Remember That This Moment is Not Your Life | The Six Stereotypes Of Stoicism

Welcome to the daily stoic podcast designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It can be easy to forget it in the depths of winter or the doldrums of summer or in the middle of an interminable divorce or the brutal bear market. You know, when it feels like forever, when it feels like things will never change, You just lose track. You get confused. You start to give up. January ain't the whole world, Bon Iver sings in the song short story. He's saying that winter doesn't last forever. No season does. And it's also worth pointing out that January isn't winter for the whole world either. But, again, this is easy to forget when the news is dark or everything is going poorly at work. You can start to think it will always be this way, or that it is this way for everyone, or that it's going to get worse. Your child is sick, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself in Meditations. Leave it there, he says. You don't have to tell yourself that they might die from it. Extrapolation, we have to understand, is the enemy. January is January. A slump is a slump. They're not fun, but neither are they the whole world or forever. Remember that this moment is not your life, goes one of the most quoted lines in The Obstacle is the Way. It is just a moment in your life. When people hear the word stoicism, they often think cold and emotionless, suppressed, repressed. But, in all my years of writing and thinking about stoicism and also practicing it in my life, I can tell you that's not true. It's not supported by the scholarship. It's not supported by the practice. So much of what people think about stoicism and the stereotypes about it are totally wrong. I I think one of the things that people don't like about stoicism is this idea that it's about suppressing your emotions because we know that's not healthy. You know, just stuff it down, don't feel it. Sometimes people call this toxic masculinity. That's not what the stoics were doing at all. Seneca says no amount of philosophy takes away natural feeling. The stoics write beautiful essays on grief. They write beautiful essays on anger. They're talking about processing these emotions, understanding where they come from, understanding why giving yourself over to them is probably unhealthy. But they're not saying just stuff it down. They know that that never ends well for people. So stoicism is really the ability to rationally analyze and understand our emotions. I I wouldn't say that a stoic is emotionless. Do they try to be less emotional? Sure. And we all know when we get too emotional, when we're making big decisions, bringing emotions to it often leads us astray. And look, the the stoic art of journaling was a place to process your emotions. Anne Frank said that paper …