Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose.

You can prepare properly and still fail. Treat someone well and still be left. Work hard for an opportunity and receive no answer. So how do you live well when effort cannot guarantee the outcome?

In this solo episode, Sam explores Stoicism as a practical philosophy for the moments when reality refuses to cooperate. Drawing on ideas from Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, he examines the difference between what we can control, what we can influence and what we eventually have to accept.

Through stories about relationship boundaries, rejection, a triathlon in which almost everything went wrong, fear in the fire service and lessons learned while volunteering with Samaritans, Sam considers how easily we add painful interpretations to difficult facts.

He also explores the difference between emotional regulation and emotional suppression, why resilience can become harmful endurance, and how modern Stoicism is sometimes used as an excuse to avoid vulnerability. The episode ends with a practical reflection involving control, acceptance, the four Stoic virtues and memento mori: the reminder that our time is finite.

This is an episode about responsibility without certainty, overthinking, emotional wellbeing and deciding what deserves your limited attention.

Read Between the Chapters on Substack:

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You can do everything right in life and still get the outcome that you didn't want. For example, you could be training really well, eating well, and you could still get injured.

You could be treating your partner really well and looking after them in the relationship. They may still leave you. You can be preparing well for an interview.

You could do all the prep is possible for you to do, and you still may not get the job. A lot of the things that we care about most in our lives are things that aren't within our control completely.

There are certain things that we can control, there are things we can influence, and there are things that are out of our control.

And it seems to be one of the fundamental problems of being a human being, I suppose, is that we often look at the things that we can't control and let them affect us and dwell on them for too long. In today's episode, I'm going to be looking into the philosophy of Stoicism.

It's a philosophy that really interests me and I think is commonly misunderstood online as well. It's asking the question of how do we live well when reality isn't fully cooperating?

Some of these things I've discussed on the podcast, whether that's in conversation with other people or myself, things like control, responsibility, acceptance, emotion, and perspective on your situation. And many of the conversations I've had on this podcast do relate back to that philosophy.

So what does Stoicism actually teach us, and is it a good way to live? And also a good question to add on to that is, where can Stoicism go wrong and how is it misinterpreted in the modern world?

Before stepping into the first of the sort of practical takeaways from this episode, I just want to look into where Stoicism comes from. And it's going to be very, very brief. I'm no historian, but it did start around 300 B.C.

In ancient Greece, and it was a person called Zeno who started this whole thing.

And the reason that I mentioned that, and I'm going to just jump forward now, is because a lot of the things that we call Stoicism and we look at as Stoicism are from the Roman Stoics of a lot later on.

So the three names that most people will know, if you know this area, is Seneca, who was a Roman statesman and writer and an advisor to the emperor Nero. Epictetus was born enslaved and later became a philosopher and a teacher, and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor.

So those three people have three very different backgrounds, and that's One of the interesting things about stoicism, it's for everyone. And ultimately they are all asking the same question, which is, what does it mean to live well, regardless of what happens around me?

Stoicism isn't about being tougher or resilient or feeling less emotion. In fact, in a way, it's more about feeling emotion. But I'll get into that shortly.

Some of the virtues so stoicism has four central virtues, which are wisdom, courage, justice and temperance. And they believe that those four pillars, if you like, are the things that stoicism relies on and needs.

And it's important because, as I said a moment ago, stoicism isn't just about surviving difficulty, it's about how to live well. It's about what kind of person am I going to be whilst I'm going through life and the experiences that come with life.

I suppose to wrap it up, you could say stoicism is less about what happens to you in life, but it's more about the person that you are in response to what happens.

So looking at the idea of control, which is one of the central ideas of stoicism, Epictetus starts with a simple distinction that some things are up to us and other things are not. A practical version that I sort of look at are, if you list stuff, you could list them under control, influence and accept.

So things you can control, things that you can't fully control, but you can influence. And also things that are out of your control and you may have to accept.

So things that maybe you can control would be my behavior, my efforts, the effort I put into things, my preparation, the words that I use. We often react quickly with the words, but the words we use, we have a choice to use them.

