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. So I grew up in the suburbs.
I went to school in the suburbs of Los Angeles. That might be a little bit insulting, I guess, to call the Inland Empire a suburb of Los Angeles, but I think it kind of is in a way. But after that, I did the big city thing. All I wanted to do was move to Los Angeles, which I loved.
And then after that, I moved to New York City. I moved to New Orleans in between, but I was like, I was a city guy. And it wasn't until we moved to Texas, where at first I lived in the city, I lived in East Austin, but it wasn't until we really moved to Texas. That's my wife and I like to say, we moved out to the country, that I just realized how unnatural my life was, how much the noise and the busyness and the craziness of it was not just disconnecting me from myself, which it certainly was, but disconnecting me from the natural world, right?
You just stop noticing the seasons. You have no idea where your food comes from. You're operating from this sort of fundamentally modern place, but a place that we were not necessarily evolved to exist in. And it's funny, it wasn't until I went back to New York City after I lived in the country for a while that I like, I just felt it.
I was like, oh, like, I'm not used to this. It's like when you cut something out of your diet and then you put it back in, you're like, oh, I'm going to be allergic to this, or my body doesn't handle this well. You just drift away from nature. And obviously Stoicism is about living in accordance with nature, not necessarily the natural world, but also the natural world.
This idea of exposing yourself to things much bigger than you as a form really of ego death, also as a Stoic concept, this idea of sympathetic, realizing our interconnectedness, our place in a larger ecosystem. It's something I wrote a bunch about in Ego is the Enemy. It's like, how do you, how do you remind yourself that you are not the center of the universe? And in fact, the universe is vast and enormous and also wonderful and beautiful and awesome.
And in the sense of inspiring awe. And this is actually one of my favorite chapters in Ego is the Enemy. It's called Meditate on the Immensity. A monk is a man who is separated from all and who is in harmony with all.
Evagrius, Ponticus. In 1879, the preservationist and explorer John Muir took his first trip to Alaska. As he explored the fjords and rocky landscape of Alaska's now famous Glacier Bay, a powerful feeling struck him all at once. He'd always been in love with nature.
And here in the unique summer climate at the far North, in this single moment, it was as if the entire world was in sync. As if he could see the entire ecosystem and the circle of life before him. His pulse began to pick up. And as he said, he and the group were warned and quickened into sympathy with everything, taken back into the heart of nature from which we all came.
Thankfully, Muir noticed and recorded in his journal the beautiful cohesion of the world around him, which few have ever matched since. As he said, we feel the life and motion about us and the universal beauty, the tides marching back and forth with weariless industry, laving the beautiful shores and swaying the purple dulces of the broad meadows of the sea where the fishes are fed, the wild streams in rows white with waterfalls, ever in bloom and ever in song, spreading their branches over a thousand mountains, the vast forests feeding on the drenching sunbeams, every cell in a whirl of enjoyment, misty flocks of insects stirring all the air, the wild sheep and the goats on the grassy ridges above the woods, bears in the berry tangles, mink and beaver and otter far back on many a river and lake, Indians and adventurers pursuing their lonely ways, birds tending to their young, everywhere, everywhere, beauty and life and glad, rejoicing action. In this moment, he was experiencing what the Stoics would call sympatheia, a connectedness with the cosmos. The French philosopher Pierre Hadot has referred to it as the oceanic feeling, a sense of belonging to something larger, of realizing that human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity, as he put it.
It is in these moments that we're not only free, but drawn toward important questions. Who am I? What am I doing? What is my role in this world?
Nothing draws us away from those questions like material success. When we are always busy, stressed, put upon, distracted, reported to, relied on, apart from, when we're wealthy and we're told we're important or powerful, ego tells us that meaning comes from activity, that being the center of attention is the only way to matter. When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it's like a piece of our soul is gone. Like we've detached ourselves from the traditions we hail from, whatever that happens to be, a craft, a sport, a brother or sisterhood, a family.
Ego blocks us from the beauty and history in the world. It stands in the way. No wonder we find success empty. No wonder we're exhausted.
No wonder it feels like we're on a treadmill. No wonder we lose touch with the energy that once fueled us. Here's an exercise. Walk onto an ancient battlefield or a place of historical significance.
