This Is Real Time Travel | The View From Above
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This is real time travel. It was, despite being a golden age, still a primitive time. Wheels were made of wood. Pipes were lined with lead. Light came from fire. Roads were made of dirt and stone. Books were copied by hand, one word at a time.

Yet the ancients, they were marvels of technology, not just compared to the past, but compared to today. After all, the ancients invented time travel, didn't they? They knew how to bring people back from the dead, didn't they?

As we've said before, that's what books are, a way to visit the past, a way to talk to the dead. In her fascinating and I think must-read book, Papyrus, Irene Vallejo rhapsodizes about the Library of Alexandria. It was, she said, one of the greatest inventions in human history ever.

Not because it was a building that stored books, although they did invent some incredibly impressive ways to store and organize and maintain texts, but because of the idea itself.

I believe the great innovation of the scholars at the Library of Alexandria, she writes, has little to do with their love of the past. What made them visionaries was their understanding that Antigone, Oedipus, and Medea, those beings made of ink and papyrus in danger of being forgotten, should travel through the centuries. That millions of people still unborn should not be deprived of them. That they would inspire our rebellions."

that they would remind us how painful certain truths can be, that they would reveal the darkest recesses of ourselves, that each time we became too proud of our status as childrens of progress, they would be there to give us a slap in the face, that they would continue to matter to us. For the first time, they considered the rights of future generations like us.

The ancients did not just leave us words on papyrus. They left us a gift that keeps given through the ages. Their foresight in preserving wisdom for future generations has given us an invaluable inheritance, one that continues to illuminate our path forward even as technology races ahead. And in this way, they were perhaps the greatest futurists of all.

Understanding that human nature and our need for guidance would remain constant even as everything else has changed. To be a great reader, as we say in the Read to Read Challenge, it's not just that you read, but how you read. It's about thinking critically and digesting books above your level.

I think it's one of the best challenges we have. I'll link to that in today's show notes. And then of course, the fourth virtue of stoicism, the virtue of wisdom is what my new book is all about, which you can pre-order at dailystoic.com slash wisdom.

I haven't been talking about it much. That'll start to gear up here soon. But we've got signed first editions, signed and numbered first editions on that landing page. And you can actually get a limited edition signed sort of four volume set of all the four books with this special title page for the launch. I've got, I think, 1500 copies of those. So those will go out really quickly. Grab all that at dailystoic.com slash launch.

pre-order. I think you're going to like this one. I'm really proud. It's going to be coming out into the world soon. So grab it before it runs out. The View from Above. This week's entry from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflections on the Art of Living. It's our companion to

to the Daily Stoic. It is a journal, but there's a lot of writing in it. I mean, there's a weekly meditation. There's a conclusion and intro. It's like 20,000 words. I do kind of think about it as a book I wrote. Each week we read here the week's entry so you can listen to it and hopefully it can influence your journaling in whatever form you decide to write down and think about your thoughts. As Epictetus says, every day and night, keep thoughts like these in hand, write them, read them aloud and talk to yourself and others about them.

So today's entry is about taking the view from above. The way to escape petty concerns and the worries of daily existence requires taking some time and getting what the Stoics like to call the view from above. This was something Marcus Aurelius reminded himself to do regularly. He had learned from Heraclitus that everything in the world was constantly changing and that remembering this can eliminate so many stresses and concerns.

So this week, don't just look at what you're dealing with in your life up close. Try to see it from far away too. Try to describe what another larger perspective would look like of your problems, of your worries, and of your obsessions.

And Marcus Aurelius quotes here from Plato. He says, This is from Meditations 748.

Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them, Marcus also says in meditations. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life.

And then we have Heraclitus. He says, the cosmic order, the same for everyone, wasn't made by any God or human, but always was and always will be an eternal fire kindled in measures and extinguished in measures. Look, it's easy when you're thinking about something, when you're dealing with something, when you're way deep in something.

for it to feel like the most important thing in the world, for it to feel unprecedented, for it to feel overwhelmingly big. But when you zoom out, I know it's been a while for me, but when you're in an airplane and you look down and you see these enormous fields or these whole cities, or you even see the town, sometimes when I'm flying in Austin, I can see the road I drive to get to my house and I could see my tiny little house. It just shrinks everything down into its proper place.

proportion, which is to say it makes it really, really small because we are really, really small. We are ants. You know, you look at ants on an ant mound fighting over, you know, little seeds and tiny things. And it's easy to think, oh, these silly little creatures. But that's us. We are them. We are tiny. And by taking this view from above, thinking of it with this perspective is really, really important. And it cuts you down to size.

It's crazy to think if you haven't seen the blue marble photo, it's actually this is the icon on the back of our Sympathia Medallion. It's crazy to think no human was able to see Earth from a distance until the 1970s. Right. The highest perspective we could get from it was from a mountain, you know, like 10 or 15,000 feet or whatever.

It wasn't until relatively recently, like when your parents were kids, if you're my age, that we were even able to truly see our own planet from a distance. But Edgar Mitchell, one of the astronauts, he talks about this feeling you get in space when you see the Earth from a distance.

And he talks about how immediately clarifying it is, how immediately you feel a deep connection, a profound connection to your fellow humans, how all your petty, silly concerns go away and all you want to do is help to be of service, to be good, to focus on what matters. And this is what Marcus is trying to do 2,000 years ago when it was a dream that human beings would ever enter space.

He's even then imagining himself along the stars. He's trying to wash away the dust of earthly life. He's trying to get perspective. Well, look, you have the benefit of doing that. You can get in an airplane. You can look at the satellite view on Google Maps. You can recall your memory of the heights that you've been to looking down from the Empire State Building or

that tower in Dubai, if you've ever been there, you know, you have the ability to take Plato's view literally and figuratively in a way that the Stoics would have never imagined. And yet here we are tweeting about nonsense

fighting over nonsense, acting like those silly ants that we think we're so much better than. Take Plato's view, get some perspective today. Also look at history, you know, just think about Marcus Aurelius and what people were concerned about now and 2,000 years distant, the perspective that it gives us and what people will be thinking about this very moment, 2,000 years from now. This is so humbling and so important. You gotta do it. Check it out. Take Plato's view.

Hopefully you'll be calmer and wiser when I talk to you next week. 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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