And also my response to situations which, again, I mentioned a moment ago, in terms of things we can influence. Relationships, both romantic and friendships, teams, teamwork. So a lot of us in our jobs will be working as part of a team.

Conversations, other people's perceptions of me. Again, it's something that I don't have a lot of control over, but I can influence slightly by adjusting my own behaviors.

And the third list is looking at what we maybe need to accept the things that we cannot control in the world. Obvious things would be the past. You cannot change the past. You can. And it's one of the things that we dwell on so often.

We look back at the things that we've done and regret them, or maybe live in them too long if it's a positive thing. Things like luck as well. Luck ultimately Things happen that you can only put down to luck.

I think the important thing is that taking responsibility does not mean having complete control, because that is impossible if you haven't gathered by now. But I can be responsible for doing my part without being able to guarantee the result. The result I want.

We all do things in life with the idea of an outcome, and sometimes that happens, and sometimes that does not.

I was speaking to Davina Henn on the podcast a while back, and she was speaking about boundaries and setting boundaries and how we often disguise attempts to control other people's behavior as setting boundaries. So if someone was shouting at you, you could say, you're not allowed to shout at me. That's you trying to control their behavior.

You can't ultimately control whether they shout at you or not. But what you can do is say, if you keep shouting at me, I'm gonna leave. That's you taking a bit of responsibility.

You can take control of that part of it. You cannot control whether they're gonna shout at you or not. They control that.

Now, it's important to note as well that we don't go too far into this where we start saying things like, I can't control it. And that becomes an excuse, just using that as a reason for things not happening.

Something can be outside of my control, but it can be influenced by me as well.

So it's important to remember that you can do everything genuinely available to you, and you may have an influence on the situation, but you also have to accept that that effort that you put into something does not mean certainty. They're two different things. Do all that you can without believing that the world owes you the outcome that you are after.

And on the topic of the outcome, it's important to then look at how we frame things. So massive. Massive. Re.

Gurgurgitating point that keeps coming on this podcast is the fact that the story you tell yourself about what you go through can really shape how you move through life and how you look at a situation. So the stoic idea would be that you would separate the actual fact of what's happened from your judgment of what's happened.

So a simple example that maybe we all can relate to, I know I can, is you message someone and you maybe want an answer from them. It could be a friend, it could be a family. Whoever it is, you've messaged them, you're asking for something in return. They haven't replied.

And the hours are going by, and the fact of the matter is they might be busy, they might be doing something they may have seen it and thought, I'll reply later when I'm home, when I'm settled.

But the story we start to tell ourselves about this situation is they don't like me, or they don't want to be part of this, or if it's a invitation to something, they don't want to come, I've done something wrong, and it becomes something that we turn back onto ourself very often. And ultimately what we've done is we've just taken a fact that they have not replied and created an entire story around it.

So when we think of ourselves doing that, and maybe you'll notice yourself doing it whilst listening to this podcast, or maybe you've noticed it today already when you're listening, just think about what are the actual facts, what do I know? And what is the story that I've added on top of this?

Again, just too important to caveat this one and say that this does not mean that everything is just about mindset. Obviously, things happen and they are genuinely bad things or unfair things.

And it's very difficult to adjust your mindset or reframe your mindset in those moments.

But it's just important in some of those, maybe more simpler moments to look at the situation, take a bird's eye view of it and think about what is the reality, what is the reality here, and what is the story that I've added on.

So one of the ways this came up in my podcast conversations was with Sean Conway, who's done iron105.105 iron distance triathlons in 105 days, which is one of his many world records, is an amazing man and an amazing mindset. But he was telling me about his friend in this moment, about his friend who had been training super hard to do a sub 10 Ironman. He wanted to do this.

It was Hamburg, and he went to Manchester Airport, where he was meant to be flying out and his flight was canceled. So he somehow found another route to go down to Heathrow just to make the race.

So he gets to the race on time, just about, but he's very late, he's not had a good night's sleep, stressful journey, all of the rest. During the bike leg of the triathlon, someone drops a bottle at an aid station and he crashes and hurts himself quite badly.

