It’s Never an Accident | Ask Daily Stoic

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

It's never an accident. It wasn't some freak of circumstances that allowed Marcus realists to be great amid disaster and unbelievable power. It was an coincidence that Cato was the last honest man in Rome, a brave and solitary figure standing against the tide.

Wasn't an accident that earned Stockdale the Medal of Honor in the Hanway Hilton that allowed

“him to ride out seven years in solitary confinement in torture?”

No. It wasn't. It was epictetus who said that the whole point of philosophy was to be able to meet whatever life through it you with this is what I trained for. That is precisely what these men had done.

In fact, Marcus really thanks Rooster to kiss 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. And Stockdale, Stockdale liked to joke that his plea beer at the Naval Academy prepared him for torture and prison.

And, of course, his study of philosophy didn't hurt either. And neither did his training in the Navy's Sear program survived evade, resists, skate. 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. 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.

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That's livemomentus.com, promo code daily stoic. Talk back to another episode of the daily stoic podcast. I've said before, like, Meditation is in 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 miss 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 the shelf. Like, I grab it, and I pull the leather bound down, and I spin to something, and that

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 Meditation's month here at Daily Stoke. We've been reviewing Meditations in a variety of different forms done episodes about it,

we've done deep dive about it, and then we're doing our Q&A about it on the day after Mark's Real Estate's 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 into Mark's Real Estate with us, take our Meditations course. The book club we're doing. Well, we'd love to have you join us. Good setup right now.

DailyStoke.com/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, thank you. It was nice to take the course and revisit Meditations.

It's been a while since I've read it in detail. I dip in it out of it once in a while.

One thing that always strikes me and I'm curious for your opinion on it or maybe direction

to other readings is when he talks about the cycles of, I think, generations, humans, vampires, 749 always strikes me as a good example of that. But he's got other passages, 10, 27 and so forth that I always make note of. On cycles and seasonality, I know you've talked about dark energy and how that sort

“of makes a reappearance and for Robert Green is touched on this when he's in the, I think”

laws of human nature. He's got a chapter on that from Machiavelli. 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 for 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, find himself that he didn't live in some sort of unprecedented future that nothing was new under the sun, that this is just how it, 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, you know, the types of politicians that we have today. I don't think any of their personalities would be surprising to the Stokes. Some of the political dysfunction we have certainly would have been familiar to Cato or to Sanica or to Marcus Serreelius.

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 solved, the things we've been able to tackle as a society over the, you know, the intervening 2000 years. But one of the things that you get when you study the Stokes 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 not a radically unfamiliar foreign country.

And I think that's always what is so striking about meditations.

Like on some level, Marcus realises life and the road that Marcus really lives 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, 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 isn't secure or has anxiety or has ambitions.

“He's still fundamentally a human being and I think that's what makes him so recognizable”

and related relatable to us. And so when Marcus really is saying you, although he means me, he accidentally ends up meeting all of us and that is the beauty of the power of meditations. Deborah, you're up. Hello.

How are you? 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.

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 really talks about the idea of living in accordance with nature, that's not a concept of stoics defined super well.

“There are also, I think, so some passages and meditations that feel almost nihilistic.”

You know, he says, this is a book 636, Asian, you're a 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 it goes, what does it matter

if you live to be older 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. That's not exactly how I think about it. You know, continual awareness of all time in space, of the size and life and the span of things around us, of great seed and infinite

space, a half twist of a corkscrew against eternity. So there's something about that that seemed 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 really is 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 that tension sometimes strikes me and I think that I've wrestled with that for quite some time as I've read meditation. Then 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, what, what's the, what's the, where is he coming to from that? I, I think about that quite often. Thank you.

