Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It's a scary thing when you realize you can't trust your mind. And yet, when you realize you can't trust your mind, it makes you less afraid. In Book 411, he says, not what your enemy sees and hopes that you will, but what's really there.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, they have this great acronym for fear. It's false evidence appearing real. What Stoicism is as a philosophy, as a rational way of thinking, is something that helps us break down our irrational fear. We actually look at what that worst-case scenario is, and think about whether it's actually so bad.
We take a minute and think about whether the emotion we're having, whether the doubt we're having, whether the feeling we're having, is true or not. Is it based on anything real? Can we trust our perceptions here? Is there something we're missing?
What are we making up about this situation? So Stoicism is about being rational, talking about breaking these things down. Epictetus, we talk about taking every opinion and putting it to the test, checking if it's true. Sure, we trust our gut, we trust ourselves, but we have to verify.
We have to make sure that that's true. And that's what Marx really says. The enemy wants you to be intimidated. The enemy wants you to overestimate their forces, wants you to overestimate their odds, underestimate your odds.
They want you to be scared. That's why they're doing that tactic. That's why they're making themselves seem bigger than they are. That's why they're talking a good game.
And what Stoicism does is it helps us break this down. So we can see not what our doubt and our fears want us to see, not the false evidence, but what is really there. We can best understand Marcus Reelis' meditations as trying to calm himself down, trying to get to a center, trying not to freak out. He's an anxious person.
He's a frustrated person. He's a scared person. He is a normal person, like you and I. And that's why book 932 is so beautiful.
Here we have, again, Marcus Reelis, the Emperor of Rome saying, You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind, things that exist only there. And he says, You can clear out space for yourself. How do we do this? He lists them, but comprehending the scale of the world by contemplating infinite time.
By thinking of the speed with which things change. Each part of everything, he says the narrow space between our birth and death, the infinite time before the equally unbounded time that follows. Meditations is a place where Marcus Reelis is zooming his thinking in, zooming his thinking out, challenging himself to think about things differently, trying to clean out the junk that clutters his mind, trying to clear out some space for himself in what must have been incredibly busy and stressful and frustrating life. He had every luxury, every technology, every benefit, every good thing you could possibly imagine.
But he took the time to remind himself that these things didn't actually matter. They weren't what they appeared to be. There was false advertising associated with all of them. This is Meditations Book 613.
You can imagine him at a dinner party observing this. He says, Like seeing Rose to meet and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing, This is a dead fish, a dead bird, a dead pig, or that this noble vintage, talking about wine, is grape juice, and the purple robes, our sheep's wool, died with shellfish blood. He says, Or even making love, something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure, and a little cloudy liquid. Perceptions like this, he reminds himself, latching onto things and piercing through them.
We want to see what they really are. He says, That's what we need to do all the time, all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust, to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrust them. He said, Pride is a master of deception. When you think you're occupied in the wadiest business, that's what he has you in his spell.
Again, he's not saying that you can never have sex, you can never have a nice meal, you can never have a nice drink, you can never do anything fun that you shouldn't respect or honor the job or the profession you've run. You should just remind yourself what it really is, to take it seriously, but not yourself for having it or getting it, and to not do anything shameful or embarrassing in pursuit of those things because you tell yourself they're so important and priceless and impressive. You have to strip them of the legend that encrust them, wipe away the false advertising, and see what they really are. Marcus Aurelius was very rich, Marcus Aurelius had a lot.
And yet what Stilik philosophy teaches him is that material things don't really matter. This is book 727. Treat what you don't have as non-existent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you crave them if you didn't have them.
But be careful. Don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them, that it would have set you to lose them. But this actually makes me think of a passage here, towards the beginning of the book. It's wrong to think of the Stotes as not caring about anything, having to know possessions, rejecting the world entirely.
That's actually not, it's a little more complicated than that. In book 1 of meditation, Marcus really is talking about what he learns from his stepfather, Cantiminus. And this is a good one. He says, the way he handled the material comforts that Fortune had supplied him in such abundance without arrogance and without apology.
