If We Were Dying, It Would Be Easier | What Grief Teaches Us About Being Alive

0:00Ryan Holiday: So I have a bunch of traveling I'm doing through the end of the year on Daily Stoic Live Tour. I just got back from San Diego. I like to stay in the places that I'm staying. I like to book places on Airbnb so I can be like a local. I not only do some of my best writing, but I learn about things that I wouldn't have known otherwise. When I was just in San Diego, I took a walk along the water. I bumped into someone who recognized me and they told me about their favorite local bookstore, which was like two blocks from where I was staying. And I never would have known about it if it wasn't for that encounter.

0:30Ryan Holiday: It was cool to me to think that I have helped facilitate that experience for many, many people coming to Austin over the years. The first house that I bought in Austin when my wife and I first moved here, we would list it on Airbnb. And it helped me make the transition from my corporate life to being a full-time writer. So if you're going to be away, you should maybe think about listing your place on Airbnb. It can be a great way to earn extra cash while you travel. It can offset the cost of your trip or maybe even go towards whatever you're doing next. If you've got travel coming up, check out Airbnb.

1:01Ryan Holiday: Your home might be worth more than you think, and you can find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:21Ryan Holiday: If we were dying, it would be easier. If we knew we had terminal cancer, if we were mortally wounded or being deployed to a war or the world was ending, it would put everything in perspective, right? We would get our affairs in order. We would say what needed to be said. We would stop wasting time. We would let go of our grievances. It would be immediately clarifying. It would reorder our priorities. It would force us to get serious. If only we could, as Marcus Aurelius said, let everything we do and say be that of a dying person. Then we would get so much more right. Well, the good news and the bad news, according to Seneca, is that we are a dying person.

2:03Ryan Holiday: We are dying every minute, he said, dying every day. Little by little, we are losing the life we have left. It's just that we don't realize it. We forget. Instead, we hold on to grudges. We neglect relationships we should be investing in, and we waste time and energy on things that wouldn't matter if we knew how little time we had left. Perhaps what a diagnosis or an impending deployment does is that it gives us something to point to. It's right there in our face. It breaks the walls down and gives us clarity that was obscured by all the clutter and all the distractions. But we shouldn't need a diagnosis.

2:40Ryan Holiday: We shouldn't need the orders or the bad news. The clock is already running. The diagnosis has already been made. we are dying every day. The question is whether we can remember that before circumstances force us to.

3:02Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We know that the Stoics lost people. Not just because everyone who has ever lived has lost people they love, but because Rome was a tragic and dark and unhealthy and violent place. Seneca buries an infant. Marcus Aurelius buries multiple children. He loses his father as a young man. He lives through a plague. You know, Seneca writes a series of essays. They're called Consolations. In one case, it's him consoling his mother over the loss of him. He hadn't died, but he was being exiled. He's going to go away for a long time, maybe forever.

3:49Ryan Holiday: He writes to the daughter of a friend of his. His friend had died and he was consoling his daughter. This is a genre that Stoics aren't just talking about memento mori, like practicing, meditating on your own mortality, But they were talking a lot about grief, right? It doesn't matter how stoic you are. If you love someone and you lose them, that's sad. We have a story about Marcus Aurelius mourning one of his teachers. He's breaking down in tears and a philosopher tries to tell him, you know, that's not manly. And it's Antoninus who says, hey, let this kid be human. So this is part of the human experience.

4:26Ryan Holiday: and it's something i wanted to talk about in today's episode i had kate bowler out to the painted porch in the studio recently if you don't know who kate is she's a four times new york times best-selling author she has this great podcast she's a professor of religious history at duke but at 35 she was diagnosed with stage four cancer and this as you can imagine was a profoundly transformative experience changed how she thought about grief and hope and happiness and control what it means to live in a world where so much of what happens is outside of our control. And in this little chunk, Kate and I are going to be talking about grief, talk about Joan Didion's incredible book, Blue Nights, talk about her terminal cancer diagnosis, which thankfully turned out to be at least temporarily incorrect, and how she found happiness inside a life, a world that has real suffering in it.

5:22Ryan Holiday: And so we talk about grief as something that can have a strange effect on us. It can make the world dark and also the world brighter. And this stoic practice of memento mori. So let's get into it. As I said, Kate is an incredible author. Her new book about joy is called Joyful Anyway. Like, how do you have joy in a world with so much darkness? My favorite book of hers is Everything Happens for a Reason and other lies I've loved. Let's get into it with Kate. I mean, obviously, one of the things you talk about in the book, which is, you know, a constant theme of life is like grief and how do we handle it?

