Chapter 1: What does it mean that our true character emerges under pressure?
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 never an accident. It wasn't some freak of circumstances that allowed Marcus Aurelius to be great amid disaster and unbelievable power.
It wasn't a coincidence that Cato was the last honest man in Rome, a brave and solitary figure standing against the tide. It wasn't an accident that earned Stockdale the Medal of Honor in the Hanoi Hilton that allowed him to ride out seven years in solitary confinement and torture. No, it wasn't.
It was Epictetus who said that the whole point of philosophy was to be able to meet whatever life threw at you with, this is what I trained for. And that is precisely what these men had done. In fact, Marcus Aurelius thanks Rusticus at the beginning of Meditations for teaching him that he needed to train and discipline his character.
Cato, as we said, trained his whole life in how he dressed, to what he ate, to how he spoke for some future moment when he would need to stand up, defend the Roman Republic.
Chapter 2: How did Marcus Aurelius and Cato train their character?
And Stockdale? Stockdale liked to joke that his plea beer at the Naval Academy prepared him for torture in prison. And of course, his study of philosophy didn't hurt either. And neither did his training in the Navy's SEER program, Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. And now that training program is built around much of what Stockdale learned from experience.
No one magically steps up in the big moments. No, we revert to our level of training. Our true character comes out under pressure. So we must train that character. We must develop our bodies.
Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from Stockdale's experience?
We have to put in the work. Because when life's true tests arrive, and they will, we need to be ready to respond with both confidence and confidence. And that comes from preparation, not luck. It is never an accident. So generally, I get to wear whatever I want, which is usually, if you see me, it's running shorts and a heavy metal T-shirt.
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Chapter 4: Why is preparation essential for facing life's challenges?
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of Stoic philosophy in modern life?
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Welcome back to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've said before, like, meditations isn't a book that you have read. It is a book you are reading. And it is a book I have both read, and it is a book I am reading. And there are things that I missed the first time I read it, and the second time I read it, and the third time I read it.
Things that are only appearing to me now as I pick it up. Here, let me grab it off my toe. Like, I grab it and I Pull the leather bound down and I spin to something. And that you might see what the life of a good man is like. Someone content with what nature assigns him and satisfied with being just and kind himself. How many times have I read that passage? Many, many, I'm sure.
But there's something about picking it up at random and reading it and rereading it. And it just happens to be that you take something new out of it each time or something new strikes you each time. The randomness of it is a sort of part of my practice. As you know, this has been Meditations Month here at Daily Stoic.
We've been reviewing meditations in a variety of different forms, done episodes about it, we've done deep dives about it, and then we're doing our Q&A about it on the day after Mark Sebelius' birthday, on the 27th. I'd love to see you in there. Just to give you a little teaser of what that's like, here's some of the questions from last year's Meditations Q&A.
If you want to join us, if you want to keep doing this deep dive experience, into Marcus Aurelius with us, take our meditations course, the book club we're doing. Well, we'd love to have you join us. You can sign up right now, dailystoic.com slash meditations. I will link to that in today's show notes. But in the meantime, here's me answering some questions from meditations.
Hi, Ryan.
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Chapter 6: How can we apply Stoicism to handle personal struggles?
Thank you. It was nice to take the course and revisit meditations. It's been a while since I've read it in detail. Um, I dip in and out of it once in a while. One thing that always strikes me and I'm curious for your opinion on it, um, or maybe direction to other readings is when he talks about the cycles of, I think generations, uh, humans, uh, empires, uh, seven 49 always strikes me as, as, uh,
a good example of that, but he's got other passages, 1027 and so forth that I always make note of. Just, yeah, on cycles and seasonality, I know you've talked about dark energy and how that sort of makes a reappearance. And I've heard Robert Green has touched on this when he's in the, I think, Laws of Human Nature. He's got a chapter on that from Machiavelli.
Anyway, just curious on your thoughts on that and maybe other readings you might point to in addition to meditations.
Yeah, the Stokes did seem to think of history and indeed the sort of whole arc of the world as this sort of cyclical thing. I think we get a sense from Marcus that he believed that sort of human beings have always been human beings and have always sort of had the same vices, always done the same things, been drawn to the same types of characters, made the same mistakes.