Look at the statues and you can't help but see how similar the people look, how little has changed since then, since before, and how it will be forever after. Here a great man once stood. Here another brave woman died. Here a cruel rich man lived in this palatial home.
It's the sense that others have been here before you, generations of them, in fact. In those moments, we have a sense of the immensity of the world. Ego is impossible because we realize, only fleetingly, what Emerson meant when he said that every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. They are a part of us.
We are a part of a tradition. Embrace the power of this position and learn from it. It is an exhilarating feeling to grasp this, like the one that Muir felt in Alaska. Yes, we are small.
We are also a piece of this great universe and a process. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has described this duality well. It's possible to bask in both your relevance and irrelevance to the cosmos. As he says, when I look up in the universe, I know I'm small, but I'm also big.
I'm big because I'm connected to the universe and the universe is connected to me. We just can't forget which is bigger and which has been here longer. Why do you think that great leaders and thinkers throughout history have gone out into the wilderness and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It's because in doing so, they found perspective.
They understood the larger picture in a way that wasn't possible in the bustle of everyday life. Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to. Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you're convinced the world revolves around you.
By removing ego, even temporarily, we can access what's standing in relief. By widening our perspective, more comes into view. It's sad how disconnected from the past and from the future most of us really are. We forget that wooly mammoths walked the earth while the pyramids were being built.
We don't realize that Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those famous pyramids that marked her kingdom. When British workers excavated the land in Trafalgar Square to build Nelson's column and its famous stone lions, in the ground they found bones of actual lions who'd roamed that exact spot just a few thousand years before. Someone recently calculated that it takes but a chain of six individuals who shook hands with one another across the centuries to connect Barack Obama to George Washington. There's a video you can watch on YouTube of a man on a CBS game show, I've Got a Secret, in 1956, in an episode that also happened to feature a famous actress named Lucille Ball.
His secret? He was in Ford's theater when Lincoln was assassinated. The English government only recently paid off debts it incurred as far back as 1720 from events like the South Sea Bubble, the Napoleonic Wars, the empire's abolition of slavery, and the Irish Potato Famine. Meaning that in the 21st century, there was still a direct and daily connection to the 18th and 19th centuries.
As our power and talents grow, we like to think that makes us special, that we live in blessed, unprecedented times. This is compounded by the fact that so many of the photos we see from even 50 years ago are still in black and white. We seem to assume that the world was in black and white. Obviously, it wasn't.
Their sky was the same color as ours, in some places brighter than ours. They bled the same way we did, and their cheeks got flushed just like ours do. We are just like them and always will be. It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am, Muhammad Ali once said.
Yeah, okay. That's why great people have to work even harder to fight against this headwind. It's hard to be self-absorbed and convinced of your own greatness inside the solitude and quiet of Everything you want now, and climate change does exist, not a very popular statement, and it requires wisdom to know how to tackle such statements in a post-truth world. And it is kind of strange, like when you think about it, that we have one day a year to remind us that we live on a fragile planet.
But what Kai is describing is not a political thing, it's a philosophical thing. And for the Stoics, living well meant living in alignment with how the world actually works, not how we wish it worked, or not our fantasy of how it works. And if we're exhausting the systems that sustain us, that's not just unfortunate, it's irrational, it's unvirtuous, and it's dangerous. As the Stoics also say, it's unjust.
And in Meditation 4, this talks about how what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. But of course, part of the busyness and noise of the modern world is there to prevent us from thinking about just that. And it's only when we step off, when things slow down, that we start to see what we didn't see before. And for Chloe Dalton, that came through a wild hare.
Back in February 2021, Chloe was a political advisor in the UK. She was spending the lockdown in her country house in the English countryside. And on a walk there, she found a tiny newborn hare that they call leveret, that had been chased by a dog. She takes it home and she starts to raise it, even though supposedly raising a wild hare is basically impossible.
She kind of figures it out as she goes. She was always planning to release it. But then the hare starts coming and going on its own. And it roams the fields at night, but it returns to her house during the day.
And even though she knows it might not come back one day, she never tries to stop it because keeping it confined wouldn't really be living. And she wrote this amazing book about it that I've been raving about called Raising Hare. But I actually have a chance to talk to her about just that. Let's talk about the idea of living with nature, because that's obviously one of the beautiful things in the book.