6:05Ryan Holiday: And you have this scene at the beginning kind of reminded me of, have you read Joan Didion's Blue Notes? Not in a while. She is describing the scene of spilling out onto the sidewalk in New York City, Her daughter has just gotten married. They're getting in the car to drive away. She's with her husband. And she's like, you know, little did we know that 18 months later, like two of these three people would be dead. And then obviously her sort of final works are about wrestling with the magnitude of that way sort of life just can beat the shit out of you. But you have a similar scene in the book where in such close proximity, the happiest day and the unhappiest day of our lives can be.

6:48Yeah. I mean, I had just a really rapid series of world's best, world's worst. I got my dream job. I finally had this little pumpkin-headed, froggy-eyed baby I'd wanted forever and couldn't because of infertility. And then I very suddenly got a stage four cancer diagnosis. And then it was...

7:12Ryan Holiday: Which was terminal, right? Yeah. They said, I mean, it was the fall and we thought it would be my last Christmas. And I had this little kid that smelled like cookies and it was unimaginable that he wouldn't have any memory of me. And the speed with which things come undone, I don't think I'll ever get over what an avalanche life can be. And maybe what an illusion stability and security are. Exactly. And that's why, like, if someone is having a beautiful season, I like a season in the sun, a season of happiness. I always just want to be like, bless this. Like, whatever. You have no idea. No idea what's going to happen.

8:05I did have a watch of like, I came out of chemo and saw this poor woman eating a very decorative salad. I was just like, what are people even doing with decorative salads? Like, I just didn't get just pictured how long it took to chop it up. And I was like, what's time?

8:20Ryan Holiday: It's like when people come up to you and enjoy this. You have no idea what my morning with these monsters is. Exactly. I think I think there's suddenly the value of everything you had is so clear to you. And also there's this weird, there's like one of the only gifts of grief, and I will say only, is that it really paints the world in bright colors. And it's like falling in love. And everybody is so beautiful. Like I am a faculty member at Duke University. My desire to gossip is very strong. Yeah. And all of a sudden, I just couldn't gossip. I stopped swearing. Because all this stuff seemed trivial.

9:09Everything was, I just thought everyone was so magical. Right. The amount of people, suddenly I'm just like, senior colleagues, I'm touching their big cheeks, putting my hands on their edges, loving them. It was awful for them. I just loved them so much. It's just so strange. I mean, when you think it's all going to go, life is, its brevity makes it shocking and brutal and sweet. And then I think trying to count time later is really tricky. I went through about five years of, like, we just really didn't know. It was just like, at first it was that I wasn't going to survive two years. And then it was always like, well, you'll be fine for a little bit longer, but we don't know.

10:00It really only took till about five years where everyone's like, you'll probably be OK. Five years of I counted weeks and months.

10:09Ryan Holiday: It's a long time to be in limbo. It really reorganized how I thought about time. Right. And in some ways it made me worse. Because like a lot of the hyper efficiency and desire to live my like, I just want to squeeze everything in. I wrote like a billion books in a very short period of time because I was like hungry to live. And also the way I think is by writing things down. And then it kind of flattened out in a way in which I just noticed like, well, if I got my life back, what monster wouldn't be so grateful for everything that they've lost? So I thought, well, any kind of dissatisfaction with my life probably means I'm like, well, definitely a bad Christian.

10:50Yeah. For sure. I mean, that's a but probably a bad woman because, don't I have this beautiful child and definitely a bad cancer survivor. Yeah. And I think trying to rediscover then without just like making my life back into a ticking clock again.

11:05Ryan Holiday: Yeah. How to think differently about the beauty of life without having to either return to a sense of imminent tragedy. Right. Or just imagine that you get things forever, which I know you don't. Yeah. The memento mori thing is weird. It's not remember that you are going to, I mean, obviously you're remembering that you are going to die, but it would be different if it was, you are going to die tomorrow. That would, you know, or you are going to die in one month or one year. Like the certainty of that, it would actually in some ways be totally destabilizing because it makes all these other things irrelevant.

11:41Ryan Holiday: It's that you could die. So how do you find a way to live in the uncertainty? So you're both, you know, not taking the future for granted. Yeah. And at the same time, not taking and not future for granted. Like you do have to assume at some level you might be around in a year or two years or five years. And so it's that balance that we're trying to get right. Yeah. You're kind of framing language of the future and what kind of hopefulness is a gift and what is a poison. because I do think that when I think most people imagine just end up reframing hope as just another language of certainty like things will always come my way there will always be another opportunity and when you know for certain that that's not true yeah my hope is that that it really resets the baseline for reality and that the baseline is that the gifts that we have are so rich and so beautiful and the things that we lose are so precious and very little of it is based on what I deserve or what anybody deserves.

12:47But that I want to be able to live with the kind of capacity to ride that roller coaster. And I think that's why I found happiness to be such an unsatisfactory framework of just like the slow math of trying to like accumulate every nice contended convenience and live as if you can just sort of snack forever and never be hungry.

