It’s Right There. Take It. | Stoic Lessons Hidden in Bruce Springsteen Songs

Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It's right there. Take it. It's right there. It's not underlocking. Key it's not secret knowledge. There's an unlimited amount.

They're making more and more of it every day. It's there for everyone and anyone. Yeah, what do most people do? They ignore it. Epictetus said that it's impossible to learn that

what you think you already know.

“Truman said that the only thing new in the world is a history you don't know.”

These two insights combine. You can't learn history that you don't take the time to look at that you think you are the understand. History is full of men and women who wrestled with the same problems we are struggling with today. History helps us avoid the pitfalls they fell into and take advantages of the opportunities before us.

It can keep us from losing our mind over breaking news because we better understand how the world actually works. What you studied in school is only a start. What you've read in books is only a start. History must be returned to again and again. Look that from every angle studied from every perspective.

We can't be satisfied with just getting the gist of it. If we really want to benefit, we have to truly understand what happened and what it means.

“That's something I talked about in wisdom takes work looking at the lives of men and women who didn't ignore history.”

Who studied what came before them, who learned from it and used it to make better decisions when it mattered most. History is right there. Take it, use it, let it make you wiser. If you're selling online or out of a storefront, it's full time, good for you or a side hustle. You know the challenge, it's not easy, it's a lot of work.

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You might have picked up on the fact that I am a huge spring-stean fan. I'm always sneaking

him in to the DailyStouac email, so the DailyDaddy emails. If you've watched any of the walkthroughs we've done in the painting porch, I'm always pushing deliver me from nowhere into people's hands. Basically, since the day that book came out, that's the making of Nebraska. Actually, specifically, Nebraska's one of my favorite albums, and I've quoted a bunch comparing Marcus Reley's and his brother, Kato, and his brother to the brother relationship in

highway patrolmen, which is one of my favorite songs from Springstean. I never really figured out how to put Atlantic City into a DailyStouac email, but maybe I'll figure it out these days.

them to see Springstean, my wife was going to be out of town. That trick I canceled, but still

“just going to be the three of us on excited about that. And since his music's been so important”

to what we do at DailyStouac and DailyDad, I thought I'd do an episode where I dive into some of those emails because there are a bunch of them. And you know, it's funny when I had this idea for the episode, I asked Katie and Claire are emailing. Podcast producers, I said, hey, just go find all the different times that we've mentioned Springstean and the different emails, and they they felt like three or four. And I go, no, no, there's way more. I was searching in my Gmail for

not Springstean's names, I don't always quote them, but like snippets from lyrics and so many of them

came up. So this was an excuse for me to sort of go back through the archives and find some emails I really liked. Here are some stoic ideas inspired by the boss himself. We're busy. We're tired. We have so much to do. We had dreams once sure, but they slowly deflated,

“the mortgage, the kids, the job, watching TV. That's how we fill our days. It's a slow downward spiral”

that Bruce Springstean sang about in racing in the street. Some guys, they just give up living, you sang, and start dying a little by little piece by piece. If you're not that guy, you at least know him or her. They're the mainstay of the modern world overworked, under sex, over tired, and under appreciated. Facebook is to blame, right? The capitalist pigs are responsible. Yeah,

it's because of the 24-hour news cycle. Certainly none of those things help, but the truth is that

this is a timeless problem. It goes back much further than Bruce, or even the century, because Seneca spoke about those guys too. How much time has been lost to groundless English. He writes, "Greetie desire the charms of society, how little is left to you from your own store of time. Wake up," he says, "Stop sleepwalking. Stop giving away what you can never give back." That's from his essay, "The Shortness of Life," where he tries to get the reader as Bruce Springstean

does in his best songs to realize that you are dying before your time. We only get one life. Once time ticks by, it never comes back. Yes, each of us will die. That's a fact. But for the moment we are alive, which is why we have to live, which is why we have to protect our time, our dreams, and our spirit. We can't give it up piece by piece. We can't start dying before our time. We have to live now, while we still can.

Again, which will you be? Arthur Ashes' time with his daughter was cut tragically short. At the end of his memoir, no-in how little time he had left. He wrote some advice to her that touched on something we have spoken about again and again here at Daily Dad. We are being watched by our ancestors. He said, "As I am watching you, we possess more than they ever dreamed

of having. So we must never let them down." We are watched by our ancestors, yes, but we are also

“as Bruce Springstean put it haunted by their ghosts, which will you be for your child?”

