Ryan Holiday

And one of the things I reminded myself of was X, Y, and Z. So I think there's sometimes when we take the words in isolation, they can feel a little blase or a little black and white.

But when we actually look at who the Stokes were as people, and I would also say who we are aspiring to be as people, we can add a little bit more empathy and patience and understanding here.

All right, well, thank you so much.

Yeah, of course.

Somebody's asking a question about a stoic official who they realized he couldn't be bribed when they saw him cooking radishes, that he wasn't materialistic at all.

I believe that is a chapter in Right Thing Right Now, or maybe in Discipline is Destiny.

And it's not Cato.

I think it's one of Cato's heroes.

Yeah, it's in Discipline is Destiny about sort of keeping your needs small, if I'm remembering correctly.

Indira.

Yeah, I don't know if you would say it's innately wrong.

I think he's certainly pushing back against, you know, sort of outright hedonism or against doing whatever you want whenever you want it.

I think there's a skepticism in the Stoics about...

The permanence and the power of pleasure, you know, that it's rather fleeting, that building your life around doing things so you can have this sort of ephemeral experience is probably not worth it.

what people are often willing to give up to get it.

Although the Epicureans themselves, although they had this reputation as being hedonists, talk about this too, you know, the idea of that it's not just how you feel when you are getting the thing, but how do you feel after the regret or the shame or the pain that you inflicted on someone else?

So, yeah, I don't think the Stoics were anti-pleasure, but they did look at it with some skepticism and they prioritized it differently than, you know, we got to, again, imagine who Marcus Aurelius is seeing quite often.

And we can kind of see better pictures of this in Epictetus's writing.

So Epictetus lives in the court of Nero.

And although he is quite powerless, he's surrounded by very powerful, rich and important people.