13:08Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And I was like, well, if you know that the bottom drops out, can we have a deeper appreciation for something like joy, which can take you from zero to 100, which can help you see reality more clearly and also kind of stun you back into an awakeness to what's already there? How do you do that when you are reeling from the loss of a person? like someone you love or someone you're with? Or how do you think about grief in that sense? Yeah. I think that's a really terrifying thought for a lot of people that it's like a song and then they won't hear the music is how I was thinking about it. And I think that's one of the only things that we can, I'm very careful with the things I think we can actually promise each other in times of like devastation.

13:57And I think we should be able to, in a loving and gentle way, promise each other joy, that joy will come back, not as a solution. It will never cure that grief, but it will help us sing the song of our life. I'll never forget my friend TJ's uncle gave him this advice and he gave it to me when I was sick. He was like, too many people die with a song still in them. And if you believe that there will be truths you have to sing in a major key and ones you have to sing in a minor key, but that you will still hear the music. I think this is a kind of like belief in the persistence of the transcendent quality of joy that can surprise you, visit you.

14:44But also like, I mean, it will I mean, what happens in grief is despair. It will shout down the loudest voice, which says that nothing will ever be good again.

14:54Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And also you wouldn't want joy to be dependent on you. Right. Like, like what a what a sad thing that would be that like, yeah, the joy in your children's life or joy in your life is dependent on. Like I've said this before, it's like it would make you feel terrible if nobody missed you. But also if them missing you was debilitatingly sad and torturous to them, you also wouldn't want that. Yeah. Right. Like, but obviously that can be hard to appreciate the closer you are to the same happening. When I first started this project, someone really, really close to me lost her mom. And this was just kind of the debate we were having is when is it the right time to let in that little bit of hope?

15:42Ryan Holiday: Yeah. That Joy is going to still find her even though she lost her mom suddenly and too soon. And it was the kind of sometimes we lose somebody that we needed them for the end of the story. Like your story together wasn't quite done. Yeah. Those are really difficult to grieve. Yeah. The unfinished business. I think that believing that there was going to be a part of that story together that would feel redeemed by being able to like look back on beautiful times together, but also just feel like she was still capable of joy, I think was going to be and became like very healing for her. Yeah. And I think it's worth pointing out, like nobody's last thoughts are like, I hope they never feel good again.

16:25Ryan Holiday: You know, like they are not hoping to. May this suck out every last possibility of hope. Yeah, I'm taking the keys with me. I buried your passwords. That's like that's the opposite of what they're probably like. That's the opposite of what they're thinking of. That's right. Your phone now has my face ID. But that is kind of how it can feel in those moments. You're like, well, I can never say this. I can't say this now. Or, you know, things will never be the same again. Or I can never step foot in that room again. And then I think people think joy would be inappropriate. Like you're not grieving.

17:08You're not devastated. No. And I would say this is true of grieving people. This is also true of liberals. I'm just going to say good liberals always feel like they can't be joyful when someone else in the world is in pain. And I think it's that goes back to a kind of math framework where like one has more and the other has less. But every person I know who does like really existentially complicated work in their life has made like made a place for joy, made like a discipline around joy. Sure. Because as my friend Gary Haugen says, like joy is the oxygen for doing hard things. It has to be the reminder of your own, like of the goodness of your life, which is the reason why we would keep doing the hard things in the first place.

17:58Ryan Holiday: Yeah, like it somehow feels sacrilegious to be having fun or doing creative work while the country's on fire. And it's like, no, no, no, that is in a way the first step towards sort of reclaiming things. Yeah. Is like, I'm not going to let you take from, like you wouldn't let them take that from you by force. Yeah. Right? Like you wouldn't let them control what you say and think, but you are letting them inside your head. Yeah. You know, deciding that you don't get to be happy because it's inappropriate or something, which is totally. But yeah, like, again, as your grandparent or spouse or whomever you lost isn't going to come back and be, what the fuck?

18:32Ryan Holiday: You guys did Thanksgiving anyway? You know, like. Did Thanksgiving anyway. I gave you that recipe. I thought it was over. Grandma's recipe for a reason. This was supposed to die with me, guys. Every good thing dies with me will be my new memoir. Yeah, that's not. I don't know. It's so ridiculous when you say it that way. But at some level, that's that's what we're telling ourselves. Like it's they never said anything like it. We just assumed like literally the the worst, most like self-absorbed reality that could possibly. I think that the thing, too, if you think about a moment of joy, the other bit that is like they would want for you is it feels like grace.

19:18Like it's weird, but it feels like it's like a mercy because it usually it'll it'll like cover a wound. Yeah. It's just a good reminder that there are some things we really can't fully heal ourselves. And so when we receive something like that, it will feel like a gift because it is a gift.