Again, this point, he could, he could have given up at the very start. He could have just said, look, I've had a shocker trying to get here. He could have, he could have given up before he even left.

He could have given up at Manchester Airport, but he decided to go and get on a plane. He got there, he decided to still start regardless of a bad time. He now has fallen off his bike, injured, but he carries on.

He gets a puncture later on and he has to walk back roughly half an hour or so to get the bike repaired. At this point, at this point, he knows that the sub 10 hour target is gone.

The thing that he's been training so hard for, for all these months, and there's been so many points in the last 24 hours where he could just think, this is ruined, this race is ruined. Everything that I've trained for is pointless because all these things have happened and ultimately these things are out of his control.

But with all those things and I suppose the Original goal of sub 10 disappearing, one option is to give up wanna. One option is to rethink his new goal. And his new goal could be simply to just finish and enjoy it. And he did.

And it's that moment of as you go through something which is actually quite a severe repetition of things that happened. I mean, it's unlucky to miss your flight in the first place. It's then un.

Unlucky to crash on the bike leg of the triathlon, it's unlucky to get a puncture and all these things happen to the same guy in a few hours apart. So it's really about what you tell yourself. And to reflect on.

One of my own personal ways that I've noticed myself doing this before is with this podcast, right?

So the way it works, obviously behind the scenes, I'm looking at guests, I'm trying to research guests, I'm trying to find people I want to get on the podcast and speak to.

And part of that is convincing them to come on the podcast is introducing myself, introducing the show and inviting them on and explaining why the conversation would be worthwhile. Now, no one that I reach out to, I feel like owes me a reply. So everyone who does come on I'm super appreciative of.

However, there are times when you message people, maybe you send loads of emails out in a day, loads of messages, and you don't get any responses and you maybe follow them up as well and still don't get a response. And it's easy to then run with that.

So story in your mind of it's because I'm not good enough, it's because the show's not big enough, it's because they don't like me as a person. Whatever, whatever it may be. But the reality is they're probably very busy. They may not know the show well enough to say yes to.

It may be that the email just doesn't even get through properly. It may be an incorrect email or maybe it gets caught by spam for whatever reason. Perhaps it goes to a. A PA and doesn't actually get through to them.

The PA decides it's not for them. So all those things that you can run away with in your mind and it's that thought of I'm not good enough, I've been rejected.

When the reality is, well, it may be that, but more than likely it's one of the other reasons. And me thinking that it's because I'm not good enough is. Is no use to anyone, myself, mostly to round it all up.

The reality is that life is difficult enough without adding our own narratives onto what's happening. Things happen and life can be brutal. So the less we can add to our stress, the better it is.

So really think about what you're feeling inside and don't just reject it and don't just accept it, just explore it and try and understand which part of it is fair and which part of it is perhaps made up and exaggerated by your mind. Because our brains love to do it whilst talking about our emotions and the way that we maybe run away with things in our life.

I'm going to next touch on this point and I think this is one of the most misunderstood things about stoicism. I think this is how we've been missold stoicism in the modern world. I think a lot of people think that stoicism is about keeping your emotions in.

Don't cry, don't complain, you're unaffected by everything. Just be stoic, just get on with it. And it's like a deadpan face. Just keep, keep going. Ignore everything.

And I think it's a really dangerous misunderstanding to believe because stoicism is way more complicated than that. And especially the one where we speak about keeping your emotions in. Don't acknowledge your emotions, just keep going.

I think stoicism is the complete opposite. It's about acknowledging your emotions. You acknowledge the emotion that comes in, but you then decide how to react to it.

It's not about letting that emotion run away with it. And obviously there's going to be times in the grips of deep grief and as an example where you're going to cry, you're going to feel very sad. But.

But down the line, you don't let that overtake your life and that's where stoicism comes in.

So whatever feeling you're feeling, and it could be a positive feeling as well, we often think of the negative here, but very often we run away with positive feelings, and that can be quite dangerous. We may think we've got everything sorted, and then suddenly something goes wrong and we fall off a cliff.