If they were there, he took advantage of them. And if not, he didn't miss them. That's exactly the middle ground that balance we're trying to get. You can't care about stuff too much.
You can care about and be grateful for the things you have. But again, not too much. Couple of years ago, I lost one of the most valuable things in the world to me. It was my copy of Marcus Reus' Meditations.
I was on a flight from London to Vancouver, and I left it in the seat pocket of an air canada flight. The reason that my copy of Meditations is so valuable is that it has 20 years of notes, 20 years of highlights, 20 years of me coming back to the same ideas over and over again. Marcus Reus' is clearly fond of the philosopher Heraclitus. But one of the lines from Heraclitus is the idea that we never step in the same river twice.
And so it goes with reading the same book. Even though this book is the same as it was when it first arrived on my doorstep all those years ago, every time I come to it, I'm a new person. The world is different. What I know is different.
What I'm looking for is different. And so I find something new out of it each time. So I've gotten so much out of this edition, which I've read, and thankfully a lovely flight attendant returned it to Lost and Found, and I was able to get it in this book that came back to me. But I have many other editions.
My point is there are certain books that grow with you, that change with you, that aren't books that you have read, but they are books that you are reading. And Meditations, I think, is the ultimate book of that. And here this month is the month of Marcus Reus' birth. If you haven't read Meditations yet, I don't know what you're waiting for.
There's a reason this book has endured over the last 20 centuries. There's a reason it's endured even in my own life over the last two decades, and if you haven't picked it up yet, you're missing out. This is one of the most famous misunderstood passages in it. He says, when you wake in the morning, tell yourself the people I will deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, and surly.
Now, you think this is stoicism, sort of being pessimistic in advance, managing expectations, being a little bit cynical, but that is actually precisely wrong. Although it is true, we will meet annoying and obnoxious and dishonest and shitty people in the course of the day. That's not what Marcus really wanted to remember. He says, they are like this because they can't tell good from evil.
But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and I've recognized that the wrong viewer has a nature related to my own. This is actually the most important. He says, no one can implicate me in ugliness, nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like two rows of teeth, upper and lower.
To obstruct each other is unnatural. He said, to feel angry at someone, to turn your back on him, these are obstructions. So yes, there will be annoying. There will be obnoxious people.
There will be frustrations today. But your job is to work with those people, to manage those frustrations, to not let shitty people turn you into a shitty person, to not let obnoxious people make you obnoxious. Be prepared for it, anticipate it, don't let it break you, don't let it ruin you, don't let it make you bitter or angry or ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous or surly. When you run up against someone else's shamelessness, ask yourself, is a world without shamelessness possible?
No, they don't ask it even possible. They have to be shameless people in the world, and this is one of them. The same goes for someone vicious or untrustworthy with any other defect. Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of his members.
He's trying to say, look, look, a world without assholes, a world without jerks, a world without liars, a world without passive aggressive people, a world without frustrating people, a world without haters, a world without setbacks. This is not possible. You're going to experience these things. When you're experiencing them, take yourself, this was statistically inevitable.
I am dealing with what I was always going to have to do with. I'm not being singled out. This person is trying to make my life a living hell. This is not unique or unprecedented.
This is very precedent. This was unavoidable. So let me be patient. Let me deal with it.
Let me learn from it. Let me grow from it. And let me focus on the positive here, which is the majority of people are not there shameless, annoying, untrustable. Most people are good.
So once I finish dealing with this bad person, I'm getting out of the way, and most of the other interactions I'm going to have are going to be positive. Marcus Aurelius was beloved and admired, but of course not by everyone. No politician, no leader, no great man or woman has ever achieved anything without their beat. Haters, endowters, and critics.
And so he gives us a prescription for dealing with that. He says in book 927, when you face someone's insult hatred or whatever, look at their soul, get inside them, look at what kind of person they are. You'll find you don't need to strain to impress them. But you do have to wish them well, he said, they are your closest relative.
