Stoicism, Buddhism, and embracing impermanence with Young Pueblo

Executive overview

Most people treat change as a threat — something to resist or survive. But both Stoic and Buddhist thought converge on a deeper insight: everything you have, including life itself, arrived through change. Resisting impermanence doesn't protect you; it just generates suffering.

Ryan Holiday and poet Diego Perez (Young Pueblo) explore where Stoicism and Buddhism overlap — on impermanence, emotional maturity, detachment from outcomes, and the trap of clinging to opinions.

Change is not the enemy of what you love — it is the source of it.

Where Stoicism and Buddhism converge

• Both traditions identify attachment to opinions and expectations as the root of most suffering
• Core insights — unconditional love, goodwill, making meaning from suffering — are rediscovered independently across cultures and eras
• "Awakening the individual" and "stabilising the community" move in sync across Buddhist, Stoic, and other traditions
• Tradition is often a solution to a forgotten problem; remove it without understanding why it exists at your peril

Emotional maturity and the gap between feeling and action

• Emotional maturity is not transcending emotion — it is sitting with the rawness of a feeling without letting it take over
• Stoicism and Buddhism both introduce the gray area: you can feel an emotion fully without acting on it
• When facing injustice, a mind clouded by anger loses strategic clarity and risks reproducing the same brutality
• Compassion for wrongdoers is not excusing them — it is recognising that people causing harm are living inside profound internal suffering
• "They're not getting away with anything" — someone winning the external contest while unable to access peace or satisfaction is still losing

Impermanence as a framework, not a consolation

• Marcus Aurelius: everything you have — including your existence — came from change; fearing death is fearing the same process that gave you life
• The mistake is believing you can choose when change stops — that you can "take your cards off the table" and keep your winnings
• What cannot be taken away: the fact that you had something, that a moment happened, that you did the work
• Young Pueblo: the universe is not just one of change but of motion — nothing is static; that dynamism is what produces life
• Gratitude toward change is as valid as fear of it — every person you love exists because of change

The power of having no opinion

• Marcus Aurelius: we always have the power to choose to have no opinion
• Endless opinion-having is both a source of harm to others and a source of personal unhappiness
• Understanding the ceaselessness of change helps — many things you feel urgently opinionated about will resolve or disappear on their own
• A practical alternative to debate: "tell me more" — hearing where someone is coming from before deciding whether the disagreement even matters
• The Buddha's final warning to his community: attachment to views has the power to divide even the enlightened

Success, enoughness, and the trap of external validation

• Joseph Heller's response to Vonnegut at a billionaire's party: "I have something he will never have — enough"
• Very few wealthy or powerful people actually feel sufficient; they measure themselves against someone else, just like everyone else
• Fame and success are a poison best taken in small doses over time, not all at once — sudden large-scale success is destabilising
• The people wealthiest people call when they divorce are the ones with internal peace, not external status
• Doing work that others would dream of doing is the lottery — remembering that reframes the daily grind

On not identifying with your output

• There is a difference between articulating an idea beautifully and having fully integrated it into your life
• Don't credit the person with the thing they are a conduit for — artists and philosophers are actively learning too
• The tortured artist myth is as misleading as the myth that great books "just happen" — methodical, gradual, painstaking work underlies almost everything impressive
• Atomic Habits didn't come out of nowhere: years of email list building, 200 podcasts, deliberate launch execution
• Long-term relational stability frees up mental bandwidth that would otherwise be consumed by seeking

Living in turbulent times — the Stoic precedent

• Cato lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and Julius Caesar's overthrow of it — he didn't disengage, he stayed philosophically involved
• Socrates lived not in a golden age but during the time of the Thirty Tyrants and the Peloponnesian War
• The Buddha, Confucius, and the Vipassana teachers who revived that tradition all operated amid corruption, war, and upheaval
• Wisdom that emerges amid chaos is not incidental — the chaos is often what makes the wisdom necessary and testable
• Political fear and outrage often consume energy that could address actual injustices; preserving that energy is itself a strategic act