It’s The Most Empowering Thing | The Freedom Of Contempt
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I think when things are difficult or we know things are going to lead to hard conversations or changes we have to make in our life, we come up with reasons not to do them. When I think about therapy, I think, how can I make this as easy to do as possible? Whether that's like scheduling a bunch of appointments in a row, whether it's doing it remotely so I don't have to get in my car and drive somewhere. Like, I want to eliminate the excuses that

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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off

with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. It's the most empowering thing. We all have those days when we...

rather just not. Days when we'd rather not deal with an annoying coworker or a petty family member. Days when we'd rather not bother with all the work we have to do, all the responsibilities we have to manage. Days where the awfulness and corruption of the world gets to us, and we'd rather just not get out of bed that day. And Marcus Aurelius and all the Stokes, of course, knew days like this.

Life was one thing after another for them, too. Think of Marcus Aurelius' life. We have a plague. We have famine. We have backstabbing. We have wars. He does not meet with the good fortune he deserved, one ancient historian noted, as his whole reign was a series of troubles.

It would have been easy for him to give up trying to retreat into luxury or pleasure. It would have been easy for him to allow the indelible stain of power to ruin him, as it had for so many emperors before him. Yet within the pages of meditations, we witness Marcus Aurelius doing something very different. We see him fighting to be the person philosophy tried to make him.

No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you are in right now, he writes in Meditations. He was saying that we don't just talk about philosophy, we have to apply it to our daily lives, whatever profession and place we happen to occupy.

And that's why if you're interested in Stoic philosophy or philosophy in general, Meditations by Mark Schwelis is the first thing to read, according to Arthur Brooks when he came on the Daily Stoic podcast. It's the most empowering thing I've ever read, he said, especially since I read it when I was young. He said it's always been incredibly important to me.

And the reason that he and thousands of other people say this is because in meditations, Marcus is showing us that it doesn't matter how rich or powerful or famous we are, that life will still include pain and suffering. Life will still throw obstacles that seem difficult at us. What matters is how we respond to those things.

We shouldn't assume that something is impossible because we find it hard, Marcus writes in Meditations, but recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too. And it's ideas like this that explain why Meditations has been this sort of secret of leaders and ordinary people for almost 2,000 years. That people, whether they're military leaders or students or entrepreneurs or artists or stay-at-home parents or

championship athletes, they've turned to meditations for guidance. And it's why for over a decade here at Daily Stoic, for almost 20 years in my life, I've been trying to make this work accessible to people.

And it's why we're doing Meditations Month here at Daily Stoic in honor of Marcus's 1905th birthday. We're doing this deep dive into meditations, what it means. We put together this really cool sort of guide book club that we're all doing together. We're doing a Q&A about it on the 26th. It's free for anyone who grabs the guide. Plus, we've got the leather-bound edition of Meditations. And I just wrote a new forward to Meditations, which the Modern Library put out. Meditations

Meditations Month has been awesome. Excited to all of you who joined us. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or you can just go to dailystoic.com slash meditations to get the bundles of all that stuff I was just talking about. Or just go to your local library and grab a copy. I don't care. Just bring Marcus into your life. It's one of the most important and empowering decisions you will ever make.

The freedom of contempt. The language we use to describe things imputes value to those things. We often embellish our language with superlatives to help make our choices of what to buy, wear, eat, or drink seem much better than they really are. As Emperor Marcus Aurelius could have the finest Falernian wine at his table at any meal, but he preferred to remind himself that this was only grape juice.

As emperor, he was the only Roman allowed to wear a purple cloak, but he took pains to point out that this cloak was like any other, just dyed with shellfish blood so as to produce a purple hue. This week, try to practice cutting your own luxuries and the things you yearn for down to size with a little contempt. Describe them with the bluntest language you can and see how much their power over you diminishes.

Just as when meat or other foods are set before us, we think this is a dead fish or a dead bird or a pig. Also, this fine wine is only the juice of a bunch of grapes. This purple-edged robe is just sheep's wool dyed in a bit of blood from a shellfish. Or of sex that is only the rubbing of private parts together followed by a spasmic discharge. In the same way our impressions grab actual events and permeate them, so we see things as they really are.

Marcus Aurelius' Meditation 613. Keep a list before your mind of all those who burned with anger and resentment about something, or even the most renowned for success, misfortune, evil deeds, or any special distinction. Then ask yourself, how did it work out? Smoke and dust, the stuff of simple myth trying to be legend. That's

That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 1227. You know what wine and liquor tastes like. It makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand bottles pass through your bladder. You are nothing more than a filter. This is from the Daily Stoic Journal. The week's entry is titled The Freedom of Contempt. I don't know. This has long been one of my favorite exercises in all of Stoicism. It's just brilliant. It's cynical. It's funny. It's really practical, too. You know,

Marcus Aurelius didn't have to live in a time of Madison Avenue advertising. He didn't live in a time of social media influencers. He didn't live in a time of propaganda and misinformation. There wasn't spinning and selling the way that there is now. And yet even then he had to practice, you know, just seeing through all the bullshit, seeing through to what things actually were, stripping them, as he says, of the legend that encrusts them.

So when Epictetus talks about putting things to the test, this is what Marcus is doing. He says, I'm not going to get distracted by my urges, by my immediate positive reaction to this, to the way my mouth is watering when I see X or the way that my eyes get big when I see Y. He says, I'm going to really break down what I see here. I'm going to describe it in the most unflinching, unvarnished way.

least sympathetic language possible. And I'm going to see what that reflection back to me does, how it changes my opinion of it. Right. Sometimes, you know, there's that expression about seeing how the sausage gets made when you go and see the sausage gets made or you see, you know, underneath things, they lose their power over you. And that's what this practice is really about. And it's so important.

It's not that you'll never enjoy this or that ever again. It's just you want to enjoy it with the deceit turned down a little bit, the legend, a little more thread there. And this is an active practice we have to go through. So as you as you walk out in a parking lot and you, you know, you see a Lexus, remind yourself this is just a Toyota with fancier branding.

right? When you see a $300 pair of Nikes, remind yourself of the sweatshop that this was likely made in. When you hear someone talking about how they are a billionaire, remind yourself just how dumb a lot of billionaires have turned out to be, right? When you're intimidated by someone's fancy degree, again, remind yourself who else has graduated from that institution. Think of the corrupt

Think of the evil ideas that have come out of that institution over the years. Again, this isn't to dismiss or demean the things entirely. It's just to counteract that impulse of jealousy, of envy, of lust, of fear. There's that expression about if you see a beautiful woman that somewhere someone is sick of that person's shit. And that's true for everything.

everything, every person, it'll take it down a peg and then help you see it a tad more rationally. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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