The gods assist them just as they do you by signs and dreams in every other way to get what he wore. His point is, this person who you so desperately want to impress and you don't like that they don't like you, think about, he says elsewhere in meditations what they do in private. Think about their own values. Think about their own problems.
You shouldn't hate the haters. You shouldn't let the haters make you worse. In fact, sometimes haters are helping you, guiding you, telling you things you need to know. But you also shouldn't let them turn you off to your fellow human beings.
You should keep their opinions and views in perspective, not dismiss them entirely, but don't give them more credit than they do. Someone just hurt you, someone just screwed you over, someone just did something shitty and awful and frustrating. Well, here's a 2,000 year old piece of advice from the most powerful man in the world. He said, when faced with people's bad behavior, turn around and ask when you have acted like that, when you saw money as a good or a pleasure or social position, said your anger will subside as soon as you recognize that they acted under a compulsion.
What else would they do? He's trying to remind himself of something that Socrates talked about, that nobody's wrong on purpose. When you were wrong or you didn't know it was wrong, you thought it was right. You were acting with the information that you had.
And by the way, what you do after, even if you did realize you were wrong, you forgave yourself. So don't hold people to a standard that you don't hold yourself to. In fact, give them the grace that you so readily give yourself. But if you can take a minute and put yourself in that other person's shoes, if you can think about what they thought about what they were doing as they were doing it, it's going to take away some of that anger, it's going to calm you down, and it's going to allow you to move on.
It's going to also allow you to get better because now you see something of yourself and other people. He was betrayed by his most trusted general. He was criticized. He was slandered.
His wife may have cheated on him. Certainly, people lied to his face. Certainly, people tried to take advantage of him. He saw in many ways the absolute worst of people.
And he writes this wonderful prescription in meditations that is advised to us more than two thousand years later. Best revenge is not to be like that. Another version of this translation in meditations is the best revenge is to not be like your enemy. I think this is critical.
You can't let bad people make you a bad person. You can't let the assholes turn you into an asshole. You also can't let bad times turn you into a bad person. You have to stay good.
You have to stay true to your principles. And really, we have to remember the stoages. The only way we can truly be harmed by anyone or anything is if we let it affect our character. If we let it change who we are for the word.
That is the only way we have been irreparably harmed by someone or something else. It's so phony. It's such bullshit. And yet we just accept it like it's not.
We just act like it's totally normal. He says, the despicable phoniness of people who say, listen, I'm gonna be level with you. He says, what does that even mean? It shouldn't mean to be said.
He said, it should be honest, written in black letters on your forehead. It should be audible in your voice visible in your eyes like a lover who looks in your face and takes the whole story in at your glance. It says, straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks. When you're in the same room with him, you know it.
Another translation says, an honest person should be like a smelly goat in the room. You know when you're in the room with them. But the point is when you say, I'm gonna be honest with you here or you say, with all due respect, these little prefacees, these little empty phrases, they're actually saying a lot. And what they're saying is, can I be honest with you here?
Can I give it to you straight? What you're saying is that that isn't your default. What you're saying is that that's not what you normally do. That that's not your reputation that people don't know what to expect when they hear from you.
And that is embarrassing. And that's why you should cultivate this habit of being honest, being straight forward of saying what you mean. Of course with kindness, of course with tact, but always with the truth. A prescription for what he needed to do, whatever that day brought him.
Whether it was temptation, or adversity, good news, or bad news, ideal conditions, or frustrating ones. He says it here in book 6, 2 of Meditations. He says, just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm, tired or well rested, despised or honored.
He says, even if you're busy, even if you're dying. Because dying too, he says, is one of our assignments in life. And even then, he says, you have to do well what needs doing. Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter.
If you're an emperor or an ordinary person, it's a big situation or a little one. Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Being an effective leader is difficult, right?
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Whatnot.com.sell. We think all our problems are so modern. We think they're so new. We think we live in unprecedented times.
We think everything is changing really, really fast. Of course, it's always been this way. That is the oldest thing in the world to change. It says some things are rushing into existence and others out of it.
Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly remakes the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. It says we find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold, like an attachment to a sparrow.
We glimpse it and it's gone. And in fact, he returns to this name over and over and over again in meditation. There's a great southern expression about how if you don't like the weather, just wait, it'll change. He says it would take an idiot to feel distress or indignation about change because it's not going to last either.
And this is the most important lesson that Marx really teaches about change. It says you're frightened of change, but what can exist without it? This present moment that you're trying to protect and preserve, it has not always existed. It itself is a product of change.
You are a product of change. So what we have to do is embrace it. What we have to do is accommodate it, figure out how we're going to use it, what we're going to learn from it, and how we're going to make the best of it. Marx really didn't have to try to get better.
He didn't have to get outside of his comfort zone. He didn't have to worry about job security. He had a job for life. He was supposed to be infallible.
He was literally worshipped as a kind of a God. He had unlimited power. He could make people tell him what he wanted to hear. He could make everyone tell him he was perfect and did not need to change.
And yet we see in meditations that he wanted to work always on getting outside of his comfort zone, on challenging himself. That's why this passage in Book 12 is so great. He says you should practice even what seems impossible. The left hand, he said, is useless at almost everything for lack of practice, but it guides the reins better than the right from practice.
And he talks about this elsewhere in meditations that he is actively trying to practice holding the reins in his non-dominant hand. He's working on getting outside of his comfort zone. He's working on trying to do things differently. He's working on doing them the hard way.
He's taking the stairs instead of the elevator, so to speak. He's not taking the easy way out. He's not giving himself the gimmies. Why?
Because you don't get better if you do that. But by challenging yourself, by facing resistance on purpose, you get better. You grow, you get stronger, and the non-dominant hand gets a little less useless. This is Book 754 of Meditations.
It's a good reminder everywhere, at each moment, you have the option to accept this event with humility, to treat this person as they should be treated, and to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in. Easy to say, hard to do, but it's something we should all be striving for. It was one thing after another. There was a plague.
There was a famine. There was a flood. There were wars. He had health issues.
He had marital issues. He had family issues. He was betrayed in a coup by one of his most trusted advisors. He gets chosen to be the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world.
But then he has bad luck. And he addresses it here. It's in Book 537. He says, I was once a fortunate man, but at some point, fortune abandoned me.
Why the gods forsaken me? Why are they picking on me? Why is my luck so bad? But then he catches himself, and he says, no.
True, good, fortune is that which you make for yourself. And he defines this good fortune as three things. He says, good fortune is good character, good intentions, and good actions. We don't choose whether we live in good times or bad times, a good world or a bad world, but we do control whether we are a good person, whether we do good, whether we play the hand, we are dealt good.
The people you admire aren't perfect. They screw up. They get rattled. They make mistakes.
They fall short of their values. What makes them great, though, is how quickly they're able to get back to, how quickly they're able to return to their principles, how quickly they're able to get back on track. Which is actually something where it talks about in an education. This is one of my favorite passages.
He said, in this book 611, when jarred, unevitably by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help it. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it. The point is, it's okay that you screwed up. It's normal that you screwed up.
It's human that you screwed up. But you don't have to keep screwing up. What matters is how quickly you get back to it. This one is fitting here as the ocean crashes behind me.
He says, to be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over, it stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it. Right? Stillsism is not the absence of emotion, but it is about that even keel, not getting too high and not getting too low. It's actually funny, you know, the buddhas have a different image.
They talk about if you've got a cup of water from the ocean or a river or lake, it would be hard to see at first. But if you let it sit for a second, eventually it would settle down and not water would become clear. That's what Marcus really is talking about. The world is going to be noisy.
The world is going to be loud. A lot of things are going to happen. But if you take a minute, if you pause and reflect, you give things a second to settle down. If you don't get lifted up by them or dragged down by them, eventually you get to a level set, a kind of point of clarity.
And in a way, that's what Marcus really is doing in meditations itself. It's kind of crazy if you think about it. We all know ourselves better than other people. We all know what we're trying to do.
