You Think You Have Time. You Don’t.

0:00We are coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Stoic book, Daily Stoic website, which also means we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Stoic Shopify store. We've been using Shopify since the very beginning with Daily Stoic. We sold a print, I think, first, and then shortly thereafter, we came out with the Memento Mori coin. And we've used Shopify because we love it. We even expanded it out to the bookstore when we opened the bookstore. I guess this would have been in 2020, 2021. So we've been using Shopify forever because Shopify is the best and the biggest commerce platform there is.

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2:00Ryan Holiday: Wayfair's got a ton of options. Even bigger furniture that would normally be a pain to ship is conveniently delivered right to your door. Wayday is the sale to shop the best deals in home. Get up to 80 % off with fast and free shipping on everything. Head over to Wayfair.com from April 25th through the 27th to shop Wayday. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Last year I had a very strange near-death experience. I was in Greece and I went out for a run and I got stung in the back of the throat by a bee.

2:46Ryan Holiday: And so there, for somewhat absurd reasons, my life was flashing before my eyes. But that was not the first time that that ever happened. One, because I've had other near-death experiences like that, but also I actively force myself to think about my mortality on a regular basis. This is the stoic practice of memento mori. Remembering you are mortal, remembering that you could go at any moment. And one of the ways I do that is when I travel, I try to stop in various cemeteries and just spend a little time walking around, looking at the headstones, thinking about the people buried there, thinking about the people that have come before us.

3:20Ryan Holiday: And that's what I want to talk about in today's episode. Some stoic lessons that I've gathered from cemeteries all over the world, where in thinking about death, I changed my life and I think might be able to change yours.

3:37Ryan Holiday: This is one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world, but you know what good it does the people who are buried here? Nothing. There was a guy buried in this cemetery. 250 ,000 people came to his funeral. That's insane. I've never even heard of this person. 250 ,000 people. But you know what good it did him? No good at all. Marcus Aurelius tries to remind us that people who long for posthumous fame, what they forget is that they won't be around to enjoy it. He says, and even if you were, people are still annoying and obnoxious. It's not that special. Marcus Aurelius is remembered by history, not because he strove to be remembered, but because of how he lived his life, what he tried to do with the time that he had.

4:18Ryan Holiday: What he wasn't thinking about is legacy. Legacy is for everyone but you. This beautiful cemetery, this is for the people who loved those people. It doesn't do them any good. But what of the time they wasted? What of the wrong things they valued? You want to think about how you're spending your time now. Are you living now? Are you appreciating it now? Death is the one certainty. It's the one thing that will happen to every person that's ever been born. It's the prophecy that never fails, they say. And yet, how many people in this cemetery were surprised by it? How many people were caught off guard?

4:52Ryan Holiday: how many people thought, oh, I thought I had more time. How many of these people wasted enormous amounts of their time, as we all do. Seneca says we protect our property, we protect our money, and yet we're so frivolous with our time. The one thing we should be the strictest misers about, he says, we just freely hand out to people, we let it be wasted because we think we have so much of it, and we don't. Eventually, we all come to the end, and not just eventually, could be sooner than you think. Obviously the thing we all dread most is something happening to our kids. No parent ever wants to bury a child.

5:28Ryan Holiday: And unfortunately it's true one day our children will die, we ourselves will die. But the Stoics remind us that simply seeing death as this tragedy, this thing that's out there that could happen to you at some point in the future, says you actually have to think of death as something that's happening now. He says the time that passes belongs to death. So however old your kids are, those are years that they'll never get back that you'll never get back. So we have to spend our time wisely. We have to be with our kids when we're with our kids. When Marcus Urielis tells himself, as you tuck your children in at night, say to yourself, they may not make it to the morning.

6:03Ryan Holiday: What he's trying to do is make sure that he doesn't rush through this thing. Only get to do so many times. In the midst of life, we are in death. As we kill time, as time passes, it is killing us and it is gone forever. And so is that five-year-old and six-year-old and seven-year-old, an eight-year-old, an 18-year-old. You'll never get that again, so be there for it while it's here.

