Memento Mori: The Reminder You Desperately Need

death is the ultimate barrier for all of us i carry a coin that just says momento mori which is latin it means remember your death memento mori to me puts everything in perspective as mark surely says it shows you what's essential and what's inessential want to take a sharp right turn and talk uh you're going to die momento mori 100 i think i think i carry in my pocket every day i carry a coin that just says momento mori which is latin it means remember your death right on the back there's a quote from marcus aurelius the stoic and he he wrote to himself he said you could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think so this could be the last the last show i'm on in my life this could be the last city i'm on in my life this could be the last book i ever write you know the last time i talked to my wife the thought of your mortality and death in it and not in a depressing way should shadow everything that you do because it's the only way to make sure you do it right boy do i talk to death not death a lot right right yeah i mean i talk i mean the funeral like oh yeah i believe in it the most as you can probably know a little bit like i love i'm glad you brought that up no you're three words you're gonna die yeah that should that should let you cut out [ __ ] that should let you uh decide how you're going to treat other people and let yourself be treated and it should determine the quality of the work that you're going to do this happens to everybody in a micro it's called when police lights go on behind you you're scared shitless you change your behavior then the car drives by you right and then for like three minutes you're like okay i'm gonna go 55 now and then you know four minutes later you're going 73 again right and that's how i think people do it in life like something bad happens they hear something they see something and they're like oh [ __ ] i'm gonna live under the mindset of you're gonna die like yeah they've seen my thing it hit them for a day well it's like uh you hear about a friend who has cancer and you think like what would i do if i had cancer you do have cancer you're gonna [ __ ] die you do have cancer you just don't you just don't first off because lots of people do get cancer so there's a real chance the cells are the cells are already in your body right but like you do have a fatal diagnosis from a doctor he just can't tell you if it's six months or 60 years but you are definitely a hundred percent going to die and it could be tomorrow so what are you gonna do with that information my friend emailed me on a friday i told myself i was going to respond on monday and by sunday he was gone he'd fallen dead of a heart attack and this is why the stoics practice memento mori life is short you can go at any moment but also they said the people who are precious to you you do not possess them you can't take them for granted you can't assume they're going to be here forever you can't assume you're always going to have them you don't have them now they're they're here on loan they are here under shaky status at best so you can't take people for granted you can't take time for granted you can't go to bed angry as they say you can't hold on to grudges like be with them now while you can forgive them now while you can appreciate them now while you can enjoy them now while you can that's the only thing we can do memento mori you could leave life right now as marxist but also they could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think particularly with the people who matter most to you one of the most withering lines from seneca he says you're afraid of dying but how is the way that you're living any different from being dead and i think his point is that we go around we have this anxiety about death we don't want to die we want to stay alive but if we actually looked at our life i mean you're afraid of you're afraid of dying because you're going to miss out on all these netflix shows like you're afraid of dying because you're going to you're not going to get to spend all that time in traffic anymore marcus realized he said something really similar he said you're afraid of dying because you can't do this anymore and it's the same idea like we waste so much time so much of life is absurd and lame and ridiculous and we're really just like burning the days we're just like we're almost like prisoners we're just watching the the second hand on the wall just tick away until we are freed by death and so the idea isn't depressing it's not saying that life is is meaningless and that you should kill yourself it's saying the opposite it's saying that life is super meaningful and you're an idiot if you waste a single second of it i mean that's that's sort of the idea of the of the memento mori coin that that we've we've made and that all these people carry with them now it's like look you will die it's a fact of existence and you can leave life at any moment so let's make sure that you make the most of this moment that's the idea the other i think badass line from seneca see says you act like mortals in all that you fear and immortals in all that you desire so we go around and we we we're afraid of [ __ ] we're afraid of heights we're afraid of getting hit by a bus we're afraid of being mugged we're afraid of dying in an accident and yet when we think about like all the money that we're trying to earn and all the fame that we want and all the pleasures that we want to have we're acting as if this is going to go on forever and that we need as much of it as humanly possible and that we need to defer the present moment so we can have more in the future but the truth is we are mortal and that the future is not a given and so why don't we just find you know the aristotelian means a midpoint between the two why don't we think about that why don't we just think about letting this moment that we're in be enough not having fear not having desire just having sort of gratitude and appreciation and presence for what we have in front of us i mean to me that's the way to do it it's actually a really important final stoic concept i carry a coin in my pocket it says memento mori and on the back has a quote from marcus really he says you could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think to me this is the ultimate way to cut obstacles down the size to put things in perspective to be grateful instead of resentful to be excited instead of bitter or resigned it's like i'm alive it's pretty good right and to waste our time resenting to waste our time hurling ourselves against a wall that's never going to change and always will be thus is to waste this precious gift our existence the the present moment and the stoics advise us not to do that seneca says we should prepare each day every minute as if we're coming to the end of life he said leave your books in good shape