We all know who we are. And yet for some reason we're like a weather vane. We let public opinion or trends decide what we like. We let the criticism or the potential criticism of others decide what direction we go with our life.
It's so absurd that Cyril Connolly is trying to take it to its logical extremes that there are people who are afraid even to kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors might think. That's why I love this passage in book 12 of meditations. Marcus Rios, the most powerful man in the world. The person who really had no reason to care about what anyone else thought.
And yet to do his job well needed to understand public opinion. He said, it never ceases to amaze me. We all love ourselves more than other people, but care about their opinion more than our own. If a god appeared to us, he said, or a wise human being, he even prohibited us from concealing our thoughts, or imagining anything without immediately shouting it.
We wouldn't make it through a single day. That's how much we value other people's opinions instead of our own. It's not that we shouldn't care at all what other people think. We should just care a whole lot less.
He says, take Antoninus as your model always as his stepfather, his predecessor. His energy in doing what's rational, his steadiness in any situation, his sense of reverence, his calm expressions, gentleness, his modesty, his eagerness, to grasp theses. And now we never let things go before he was sure he'd examine them thoroughly. Understood them perfectly.
The way he put up with unfair criticism without returning it. How he couldn't be hurried. How he wouldn't listen to informers. How reliable he was as a judge of character or of actions.
Not prone to back by the Eucharidus or jealousy or empty rhetoric. Content with the basics and living quarters and betting and clothes and food and servants. How hard he worked. How much he put up with his ability to work straight through dust because of his simple diet.
His constancy and reliability as a friend. His tolerance of people who openly questioned his views and his delight at seeing his ideas improved on. His purity. Without a trace of superstition.
So that when your time comes he says, this is why he was fighting to be the person that Blossie tried to make and her conscience will be as clear as his. This is Meditations 624. I think it's one of the most powerful lines in Meditations. He says, Alles and End of the Great and his new driver both died and the same thing happened to both.
They were both absorbed alike into the life force of the world or dissolved alike into atoms. I think he's just reminding himself here again, a man as famous. Perhaps even more powerful. He's reminding himself that at the end we're all equal.
At the end we're all mortal. At the end of the day we all become worm food. And so if you can't let your accomplishments puff you up you can't believe that your legacy is going to help you last forever. We've got to remind yourself we're all equal in the end.
We know that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Right? And yet here in this book which is written by the most powerful man in the world. You see him fighting to do precisely the opposite.
In book 630 of Meditations Marx really says, To escape imperialization that indelible stain. He writes elsewhere about not being stained purple by the cloak of the emperor. He says, It happens. He says, You have to make sure that you remain straight forward upright, reverent, serious, unadorned and not even the most powerful man in the world.
He says, You must fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you. So why isn't Marcus Aurelius corrupted by power? Why doesn't it break him or make him evil or wrong? Well, Meditations is the answer.
He's fighting to be the person that philosophy tried to make him escape imperialization. He's trying not to be stained purple. And he's doing it by writing these notes to himself, by checking in with himself, by putting himself up for review, by holding himself accountable. Well, one of the things he does is he tries to think, he says, Of the qualities of the people around you.
He says, When you need encouragement, think of the qualities of the people around you. So think of this one's energy, this one's modesty, another's generosity and so on. He says, Nothing is so encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us. When we're practically showered with them, he says, It's good to keep this in mind.
And that's why the first book of Meditations is so powerful. It's known in the Gregory Hayes translation, it's titled, Dettes and Lessons. And in Dats and Lessons you have Marcus Aurelius writing about what he learned from Roostice his philosophy teacher, who told him to never be satisfied with just getting the gist of things. He talks about, Sex this, the philosophy from whom he learned kindness and gravity without errors, to investigate and analyze, with understanding and logic and the principles that we ought to live by.
