We’ve heard it. 

We’ve said it.

When things go back to normal.

I found myself thinking that this very morning as I took my sons for our morning walk. How much longer is it going to go on like this?

It’s understandable of course. This all feels very strange. A pandemic that has disrupted our lives. Everything seems so polarized. The election is still being contested. This is not how stuff usually is, right?

But of course, that’s not true at all. Any student of history knows that 2020 is hardly abnormal.

A hundred years ago we had a pandemic much worse than this one…in the middle of a world war. We had a great depression after that. There was a pandemic in the ‘50s. In ‘68, not only were there massive civil rights protests and riots, but there was also a flu pandemic that killed some 100,000 people in the U.S. and over a million across the globe. In fact, I defy you to find me a single “normal” decade in American history.

The last two decades have hardly been peaceful and simple. They began with a contested election and legal challenges. They were followed by a terrorist attack that left 3,000 dead. Then we had a financial crisis on par with the Depression. Now here we are, simultaneously facing a pandemic, a nationwide protest movement, and an economic crisis.

The Stoics were fond of quoting Heraclitus: the only constant is change.

It’s true, but the funny thing is that even change seems to rhyme with itself, if not outright repeat.

As the Bible tells us, “The thing that hath been,” we read in one part, “it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun… That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.”

Did Marcus Aurelius read Ecclesiates? Or did he discover for himself that, “Whatever happens has always happened and always will, and is happening at this very moment, everywhere. Just like this.”

“Time is a flat circle,” Rustin Cohle says in the first season of True Detective. “Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again forever.” And so it was that another generation found out about Nietzche’s idea of “eternal recurrence.” Did Nietzsche read Marcus? Did Nic Pizzolatto read Nietzsche? Or Marcus? Or Ecclesiastes? 

Or is this realization just something you can’t help but pick up if you’re paying attention?

It’s interesting to observe that Marcus’s reign was not really that different from the reign of Vespasian. It was filled with people doing the same things: eating, drinking, fighting, dying, worrying, and craving. Can you imagine if, during the crises he faced, he chose to “just wait for things to go back to normal” instead of doing, well, anything?

Everything that happens is normal. There is nothing unusual about any of this. 

Life is life. The only surprise is that we’re surprised. 

Sure, you’d rather not be working from home. You’d love to be traveling freely. Maybe you would like anyone to have been president rather than Donald Trump. But who is to say having or not having these things is “normal?”

They just are.

And you can’t just wait them out. 

Because what you’re waiting to end…is life. It’s now. It’s the present moment. 

One of the reasons to study history is that it gives you perspective. Distance has the effect of sanding down the edges and smoothing the transitions between things. When you read about the Great Influenza, when you immerse yourself in the characters of Shakespeare, when you visit a Civil War battlefield or an ancient castle, you gain a better understanding of how similar the past was to the present. How the more things change, the more they stay the same—how our petty plans and projections have very little impact on the tides of time. There’s nothing to take personally. 

It just is. 

History is violent. History is hard. History is confusing and overwhelming. History didn’t care about the people who had to live through it. History is like this because history is just a recording of life, and life is like that. 

But does that mean we can’t have peace or happiness within this chaos? That because there is no such thing as “normal” we should be anxious and depressed?

On the contrary!

I remember once reading a book about the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann—the adventurer who found the lost city of Troy. In the 1860s, he immigrated to America and worked his way across the country on a variety of jobs. It was incredible to notice that this guy had lived through the Civil War, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and it never even appeared in his diaries or changed his plans. He had found his own personal normal inside the craziness of world events. He’d simply gone on with his life. 

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes, “No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations… against the backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.” 

That’s what I came to realize on my walk this morning. Yeah, this time is weird. It’s maybe not what I’d want, if I had a choice. But I don’t have a choice, because this is just life. 

Why should I pine for it to be over or different? What matters is right now. What matters is the quiet hour we had together on that road. What mattered was the sunrise coming up behind us. What matters is that the last eight months have been eight months of being alive—and I chose to live them.

How much longer will it be like this? How much longer until the next change? 

No one can say. Nobody knows anything for certain except that change will eventually come. 

If people could manage to find happiness and purpose and stillness amidst war, under the rule of tyrants, through plagues far worse than this one, what excuse do we have?

None. This is normal.

This is life. 

Accept it and love it. 