And he found himself saying, that he didn't live in some sort of unprecedented future, that nothing was new under the sun, that this is just how it always went. And we shouldn't be surprised or disappointed or alarmed by any of this. And I think that's a good lens into where we are now. Yeah.
You know, the types of politicians that we have today, I don't think any of their personalities would be surprising to the Stoics. Some of the political dysfunction we have certainly would have been familiar to Cato or to Seneca or to Marcus Aurelius. Maybe there was anything that they would be surprised by.
It would be the progress that we've made, the way we've gotten out of some of these traps, some of the vexing sort of problems that we've The things we've been able to tackle as a society over the intervening 2000 years. But one of the things that you get when you study the Stoics is all the similarities. And then you're also struck by some of the unfathomable differences.
You know, the past is a foreign country, they say, but but not not a radically unfamiliar country. foreign country. And I think that's always what is so striking about meditations. Like on some level, Marcus Aurelius' life and the role that Marcus Aurelius lived should be incomprehensible to us. I mean, this is a guy with an arranged marriage. This is a guy who's the head of an enormous empire.
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Chapter 7: What insights do we gain from Marcus Aurelius about human nature?
This is a guy who owns slaves. This is a guy writing in a foreign language. You know, there are all these ways that he shouldn't be like us. And yet he still has to get out of bed in the morning and he still is insecure or has anxiety or has ambitions. He's still fundamentally a human being. And I think that's what makes him so recognizable and relatable to us.
And so when Mark Stabilis is saying you, although he means me, he accidentally ends up meaning all of us. And that is the beauty of and the power of meditations. Debra, you're up. Hello.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
When you read meditations, what passages are the biggest struggle for you, either in terms of just trying to understand physically what it means or personally that you really grapple with?
Oh, that's a great question. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I don't have my OG copy on me. I have a new one here in front of me. But it's funny to watch as I go through it. I can see that I asked questions to myself when I read it the first time that, you know, I've subsequently been able to answer or differing opinions as I go. I mean...
When Marcus Aurelius talks about the idea of living in accordance with nature, that's not a concept the Stoics define super well. There are also, I think, some passages in meditations that feel... almost nihilistic.
You know, he says, this is book 636, Asia and Europe, distant recesses of the universe, the ocean, a drop of water, Mount Athos, a molehill, the present, a split second in eternity, minuscule, transitory, insignificant. You know, there are moments, you know, there's one passage where he goes, what does it matter if you live to be old or not? What do you care?
There's just some passages where I wouldn't say Marcus seems depressed, but he does seem almost excessively cynical or, yeah, there's just a darkness to it. And I sometimes struggle with those.
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Chapter 8: How does the Stoic perspective help us deal with pleasure and pain?
That's not exactly how I think about it. Yeah. You know, continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life and the span of things around us, a grapeseed in infinite space, a half twist of a corkscrew against eternity. So there's something about that that seems kind of sad and insignificant.
And then book 10, 16, the one immediately above it, he says, to stop talking about what a good man is like and just be one. So there's this kind of tension in Marcus Aurelius where he's like, we're all infinitesimal and small and don't matter. And, you know, nothing lasts. And then he's like, but make sure you do good stuff. You know, that tension sometimes strikes me.
And I think I've wrestled with that for quite some time as I've read meditations. And I sometimes wonder, like, if you saw him the day that he wrote that, would you be like, oh, he was just in a mood that day? You know, where is he coming to from that? I think about that quite often.
Thank you.
Yeah, great question. Let's do Joseph.
Hi. Hi. My question is, when you read meditations, he kind of mentions when somebody wrongs you, you should think about it in the way of that person wronging themselves. And we should try to not let it kind of take the weight that it does on us. My follow up to that is, well, you know, undisputably, that's a great mindset to have.
How does that kind of work with like the struggle of reality and being a human being that does take the weight from those things?
Yeah, I think what he's saying is, first off, that we're all sort of part of this, you know, interconnected universe. And so when we harm one thing, we harm all things. But I think he's also saying that they're harming themselves by making themselves the kind of person that would do that thing. Right.
So by stealing from you, yes, they're harming you in the sense they're taking something from you, although the Stokes would go, did you really need it? You know, did you really lose anything by losing it? But they're also saying that one thing that did happen is that that person became a thief. Right. And and that that is undeniably not a good thing to be.
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