Dying Every Day (Stoicism in a Year)

Επεισόδια

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  Dying Daily: A Stoic Lesson from The Odyssey 22.07.2026 13λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.Picture a man tied to the mast of his own ship.He gave the order himself. Bind me here, he told his crew, and whatever I say, however I beg, do not untie me until we’re past. Then he had them fill their own ears with beeswax so they couldn’t hear a thing, but he left his own ears open.And then the ship sails into the most dangerous stretch of water in the world, where the Sirens sing—a song so beautiful that every sailor who’s ever heard it has steered straight for the rocks to get closer, and died there, surrounded by the bones of everyone who came before. The man at the mast hears it. And it’s worse than he imagined. He strains against the ropes. He screams at his crew to turn the ship, to let him go; he has to get closer—and they can’t hear him, and the ropes hold, and slowly the singing fades behind them, and he survives.That’s Odysseus. And if you’re anywhere near a movie theatre, you might be aware of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey in theaters (I saw it a few days ago). For this Dying Daily episode, a shorter and more casual version of the podcast, I want to talk about why the Stoics were interested in this story. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 155: Resist and Persist - The Stoic Art of Self-Discipline | Dying Every Day 16.07.2026 12λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 155.This week's episode is something a little different. Over the past few months, I've been building an audio course called "Resist and Persist: The Stoic Art of Self-Discipline." And I wanted you to hear the introduction. Mostly because the argument it makes stands on its own, and I think it's the most useful thing I've written this year: that if you've failed at self-discipline and everyone listening to this has, it's probably not a character flaw. It was a sequencing error. You were working on the right problem in the wrong order. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 154: Epictetus on the Discipline of Waiting | Dying Every Day 09.07.2026 5λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 154.“Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”— Epictetus, EnchiridionWaiting reveals what the soul believes it deserves.The delayed reply. The stalled decision. The slow line.The season of life that will not resolve on your preferred schedule.Impatience is rarely just about time. More often, it is about control. The mind wants reality to move at the pace of its wishes. When it does not, irritation rises—not only because the thing is delayed but also because the self feels crossed.Epictetus gives one of the sternest and most liberating pieces of Stoic advice: “Stop demanding that things happen as you wish.” [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 153: Stoicism and the Founding Fathers | Dying Every Day 04.07.2026 13λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 153.“A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.” — Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (1713)In the brutal winter of 1777, the Continental Army was dying at Valley Forge.Not in battle. In the cold, the hunger, the disease. Men with no shoes, no blankets, no reason left to believe the war could be won. Desertion was constant. The cause looked finished.And in the middle of that, George Washington did something strange. He had a play performed for his men.The play was Cato—Joseph Addison’s tragedy about Cato the Younger, the Roman senator who stood against Caesar’s tyranny and would not bend. It was Washington’s favorite play. He quoted it throughout his life. And he chose that winter, of all winters, to put it before his freezing, starving soldiers—because he believed the play’s message was the very thing that might keep them in the field.That message was Stoic virtue. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Dying Daily: Seneca on Learning to Die 29.06.2026 4λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.“He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”— Seneca, Moral LettersMuch of fear is fear of losing. Losing comfort. Losing status. Losing strength.Losing the familiar structure of the life you have arranged and quietly begun to mistake for permanent.Seneca’s point is severe because it reaches the root. Until you have made some peace with death, you will be ruled by lesser fears. You will delay when you should begin. Cling where you should let go. Submit where you should stand upright.To learn how to die is not to become theatrical about mortality. [...]#stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 152: Courage in Practice—Cato the Younger on Being Incorruptible | Dying Every Day 25.06.2026 10λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 152.There is a man almost no one talks about anymore, and a small detail in his story that is hard to forget once you have noticed it.His name was Cato—Cato the Younger. He lived in the final decades of the Roman Republic, when the whole system was rotting from within. Bribery was everywhere. Everyone was on the take. Power went to whoever could buy the most votes. And Cato was the one man who would not play along.A group of candidates for office—ambitious, self-interested men, exactly the sort you would expect to cheat—made a pact among themselves. Each would put up a large sum of money, and anyone caught bribing voters would forfeit it to the others. An honor system among people with very little honor. And they needed someone to hold the money: someone who could not be leaned on, someone who could not be bought.They chose Cato. [...]#stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Dying Daily: "You Decide What it Means" | Dying Every Day 17.06.2026 8λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.In today’s episode of Dying Daily, an occasional and much more casual series on the podcast, we sit with a question that most of us already know the answer to but haven’t done anything about: Who (and what) are we taking for granted?We’ve all been there: stuck in a slow line at the end of a long day, quietly frustrated at everyone and everything in our way. In his 2005 commencement speech “This Is Water,” David Foster Wallace argued that the irritation isn't the situation—it’s a choice we don't know we're making. This episode looks at Wallace’s idea of the “default setting,” its kinship with Stoic philosophy, and the small, repeatable freedom that hides within an ordinary bad day: “You decide what it means.” [...]#stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 151: The Unlived Life—Marcus Aurelius and Jung on Becoming Whole | Dying Every Day 10.06.2026 10λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 151.The Meditations are usually read as the record of a man who had mastered his philosophy—reminders to himself to stay on the path he had already found. That reading is not wrong. But it is incomplete. What Marcus does across these pages, again and again, is similar, not necessarily the same, to what Carl Jung would describe eighteen centuries later: looking directly at the parts of himself he would rather not see, naming them, and refusing to let them operate on him from the dark. [...]#stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 150: Stoicism and CBT on Training the Mind | Dying Every Day 03.06.2026 10λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 150.“Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by the opinions about the things: for example, death is nothing terrible, for if it were, it would have seemed so to Socrates.”  — Epictetus, EnchiridionEpictetus is not making a philosophical argument. He is performing one.He has taken the belief—death is terrible—and subjected it to a test. He has sought evidence and found a counterexample in Socrates, who faced death with equanimity. Epictetus concluded from examination, not argument alone, that the terror lies in the opinion of death, not death itself.This activity is philosophy as a cognitive practice. A man sitting alone, identifying a distorted belief, testing it against evidence, revising it, and recording the revision. Doing it again tomorrow. And the day after. [...]#stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 149: Plato's Cave and the Cost of Ignorance | Dying Every Day 30.05.2026 14λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 149.“All men want to live happily, but when it comes to seeing clearly what makes life happy, they are in the dark. Achieving a happy life is so challenging that the more desperately one pursues it, the more elusive it becomes.”  — Seneca, On the Happy LifeSeneca is not describing the lazy or the careless. He is describing everyone.Everyone wants a happy life. Everyone is moving toward something they believe will produce it. And yet the more urgently people pursue happiness without first understanding what it actually is, the further they get from it. The wrong road, traveled faster, does not bring you closer to the destination. It carries you further away. [...]#stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 148: In Defense of the Examined Life | Dying Every Day 27.05.2026 12λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 148.In 399 BC, a jury of five hundred Athenian citizens voted to convict Socrates of impiety and corrupting the youth. They were now deciding his penalty. The implicit offer was simple: stop asking questions, go into exile, live quietly, and stop examining people and calling into question the beliefs they had never thought to question.He refused. He stood before the jury and said that daily conversation about virtue and the examined life was the greatest good available to a human being—and that he would not stop, regardless of what it cost him. It cost him his life. He drank the hemlock. And the phrase he used in that courtroom, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” has been echoing for more than two thousand years.Here’s Socrates in Plato’s Apology, “To talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and the unexamined life is not worth living.”What Socrates was not doing, standing before that jury, was making a grand gesture for posterity. He genuinely believed that a life of unexamined ease was not worth having. [...]#stoicism, #philosophy, #meditation---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Dying Daily: Two Paradoxes, One Truth | Dying Every Day 23.05.2026 11λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.One Stoic text that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes—six ideas that seem like contradictions until you understand what the Stoics actually mean. In this Dying Daily, we sit with one of them: the claim that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness.To test it, we go to September 9th, 1965—the moment Navy pilot James Stockdale ejected from his burning plane over North Vietnam. He had thirty seconds of freefall. His last thought in freedom: “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”He endured seven and a half years at the Hanoi Hilton, sustained by a philosophy his captors could not break. This is the essence of the Stockdale Paradox and Cicero’s Paradox—two thousand years apart, yet conveying the same insight. [...]