6:30Ryan Holiday: Death is one thing that we all have in common. It's one thing that equalizes all of us. It's one thing that crosses all language, socioeconomic, cultural, geographic barriers, even transcends space and time, right? Everyone who ever lived was mortal, and they all faced their own mortality as we will face our mortality. I'm in this cemetery now and most of the tombstones are in another language, Chinese, Japanese, ancient, Hawaiian. And you're thinking about, yeah, these people lived in a different culture. They had different beliefs, different perceptions. Maybe they thought different things about the afterlife.

7:08Ryan Holiday: All the same, they had to face this unchanging, unavoidable thing. And that's true for Marcus Aurelius. That's true for Seneca. that's true for Epictetus they had to come to terms with the fact that however powerful they were they couldn't escape death whatever their beliefs about the afterlife were this life was going to end at some point and so in this way death is a great equalizer it's a common thing we all have in common just as we all have grief and loss in common it's it's a thing that yes takes us apart it strips us from our loved ones it takes people we love away from us and ultimately takes us away from people we love.

7:43Ryan Holiday: It also brings us together with everyone and everything that ever lived. So when the Stoics talk about how everything has two handles, that's the other way that you could think about death. Not as something horrible and sad and awful and violent, but as something communitarian, something that unites us, something we all have in common, something transcendent and sacred then in that regard. And actually this cemetery that I'm in right now is a plantation cemetery of workers from everywhere from Spain and Puerto Rico, Korea, China, Japan, all over the world people came here. Different cultures, different beliefs, different socioeconomic backgrounds, but all had one thing in common.

8:23Ryan Holiday: Obviously trying to provide for their family, trying to make a better life. Many of their descendants still live here in Hawaii. So death brings us together, but also life brings us together. In this cemetery that I'm in here in Maui. Like look, you see all these holes.

8:44Ryan Holiday: That's because chickens are roosting here in the graves, digging little nests and laying eggs. So both in the midst of life we are in death, in the midst of death there is life. But I guess also it's just this idea that none of this last we get chewed up and turned into worm food. Sure, but even our tombstones, Like this cemetery is right next to a freeway, next to a business. I remember I once visited a cemetery in Brazil and another one in Milan, and they were taking these family tombs and just selling them to new families because they had to make room. They were running out of grave space. And it's just a reminder that, again, the most powerful among us, the most important among us, eventually we just end up taking up space.

9:26Ryan Holiday: We get in people's way and life goes on. and that's something that I think spending time in cemeteries reminds us.

9:38It's crazy to think I mean yeah there could be 200 or 300 or 30 people buried here.

9:45Ryan Holiday: Right anywhere from 60 to 600. Over how long like do you know when this came in? Well I mean the you figure the mine life here was 1865 to 1930. Right. So 70 years. There's a samuel johnson quote like they discovered these old enormous like tombs from these kings in scotland and he said like in any case they were people who when they died would not have guessed that they would have been forgotten so soon the people who died here the people who buried them the people who came and visited you would hope right that it would be in better repair than this and yet this is the inevitable process in meditations marcus really says like alexander the great and his mule driver the same they both die they're both buried in the same ground and the same thing happens to both meaning they're both ultimately consumed by worms and become nothing and their accomplishments are equalized but yeah the point is it's like not just like your coffin and your tombstone and your fence but then you know as we find with indian burial grounds or all sort like eventually this too no one even knows this is a cemetery that wasn't there that wasn't there that you wouldn't know it anymore already right 50 years later yeah in meditations marcus really says like those who long for posthumous fame forget that they won't be around to enjoy it, number one.

11:01Ryan Holiday: But number two, he says, you also forget that the people in the future will also suck.

