It Can’t Think About You | How to Be a Better Friend, According to the Stoics
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What does it mean that 'it can't think about you'?
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 can't think about you. It does so much damage. It sets us back so much. It's something we desperately don't want to happen. So yeah, we think about it a lot. We fret about it a lot. We dread it a lot. But it's worth remembering, as we said recently about toxic people, that these things aren't thinking about you at all. Just as a Nero is not thinking about Seneca, the economy is not thinking about you. This drought is not scheming to disrupt your plans. The airport isn't trying to make you miss your flight and thus your meeting and therefore screw up your career.
The highway doesn't care. Neither does gravity or cancer. These are impersonal forces. They are inanimate objects. This is fortune and fate. It's not targeting you. It's not favoring or picking on you. We have to figure out how to deal with them without turning our minds over to them. We can't let them steal our focus or our happiness. We can't let them consume our every waking second. And most importantly, as Mark Strelitz writes in Meditations, I love the Hayes translation. You may have heard me mention that, I don't know, once or twice. The point is we can't let these inhuman forces steal our humanity. These things are indifferent to you, and your goal is to be a little more indifferent to them.
Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, there's this stereotype of the Stoics as unfeeling and withdrawn, unfun. But friendship is a theme that runs throughout the Stoic writings. And in fact, one of the most powerful images we get from the Stoics is rooted in friendship. Seneca says, you know, you're making progress in this philosophy when you become a better friend to yourself. But you think about Seneca's letters. Who's he writing to? He's writing to his friend, Lucilius. You can't open Marcus Aurelius' meditations and read part one, Debts and Lessons, and not see how this man was shaped by so many different relationships, people who taught him, people whom he loved. When you read his letters to his rhetoric teacher, Franto, you go, man, this relationship has transcended like teacher and student, and they've become very close friends.
And that's because what kind of life is it if you are alone, if you are disconnected, if you do not have friends, and if you are not a friend yourself? So that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. We did a deep dive over at Daily Stoic for some Stoic tips for being a great friend. I did not read this one. I worked on the article, but I didn't have time to do the audio. It was narrated by Kat Pichik. And I hope this episode inspires you to show up as a great friend to yourself and to others. Because that is in many ways the meaning of life. It is the secret to a good life. And while our friends might not always be great friends to us, we can strive to be great friends ourselves. That's something that's always in our control.
That's what we're talking about in today's episode. So here's some stoic tips on being a great friend. Be a great friend. Have great friends. Talk to you soon.
When we think of great Stoic figures like Marcus Aurelius, Cato, and Epictetus, we tend to focus solely on the individual, their perspective, their observations. But how did these brilliant thinkers treat those around them? We know from historical accounts that Marcus ruled the people of Rome with reason, and Cato earned the respect of his troops by sleeping in the trenches with them. Even so, out of all the Stoics that we read today, there's only one who gave us such comprehensive insight into how they spoke and acted towards their dearest friends. Seneca's letters from a Stoic are nothing more than a series of deep conversations he had with a close friend, each letter covering a different topic or merely expanding upon what was said in earlier letters.
The collection of correspondence certainly gives us more insight into Seneca himself, but it also raises as many questions as it answers.
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