Not Everyone Is Lucky Enough To Do This | 9 Core Stoic Beliefs

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.

Not everyone is lucky enough to do this.

You take it for granted, but not everyone can do it. As we said recently, the Roman emperor didn't have the freedom to take a walk. It's too dangerous, he was too busy. So when Seneca wrote that we should take wandering outdoor walks so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing, he was talking about a luxury that Nero didn't enjoy. Seneca had it during his painful exile, but Nero lacked it on the Palatine. When Seneca wrote about the noise of the baths, the messy, annoying, even disgusting humanity therein, he was speaking of an experience that again, Nero for all his power would have mostly lost. It's not just emperors who lose these things we take for granted. Ask a celebrity what it's like to lose their privacy or their ability to be anonymous. Ask someone who has been injured as Epictetus was, what it's like to lose their mobility. Ask a prisoner or someone who has to work two or three jobs to support their family, what it's like to lose their free time.

We have power of movement literally and figuratively that not everyone has, that we ourselves might not get forever either. We should not let it languish. We should appreciate and be grateful for it. We should get up and go for a walk. Instead of complaining about how crowded our favorite restaurant is, we should be glad to be able to share it with our fellow citizens. Instead of complaining about running errands, we should be glad that we can do them for ourselves. Instead of complaining about traffic, we should be grateful we have somewhere to go and the freedom to go there. Enjoy it while you can. Enjoy it because you can. Not everyone gets to.

SPEAKER_2 (2:09)

The nine core Stoic beliefs. One, if you want a smooth flow of life, live according to nature. At the core of Stoic teaching is the founder Zeno's idea that smooth flow of life comes from living in agreement with nature. It was the second leader of the Stoics, Zeno's student, Kleanthes, who added the last part with nature. The Stoic saw an entirely material universe that was shot through with reason and purpose. A great world city of human beings that were connected to it and each other as both rational and social creatures. Zeno was the first philosopher to treat duty as a central concern. Our obligation to act appropriately in given roles in family and society. And it was no accident that as a consequence, he taught that we were obligated to participate in public life until we are unable.

Zeno divided the Stoic curriculum into three parts that were meant not only to be studied, but practiced, physics, logic, and ethics. The Stoic saw physics as the fertile fields, logic as a protective fence that kept out corruption, and ethics as the fruit produced by the integration of these three areas of study in our actions.

Zeno had challenged his students to get to the place where everything they did was in harmonious accord with each man's guiding spirit and the will of the one who governs the universe. The Stoic God was not transcendent and above nature, but instead was synonymous with it. Their pantheism, God in all things, held that each of us shared in the divine fire. Like other Greek thinkers who preceded him, Zeno believed that each of us has a daemon, an inner genius or purpose that connects us to the universal nature. Those who live by keeping the individual and universal natures in harmony are happy, and those who don't are not. The disjunction of these two natures is a root source of human misery and not how we are meant to live. So how do we avoid this disjunction?

Two, happiness isn't found in things, but in virtue alone. It's all about what we value and the choices we make. The early Stoics often disagreed about many particulars, but they all agreed that for human beings, the happy life was to be found only in the pursuit of virtue, erite, or human excellence. A pursuit that involved tempering our desires, aversions, and impulses, so that they align better with the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, justice, and practical wisdom. Simply put, for human beings, virtue happens to be the best operating system for making our way through the world. It's the program we are all meant to be following. These four main virtues and the many sub-virtues that relate to them, are where our focus needs to be and they are a package deal, inseparable and complete.