And so it's about just being real with the emotions you're feeling and acknowledging them, but also deciding how you respond to them.

I think an example of this, and I've spoken to people in the podcast about anger before, but anger is this emotion that we often look at as a negative, but it can be a positive thing. It can be. Ultimately, it's a warning. It's a reminder that something is happening that we don't agree with.

And we maybe recognize anger and shut it off completely because we feel ashamed for feeling it. But the thing with anger is it's very useful if we then start to look into that and decide to go instead, why am I angry? What's created this anger?

What is it I don't agree with? You can then look into that and decide how you're going to respond, what needs to change in order to. In order for you to not feel that anger.

Things like fear in a situation. So working as a firefighter, sometimes you're in a situation that might be scary, and it'd be weird if people didn't have the emotion of fear.

But you've also got to control it because you're in a situation where other people need you, they depend on you. And if you do let fear totally overcome you, you're not going to be very useful. And, in fact, you could be quite dangerous.

Feeling it when it's raw in this moment is absolutely fine. And you have the choice to decide how you respond to that and how you take that emotion on board.

Feeling something come in, as in an emotion is not the same as giving it complete control to run your life. You have the control over that part, the emotion cropping up. You don't have control over that.

So when I spoke to Liz McConaughey on the podcast, who's a British army vet who flew in the Chinooks helicopters, and she spoke a lot about mental health and PTSD and traumatic experiences that she had pushed into a locked box in her mind, eventually the box that she'd crammed all of these moments into, which she'd kept locked shut for so long, finally opened, and she said the files went everywhere.

So suddenly you've got all these things that you think you've processed and you think you've put away in this neat place, but once that box explodes and the files go everywhere, you everything's just scattered and you need to start picking them up one by one. And that's where things like therapy help.

And she, over time, again takes a lot of time, she processed those experiences and she now describes them as more like being stored in a filing cabinet.

So those experiences are still there, but rather than just cramming them into one box where the pressure can build up over time, you can file them away. Once you've processed something, you can file it away and leave it for another day.

Another danger with using stoicism is as an answer to somebody else's pain is that we start to over clinicalize what they're going through. So if you were listening to someone who's grieving and you just said you don't have control of this, so you just have to accept it.

If you say that to someone who's just lost someone close to them, that's not going to help them in the slightest. And something that I learned whilst I was listening on the phones for the Samaritans charity.

So it's a crisis line for people maybe suicidal, but also just people suffering with their mental health and perhaps just lonely in life and want someone to speak to and empty their mind with. And one of the best things you can do is just stay silent and listen.

And the words you use, the sounds of confirmation, the pauses that you make, allow someone to fill those gaps. If you sit in silence for long enough, someone is going to feel uncomfortable and they're going to add on a little bit more.

So if you ask someone how they are and they say, yeah, I'm okay, you obviously can ask them again. Are you sure? They may say, yeah, I'm fine, you know, I've just been going through a lot recently.

And then if you hold that silence, they may then open up and say, yeah, it's just this thing with my girlfriend or whatever it is. And then they just start to tell you a bit more. And it's a really powerful thing that not a lot of people maybe know how to do.

I know I didn't know how to do it beforehand. I thought giving advice would be the useful thing. If I think I know how to answer your problems, why wouldn't I tell you that?

But the truth is that the power rests in you finding your own solution to your own problem. If I just give you the answer, A, it may not be the right answer for you and B, it doesn't give you any power because I've just told you what to do.

And the other thing around this is, I think when we speak about men talking and men's mental health around masculinity, this idea of being stoic is still a little bit prevalent in certain circles. And when men think they're stoic or they want to be stoic, they mean often.

Anyway, I'm generalizing here, but they often mean that they are emotionally unavailable, emotionally detaching themselves because they're trying to avoid the feelings. But again, what I've said throughout is stoicism is about being emotionally regulated, and it's about understanding your emotions.

They are very, very different things, and I think a lot of people get that wrong. Emotional control should mean choosing your response and not pretending the emotion never existed.

