William B. Irvine on Stoicism within Families
The Minimalists
Joshua Fields Millburn
4.7 • 11.5K Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2020
⏱️ 4 minutes
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Summary
Joshua discusses practicing stoicism within families with author and professor William B. Irvine. Listen to “Maximal” episodes of The Minimalists Private Podcast exclusively at patreon.com/theminimalists
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Da Minimists. |
| 0:02.0 | There is no minimalist rule book. |
| 0:05.4 | Well, until now, the minimalist have created 16 rules for living with less, a free ebook, |
| 0:12.8 | which you can download right now at TheMinimalists.com slash resources. |
| 0:18.5 | Enjoy. |
| 0:20.5 | How do you live a stoic existence with a family? |
| 0:28.4 | I often get this question with respect to minimalism. |
| 0:32.6 | People are, yeah, it's easy to say, when I first embraced minimalism, I just got out of |
| 0:39.0 | a marriage and so I'm married now with a six-year-old daughter, but at the time it was, oh, it's |
| 0:45.6 | easy for this young, single person to embrace minimalism, try it with a family. |
| 0:51.4 | But of course, one of the people who inspired me early on was a Zen Buddhist who's a minimalist, |
| 0:56.3 | namely, oboe, about done. |
| 0:57.9 | He has six kids and a wife and a whole minimalist family. |
| 1:02.4 | And what I realized is that you can embrace these different philosophies with a family. |
| 1:09.2 | It is more difficult. |
| 1:11.5 | However, it does seem to be more important because you have other people who depend on you |
| 1:18.9 | in a way. |
| 1:19.9 | Yeah, and a family can be a great source of delight, a great source of joy. |
| 1:24.8 | And yet look at all the people who have families and simply ignore the people in the families, |
| 1:32.5 | all the people who are too distracted with other things to really form the close relationships |
| 1:37.4 | they could be taking. |
| 1:40.1 | So a stoic is not going to take their kids for granted, not going to take their spouse |
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