In his letters—the pre-digital medium for distant long-form conversation—Seneca instructs his friend Lucilius to find one thing each day that will fortify him against death, despair, fear, or adversity. Just one thing. One nugget. And that’s what most of Seneca’s letters to his friend are about. They have a quote in them. Or a little prescription. Or a story. But in each case, Seneca is explicit. Here’s your lesson for the day, he says. Here’s your one thing.

Obviously that’s the logic behind the daily emails I write (Daily Stoic and Daily Dad) but it’s also the way I try to live. Every time I listen to a podcast or record one myself, I try to walk away having grabbed at least one little thing. That’s how wisdom is accumulated—piece by piece, day by day, book by book, podcast by podcast.

So today, I wanted to honor that Stoic process by sharing some of the lessons I’ve picked up over a couple thousand hours of listening to podcasts, being interviewed on podcasts, and interviewing people for the Daily Stoic podcast (which you can subscribe to here and here). And with over 30 million downloads of Daily Stoic’s episodes so far, I get really excited to think about how much cumulative knowledge that’s created for people.

But here’s some top-line stuff you can use right now:

***

• Interviewing is a skill like any other. It seems easy—aren’t we all good at having conversations? No we are not! I’m always looking to see masters at work and I try to learn from them when I get a chance to watch. Trying to myself, and seeing how hard it was, has been a great lesson.
• Brian Koppelman’s podcast is called The Moment. It’s about the critical moment in every aspiring artist’s life. When the craft they have long elevated as magic or beyond their grasp suddenly becomes a bit more comprehensible. When they begin to see the medium in a new way. When they realize that on the other side of the work they admire and love is just another human being. And I’m a human being too—which means that if I work hard enough, I can do the same thing. I wrote about my moment here.
• What should a person do after they screw up? What can they do? It occurred to me when I was asked to be on Lance Armstrong’s podcast a couple years back. What does Lance call his podcast? He calls it The Forward. Because that’s really the only thing you can do in life: go forward. That’s what Lance is trying to do with his life now. You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to forgive him. But move on and move forward, is all he can do.
• It’s not fair. When I interviewed Tim Ferriss for the Daily Stoic podcast, he advised that we strip those three words out of our vocabulary. Because they are impotent and meaningless. Because they don’t do anything but make us upset or make us believe we don’t have options. We talked about that Epictetus line, “It is not things that upset us, but our judgements about those things.” “Fair” is an opinion we have about an objective reality we’re in.
• Also from Tim. Tim has always stressed the value of evergreen long-form content. As he told me in my interview with him, “Long-form content isn’t dead; it’s simply uncrowded and neglected. I double-down when formats are out of favor.”
• Matthew McConaughey told me why he shut down his production company and his music label. “I was making B’s in five things. I wanna make A’s in three things.” Those three things: his family, his foundation, his acting career.
• Another from McConaughey. He told me he’s known in Hollywood as “a quick no and a long yes.” What a great expression! Before he says yes to doing a movie, he sleeps on it for ten days to two weeks in the frame of mind that he’s not going to do it. If he sleeps well, he doesn’t do it. If the thought that he has to do it wakes him up at night, he does it.
• An amazing chat with James Altucher on his podcast inspired my piece on envy and jealousy and a thought exercise I still do. We’re usually envious of certain aspects of a person’s life. Instead, picture that you can change places with them in every way. Would you? The answer is always no. You gotta stay on your path. Don’t be distracted by others.
• The legendary basketball coach George Raveling told me he sees reading as a moral imperative. “People died,” he said, speaking of slaves, soldiers, and civil rights activists, “so I could have the ability to read.” If you’re not reading, if books aren’t playing a major role in your life, you are betraying the legacy that they left for the generations after them.
• An essential piece of advice I got from the author Steven Pressfield: There are professional habits and amateur ones. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly.
• I asked Jocko Willink what his advice would be for someone reeling from the events of the pandemic. “Really, it just comes down to having humility.” People who accept reality can change and adapt. People who let their ego get out of control and deny the severity? Those are the people he’s been seeing get their asses kicked.
• Just a few more years, we tell ourselves. Just until I make enough money. These are the lies we all tell ourselves, the rationales for why we’re doing the thing we hate or being the kind of person we’d rather not be. The brilliant comedian and writer Pete Holmes called it the lie of the “One Last Job.” It’s the lie that bank robbers tell themselves, just as comedians or musicians do—one more tour, one more album, then I’ll slow down. But it never happens. You could leave life right now, Marcus Aurelius reminds us. We have to let that determine what we do and say and the jobs we take and the work we do.