11:11Ryan Holiday: We stopped in the second of Tombstone's two cemeteries. Its famous one, Boot Hill, is actually like a tourist attraction. That's where some of the participants from the gunfight at the OK Corral are buried and some other ones. It's actually not a super historically accurate cemetery. This is the city cemetery. It's down the street a little bit and what I like to do is I like to come to cemeteries and I like to look for the oldest graves that I could find. I found one from the 1830s. I found one from the 1850s. I found a bunch of people born during the Civil War, a bunch of Union veterans of the Civil War, some Confederate veterans too.

11:44Ryan Holiday: But I like to walk through the cemetery. It's always peaceful in the cemetery. It's always quiet and I just think about the lives that these people had. I think about how quickly they were forgotten. I also think about what they managed to do in their brief lives. But I think really what a cemetery is for me is a reminder of how short and ephemeral life is. There's one little tombstone I saw someone was born in the 1860s and they drowned swimming in the San Pedro River. They went for a swim like I did yesterday and it was the last swim that they ever made. And so I think memento mori, why I do I carry the memento mori coin in my pocket, the reason I do that is to remind myself not to take things for granted, not to be rushed, not to get upset about things that don't matter.

12:24Ryan Holiday: This moment now is a gift. Even if you're in a cramped RV, even if you're stuck in traffic, even if it's taking longer than you thought, to just relax, calm down. Life is wonderful. Life is beautiful. Even in a cemetery, it's peaceful and you can find something you can just soak in and appreciate, feel that sort of somber bit of reflection, and then go on about your life. And there's a reason that the Stoics talk about death over and over again, because it really is an important philosophical exercise. If you're running a business, you know the deal with most CRMs. They are packed with a bunch of features you're never going to use, clunky interfaces, and you spend a bunch of time just trying to find the basic info and then you stop using them.

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14:02Ryan Holiday: I'm here at this cemetery in New Orleans, and I'm looking at some of the old tombs. This person behind me was born in 1870, died in 1931. The other was born in 1872 and died in 1946. I don't just like to think about what they experienced, what they saw, but I go, this is a person with hopes and dreams. Maybe they had power. Maybe they had fame. Maybe they wrote books. Maybe they were beautiful. Maybe they had an illustrious last name. And where are they now? They're dead. They're buried in this marble box and nobody knows and nobody cares. And in meditations, Mark Cerullus reminds himself he says who remembers the name of the emperor who came before him who remembers any of these people they're gone and forgotten and this is supposed to humble us and sober us up it's supposed to be that we don't take life for granted but that we also don't prioritize and obsess over the wrong things i'm reminded of this very powerful quote from seneca he says at the end of your life you better have something to show for all your years other than a number right what do you actually have to show for it not what did you accomplish like how much did you make how powerful did you get but did you actually live those years i met a man in austin his name was richard overton he was 112 years old when he died that number would be meaningless if he didn't live a full and good life in that time so to me the idea of memento mori is not just hey you could die right now nothing matters it's that you because you could die how do you actually show how do you have proof of life for the years that you've been alive proof of life to me that's what memento Moria is about.

15:29Ryan Holiday: That's why we can't forget it. Pandemics have always been with us. There are people buried in here from the Spanish flu. There are people that are buried in here from yellow fever, from typhus, from malaria, all sorts of terrible diseases from wars, from tragedies, from violence. Death was ever present in history and in the ancient world. Marcus Aurelius lost, I think, six children before they reached adulthood. Death was ever present. In our antiseptic safe world today with the advances in modern medicine where we push death away where people die in special homes where we don't have to think about it let alone see it it's really easy to to deny death to deny the reality of this thing that will happen to all of us and so for the stoics the idea of memento mori was a constant reminder an active practice that life is short that we could go at any moment that we're not in control that we never will be in control and that even if the averages are in your favor that doesn't matter for you the individual which is why you can't take life for granted which is why you can't be entitled which is why you can't waste time which is why you can't take other people or relationships for granted you could leave life right now marx really says let that determine what you do and say and think