Yeah, great question. Let's do Joseph. 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 like

even 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 strokes would go, did you really need it? You know, just really losing 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. And so by doing it, they became that thing. I think that's what Marcus is saying. Now, look, someone comes and steals your life savings. You know, again, okay, you still have your life, you know, you still have, you know, your character, you still have all these things. Sure, I think I get what the strokes are saying. And yes, that person degraded

themselves by being the kind of person that would steal someone's life savings. But it doesn't change the fact that you now still have to figure out how you're going to afford to live in retirement. So I think it's a philosophical point that is easier to stomach the smaller the stakes. But the bigger the stakes doesn't change the same fundamental assumption. It just means it's still

“true. It's just still kind of a big thing that you have to deal with, right? And, and again,”

I bet if you were talking, if, if you lead a passage like that in meditations and then you were talking to Marcus Rios and you were like, okay, but I still have to figure out how I'm going to live in retirement, I don't think he'd be like, yeah, we'll get over it. That's, you know, it's nothing. I do think as human beings, you know, the strokes would have been understanding, and empathetic, and perhaps even generous, but they're just trying to get you to see it that way.

I don't think if, if you were to come to Marcus Rios and go, hey, someone just, you know, stole my life savings or, or hey, you know, my child just died, he would go, yeah, but you knew they were mortal when you had them, you know, he would say, hey, when that happened to me, here's how I felt, right? And one of the things I reminded myself of was X, Y, and Z. So, I think there's sometimes, it would be take the words in isolation. They can feel a little

blase or a little black and white, but when we actually look at who the strokes were as people, and I would also say, who we are aspiring to be as people, we can add a little more empathy and

Somebody's asking a question about a stoic official who they realized he couldn't be

bribed when they were, when they saw him cooking radishes that he wasn't materialistic at all.

“I believe that is a chapter in right thing right now, or maybe in discipline as destiny,”

and it's, it's not Cato, I think it's one of Cato's heroes. Yeah, it's in discipline as destiny about sort of keeping your needs small, if I remember correctly. Indira. Hi Ryan, thanks. Hi. Of course. All the content that you put out there, it's so inspiring. As I'm reading meditations, I keep seeing pleasure come up, sprinkled all throughout, and I'm getting the sense that he feels that pleasure is innately wrong, and I, I'm just grappling with that.

Yeah, I don't know if you would say it's innately wrong. I think he's he's certainly pushing back against, you know, sort of outright hedonism, or against doing whatever you want,

“whenever you want it. I think there's a skepticism in the stoics about the permanence and the”

power of pleasure, you know, that, that, that, that it's rather fleeting, that building your life around doing things. So you can have this sort of a femoral experience is probably not worth what people are often willing to give up to get it, although the Epicurians themselves, although they had this reputation as being hedonist, talk about this too, you know, the idea of that it's not just how you feel when you are getting the thing, but how do you feel after the regret

or the shame or the pain that you inflicted on someone else. So yeah, I don't think the stoics were anti-pleasure, but they, they did look at it with some skepticism and they prioritized it differently than, then, you know, we got to, again, imagine who Marcus really is is seeing quite often. And we can kind of see better pictures of this in Epic Titus' writing. So Epic Titus lives

in the court of Niro, and although he is quite powerless, he's surrounded by very powerful rich and

important people. And he sees it the ways in which they are actually more enslaved than he is, because they're trying to be richer than other people, they're trying to outdo each other, they can't endure setbacks or, you know, sort of ordinary life because they've become so soft and entitled by their pleasures. So I think Marcus and the sort of general stoic writings when we hear them talking about pleasure, we should probably contextualize how often this is a reaction

against the decadence and the overindulgence of people of their class and space, right? Like, there's a story that Epic Titus tells about this Roman who spends through most of their

money and they go to Niro and they go, hey, I'm like basically down to my last million dollars.

And Niro goes, like, oh my god, how can you bear that? Like, the idea of not being a millionaire

“was, you know, the worst fate that these guys could imagine, that's how sort of spoiled and out of”

touch they were, right? And so I think that's kind of the pleasure that the stoics are reacting against. Thank you so much. (gentle music)