• Pop star Camila Cabello talked about that metaphor from Stillness about looking at the human race as a single person and yourself as an individual part of that person. Just like it’s not the hand’s job to be the best eye, Camilla said, “It’s not everybody’s job to be number one. It’s just your job to be you. The world needs you to be you.”
• Wright Thompson’s book The Cost of These Dreams was one of the books I recommended everyone should read in 2020. I liked his line in our interview, “It’s over now—was it worth it?”
• I was surprised to hear Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes say that she doesn’t miss or reminisce on being at the Olympics or standing on the podium. “When I dream about exciting moments and memories in my life, those don’t come up… It’s those moments with your family. It’s those moments with your spouse. It’s those moments knowing you planted an amazing positive seed in a stranger’s life. Those are the moments that fulfill us.”
• I asked one of my favorite writers, Rich Cohen, about how he’s able to be so consistently productive at such a high level. He said he approaches a big project like he approaches a cross-country road trip. “The way you deal with long road trips is you set yourself a minimum number of hours a day, no matter how you feel.” The point is that “not much” adds up if you do it a lot. That what Zeno said too: “Well-being is realized by small steps, but is no small thing.”
• The great basketball coach Shaka Smart said something similar. He tells his players not to figure out their priorities, but to figure out their priority. “The root of the word ‘priority’ is singular… It was a singular word—the one thing. In modern times, we’ve turned it into ‘priorities,’ but then all of a sudden it turns into eight, ten, 15 things and that defeats the purpose.” Just do one high-quality thing every day, he said; it adds up.
• Another great basketball coach, Buzz Williams, told me that he keeps a list of what-ifs. Ten times a day, he asks himself, “What if?” What if the college basketball season is canceled? What if we can’t travel for recruiting? What if I experimented with a new routine? “The what-if scenarios force me to think how I can be prepared no matter which way this all unfolds. Because on the other side of this… the people who are going to be the most successful are the ones that can pivot the quickest.”
• One of the first greek words I ever came across was in a lyric of a MxPx song: “First step to Kairos is to take the shells out of our eyes.” I’ve always wondered, what the hell does that mean? I finally got to ask MxPx singer and songwriter Mike Herrera, what the hell does that mean? It’s his spin on the biblical line about hypocrites: “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.”
• We do a bad job imagining ourselves on the other side of the judgment we swiftly render against other people. As Billy Bush told me, “We have to be able to fail. We have to tell our children, ‘It’s OK to fail and to not be at your best and to screw up, and then build yourself back up.’ People have to allow other people to do that. It’s not sustaining to not allow people to do that because, at some point, it’s going to be you looking for that welcoming, empathetic embrace.”
• Along similar lines, Rich Roll said, “It’s only through weathering obstacles and grappling with difficulties and you know making mistakes that we truly learn who we are and as a consequence grow.” (Or the obstacle is the way…)
• Austin Kleon talked about being a parent: “You have to be the kind of man that you want them to be. You have to become the kind of human being that you want them to become.” Marcus Aurelius was talking about being a human being: “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
• I loved what the philosopher Quill Kukla said on Tyler Cowen’s podcast about why they love boxing: “From a philosophical point of view, why is boxing good for me? I think philosophers who only do philosophy and nothing else tend to be bad, boring philosophers… I think that if you just do philosophy, you literally don’t have material… Imagine if you were a stand-up comic, and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long. You wouldn’t have any material.”
• Danica Patrick talked about the surreal reality that’s been her life as an international celebrity. “It made me realize that the stuff that we see—the celebrities, the magazines we pick up—we just think, ‘Oh, they’re famous.’ No, they’re being made famous. Somebody’s paying for that… So early on, I realized that there’s a lot of bullshit out there. And that there’s an agenda behind everything.” This is something I try to remember whenever I see someone getting attention and wonder, “Why am I not getting that?”
• One of the great perks of my life is getting to have regular conversations with one of the great writers of our time, Robert Greene. We recently decided to record one of those conversations. I asked him about what I think is the thread through all his books, something which is also in short supply these days: an unflinching commitment to reality, even when it’s inconvenient. “Whenever I hold a belief, or I’m writing a book,” Robert explained, “I always start with the premise that I’m probably wrong, that i’m actually quite ignorant, that my idea is pretty stupid. And I look at the evidence on the other side and I examine it and I try to convince myself that my initial idea was right. And if it isn’t, then I change it.”

***

The line from Zeno was that we were given two ears and one mouth for a reason. That reason? To listen more than we talk.