You talked about just sort of noticing the seasons and the rhythms of life. It seemed like having this wild animal in your house. It's not that it awakened the wild animal in you, but it just awakened you to the sense of nature being this sort of force with kind of rhythms and a power to it, and that you sort of accommodate yourself to that or you don't. Yes, absolutely.
And the passage of the seasons brings renewal. I suppose it's another way of thinking about what you just said about acceptance. You know, you wait and the spring will come and all the dead things that have broken off and rotted and look so unpromising will restore life. And in the process, while they all look dead, they're actually sustaining life.
Birds are feeding off them and the ground is being enriched and all the new growth is being made possible. And I found it incredibly consoling to realize that there are these underlying rhythms to life that govern our lives. And that when, you know, it is just that basic fact that even when things look really, really dark, you know, renewal is usually just around the corner because that is human nature. And that's our great capacity.
And it is also the sort of nature of the environment around us. So I found myself studying it almost in a daze. You know, I was drawn in and fascinated by the detail of what I was observing and trying to understand it and trying to think of words to describe color and to think about how little I understood about the basic elements of the landscape and what is grass and what are these plants that grow amongst the blades of grass. But also at the sort of larger level, I saw myself and my place in nature and my place on the earth and in history in a totally different way.
And I let go, I think, a bit of some of my previous struggles and was a little bit more accepting of life in all its complexity. There seemed to be in the book, you did seem to have a certain respect for sort of the laws of nature in the sense that like, you don't give it a name. You're not trying to turn the hare into a pet. You're not trying to train it.
You're just sort of going like, hey, this is nature sort of intersecting with my life in a way that's a little bit unnatural. But for the most part, I want to respect that nature as much as possible. Absolutely. But I think a lot of people have done the same thing in the sense that, you know, it was so obvious that this was a wild animal.
You know, hares have never been domesticated. And we're just not used to this idea as humans. When you think about the fact that 96 percent of all living biomass on earth, as it were, are made up of humans, livestock and pets, and only 4 percent are wild animals. We don't really come into contact with wild animals very much.
But the idea of an animal that has lived alongside humans for thousands of years, but we've never domesticated it. So, you know, instrumentalized this in the way that we do other animals. You know, I felt like I was in the presence of something very different, an animal that wasn't conditioned genetically to need me or approach me or seek food from me, that was just living alongside me, got all its sustenance for the most part, from the hedges and the field margins outside and just chose to sleep in the house and to rest alongside me, giving, you know, the idea of giving the hare a name. It just would have felt wrong.
It would have felt like I would have trivialized this kind of glorious wild animal that I didn't fully understand. And I felt so privileged to be able to see. So it wasn't based on any kind of ideology about humans and nature. It was just an instinct.
Did it give you a glimpse at all into your own nature, like into human nature? It's kind of a controversial topic these days. And obviously, you know, there's what they call the naturalistic fallacy that just because humans naturally do things doesn't mean we should keep doing them. A lot of a lot of this thing we call society is us triumphing over some of those parts of our nature.
But we do seem to somewhat be in denial that humans are, have done certain things for millions of years and are supposed to do things for millions of years. Like, did it give you any sense of your own kind of nature and the rhythms of your life? I think two things. You know, one is, it certainly made me think that we are in the habit of thinking that nature, the nature outside of us, exists for us.
And even if you don't have a religious sort of upbringing or mindset, it's that sort of idea that, you know, trees make firewood and animals make this. And, you know, we get our clothes and our food and whatever from the landscape around us. And it really made me think about those automatic assumptions that if human and animal interests come into conflict, the human should automatically prevail because somehow we're more important. It definitely made me think about that.
And on the level of like my own personal nature, I'm just going to be very open here, take it as you will. But I think it made me very conscious of the way I had shaped myself into something that would be successful in a certain context. I worked in politics and in foreign policy, very male dominated world still, although that never held me back. I was given incredible opportunities.
I sort of felt there was a certain way I had to be in order to be taken seriously in that kind of environment, which did involve suppressing in a way parts of my nature. And obviously we all have to do that in order to sort of exist alongside other people. You can't just let it all hang out. But I realized that, and this seems probably self-evident, maybe I was a bit late to this realization, but it just made me conscious of myself as a broader, much broader person than the person I'd made myself into so that I could succeed in this particular professional niche.
