It’s Cheap To Be Dead | with Wherever You Go, There Your Choice Is

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2:57Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

3:36It's cheap to be dead. When you consider the insane amounts of money that some people feel the need to accumulate, when you see their estates, when you see them pinch every penny, what they'll do for a dollar, when you reckon with the cost of family and friends it took to earn all this, you might assume that they get to take it all with them when they die. Of course, we don't. The Roman poet Juvenal joked that while Alexander was living, the whole world could not contain him. But in death, a coffin was sufficient. The humbling wisdom of this joke is one that we ought to remember too as we save for retirement, as we invest for the future, as we build our legacy.

4:14It's very cheap to be dead. You won't need any of this when you're gone. You won't be able to appreciate your posthumous fame, as Marcus Reelius pointed out, just as you won't be able to reap the appreciation of your investments. Your legacy, your intellectual property rights, your real property, all of it will become utterly irrelevant to you one day very soon. all of it will become completely worthless, not objectively, but subjectively. Can you let that sink in? Can you make better, more temperate, moderate decisions today in light of that?

5:07Wherever you go, there your choice is. This is the January 19th entry in the Daily Stoic. And our quote today is also from Epictetus, Discourses 2.6. He says, a podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low. But in each place, your freedom of choice is to be maintained, if you so wish. The Stoics all held vastly different stations in life. Some were rich and some were born at the bottom of Rome's hierarchy. Others had it easy and others had it unimaginably hard. This is true for us as well. We all come to philosophy from different backgrounds. And even within our own lives, we experience bouts of good fortune and bad fortune.

5:49But in all circumstances, adversity or advantage, what we really have just one thing we need to do. Focus on what is in our control as opposed to what is not. Right now, we might be laid low with struggles, whereas just a few years ago, we might have lived high on the hog. And in just a few days, we might be doing so well that our success is actually a burden. One thing will stay constant, our freedom of choice, both in the big picture and the small. Ultimately, this is clarity. Whoever we are, wherever we are, what matters is our choices. What are they? How will we evaluate them? How will we make the most of them?

6:24Those are the questions that life asks us regardless of our station. How will you answer? This is actually one of the quotes that Stockdale sort of leans on in his seven years in the Hanoi Hilton, right? That a podium and a prison is each a place, right? He experienced both. He's this high-ranking military officer. He'd gone to great colleges. He lived a great life in America. And then all of a sudden he's parachuting into a camp where he is viciously tortured and deprived day after day after day. And in some sense, many, many, many, many of his choices were taken from him, right? Do I go for a walk today or not?

7:08Do I eat this or that? Do I do this or that, right? So much of his life becomes circumscribed there in this tiny cell in this solitary confinement. And yet he retains always the choices of what kind of person he is going to try to be in those circumstances. Is he going to do his job? Is he going to stick with the philosophy that he believes in? Is he going to give up or not? He still has a lot of choices inside this world where so much choice has been stripped away. And that's really what the Stoics are saying. You become extremely wealthy, extremely powerful. you have more choices, but you also have the same choices, right?

7:50Everything is taken from you and you're in literally a pit in the ground. You're in a prison cell. All that power and wealth and all this stuff has been taken away. And yet most of the same choices remain, right? The dichotomy of control is still more or less the same. And so, you know, stoicism is then even at its core, right? Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Those two men occupied those two spheres, not theoretically, but in practice, actuality. Marcus Aurelius is all powerful. Epictetus is powerless. Podium, prison. Yet they both try to focus on what's in their control. They both try to be a good person.

8:32They both try to make beautiful choices within the world that they are in. They both try to let reason rule those choices, let ethics, let virtue lead those choices. And that's the lesson for us today. That's the idea that wherever we go, our choice follows us. We still have choices, right? We always have choices. Not as many of the choices as we are legally entitled to, that we deserve, that's fair, that's right, et cetera, that we want, whatever. But we still have choices inside every single situation, right on down, how we feel about it, how we respond to it. That's what you should think about today.

9:12And I wish you all the best.

9:22Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, That would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

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