Today and everyday, we should try to honor the Stoic virtue of wisdom. Get your one thing.

Two ears, one mouth.

Listen accordingly.

You can subscribe to the Daily Stoic Podcast here (Daily Dad here). Also, we have signed copies of all of my Stoic books (including the limited leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic) available at Daily Stoic’s web store.

I found out a few days ago that a friend caught the virus.

I was worried. I felt sorry for them. I was also frustrated. Because it wasn’t COVID they had been infected with, but a different virus related to it: the virus of conspiracy. 

Its symptoms presented almost immediately. Along with delusions were the corresponding symptoms of callousness and selfishness and deliberate ignorance. 

I was sad. 

This was a smart person. A good person! 

But here they were, telling me suddenly about their doubts on the efficacy of masks and sending me links to some discredited COVID denier. Over the coming weeks, I would watch them become increasingly radicalized and disconnected from reality; a process that while thankfully not nearly as deadly as COVID, was equally merciless and unstoppable. 

This idea that there are other forms of contagion to be worried about during a pandemic is, unfortunately, not a new one. Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius, in the middle of the Antonine Plague, would say that “an infected mind is a far more dangerous pestilence than any plague. One only threatens your life, the other destroys your character.”

It strikes me that the last several months have revealed a few different forms of mental infections. 

The first, of course, is conspiracy theories. When we are overwhelmed, hurt, and scared, we tend to grasp for something, anything, that explains the unexplainable. There is a simplicity to the idea that the pandemic is really a hoax, or that 9/11 was an inside job. Somehow it’s actually less scary to believe that it’s all made up, or that your own government is out to get you, than it is to grapple with the idea that they fell down on the job. A world with a cabal of child traffickers operating in plain sight is somehow actually less terrifying than a world of senselessness and chaos and horrible things that happen for no reason. 

Are there such things as real conspiracies in the world? Of course. I wrote a book about an actual one! But I love the meme designed around a cartoon from the great Hugh MacLeod: 

Another common virus is the virus of radicalization. It is this insidious process, initiated by some foreign outside influence, by which we’re drawn into an increasingly opaque world of ideas—one video, one book, one sermon after another. It starts small, a couple of tweets here and there. But then they converge, like cells forming a tumor, and before you know it that tumor is cancer and it’s metastasizing. It’s attacking our body. It’s using our own brain against us. Suddenly, the information that contradicts what we’ve picked up is confirmation of it. They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, but now if you see the sun is shining it’s only proof that the darkness is everywhere. 

And so one conspiracy theory leads to another and another and the next thing you know, you’re a raving asshole at best, or worse, a dangerous lunatic. 

The irony should not escape us: In the early 2000s, after the heinous attacks of September 11th, the radicalization of young men and women by their exposure to extremist Islamic views became a major topic of discussion at Senate subcommittee hearings and on cable news roundtables. Today, radicalization has come home—brought ashore by our own technologies and media—and it’s just as close-minded, extreme, and violent. 

It’s also created people who are totally unreachable. That is how powerful cognitive dissonance can be—impervious to reason, to evidence, to moderation, to critics, to friends and family to get back to the real you. What started as a question or two becomes an elaborate universe, a false reality we inhabit. Some people end up so brainfucked, it’s likely we’ll never get them back. 

The problem with conspiracy theories and their radicalizing effect is how related they are to another infection—in fact, they are often comorbid with each other. I’m talking about the infection of cruelty and callousness. 

The cancer starts intellectually, but it does its real damage emotionally…

One would think that people who believe that COVID-19 was a biological weapon unleashed upon us by the Chinese would then be taking the risks very seriously, but somehow it’s the opposite: these are also the anti-maskers. (“But it’s uncomfortable!” “But I’m in good shape, why do I have to be inconvenienced?!” “You can’t make me!!!”) These are also the people trying to squint at the numbers to explain away the death toll. These are the ones saying, “Oh, but a lot of these people would have died anyway. They were old, you know.” 

Just open everything back up, they say, let the virus run its course…a course that will include many more freezer trucks full of bodies, that will include the preventable losses of so many loved ones. It’s insidious how the virus works, no matter the situation. Show somebody a video of a black man being gunned down in the street and instead of the normal, human reaction of pain and compassion, the mind now plugs in reasons they don’t have to care. What about black-on-black crime? Blue Lives Matter too! But did he have a criminal record?!

It’s the certainty. It’s the closed-offness. Just as COVID can take away your ability to taste or smell, others among us lose their ability to feel.

