This Is How You Should Think About It | 3 Stoic Exercises to Stop Taking Life for Granted

0:00Ryan Holiday: One of the things that keeps a lot of us from going to the gym is it's overwhelming, it takes time, it's expensive, you don't know if you're doing it right. Well, meet Tonal, the ultimate strength training system that tracks your progress to take the guesswork out of working out so you can have the confidence to keep pushing forward. Tonal provides the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer anytime at home with one sleek system. The whole thing is designed to reduce your mental load. Tonal is the ultimate strength training system, helping you focus less on workout planning and more on getting results.

0:40Ryan Holiday: Tonal does a quick assessment, sets the optimal weight for every move, and then it adjusts it in these little increments to help you get stronger so you're always challenged. And you can choose from a variety of expert-led workouts to keep you coming back for more. And right now, Tonal is offering our listeners$200 off their Tonal purchase with promo code TDS. That's tonal.com. Use promo code TDS for$200 off your purchase. Tonal.com promo code TDS for$200 off. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:25Ryan Holiday: This is how you should think about it. It's not always going to be fun. Sometimes it's going to be the opposite of fun. It will be obligations. It will be painful. It will be obnoxious. But that is life. We have responsibilities. We are not always in control. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius had an interesting quote. He asked rhetorically, are you afraid of dying because you won't be able to do this anymore? And we can take this to refer to any of those obligations and activities we just discussed, the ones we dislike and resent. His implication is, if you're not having fun, then why are you clinging to life so hard?

2:04Ryan Holiday: But another way to think about this, though, would be, why don't you figure out how to enjoy these seemingly unpleasant things? The Stoics say that our life is dyed by the quality of our thoughts. Well, if you want to have a life that feels worth keeping, why don't you start by loving even the pedestrian painful moments? Yes, I do want to keep washing the dishes. Yes, I am glad to be at the DMV. Yeah, I know people block the sidewalk because they're distracted walking on their phones. But the miracle and absurdity of life is more salient to me than the petty annoyance. We are lucky to do these things.

2:37Let us think and act like it.

2:40Ryan Holiday: Memento Mori.

3:07Ryan Holiday: quality scores and the eight sleeps sixth generation of the pod is a smart mattress cover that now truly fits on any size mattress the hub is 50 smaller than the previous versions its thermal engine is 20 faster and the new cover has nine times the biometric sensors of the pod five and now with ai in the autopilot it learns your patterns and adjusts every single night the pod six starts at$1 ,999. That's the lowest price eight sleep has ever offered. And you can use code daily stoic right now at eight sleep.com slash daily stoic for up to$200 off the pod six and you'll get 30 days at home to try it free returns if it's not for you.

3:48Ryan Holiday: Today's sponsor is 80 ,000 hours. You have 80 ,000 hours in your career, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. That's a lot of time. Your career is the biggest opportunity you have to make if you want to make a positive impact on the world. Because like, look, if you're a talented person, you have talents, how you direct those talents and what you direct those talents at, it really matters, especially if cumulatively we all do this. If you want advice that's evidence-based, comes from an impartial perspective, you just check out 80 ,000 Hours. It's a nonprofit founded by Will McGaskill, who I've known forever.

4:27Ryan Holiday: He's an Oxford philosopher. He was a guest on the Daily Stoic podcast. And they've spent the last decade looking at the best available evidence on how to have a fulfilling career. And their free 80 ,000 Hours career guide is full of concrete, practical advice to help you create a full career plan that you feel confident in. They've got a great podcast, the 80 ,000 Hours podcast. And basically what they're trying to do is help people have not just meaningful careers, but impactful careers. How to have positive impact on the world. And you can find all episodes of the 80 ,000 Hours podcast over at 80 ,000hours.org.

5:07Ryan Holiday: That's 8-0-0-0-0-0-hours.org. slash stout.

5:20So I've got bad news. You're all going to die. Every single one of us in this room is going to die. There's no exceptions to this rule. I'm not known for my predictions, but I feel pretty confident about this one. In fact, death is the one prophecy that has never failed. And I'm not disputing the fact that there have been all sorts of amazing, important breakthroughs in technology and in medicine. We're living longer than ever before. This is wonderful. I would never deny that. But the heartbreaking fact remains that of everyone who has been born, the mortality rate remains at a steady 100%. And it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

6:10It's just a reality of life. Everyone that's born dies. In 1569, a French nobleman named Michel de Montaigne was thrown off a galloping horse. It was a horrendous accident. And as he lay sort of broken and bloodied on the ground, he was more or less given up for dead. His friends carried his limp body back to his house, and he said he could feel life sort of dancing on the tip of his lips. It was coming in and out of consciousness, and he actually remembered feeling that if he went to sleep, he would never wake up. His grasp on life was that tenuous. And somehow he lives, and this experience fundamentally changes him.