Are you the kind of example they need? If you left the kind of legacy that will protect them that will guide them, that will inspire them to be decent and discipline great and good as Arthur did for his young daughter, or we will haunt them with your mistakes with the pain you inflicted on them with the things left unsaid or unresolved. None of us controls how much time we have, none of us control how the future will go. We do have, say, over whether we're an ancestor or a ghost,

and we must live in parent, accordingly. When it comes to family, we have to be kind. Marcus, a really assist stepbrother, Lucius Varus, was hardly a great man. Unlike Marcus, he was not as driven or as smart. We hear that he liked to party. He was not always so diligent in his responsibilities. But still, Marcus, a really is loved, his stepbrother, and not only found a role for him

leading the troops, but celebrated his accomplishments, sometimes they expensive his own. What he had treated his other general so generously, it's doubtful. In Rome, it was said that not all men could be cateaus, and that included cateaus' brother. His brother was more stoic than Lucius Varus, but he also loved luxury, at least compared to his brother. Did it bother cateau that his brother were perfume? What he had judged other men harshly for doing the same thing, probably. But as

Bruce Springsteen put it in one of his greatest songs when it's your brother. Sometimes you look the other way. Is this still it? To hold people you love to different standards, to let them get away with things you wouldn't do yourself? Maybe. Maybe not. It's also life. An epictetus is

will not. He actually references this exact kind of situation. You can choose to grab

“hold of the fact that something wrong has been done to you or you can choose to grab hold of the”

fact that it was done by your brother. Someone you were raised with someone who loves you and has a good heart. Which of those is a better handle? Marcus, a realist and cateau could have looked down on their brothers. Instead they loved them. When cateau's brother died, he told a friend he'd rather part with his life than his brother's ashes. And they were willing to look the other way, not just for brothers, but with all the people they lived with, and were related to,

Marcus really did this well with his wife, who's rumored to be unfaithful. And of course, too well were not well enough with his son, who clearly went astray. Cateau did this with his sister who had a toward affair with Julius Caesar, his worst enemy. We must be kind to our family we must forgive because they are all we have. Like us, they are not perfect, not by a long shot. In fact, they might be obnoxious or deeply flawed, but they are our blood. We share a past. And if we want

to share a future, we need to see what is good in them and encourage that. Up to a point, of course, but now let's grab the kindness and forgiveness and love handle. Look for it and look away. They'll wreck this. It was a pretty stupid controversy. Josh got hammer, a congressman from New Jersey. He got caught photoshopping his 2024 Spotify wrapped list to include more Bruce Springsteen, he had added in Thunder Road and Badlands, and the rising to his most listened songs of the year,

“and then posted it on social media. How did he think he was going to get away with that?”

Well, as parents, we probably shouldn't judge. In fact, we should empathize as the apologetic and now even more embarrassed congressman explained after online sluice noticed the telltale signs of editing. The problem was that he shared a Spotify account with his teenage kids and they had wrecked his algorithm. Who amongst us has not had our YouTube and Netflix and Spotify accounts horribly skewed by our kids' love of nerd core or the frozen soundtrack? How will we ever convince

Google that we do not in fact like Mr. Beast or prank videos? Will our Netflix suggestions ever recover from the Coco Melon we have watched? It is annoying to be sure, but it is a small price to pay to help them discover their own interests. It's a small price to pay for peace in the

“car instead of whining and complaining and gratuitous insults about our taste. And someday almost”

certainly one of these songs will come on and we will be hit with a wave of nostalgia missing that 12-year-olds who like to belt out Taylor Swift desperately willing to trade anything for one more road trip listening to the Pokemon theme on repeat. So we might as well enjoy it while it's

here and not be embarrassed about it for even one second. What are we fighting about, really? There's

a great lyric in the bridge of the new Bruce Springsteen song, "Two Song Chain." We fought hard over nothing he sings. We fought till nothing remained and I carried that nothing for a long time. Doesn't that just perfectly capture in such a sad and telling way many of our relationships and grudges? We turn nothing into something and then hold on to it like it's everything. Then we wonder why we're unhappy. We wonder why we're lonely. We wonder where people we used to love have gone.

We wonder where the good times went. The answer we drove them away would ground them into dust. Marcus are really us struggled with this too. Had a problem like we all do with anger and taking offence and getting into arguments and needing to prove people wrong. If he hadn't,

he never would have written this little reminder and meditations. Run down the list of those who

felt intense anger at something. The most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever. Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend, or not even legend. Think of all the examples and how trivial the things we want so passionately are. It's heartbreaking. It's true. And all of us are guilty of it in our own way. What are we fighting about? What do we so passionately need? Why do we so passionately need to be right? Why can't we just let things go? If only we could change.