Another thing that stoicism regularly looked at and reflected on was the idea of mortality. So the phrase memento mori, you may have heard it, you may have seen it tattooed on someone without knowing it.

Often there is a skull for death, there is a hourglass for time, and there's a flower for life. And they're the symbols of memento mori. And what that means, It's a Latin phrase that means, remember that you will die.

And it sounds a bit depressing or sinister almost when you say out loud like that, but the idea is quite the opposite. It's about remembering that we are all mortal and that life is short and that every day should be lived to the maximum.

You should be living, remembering that one day you will die. Because if you don't, then scrolling for four hours whilst laying in bed doesn't matter.

Because maybe without thinking it, you're not really thinking about death. And you think that maybe that life can go on forever if time is genuinely finite, what actions and what behaviors in your life deserve that time?

It's about reflecting on that question. Maybe there's a conversation you need to have with a friend or a loved one that you're delaying. Why am I delaying that?

Maybe I'm terrified of looking stupid. I think that's most people, and I think it's definitely people who put themselves online like this and chat into a camera.

Why am I holding onto arguments? If life is short and time is finite, why am I holding on to all these arguments from the past?

We already spoke about what we can control and what we can't, and we cannot control the past. Why am I spending these hours scrolling through things that I don't even care about and I don't even remember?

Think about the last scroll hole you went down.

I know for me, I couldn't tell you half the things I couldn't tell you, like five of the things that I was scrolling through, but you just get stuck in it. And again by remembering that life is short and finite and we will die one day, maybe that will snap you out of those times.

And it's not always enough. I fall into it a lot. So it is what it is.

It's one of my favorite phrases in life, I think memento mori, along with amor fati, which is love your fate. But memento mori is one that again, I think about every now and then.

I should probably think about it more often based on what I'm saying now, but there are times where in the fire service, working in the fire service, obviously sometimes you are there on someone's what, what could be their worst day of their life, responding to incidents. And when you see someone in that moment, in that time, it gives you a unique perspective, I suppose, on.

On how quickly things can change in someone's day to day life. And it gives you that little jolt to just reflect on your own life, reflect on your own time, how it's being spent.

And it's a good reminder every now and then.

So a question to think about based on this segment, I suppose, about Mento Mori, is if I genuinely remembered how quickly an ordinary life can change, would I spend today the same way? I will just leave that question with you to think about right now.

So I think it's obvious by now that stoicism is something that really appeals to me because it matches a lot of the things that I naturally value. Things like responsibility, discipline, relationship, resilience, action, leadership.

And whilst I love reflecting on some of the points, it's also important to make sure that you don't take these things too far. And what I mean by that is when we look at, for example, something like acceptance, if we're accepting our fate.

So a more fati love your fate is sort of be accepting of what happens, don't wish for it to be any different. If we take that too far, it can become passivity. You can be a passive person who just looks at every situation and goes, I can't control it.

And that becomes an excuse not to act. If I thought that way around the podcast, I'd have never started the podcast because I could have looked at it and gone.

I could never make it to 100 episodes. What's the point? I didn't know if I'd make it to a hundred episodes.

But I started, and week in, week out, I've done it, and we're now at 117, maybe way over a hundred. So you've got to be able to act as well sometimes. That thought should be challenged. We obviously look at things like resilience as a positive thing.

But if you take it too far, it could be that you tolerate too much and you could start enduring something harmful because you think that enduring that thing makes you stronger. If there's something that's genuinely not good for you, don't just push yourself through it for the sake of it.

And again, we look at that emotional regulation versus emotional suppression. And again, I'll make that point.

It's a very different thing and a really important distinction to make because we can gloss over and just keep charging through life whilst not taking anything in, and that's that emotional suppression. And over time, that's just gonna. That's gonna come back to bite us so bad. It's gonna, like, bottle up.

And as I spoke about with Liz's analogy, you're putting stuff in a box, waiting for that box to explode, file it away as you go, regulate your emotions as you go. A lot of the modern stoicism that we see online and on social media is about not crying. Don't complain, just be resilient and keep going.