6:56He'd sort of idled through life up until this point. He'd mostly done what other people wanted him to do, wasn't particularly motivated. And this experience, this brush with death, this reminder of his mortality, it energizes him. And a few years later, he publishes his first book of essays. He actually invents the essay. He becomes one of Europe's most celebrated writers. he becomes a confidant of the king he serves as a diplomat he travels all over europe even becomes mayor of his hometown it's a fascinating sort of uh rejuvenation of his life and in a way it's kind of a timeless story right a brush with death changes life we hear about someone who finds out they have cancer and they quit their job and they dedicate themselves to some cause and it's the turning point in their lives we we hear about someone who finds out They don't have long to live and it reminds them to reach out and reconnect with someone.

7:50It rejuvenates their relationships. And sometimes I think we even think about what we would do if we found out that we had a short time to live. If we were in the doctor's office and the doctor came in and he put his hand on our shoulder and he said, you know, you have cancer, you only have a short time to live. Well, the interesting thing is we do have cancer, right? We do only have a short time to live. The prognosis was terminal the day you were born. right? That's the bad news, right? The bad news is you're going to die. The good news is, now that I've reminded you of this fact, now that we're here talking about this uncomfortable truth, you have a choice, right?

8:27How will you live? How will you respond? Who will you be knowing that your death is an eventual reality, right? And what's so interesting is that in the modern world, we can lose track of that connection to death, right? In the ancient world, death was a fundamental reality. It was a direct part of people's day-to-day experiences. The plague could come and decimate an entire town or an entire country. A war could break out and everyone might lose a family member or they might have to fight it themselves and witness death up close. Death wasn't always so antiseptic and distant, right? We were familiarized.

9:06People used to die in their own homes. They had this experience, this day-to-day contact with death. But what's interesting is even though death was way more familiar to people not long ago, they built forms of reminding themselves of this fact pretty constantly. There's actually two genres of art. There's one, which is vanitas. And if you've probably seen paintings like this, or you might notice this next time you walk through a museum, like half the paintings all have a skull on them for some reason. This is a reminder of mortality. That's what that skull was supposed to represent. What's interesting even is there's another genre called the dance macabre, the dance of death.

9:43There's almost these comical paintings showing skeletons reminding people that they're mortal. There's a church in Prague that's actually decorated with the bones of the priests and the monks who serve the church, decorated and scattered throughout Europe called cadaver tombs. And they show what the person looked like in life, and then they show what they look like now. and often they have this Latin inscription on them, which just means like, what I am, soon you will be. Montaigne actually liked to play a drinking game with his friends. They would hold up a painting or a picture of a skeleton and they would say, drink and be merry for when you are dead, you will look like this.

10:21Even with all the medical advancements that we have, even with all the technological breakthroughs that hopefully lie in the future, this won't help you if you get hit by a bus, right? This won't help you if you get drafted to fight in a war. This won't help you if you go out for a walk and your heart just decides to give up, right? These things happen. So I'm interested in how we can use this. I think you should take the thing that you're most afraid of, that you're most intimidated by, that's the most uncertain and uncomfortable, and you should look at it. You should stare at it. You should take these obstacles that we face in life and use them to your advantage.

10:55That's what this idea of the obstacle is the way means. It's how do we find a way forward through the thing that is most scary and most uncertain. And the good news is actually, when you stare and think about death, that it can have an energizing effect, right? When you know that your life is short or potentially uncertain, it concentrates your mind. It gives you focus. It gives you priorities. What's interesting about the Stoics is that of all the philosophical schools, the Stoics probably talk about death the most, but they are also the least abstract. So they're not talking about death in the sort of theoretical sense.

11:31They're not just exploring what it means. These were people with real jobs. They were the emperor. They were politicians. They were writers. They were merchants. They were entrepreneurs. They were parents. They were thinking about how death could be used in life to have meaning, to have purpose, to have insights. I don't think the Stoics were obsessed with death, nor were those painters we were looking at earlier. I think what they were actually obsessed with was life, not obsessed with death. That's not what this is about. This is about being obsessed with life. This is about living life. So I'm going to give you three exercises from my writing from the Stoics that I think will allow you to use this uncertain, scary thing to have a more purposeful existence while you're here.

12:12The first exercise comes to us from Seneca. Seneca is an interesting philosopher because, again, he's not an academic. He's a playwright. He's a Roman senator. He actually becomes one of Rome's most influential power brokers. He's the advisor and the tutor to the emperor. And he writes in this letter to a friend, one of his dear friends, he writes a letter about how he should think about death. And he says that the mistake is that we think of death as something in the future, something we're moving towards as time is passing. In fact, he says, death is happening right now. The time that's passed is owned by death.

