Most Things Haven’t Changed (But This Has) | What Do the Stoics Say About Attachment?

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Most things haven't changed, but now this has.

Some 675,000 days, more than 16 million hours, nearly a billion minutes. That's roughly how long it's been since Marcus Aurelius was writing what we now call meditations. Think of everything that's happened since then. Empires have risen and fallen. Entire countries have come into existence. We've invented the printing press, the airplane, the internet, we've walked on the moon.

And yet you open meditations and there he is, trying to talk himself into getting out of bed, preparing himself to deal with difficult people, reminding himself to be patient, to do his work, to make good use of the time that he has. You go back a little further and you find Epictetus explaining why we get so anxious about the things we don't control. You find Seneca writing about people who complain that life is short while finding endless ways to waste it. All those centuries, all that change. Here we are working on the same things. Marcus himself noticed this when he looked back at the generations before him. The age of Vespasian, for example, he wrote, people doing the exact same things, marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power.

Human beings are human beings. We have the same weaknesses, we have the same tendencies, we have the same potential.

Which is why people keep finding their way to the Stoics. You pick up something written nearly 2,000 years ago and find help with something that happened to you this morning, an argument, a disappointment, a worry that kept you up last night.

That's what we were trying to do 10 years ago. It's Ryan, by the way, when we published The Daily Stoic. It was supposed to be a passage a day, something to think about, something to try, something to carry with you into whatever the day brings, something from the past to help you with the present. And while the problems haven't changed much, a lot has happened in the 10 years since The Daily Stoic came out. I've had my own arguments, my own disappointments, my own losses, successes, sleepless nights. I've kept reading the Stoics, kept writing about them, kept talking to people here on this podcast about them. So when the publisher gave us a chance to redo The Daily Stoic, I didn't just want to slap a new intro on the book. I wanted to go through it page by page to see if I could make it better. The ideas from the Stoics haven't changed, although we've added about 60 new ones to the book. But my interpretation and my understanding of them has, and I think that's what has made a better, certainly an expanded and revised 10th anniversary edition of The Daily Stoic, which is available now. You can get some signed and numbered first editions before we run out. We also have a new leather bound edition, which I think is extra beautiful. Check all that out. Anywhere books are sold, dailystoic.com/ds10. I just recorded a new version of the audio book, which I hadn't done before. All of that, as I said, dailystoic.com/ds10.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast. Just packing up, heading to the airport today for this Australia tour. First one in New Zealand, then Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth. Sydney again? I don't know exactly. I'm very excited. I'm excited to see all of you there. I think there's a few tickets left if you want. I can grab those at dailystoiclive.com. But as part of the tour, they asked me to do a couple of podcasts, and I did this podcast called A Life of Greatness. It's one of the big podcasters over there. Her name is Sarah Grynberg. We had a lovely conversation. We had to figure out the time difference. It was crazy to do it. I came back to the studio, did it after my kids went to sleep. But it was a lovely little chat, and I thought I would bring that to you, just to turn the tables a little bit. And remind you to come see me while I'm in Australia. I'm excited to swim in the Rock Pools. I've never been to New Zealand before, so I'm pretty excited about that as well. You can find A Life of Greatness on all the podcast platforms. You can follow Sarah on Instagram, at Sarah Grynberg. And I'll see you in Australia and New Zealand, or maybe a little bit closer to home, if you're listening to the US. I'm gonna be in Nashville in mid-November, also Boston. Then in December, I am in DC and Philadelphia. All that at dailystoiclive.com.