When Marcus Aurelius was talking about destroying your character, this is what he was talking about. To me, the people ranting at city council meetings, screaming at cashiers, or making up fake doctor’s notes to get out of wearing a mask seem far sicker to me than most of the people I know who have caught the virus. I have a friend whose husband, being overheard expressing some caution about COVID, had his face licked by a colleague who believed the whole thing to be a hoax. You know who does that? A sick person. A person who has not only been infected in a way that has made them deranged, but whose insecurity about that has turned them into a bully. 

That was the saddest thing about hearing that my friend had suddenly become an anti-masker. This is a good person. A decent Christian who has always been generous, kind, respectful. Yet they had picked up some beliefs—been corrupted—by something that now violates the most essential teaching in their religion: the commandment to love our neighbors. To love them as we love ourselves. To protect the sick and vulnerable and the meek.

Do not think you are exempt or immune from this corrupting virus. If ordinary people living on the same block as you can be radicalized by falling down internet rabbit holes, if the toxic media (and social media) culture we’re in can nurture and feed unfathomably dark and awful views, then what do you think it’s doing to you? Do you think you yourself might be getting radicalized by your own filter bubble? Are you doing a good enough job holding up every impression and opinion to be tested? Or are you, too, in a less dangerous way, being swept up in the passions of the crowd, however fringe or alt or mainstream that crowd may be?

Radicalization is the scourge of our time. Ordinary people who share an enormous amount in common are being turned against each other. People who are polite and friendly and would help a stranger change a tire on a rainy night on the side of the road are being turned into weapons in a war that helps no one but advertisers and trolls and power-hungry populists.

Of course, most of us are smart enough or emotionally stable enough that we can’t be deceived by the most absurd propagandists. There’s no spiritual hole in us, so we can’t be manipulated by an Alex Jones or whomever, right? Good. But there is another mental virus out there—one that the pandemic has brought out in otherwise smart and rational people. 

When things are hard, when things are scary, when we’re tired, when we’ve had a run of bad luck: magical thinking kicks in. 

This will all be over soon, we convince ourselves. This one thing will solve all our problems. Our ex is going to walk through the door any minute now. The pandemic will just disappear because we want it to. This kind of thinking makes us feel better, sure, but…that’s just not how it works.

Just ask Chris Christie. He knew he had a lung condition. He knew that testing was not perfect. He knew he should have been wearing a mask at the big White House event. But he told himself, “No, this is a safe space.” Like a lot of people, he probably thought, “This is important, I’ll make an exception.” Or he thought, “I don’t want to deal with the hassle or the awkwardness—I’ll just hope it works out.”

And for Chris Christie and the White House Rose Garden party, we can plug in: “But I really want to see my folks for the holidays.” “It was just a small get together with friends.” “But my kids miss going to school.” “I really want to believe that racism is a thing of the past.” 

Well, that’s not how it works. 

The last few months have been a great example of the costs that come when magical thinking doesn’t materialize and the chickens come home to roost. When hope is your strategy, you get caught unprepared. When you expect problems to solve themselves, you are disappointed. When you don’t listen to advice because it’s unpleasant or comes with difficult obligations, when you focus on short-term solutions or disregard risks, you’ll find even bad situations can be made worse.

I love this little video: Just because you’re over it, doesn’t mean it’s over yet. 

Marcus Aurelius reminds us that we have to see not what the enemy wants us to see, but what is really there. He works through, in Meditations, stripping things of “the legend that encrusts them,” of removing the magical thinking that distorts our picture of the world. You can’t go around expecting Plato’s Republic, he said—the world is harsh, problems are real and no amount of hope makes it otherwise.

We must be on guard.

Not just against COVID-19, but of the other illnesses that its stresses and uncertainty can bring about. What good is surviving the virus—and most people will survive COVID-19, thankfully—if the cost is being a horrible person? If, in so doing, you blatantly rejected your obligations as a human being? If you mocked and dismissed the suffering of the people who are not as fortunate as the rest of us? You think you’re dunking on the other side… really, you’re dunking on yourself. 

We have to be kind. We have to be thoughtful. We have to see through the haze. 

We can’t deny it, either. Or else we won’t be able to protect ourselves. 

Exciting news! We have signed and personalized copies of my books available in the Daily Stoic store. We’ve also got the leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic back in stock, too. Check out my original trilogy on Stoicism, my latest bestseller Lives of the Stoics, and all the others.