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Chapter 1: What does it mean to leave a piece of yourself behind?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You can't help but leave a piece. It was just a long meeting. It was a lazy period. You got distracted. You were waiting for something better. You did it because you didn't know how to say no.
The excuses we make for doing things we have no business doing. As Seneca points out, we aren't paying for these excuses with the most precious resource we have, our time. Look back at those periods, those obligations you unthinkingly said yes to, and what do you see trailing behind you? It's your life.
Remember, whatever it is, however long or short it is, we are giving up something we can never get back. You can never ever leave, as the song lyrics go, without leaving a piece of youth, and not just our youth, but our children's youth, and just as easily our golden years or any period of our brief existence.
And this is why we have to be wise enough to know what's worth doing and what isn't, why we have to be confident enough to say no, courageous enough to change course when necessary, honest enough to stop pretending the thing we're doing isn't costing us Anything. Because every day we are spending time. Every yes is a trade. Every obligation takes its cut. Every distraction leaves with something.
The question is not whether we will leave pieces of ourselves behind. The question is whether we are leaving them with people and places that matter. I don't know if you've ever done any live shopping, but it's blowing up. And some of the kids, I don't know if I call them kids, but some of the Gen Z kids on my staff had to tell me about it.
They really love it because you can find vintage stuff and collectible stuff. I was looking at some videos of people selling vintage band tees and records and watches and And it's real people selling. Like if you're going to an estate sale or a really cool, trendy shop, not, you know, overpriced stuff, not produced stuff. There's no ads, no marketing.
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Chapter 2: How can we recognize the cost of our commitments?
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from Seneca about time?
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I'm going to bring you a couple of the questions that the folks at the Melbourne Town Hall asked me back in 2024. I can't wait to go back to Australia. The kids are very excited, and I hope to see you while I'm there. You can grab tickets at Daily Stoic Live. It'll be Auckland on October 13th, Sydney on the 16th, Melbourne on the 18th, Brisbane on the 20th, and Perth on the 21st.
I haven't been to Perth in quite some time, so I'm very excited to go back to Perth. Anyways, hope to see you in Australia.
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Chapter 4: Why is it important to know what to say no to?
Ryan, your content's brought me a lot of peace. One of the questions that I had through learning more about the philosophy of the Stoics was the phrase, know yourself or know thyself. I wonder if you can maybe comment a little bit about that phrase and I guess the teachings from the Stoics when it comes to that.
Yeah, that comes from the Oracle of Delphi and is adopted by Socrates as his motto. Know thyself. Know what you don't know. Know your biases. know your weaknesses, know your strengths. The idea of some semblance of self-awareness to me is a key attribute in the pursuit of philosophy. If you don't ultimately take from this a sense of who you are, your values, your weaknesses, what are you doing?
Why learn the names of all these philosophers? Why learn these quotes? Why learn these ideas if it doesn't, in the end, get you a little bit closer to understanding yourself and what you're capable of doing? That's kind of how I think about that.
G'day, Ryan, up here. Got a queue happening up here. Question for you. There was a essay done in the 1940s by Albert Camus called The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he finishes the essay saying, one must imagine Sisyphus as happy, in that the pursuit towards the heights should fill a man's heart.
How much of a parallel between what Camus was talking about, which is absurdism, in which we kind of go from this sine wave between happiness to despair across our lifetime, has a parallel to stoicism?
Yeah, I think there's a fair amount of overlap. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. He is detached from the outcome. the idea of ever achieving or fulfilling the thing, and he is simply doing it. And he is, on this other level, had to accept an unfair, even onerous fate, which to me, I think, sort of encapsulates some fundamental element of what the Stoics have to do.
Marcus Aurelius doesn't want to be emperor. We get the sense that it's not a thing he found particularly fulfilling or fun. In a sense, that's good. The people who really want lots of power are usually the people you don't want to have or give lots of power to. there was kind of an acceptance or resignation to the reality of the hand that life had played him.
And then the converse of this is Epictetus, who instead of being blessed with power and abundance and wealth, the things Marcus Aurelius finds so troublesome, gets the opposite of all those things. And yet he has to find a way to find freedom and fulfillment and peace inside that too. And to me, there's something about the two great Stoics being on total opposite ends of the social hierarchy.
One has extreme abundance, the other has extreme adversity and difficulty. And yet, they both come to the same fundamental understanding of life and meaning. That to me is the essence of what Stoic philosophy is.
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