12:47Seneca says we are dying every day. We're dying every minute. But we have to get better at managing this precious resource, Seneca is saying, that we fritter away our time. Meanwhile, we strongly and strictly guard our property and our money. But what's more renewable? You can always buy more property. You can always earn more money. What you can't ever do is find or create more time. So we've wasted this most precious resource on going to meetings that we don't want to go to, signing up for things we don't actually want to do. We don't say no because we're afraid to say no because we don't want to be the bad guy.

13:17We give up our most precious resource. We give time away to death. I think what you also take from this, it's an important caveat, is that other people's time is really valuable too. When you take too long in line, when you treat family members poorly, when you go slower than you need to, when you slow other people down, you're taking away time from them that they will never get back.

13:39Ryan Holiday: And so that leads us to the next lesson. This is a lesson from Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is the emperor of Rome. And what he writes in meditations, he asked this question. He asked it to himself. He never knew that we would read it. But he says, stop whatever you're doing at this moment and ask yourself, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore? And by this, he means what we spend so much of our time doing. Are you afraid of death because you won't be able to play video games anymore? Because you won't be able to watch pornography on your computer? Because you won't be able to argue with people you don't know on the internet because you won't be able to sit on your couch and get drunk or high.

14:15These are not reasons to be afraid of death. You shouldn't be afraid of death at all, he's saying. But what you definitely shouldn't do is be afraid of death. And then when you have life, sit here and waste it on things that don't matter. Seneca says it even more bluntly. He says, you are scared of dying, but tell me, is the kind of life you lead any different than being dead. And there are so many forms of life that are a kind of death, right? A life filled with resentment, a life filled with regret, a life that's all about you, a life that's all about chasing fame or money or power, a life of loneliness or isolation.

14:51These are forms of living death. When we think about our mortality, it wakes us up to that factor, gives us perspective on how meaningless a lot of the things we spend our time chasing are and the expense that those things come at, right? We put things off to the future. I'll start a family later. I'll follow my dream job later. I'll start that company later. We need more and more time because what we're not doing is being present. We're not taking advantage of what's in front of us right now. We don't want to postpone anything. We want to balance life's books each day. The final lesson comes from Epictetus.

15:25Epictetus is a former slave Dave, who becomes an influential philosopher, he actually is one of the leading influences in Marcus Aurelius' life. And this is a controversial exercise. It's a little dark, I'll admit. But Epictetus says, as you kiss your child goodnight, whisper to yourself, he may be dead in the morning. That's heavy, right? But it's important because what that does is it makes you present. It makes you realize what you're doing, how important this thing you're doing is, and how you can't take it for granted. It was said Marcus Aurelius practiced this exercise each evening, which hauntingly was necessary.

15:59He unfortunately lost several of his children when the infant mortality rate was much higher than it is now. Life is fragile. Life is short. You can't take that for granted. You can't do that. A friend of mine, his name was Seth Roberts, he sent me an email on a Friday afternoon. I saw it. I said, I love Seth, but I'm busy. I'll get to this on Monday. The next day, he went for a hike and he fell dead of a heart attack. I never got to respond to that. I never got to talk to him that one last time, even though he reached out to me. Another one of my friends, a guy named Brett Barup, I remember I was in the airport in Chicago and I was thinking, I should send Brett a text.

16:33I haven't seen him in a while. And then I was boarding my flight and I got distracted. And when I landed, I had another text from a different friend who said that Brett had passed away in his sleep that afternoon and they just found him. And so I'll never get those lost conversations back, but I can learn from that mistake. One of the interesting things about being a parent, about being a busy, ambitious person, you're often rushing, right? You rush through bedtime. You rush through dinner with your spouse. You rush through your drive home. You're rushing, rushing, rushing. You've got things to do.

17:06You've got places to be. But what the Stoics would ask is, what are you rushing towards? They would say you're rushing towards death. You're rushing away from the people you love, and you're doing it so you can watch more Netflix or respond to more emails or play apps on your phone. This is not why you should be rushing. And so when you realize this, you slow down, you appreciate, you enjoy, you breathe in, you don't take it for granted. In light of our mortality, it's arrogant to blow people off, to ignore them, to defer to later, to make plans for the distant future. It's ridiculous. And instead, you want to take advantage of what's in front of you.

17:43You want to seize it. And I think that's the essence of what I want to leave you guys with, that you get one life. We don't know what happens to us when we die. We don't know what happens after. Some people think they know, but we don't know, right? And so what matters is what you do now. What matters is what you do with the time in front of you, because that's the only thing that's certain. The present moment is the only thing that's certain. And so you can't delay, you can't waste, you can't assume anything. You must take advantage of what's in front of you. And we can end then with this final thought from Marcus Aurelius.

18:18Marcus, who talked about memento mori, about meditating on our mortality, he gives us one thought. And again, he might have written it here in this very city 2 ,000 years ago. He said, think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly. Memento mori. Thank you.

18:59We'll be right back.

19:13At Lowe's. Valid through 1118. While supplies last. Free tools vary based on battery kit purchased and location.