16:44Ryan Holiday: so this is the keselis family tomb they came to bastrop in the 1850s and they built a little building on Main Street, which housed a shop that he owned and he built a house down the street. His son, Will, who this is him, that's the father, this is Will, carried on the business when his father died in 1901. Well, I own that building now. The building has changed hands dozens of times in the decades since it left the Kesslis family, which, by the way, is what happens to all our possessions. The things you love, the things you care about, eventually someone is going to possess them that is to say if they don't throw them away there's a story about epictetus he had this lamp that was stolen and you'd think he'd be upset instead he goes look you can only lose what you have and he goes back and he replaces it the next day with something cheaper but the funny part is that after he died one of his students bought it for a lot of money he wanted to possess something that epictetus had possessed of course totally missing the point of the lesson now again the lesson isn't you should never have anything and you shouldn't care about anything you should give away all your possessions like a monk.

17:48Ryan Holiday: No, it's just a reminder that as the Stoics say, we only own this stuff in trust. We have it temporarily, not just the job, not just the house, not just the place we currently stand or operate, but everything in our life is only ours for as long as we are lucky to have it. I heard someone say, and I think about this with where I live on this ranch out not far from here, he says, the bank is just letting me make payments on it. Like, you don't even own it. You have it temporarily. And if you can think about it that way, you're not only going to be more insured against the ups and downs in life, you're going to know the proper perspective on things.

18:26Ryan Holiday: It helps me relax with my children. I don't have to take everything so seriously. I don't have to stress about everything. I don't own it. We remind ourselves that we don't really own this stuff, that it's only ours temporarily. So the day when we have to give it up, whether it's while we're living or at the end of our life, we're okay with that. We're okay giving it back. I actually had a friend of mine who died not that long ago and he wrote about the saying, I'm ready to give the gift back. That's what he was saying about his life itself, ready to return the gift. And that's a very stoic idea.

18:56All of it, it's only temporary. We only get it for a little bit.

18:59Ryan Holiday: There's a famous line in an Aeschylus play, Agamemnon. Cassandra is the prophet that can see the future, but she's cursed that no one will ever listen. And she says, when she comes home, knowing that Agamemnon is gonna be murdered by his wife, she says, I can smell the open grave. Meaning she can smell that death is on this person. They're marked for it, but they don't know it. Just sitting here in this cemetery and they just reinterred or worked on this grave, someone who's been dead for 65 years. We all have that mark of death on us. We think about this idea like, what would I do if I found out I had cancer, if I got a terminal diagnosis?

19:40Ryan Holiday: What if someone could predict my death? But you do have a terminal diagnosis. Someone can predict your death. All of us are mortal. The doctor knew with absolute certainty when we were born that we were going to die. It's just that because we feel healthy, it's just because the average lifespan is incredibly long these days in a way that the ancients couldn't have even imagined the average person living to because infant mortality then was so high. and we think we're going to live forever. We think we're the exception and we're not. It's going to happen for all of us. We have to live accordingly.

20:09Ryan Holiday: We have to make the right decisions as a result. We have to cut out the things that are wasting our time. Steve Jobs talked about this in his famous commencement address. He was talking about how life is short. It's uncertain for all of us as it tragically was for him. He said, it's too short to spend it living somebody else's life, following somebody else's track. That's one of my favorite questions from Mark Sreos in meditations. he says you're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore and by this i take it to mean all the indignities and stupid things that we spend our time doing like you want to live forever so you can go to the dmv more so you can scroll on your phone more so you can hold grudges more so you can covet more things that's not a life worth extending okay so i'm not saying that life is meaningless and you should just die i'm saying the opposite i'm saying you should try to live a life that is worth being long.

21:00Ryan Holiday: That's the tragedy, Seneca says, how many people at their end of their life, all they have to show for it is a large number. That's not what we're after. That's not meaningful. That's not what philosophy is fighting to try to make us. So this decision to cut out the inessential, to do what actually matters, to live the life we are meant to live, to be brave and to be authentic, to be real, to chase and value the right things, that's what memento mori reminds us.