The Stoic Way To Handle Real Problems
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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. I told you this that back in February, I had to fly to Hawaii to do a little chat with a lady named Oprah. That hasn't come out yet, but another honor happened to me on that trip, which is that I did a virtual talk to the team at the Irwin Army Community Hospital in Fort Riley, Kansas. It was a group that included more than 150 health care staff members, both military and civilian providers, who all serve at that hospital. And before I hopped on the talk, I heard a bunch of them were listeners of the Daily Stoke podcast, which was really cool.
So on today's episode, I wanted to bring you some of their questions. Some of these are men and women in uniform questions. serving in a difficult, stressful, complicated moment in our history. Appreciate them having me on. I appreciate that stoicism is something they are relying on. And it was an honor to get to talk to them. By the way, if you want to see me come talk, if you want to ask me some questions, I'm going to be in Portland, I think, in two weeks. I'm going to be in San Francisco, Boston, D.C., Chicago. bunch of cities. I'm going to Australia in the fall. You can grab all those tickets at dailystoiclive.com. Most of the shows are almost sold out. So you got to grab those. I'll sign your books.
You can ask me questions, all that kind of stuff, dailystoiclive.com.
So how do you apply stoic principles when the obstacle isn't abstract, but emotional and human?
That's a really interesting way to think about it. So it's like if you're deciding to take it personally, that can be good in the sense that you're like, this is designed just for me. And this is a test that's going to make me better. And I love this challenge. This might be that there's this expression popular in socialism called amor fati, which means a love of fate where you don't just like sort of bear the circumstances, but you're like excited about them. So if you're taking things personally that way, like go for it. That's awesome. But if you're taking it personally, like I'm being singled out, this is singularly unfair. This is, you know, they're out to get me. No one has to deal with as many things as I have to deal with.
You know, now what you're doing is you're taking an objective thing and you're making it subjective in a way that's only making it harder. And I do think it's worth pointing out like, OK, first and foremost, like the world is indifferent to us, right? Like the pandemic doesn't care about you. The hurricane doesn't care about you. The snowstorm doesn't care about you, whether you're in an economic bull market or bear market. These things, they are abstractions and they don't care about you at all. And they don't know you exist. And so if you take them personally or you sort of ascribe a personality to them, that's going to make it harder to deal with. And then I think something that you bring up that is also a timeless fact of civilization, which would be bureaucracy.
That's also not singling you out. It's not deliberate. It could be different. It would be better if it was different, but it's not, right? And this isn't to say that we just tacitly accept and resign ourselves to bureaucratic injustices and we don't try to fix them or improve the system. But yeah, if you let that wear you down, you're not only going to have trouble with the individual instance that you're dealing with, but you're going to burn out and not be able to be of use to yourself, your family, and and sort of future patients or people in need. So I think just understanding that this is a fact of life. This has always been there. This is an imperfect solution to an impossible problem. And that our job is to find the little pockets of change or improvement or humanity inside that system is really important.
There's actually an interesting passage in Meditations.
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