Go to the gym, do cold showers. Read this quote by Marcus Aurelius on Instagram. And it's a really narrow slice of what stoicism is. It's wrong, you could say, in a lot of ways.

And I think the important thing is to remember the four virtues to. The four virtues of stoicism are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.

And those things should be the pillars that you build your life on and that you react to as you go. So, coming to the end of the episode, I want to leave you with a couple of questions.

So in order to do this, I want you to think of something that is currently bothering you. So maybe. Well, I'm not even going to give suggestions. I just want you to take a moment to think about something that is currently bothering you.

What have you been thinking about for the last day or two or week or maybe longer? The first question is, what actually happened? So again, going back to that idea of looking at the facts, what's actually happened?

Take away the interpretation, take away the story you're telling yourself about it. What is the facts? What is the story that I'm adding?

So just hopping on top of that, be honest with yourself and reflect on what part of that story you're telling yourself is being added. What are you assuming? What have you added on top of the facts of what's happened now? When you think about what you can control.

So in your current situation, what can you control? Your actions, your preparation, your response? What can I influence? And again, you realize we're going through the three. The three lists here.

What do I not have total control over? But what could I still have an influence on? What can my behavior actually influence here? The next question is, what do I need to accept?

So what has already happened? Like I said, things in the past cannot be changed. Our reactions to them can, and how we act going forward can be changed. What am I feeling?

What are the emotions that come up for you when you think of this thing? So maybe when you first thought of the thing, there was an emotion that predominantly came up. Was it anger? Was it shame? Was it fear?

And again, I've covered those emotions and how perhaps running away from them and covering them up is not the right way to do it. Instead, you need to explore why you're feeling that, and what is that emotion encouraging you to do so?

Again, it's about being honest with yourself here. What is the thing that. That feeling, that emotion, what would that want you to do? And then decide, is that actually useful?

What would the stoic virtues look like here? So the first one, wisdom. What is actually sensible? What is actually a sensible path forward in this moment? Courage.

Again, as I spoke, and a lot of this does require courage. You've got to be honest with yourself. It's going to be tough at times. What am I avoiding? When we look at justice, what is fair?

So a lot of this stuff is thinking about yourself and less about that person, perhaps. So what's actually fair and right for everyone involved? What are that. What's that person feeling as well? Temperance, where do I need restraint?

So where do I need to have a look at this and go, I need to dial that down a bit? I need to moderate this a little bit more?

And then the final question would be, based on Memento Mori, everything that I spoke about a moment ago, if I remembered that my time is finite, would I still give this problem, whatever you're thinking about, the attention that I'm currently giving it, and with that, we're coming to the end of the episode. So to round up, I don't think that stoicism gives us a way to stop life being tough. In fact, I don't think anything in the world can do that.

But it gives us a chance to reflect on Our reactions to life. Things will happen, people will leave, plans will fail, people will die, and we'll feel emotions off the back of those things.

But the useful thing to remember is we can control how we react ultimately. It's Viktor Frankl's line from the middle of a concentration camp.

He wrote, you can take everything away from a man except the true human virtue, a man's ability to choose his own choice in any given situation.

And I may have slightly butchered that in terms of the exact quote, but the idea that a man in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and various other ones can come up with something like that, where everything's been taken away from him, but the one thing that hasn't is how he responds in his mind to the situation he is in. I think it's so powerful. So reflect on these ideas that I've laid out today.

Think about how they relate to your own life and just be aware that whatever happens to you in life happens to you. You cannot control everything, but you do get a say in how you react. I hope you found this episode useful.

I genuinely do, because I find this philosophy so useful myself. So I apologize if I've gone on for a bit longer than I planned to.

But I do really enjoy speaking about this topic and I think it's a really important thing to understand.

I think a lot of people don't understand it very well, as I've said, but hopefully you've got a bit more of an understanding today and maybe some pieces have resonated with you and you'll take them away with you.

If you have enjoyed the episode, please do share it with someone who you think would find some value from it, as it really helps the show grow when we get new people on board in the community. But lastly, from me, thank you for listening, Stay curious and I will see you in the next one. Sam.