#stoicism, #philsophy, #meditation, #selfimprovement---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 147: What Are You Running From?—Seneca and Socrates on Solitude | Dying Every Day 20.05.2026 13λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 147.“Know thyself,” the words inscribed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Not know the world. Not know the gods. Know yourself—and understand that until you do, everything else you investigate is a distraction from the only question that finally matters.The question this meditation wants to sit with is not whether you know yourself. It is whether you have given yourself any real opportunity to find out. And beneath that, what you believe self-knowledge is actually for.For this reason, Seneca advised Lucilius to “withdraw into yourself as much as you can.” [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Dying Daily: "Before We Knew It Was Passing" | Dying Every Day 17.05.2026 8λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.In this first episode of Dying Daily, a new occasional and much more casual series on the podcast, we sit with a question that most of us already know the answer to, but haven't done anything about: Who are we taking for granted? You may have seen Eric Church's recent commencement address at UNC-Chapel Hill. If not, it’s worth watching. Church warns a graduating class not to turn the people they love into holiday strings—the ones who understand when you're too busy, whom you keep meaning to call, whom you'll see at Christmas. Interestingly, Seneca made the same argument two thousand years ago: life feels short because we give our time to everything that demands it, while the people who matter most get what's left over.This episode is intended to be a conversation and an invitation to choose differently—today, before the day is over, with whoever has been sitting at the back of your mind waiting for a moment that never quite arrives. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 146: There Are Two Kinds of Joy—Most People Are Chasing the Wrong One | Dying Every Day 13.05.2026 14λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 146.There is the happiness that depends on circumstances—on getting what you want, on the day cooperating, on fortune being kind. It is real, while it lasts. And it does not last.And then there is something else. Something that does not rise and fall with the weather of events. Something James could describe but struggled to name—until he reached for a phrase that stopped him in his tracks. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 145: Why You React Before You Think—And What to Do About It | Dying Every Day 06.05.2026 12λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 145.Epictetus identified three key disciplines: desire, action, and assent, with assent being the most crucial. He described assent as the mind’s act of accepting an impression—saying yes to it, recognizing it as real and meaningful, and responding accordingly.Every moment, impressions arrive. Not the dramatic ones—those are easy to see coming. The ones that test the discipline are smaller and faster. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Bonus: Want Less. Live More. | Dying Every Day 03.05.2026 5λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is a bonus episode.We often spend much of our lives wanting more—more time, more success, more security. But Seneca offers a different path: not more, but enough. This week’s episode is ultimately a reflection on loosening our grip and learning to meet life—and death—with a willing mind. It comes by way of my Sundays with Seneca series, since it’s one of my favorite letters; I’m also sharing an audio version on Dying Every Day. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 144: What Are You Holding? - Marcus Aurelius on Anger and Attachment | Dying Every Day 29.04.2026 15λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 144.Anger is among the most examined emotions in human history, yet it remains one of the least understood when we're actually experiencing it. Today, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and psychologist Albert Ellis guide us in exploring it from the inside. I hope you find this useful! [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 143: You Already Know This. So Why Doesn't It Work? | Dying Every Day 22.04.2026 14λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 143.Why is it that we can fully grasp the dichotomy of control—know exactly where the line lies and what belongs to us and what doesn't—and still find ourselves reaching across it? Today, we’re revisiting one of Stoicism's most essential ideas, this time with Epictetus as our guide and a little help from Buddhist philosophy, to hopefully answer that question once and for all. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts
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  Day 142: "The present is all you have" | Dying Every Day 16.04.2026 11λ

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 142.“The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.14Take a moment to reflect on today’s passage.Let the logic of it settle before you try to follow it.Marcus Aurelius is making a claim that sounds almost too simple to be worth saying: the person who lives ninety years and the person who lives thirty lose exactly the same thing when they die. Not less. Not more. [...]---  🖇️ Stay Connected: Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources: Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts