Dying Every Day (Stoicism in a Year)

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  Day 157: Carrying the Fire with Shane Trotter | Dying Every Day 17.09.2026 46мин

  📮 Want more meditations for mortals? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 157.What does it take to become strong enough to carry responsibility well?In this episode, I speak with writer, coach, and author Shane Trotter about discipline, mentorship, responsibility, and the work of character.Much of Shane’s work centers on a simple but increasingly important idea: people need more than information. They need formation.We talk about standards, challenge, physical training, responsibility, and the role parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors play in helping young people develop character, judgment, resilience, and purpose.We also explore what can happen when adults remove too much difficulty from a young person’s life—and why meaningful struggle, properly understood, can be part of learning how to live well.Shane Trotter’s Work:Shane writes Setting the Bar on Substack, where he explores education, parenting, character, discipline, and human development through philosophy, psychology, and practical experience.His new course, Carry the Fire, is designed to help fathers, coaches, and mentors prepare young men to become capable, responsible adults. The program emphasizes mentorship, meaningful challenge, physical training, self-mastery, reflection, and formation.The emphasis is not simply on teaching lessons. It is on becoming the kind of person capable of carrying something forward.Shane is also the author of Setting the Bar: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Era of Distraction, Dependency, and Entitlement, a thoughtful examination of what young people need in order to flourish in an age of distraction, overprotection, and slipping standards.If you are a parent, teacher, coach, or mentor—or simply someone interested in how character is formed—I highly recommend Shane’s work. [...]
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  "Let us Postpone Nothing" | Dying Daily 15.09.2026 4мин

  📮 Want more meditations for mortals? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Daying Daily.You have been avoiding this thought.Not consciously. Not with deliberate effort.Simply by staying busy enough that it never quite surfaces. By treating awareness of death as something to manage—acknowledged briefly when unavoidable, then returned to its proper place at the far edge of consciousness, well away from the ordinary business of the day. We have even developed extraordinary technology to support this avoidance. The busyness, the noise, the endless scroll—all of it serves, among other things, to keep the biggest fact about human existence just below the level of genuine awareness. The Stoics thought this was exactly backward. [...]
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  "The Art of Paying Attention" | Letters from a Mortal 10.09.2026 6мин

  📮 Want more meditations for mortals? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Letters from a Mortal.Before we begin, a word about this edition of the podcast. Letters from a Mortal is meant to be experienced a little differently from the usual podcast episode.The pace is slower. There is more silence.These letters are meant to be more of a contemplation and an invitation to step away from the noise at least for a few minutes.They are written mostly for audio, intended for a time of stillness.There is nothing you need to memorize.Nothing you need to accomplish. Simply notice what stays with you. [...]
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  The Architecture of a Good Life | Dying Daily 07.09.2026 5мин

  📮 Want more meditations for mortals? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.Aristotle spent years trying to answer a question that most people never stop to ask. Not what makes people successful. Not what makes them comfortable or admired or free from obvious pain. Something harder and more interesting. What makes a human life genuinely good? Not good in someone else’s estimation. Not good according to the prevailing standards of the culture. Genuinely, deeply, lastingly good—the kind of good that holds up under examination, that you would choose again at the end, that constitutes something worth having been.His answer was not what most people expect. [...]
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  Day 156: The Unchosen Life—What Kierkegaard and the Stoics Knew About Freedom 03.09.2026 18мин

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 156.Imagine a young man with every door open.He is talented, and he knows it. He could be a scholar—the mind is there. He could be an artist; people have told him so. He could go into business and probably do well, or travel, or fall in love, or devote himself to a cause. Every path is available to him, and that is precisely the point: they are all still available, all still open, because he has walked down none of them. He keeps them open the way a collector keeps things in their original packaging. To choose one would be to close the others, and he cannot bear to close anything. So he stands at the center of all his beautiful possibilities, turning slowly, admiring them, committing to nothing.We know this young man. Many of us have been him. And we live in the age that has perfected him: the age of the open tab, the unchosen life, the endless scroll of options, none of which we select.We have made a virtue of keeping our options open. [...]---  🖇️ 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: The Gap Between Knowing and Doing 28.08.2026 4мин

  📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeWelcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.The philosopher and the athlete are working on the same problem. The athlete knows that wanting to be fast is not the same as being fast. Between the desire and the capacity lies the only thing that actually closes the gap—the practice, repeated daily, in conditions that are sometimes ideal and more often not. No serious athlete waits to feel motivated. Motivation is a consequence of practice, not its precondition. You train. The capacity develops. The desire follows.The philosopher has the same problem and the same solution.“First say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do.” — Epictetus, DiscoursesEpictetus taught philosophy the way a coach teaches sport. The point is not the argument. The point is performance, and it happens under the actual conditions of your life. [...]---  🖇️ 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: The Returning Mind 24.08.2026 3мин

  📮 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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  Dying Daily: A Stoic Lesson from The Odyssey 22.07.2026 13мин

  📮 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 12мин

  📮 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 5мин

  📮 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 13мин

  📮 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 4мин

  📮 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 10мин

  📮 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 8мин

  📮 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 10мин

  📮 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 10мин

  📮 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 14мин

  📮 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 12мин

  📮 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 11мин

  📮 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 13мин

  📮 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