It says not to display anger or other emotions, to be free of passion, yet full as love. I particularly like what he says he learned from Maximates, said self-control and resistance to distractions, optimism and adversity, especially illness, a personality, imbalance, dignity and grace together, doing other people's job without whining. Other people's certainty that what he said was what he thought and that what he did was without malice, said generosity, charity, honesty, the sense he gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it, that even he had a great sense of humor. He learned from his mother, her reverence or the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but to even conceive of doing it in a simple way she lived, not in the least light as a rich.
But most of all, the person Marcus Aurelius most saw these virtues embodied in, is of course Antoninus' beloved stepfather. Compassion, unwavering if you're in a sedicision once you reach them, indifference to superficial honors, hard work, persistent, his altruism, not expecting his friends to keep him entertained or travel with him unless they wanted to. And anyone who had to stay behind and take care of something always found in the same when he returned, his constancy to his friends never giving fed up or playing favorites, his constant devotion to the empire's needs his stewardship of the treasury, his willingness to take responsibility of his own. His ability to feel at ease with people and put them at their ease, his willingness to yield to Florida experts, the way he respected tradition without constantly needing to congratulate himself for safeguarding our traditional values, that he never exhibited rudeness or lost control of himself or turned violent.
No one ever saw him sweat. Everything was approached logically and with due consideration. He says you could have said of him as they saved Socrates that he knew how to abstain and enjoy from the things that most people found it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. Strength and perseverance, self-control in both areas, a mark of a soul in readiness, indomitable.
So Marcus really saw these virtues embodied in person in the people he loved but then he also took time to write them down to think about them, to read about them, which is what we have to do so we never drift far. This is one of the most powerful passages in one of the most powerful books ever. In 2000 years ago, the emperor of Rome, a person that many believed was a god that believed was immortal, that they believed had so much power that no one enough can touch him. We have Marcus Aurelius writing in his famous meditations in Book 221.
He says you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. He writes over and over again in meditations. You see him doing this momento mori practice, remembering that he is mortal, remembering that life is ephemeral, that life is short, that we are not in control, that we don't get to decide.
And so we can't take this present moment for granted. We can't take our health for granted. We can't take other people around us for granted. We can't take the future for granted.
He says you could be good today instead you choose tomorrow. Don't put it off. Do what you need to do now because you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
We would shock him today that we are still willing. And the fact that we still know his name, that it's still a bestseller, but he would shrug his shoulders at that. Here's what he says in Book 533. Soon you'll be ashes or bones, a mere name most.
And even that is just a sound, an echo. And then he comes back to this theme of fame over and over and over again. He says people who long for posthumous fame, he says they forget that they won't be around to enjoy it. He says elsewhere in meditations that also the people in the future are not that awesome.
They're not going to be that much better than the people that are around today. And that in one of my favorite passages he lists the names of the famous emperors who came before him. Thespasian and Trajan and Dohmishin. Names that were so famous at the time.
And yet he says are already being forgotten. It's like that line from Taylor Swift about the who's who of who's thought. So the fact that we're still reading Marcus really is he would say, I guess that's fine. It doesn't do me any good.
What matters is who I was in life. What matters is what I did with my life. Was I a good person? Did I do good things?
I'm going to end this video with the last passage in Murch's Realist's Meditations. It may well have been the last name that this great man wrote. He says, you've lived life as a citizen in a great city. Five years or a hundred.
What's the difference? The laws make no distinction. Says to be sent away not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge but by nature who first invited you in. Why is that so terrible?
Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor. I've only gotten three three acts. Yes. But this will be a drama in three acts.
The length fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with Grace, the same Grace shown to you. I'm actually told that this is how Marcus Aurelius left this Earth.
He reminded his weeping friends that it wasn't the only one dying that millions had died of the plague and that they should take from this lesson not sadness but a reminder of their own mortality to seize the present while they could to be good, while they could. He was happy and content with the life he'd been given. He wanted to handle business. He wanted them not to miss him.
And then he wanted to close his life with Grace and poised to die well. Which is by the way what philosophy is. Cicero said philosophy is to learn how to die. We can tell from the final passage of Meditations we can tell from how Marcus really lived his life and left this life that he learned that lesson well.