Mary, that guy.
Yes, I don't think you want to. Although, you know, so Zeno, the founder of Stosysm, his philosophy teacher was named Crete's, I'm forgetting Crete's wife's name, but she was a famous cynic philosopher too. So we tend to think of it as this primarily male world, but there were fascinating cynical philosophers in marriages, which, you know, if they were totally abstaining and rejecting all convention, they would have rejected even that. Yeah, and then the skeptics who just knew nothing.
I just, I know nothing. Yeah. They banked on knowing nothing. So no matter what, they said, I don't know.
And sometimes the extreme cases tell us something like, it's not exactly a defensible position or a scalable position, but in the extremeness of it gives us color and another angle to understand ourselves. Right. And there's a humility to it. Yes.
There's a real humility to it. So there's a kind of a pose with a cynics and there's an anti pose with the skeptics. And so they're quite different in this particular way. This is a cynic sure thing because what they do is they can make you realize that life is hilarious.
Yeah. By the way, you go fast forward in history and you just found that a lot of Nietzsche. So the whole competitive set of ideas between what the Greeks were doing, which is that essence proceeds existence. And then with the existentialist we're doing in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is that existence proceeds essence.
In other words, meaning either comes before you're born or you're born and then you find your meaning. That's the big conflict between ancient philosophy and Christian philosophy. And then you're thinking about the things that you and I are talking to. And what the modern existentialist do.
And he's just like, no, no, no, no. There is no essence. There is no meaning. It's like, so how am I supposed to live?
Just to have a good laugh, man. Just to have a good laugh. Well, the humor of the philosophers is not something I think your average person is clued in on. Right?
Like because philosophy seems dry. Philosophy seems academic. Philosophy seems confusing. And then you read- It's all the above in many cases.
But you read Diogenes, the cynic and you're like, oh, this dude's fucking hilarious. And he's a badass. Like he goes up to Alexander the Great comes up to him as he's sunbathing. And Alexander the Great says, I'm the most powerful man in the world.
What can I do for you? And Diogenes looks at him, having reduced his needs to nothing and says, you can stop blocking the sun. Get out of my way. And that's not just funny, but it's badass.
Yeah, and Nietzsche is hilarious too. And probably the best writer of all the 19th century absurdist and existentialist. Yeah. He's a beautiful writer, incredible writer.
It's really, really worth reading Nietzsche even in English. Well, it's fast forward. What do you think Nietzsche has to teach people? Where would you go?
To truly question your understanding of essence and existence. OK. And it's really, really worth understanding it. The biggest problem philosophically, and by the way, scientifically, and in terms of almost everything that we do, is an inability or unwillingness or just an ignorance about our own assumptions going in.
But that's a huge problem because you garbage in garbage out effectively. But that doesn't mean that your assumptions are garbage. But if you don't question them, you actually, it's very, very hard to grow because you're constrained to the philosophical outline that you've been given based on your assumptions. And a lot of what Nietzsche is talking about is questioning this fundamental algorithm of life, which is, did your life have meaning before you were born?
Or were you born and have to go find your life's meaning? And he breaks it all apart, smashing his cup. And he has a lot more to question. Socrates has a couple hundred years of philosophy to question.
Nietzsche has 2,500 years. And 2,500 years of Christian teachings. So he's inherited a stabler world. Sort of all the way strongly suspect that Socrates was relying on a lot that simply wasn't written down.
Yeah, the pre-socratic philosophers. And who were very sophisticated? But we don't know. And what Nietzsche had was a lot of stuff that had been written down.
And so the Socrates tradition was writing stuff down that had been preserved in the oral tradition. And who knows what's a bigger library? That's true. That is the interesting thing about the ancient world is we tend to compress it down to this period.
We go, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, they're all kind of around the same time. Diagonese is in there. And you're like, Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is like 600 years. Or it's like 300 BC to 300 AD or something.
Like that's correct. It's huge swath of time. Like they would have been like Marcus, the Roman philosophers, would have come to Greece as tourists and said, look at these ancient ruins. I know.
And it's like really looking at Liberty Bell and filling out something else. Yeah, yeah. But much older, in many cases. Right?
Like it would have gone through. It would have been built and rebuilt. And then destroyed by an earthquake. And then ravaged by the Persians.
And rebuilt. They would have just seen generation after generation and generation. They would have experienced it differently. They would have been still polished and shiny in some cases.
But they would have come and gone the smartest people who ever lived centuries ago walked where I'm walking. And then it's like we're all tourists going back to this period. It's kind of a beautiful. It is.
And the thing, however, that's worth, I think it's always worth remembering is that no doubt in the time of Socrates, he was looking back to philosophies that he could chart back to the ancient Egyptians. And so Socrates was as far ago from us as the Egyptians were to him. And that's a long time ago. And if we move over to India, for example, I mean, that's a Hinduism.
It was a 6,000 year old religion. Lord Krishna lived in Mathura in the Hindi heartland. Yeah. 6,000 years ago.
And there's a little bit written. But the whole point is that the idea has reached us. And for us to say, knowledge is limited to what's been written down in books is like for our kids to say, knowledge is limited to what's on the internet. It's the same basic idea.
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And you don't realize that that is them riffing on them. Like what I love is when there's this play by Joseph Asid called Cato, those popular in the 18th century. And once you read it, you go, oh, like 80% of what the founders were saying was just them quoting this play. Like we might say immigrants, you get the job done, or you quote the godfather.
Like it was a little touched on them at the time. We lose the illusions that they're riffing on. And in some cases, if you really go and you go, oh, actually, OK, the footnote is telling me this comes from a play from a line from a play by your deputies or whatever. But if most of it was oral, we wouldn't know that actually Socrates is a recycler.
Yeah. Yeah. Of course, he's a recycler. That's the point.
And that's exactly the whole point of what we're discussing here. You're not going to be doing good work unless you're mostly recycling. So the body of knowledge when it's actually useful is like sourdough bread. And that means it has this old thing in it.
And the starter is the most important thing in sourdough. That's the most important thing. And it can be real or the yeast and bread can go by literally the ancient Egyptians. That's what it comes down to.
And if you don't have it, you don't have bread. And the truth is that as you and I, we do a lot of talks on the outside. It's kind of what we do for a living. And 20% of it has got to be some old stuff that you've been working on and the jokes that you've that work and the big ideas.
And that's the spine of your talk. If you're new talk, it's 100% new. It sucks. Because you're doing it by trial and error with a new audience.
Yeah. And this is a profoundly conservative worldview, by the way. But I think it has the virtue of being largely correct. Is that when somebody comes out of the left field with a completely new way of seeing human nature, and it's actually destructive and dangerous.
What has it been tested in actual human experience yet? And it hasn't been through boom times and depressions, wars and like, yeah, if you came up with some totally new philosophy, it might sound really great. It might work great in a TikTok. But does it have a thousand years of human, just kind of kind of?
That's a problem with utopianism. That's the problem with utopianism is all throughout history is that they've always been a failure and led to large scale destruction, death and suffering precisely because they're not sourdough. Yeah, you got to take something old wine and new skins as they say. Yeah, I mean the problem with that is that of course is from the Gospels and it says that old wine and new skins breaks the new skins.
Well, we skipped Aristotle. Give me something from Aristotle. So of course Aristotle was almost forgotten until the middle ages and considered, you know, and also around to play because there was a new Platonist in the middle ages. So by the time you get to the 12th and 13th centuries, you know, have a rose and you have mamannadys and of course Tom's Aquinas from the three great southern European Abrahamic traditions.
And they were all Platonists. They were all Platonists, but especially Aquinas, he rediscovered Aristotle and brought Aristotle to what at the time was a modern audience? Yeah. And he said, this is the guy.
This is the guy. I mean, Plato's okay, but Aristotle's the guy. Why? Because he was a full spectrum scientist, but there was also this one weird thing that he did that Plato didn't do.
He said that change isn't a distraction from reality. It is reality. That's a big deal. That's the whole idea that dynamism is the essence of reality itself.
And so you know, you as a person are different than who you were and who you're going to be. And that change, that first derivative of Ryanness is the essence of Ryanness. And that's a pretty big deal when you think about it. Because that's just a dynamic understanding of oneself.
And to be celebrating the change. And that has a lot to do with how we understand modern behavioral science. We, I mean, the underlying unchanging essence of ourselves is not very interesting to us. Well, we wanna make it progress.
We're just like progress, progress. That's the essence of what a good life is really all about. When it's point that virtue is something not that you have as an essence, but as something you are doing and getting better at doing. That has been super, super influential in my own work.
Which is this one third philosophy, one third neuroscience, one third behavioral science. It's kind of the three parts of the pie as I put it in there. That I started off doing this work years ago saying I wanna find the secret to happiness. And it's wrong because you can't be happy.
What you can be is happier. Which is an air, there's the tealy notions opposed to a platonic notion. You can get happier. And the goal is putting yourself, your life, on a jagged, messy path or happiness.
And his definition of happiness, you diamond me a maybe give us that. I think when people think happy, they think grinning from ear to ear, living your best life. And it's not quite that way. It's not that at all.
Actually, so the biggest mistake that the moderns make is think of it as an emotion. Happiness is a feeling. It's not even one of the basic emotions according to behaviors who do work on emotions. The basic emotions, researchers.
Happiness has feelings associated with it like Thanksgiving dinner has a smell. So feelings are evidence of happiness. Which is really, really important thing to keep in mind. Because if you're actually looking for the feeling per se that you're searching for a vapor, you're gonna be about as nourished as if you were trying to get the ultimate smell experience on Thanksgiving day.
Happiness is enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. That's what happiness is all about. And that experience of going from pleasure to enjoyment, which is what it means to grow up and be a responsible person. But also to be a happier person.
And drive satisfaction. Which is joy that comes from accomplishment after struggle. And meaning, finding the meaning of your life, the wide resistance. There's tons of suffering in that.
Yes. Tons of suffering in all three of those bins. Which is, you know, and that's very Aristotelian. Udaimonia means a good life, well lived.
There's actually, there's not adequate translation. I mean, everybody, we all struggle with actually what does Udaimonia mean. It's a good life. And the good life has lots of suffering in it.
And so therefore the modern elimination of strategy. Which is to say that if you're feeling sadness, you're broken and you need therapy. That is profoundly anti-Aristotelian, but it's also an exercise in futility. Cause you can't get enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning.
And unless you're like suffering, bring it on. Which is stoic, by the way. Of course, yeah. He's saying that you have to be doing the things that humans were meant to do.
And specifically what were you meant to do. So it's a lot of like, when people talk to me, I find my purpose. That's what, he's aerosol saying, when you get there, you're a lot closer to happiness than anything else. Which is why, you know, Aristotle was a great theorist and the Stoics are very practical.
I mean, they're working out Udaimonia. That's a Stoic philosophy. Like, how do we do this thing? How do we get this Udaimonia?
And a lot of it is like, get the hell out of bed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And it's extremely Aristotelian in this way. Yeah, I think that like, this is more stoic than Aristotelian, but it's like, what are the things that I'm glad I did after that I hated while I was doing? Like going for a run, you feel great after. It's not that fun while you're doing it.
You're jumping in a cold plunge. You're not, you don't love the period of jumping in. You don't love, as you come up for it, but you love 20 minutes after. Yeah, let me ask you a question.
Do you love writing books or having written books? Well, they said that's the joke that painters like painting and writers like having written. I try to make a distinction between writing and publishing. Writing is in my control.
Publishing is not. So like, sure, am I glad to be done with a book? And is there something about that? Because books involve suffering and as all projects do.
So I get that, I do make a distinction though. Like I actually try to work on enjoying doing the thing. Because it's the only part of it that's up to me. Yeah.
And that's a really important thing to keep in mind. Because there is a lot of suffering. But in the dynamics of a whole thing, if there's nothing good for you in the journey, then you'll fall prey, sure, you're sitting here to the arrival fallacy. A very well-known phenomenon that says, when I get to the end, then I will feel peerless.
Yes. It's axiomatically wrong. If the whole thing is suffering, then you need external results to make it worth the suffering. You have to figure out how actually you enjoy practice.
Like you enjoy the doing of the thing. And then the question becomes, which is a very stoic, and both Aristotelian kind of a stoic. You know? He said the ships in motion.
I guess is how much did you enjoy the suffering? Yeah. People are like, they try to dichotomize. And they say the process should have enjoyment, but it also has a lot of suffering.
And if you only suffer, so you can get to the enjoyment at the end, the arrival fallacy will hunt you down and kill you like a dog, which means you'll win the Olympic gold and be depressed for six months. Because you're like, you feel like life is over. The real trick here, the real stoic trick is enjoying the suffering. Yes.
Yes. Do you enjoy the suffering? I do. I do.
I don't think you're just naturally there, because there's this part of you that wants to avert and avoid suffering wherever possible. But then I try to go, oh, you know, this is actually like a dream. Like I get to do this. This is my job.
I'm very lucky. And I try to enjoy it and then try not to rush through it also. And this is probably the most profound Aristotelian point of all, which is because he was a good biologist, as well as a philosopher. And he asserted in many, many places in the writings that human beings have kind of two spaces that they can live in.
There's animal impulse and there's moral aspiration. Animal impulse and moral aspiration. And now we know why the reason that we actually have a choice of living in one of these two spaces, because we have a prefrontal cortex that's astonishing and it's complexity beyond any supercomputer that exists, or will exist. I mean, it's one third of our brain by weight.
And you know, your dog's prefrontal cortex is way for thin, which is why it has only animal impulse. But if you follow what Mother Nature is telling you, what your urges are, all you'll do is the things that will immediately slightly raise your odds of survival and tossing on your genes. Aristotel points out, as do all the good philosophers and religious traditions, that you can actually choose to stand up to Mother Nature, to stand up to your animal impulses and live in your moral aspirations. And when you're making that choice, the suffering is sweet.
That's the point. This is, I mean, this is a key point of Aristotle and everybody else, by the way. 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 would really help the show.
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