And being able to step back and kind of lean more fully into those other parts of myself was really refreshing. And I would probably have thought in a way in the past that some of those had to be sort of jettisoned so that you could be more of this thing. You make these choices in life and then you kind of, you know, live by them. So I'm not sure that it was, you know, it's more like what I learned from the hare, but definitely I stopped and looked at myself and it was almost like I felt a kind of blossoming inside, bit like one of the things, you know, drop one of those sort of flowers into tea.
You feel like that on a very large scale around my heart. And that process is still continuing. Yeah. It's like your profession, whatever it is, but politics is a good example.
It probably heightens and exaggerates part of our tribal nature and then also suppresses part of our nature. And then when you, when you step off the treadmill or, you know, step off the path, you, you go, Oh, I don't like this part of myself or I've been suppressing this part of myself and trying to get something somewhere closer to whatever we're supposed to naturally be or would be without the pressures of our industry or society. Yeah. And also, you know, I, there will be trade-offs we make, you know, I use my brain a lot more than my body.
And you look at an animal like the hare, and that is in balance somehow, you know, the brain and the instincts and the ability to survive. You see that, that alertness, you know, every single moment of their existence, Suddenly you're in complete and total silence, and you realize just immediately that there's something inherently holy about silence. And that that's kind of one of the main features of churches too, although they might have sort of chanting or whatever. It's, you're in this enormous, you know, high-ceilinged stone thing where everyone is trying to be respectful or doing their own inward thing.
And then, yeah, you just notice like the absence of noise and disruption, which we totally take for granted as a species. We obviously care a lot about pollution and society's done a lot of work collectively to reduce pollution, but we just have thrown up our hands around noise pollution. Enter leaf blowers. Yes.
Yes. Exactly. Like the one I hate is like, like I hate New York City because of the noise that like a big trucks make, like a dump truck or whatever, where it's like a big heavy back part and they kind of go into an intersection and that, that sort of ka-thump. Yeah.
Not the engine, it's like just the sheer weight of the big metal thing moving around on top of a big metal thing. And I can feel that like in my chest cavity and I just, I have a stress response to those, to just loud noises. Yeah. It's not natural to hear a car horn from six feet away, not in your own metal cocoon, you know, and you feel it and your cortisol level and your emotion, like it's just not what a human is supposed to be experiencing.
Yeah. What got me thinking about the silencing and the comfort crisis is that, and that, that section on silence was not in the proposal. Yeah. But I went up to the Arctic and I'm there for like a month.
And one of the craziest things is just how silent it is. Yeah. Like I'm standing on the tundra one morning, it is dead silent. And then I just hear this.
And I'm like, what is happening? It's like a Blackhawk helicopter. And I turn around and it's a Raven flying. You can hear the flapping of a bird.
It is so silent that those sorts of noises get amplified. Yeah. Almost. And then when I went back into, I'll always remember this, when we get to back to Anchorage, I go in my hotel room and it's near an airport and there's a plane taking off and it was just like, it was like you're in an IMAX movie and your seat rumbles, like the noise from that because my sense of hearing was just so dialed down to, and then of course, that fades away eventually.
Right. And like you would just, but it is crazy to me how not just sound, but just all sorts of stimulation that we have today. Well, I live out in the country and that's one of the weird things. I'll be like on my back porch and I'll hear voices and I'll be like, is someone like in my yard?
And then it's like, no, they're like very far away, but there's the sound is carrying across the water, you know, like because all the other sounds are turned down, you're able to hear things, you know, that you would never ordinarily hear and you're subjected to phenomena you wouldn't ordinarily not be able to experience because there isn't that sort of low grade, just like white noise blanketing it out. So here on earth day, I'm just asking you to take a second and ask yourself, where am I out of alignment? Where am I reacting instead of cooperating? What am I trying to control?
That's not mine to control. And where can I do a better job respecting nature? Future generations are going to be shaped by choices that we make now. And many of the fundamentally unnatural parts of our modern environment are not good for us and they're not good for the future.
But we can make small and basic decisions about where we live, what time we wake up, what our routines are like, what we do, what we consume, what we pay attention to, how we respond. When we do that work, we get more in alignment. We get closer to living in accordance with nature. And as I found in my own life, we are happier and more well-adjusted.
Happy Earth Day, everyone.