You Are Not Fixed | How A Stoic Would Respond To A Tyrant
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. We all have bad habits. Some of us procrastinate. Nearly all of us, as Seneca said, are slaves to something, food or sex or booze or ambition. We don't work as hard as we should, or we work too hard, too quick with our temper, or we're too slow to ask for help. The point is, we're not what we could be. And in some cases, we're quite messed up. Indeed, we are all quite flawed. On an episode of the Daily Stoic podcast with Tim Urban, he's the creator of Wait But Why, and he's the author of this book called What's Our Problem? I talked to Tim about his lifelong struggle with some of these very habits, namely distraction and procrastination.
And Tim was quite aware about how his weaknesses in these areas were have made things harder for him over the years. But he also expressed a sincere belief in his ability to change and grow. In other words, he was broken but not fixed. He retains, despite this discouragement, a growth mindset.
What bad habits do we struggle with and how can we change?
He refuses to relinquish what the Stoics believed was our ultimate power, our sense of agency over our own thoughts, our emotions, and our responses to life. You know, it's easy to be cynical about ourselves. We know more than anyone how long we've been struggling with things. We know how ingrained our bad habits are, how hard it's going to be to get over them. But we can't give up. We can't quit on ourselves. If we don't believe we're capable of change, who will? And if we don't believe we're capable of change, then we are definitely not capable of change. We must remember the hopeful note that Marcus Aurelius strikes at the end of meditations. Within 10 days, he says, you will seem a god to those to whom you are now a beast and an ape if you return to your principles and the worship of reason.
I really want to tell you about the Daily Stoic Habits course, Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness. It helps you do what the Stoics are talking about, which is how to avoid bad habits, how to form better new habits. I think it's one of the best things we've done. It's six weeks of habit formation, thinking about philosophy, applying it to your everyday life. These are habits I try to apply in my life that Marcus and Seneca and Epictetus and Musonius and all the Stoics we've talked about try to apply in theirs. It's great stuff based on philosophy, psychology, research, history, and I think you're really going to get a lot out of it. You can check that out at dailystoic.com slash habits, or if you join Daily Stoic Life, which you can join at dailystoiclife.com, you get that course and all our other ones for free.
So check both those out, Daily Stoic Life and Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness.
It was on the senator's way into the Senate that the emperor stopped him. He basically told him to shut up, to stop criticizing the regime. The senator said, it's my job as a senator to do and say what I think. So the emperor threatened to remove him from the Senate. And so the senator said, that's well and good, but while I am a senator, I will continue to do my job. And so the emperor Vespasian fixes the stoic philosopher Helvidius Priscus with a stare and says, if you don't stop, I'm going to have you killed. And Helvidius says, you do your job, I'll do mine. This is what courage looks like. It's not performative. It's not even public. It's the politician putting not just their job, but their life on the line to do what they think is right.
As rare as this was in the ancient world, I think it's rarer still today. And I want to talk about this story a little bit because I think it provides us some valuable lessons about courage, real courage that we can apply here in the present moment. People think that the Stoics were teaching us to become emotionally detached, numb spectators, even as the world burns around them. And this is emphatically not what Stoicism is or was. And Helvidius' example is proof of precisely that.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00β1:10
2
What bad habits do we struggle with and how can we change?
1:10β14:26
3
How does the story of Helvidius Priscus illustrate Stoic courage?
14:26β18:13
4
What lessons can we learn from Helvidius' confrontation with Vespasian?
18:13β19:04
5
How does Stoicism define the relationship between courage and duty?
19:04β23:13
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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