right i'm sure there's some accountants in the room balance the books of life each day put the finishing touches on your life don't leave anything hanging don't put anything off do it now because now is now seneca says don't think of death as this thing in the future that may or may not happen that you're moving slowly towards that hopefully you've got many years left towards he says actually death is now death is the ticking secondhand on your watch says the time that passes belongs to death you never get it back so time then is our most precious resource we have to figure out how to spend it wisely we have to figure out how not to waste it we have to figure out how to enjoy it even amidst the obstacles and difficulties and any idea that things are going back to normal that they'll go back to the old way that they were it's just not how things work or that that you'll you'll just wait it out no now is now in the time that you waste the things that you put off problems you don't tackle that you hope will resolve themselves what you're wasting is life it was an ordinary regular season game against the team that he'd played dozens of times over the course of his career chris bosh didn't know in the locker room as he was lacing up his shoes that it would not just be the last time he played the spurs but be the last time he played professionally as an athlete an embolism in his leg would end his playing career suddenly anticlimactically tragically when the stoics talk about memento mori that life is short it's not just the idea that we could go at any moment which we can it's that the things we care about the things we love the things we're doing we're not in control of them we don't control when they begin or end and so the reason the stoics talk about being present about not taking things for granted about not deferring things into the future it's for that reason because you don't know when your career is going to end you don't know when your knee is going to blow out you don't know how long you get to do things and so to take them for granted to assume they'll always be there to not give your best is arrogant it's reckless it's selfish it's short-sighted and you can't do it you had like a real up-close reminder of this idea of memento mori like life is short yeah you could go at any moment and now you got to figure out you know you you still have this gift of time but you don't know how long you're here for my me and my wife she's challenged me um you know being a basketball player having schedules which you have to have a schedule i believe and do all these things but she's given a challenge to me that which i've accepted months ago was to be more present stay in the moment a lot more sure you know even if i'm at my desk writing or making voice memos or you know trying to produce some music and or get emails out or read these things that i need to read sure when it's time to go with the kids i put it up and it's time to go with the kids right if we're if we're if i'm walking back to the office and i see my wife sitting by the pool and you know she's answering some emails too hey babe let's come out and have lunch right all right cool i used to be in a point where i'm like no no i have to go back here and i've got to go back to the thing you know i'm working now i'm working on you know just just being more in the moment and appreciating those things and it's crazy my work has gotten a lot better it's been insane well i struggle with that i struggle with that too right because to get good at what you do you have to be driven and you have to be self-driven yeah right like you don't become great because the coach wants it for you you have to want it more than the coach wants it but then it's really hard to turn that off so yeah it's like like i like to get up early and i like to get to work but then it's like you know it's 803 and i'm like a jerk because i gotta get here and it's like who's watching you know like if i got there at 8 15 just stay 15 minutes later you know get the work done yeah but like you're rejecting this present moment which could be five minutes with your kids it could be a nice conversation with your wife could just be watching the sunset or the sunrise for sure but you're i think what i realized about the stoics the stoics are saying like where are you rushing towards you're rushing towards death right for sure you're trying to get this over hurrying and then hit the bump and then oh you know heaven forbid you know well you're no but also it's like if you once you get it all done what happens like you finish this you finish this you finish this what's the last thing that happens you die yeah so why rush like you should be present you should show up you should experience it because you only get to do it once and it's it's almost arrogant to try to get this thing over with so you could do this thing like when i put my kids down i go like you know it's like taking too long you know if they never want to go to bed i'm like what am i going to do right what am i going to do when you go to bed right like answer email watch tv that's more important than this yeah and i kind of have that um same mentality you know where we've learned to coexist in the house a lot of the times you don't have to travel 42 nights a year yeah you know so i'm gonna have my child coming in while i'm trying to do my work and say dad come here you gotta see this dad let me show you something yeah let me show you something i'm gonna have to walk across the yard because they want me to show me something and it usually will stick oh no you know what i mean no no but now all right cool yeah come on but just having that moment for them to say wow they don't care about yes all that stuff what is important to them is that hey dad came with me to look at my stick yeah look at my pet rock dad like oh it's crazy bro you know it's just but having those moments and and staying present with that you know um is definitely giving me uh more of an appreciation um for things and how they happen because this definitely is a great metaphor and that conclusion of saying okay man you know man and you know and i've had my peers a few of them gone yeah you know so let me make sure i'm enjoying today let me make sure if i'm working on something i'm working on something i want to work on yeah you know and i'm not being a mean person and even if it's a rough day man come on kids let's go for some ice cream or something or go for a walk or something but just to do something or be open to the to the flow taking you somewhere else that was one of the most beautiful things i read in an article about kobe a couple days before he died some reporter was like hey i want to interview you for this like 20-year anniversary some some big espn piece and they texted him he just texted back now i got my girls yeah you know like he didn't know that he only had him for three more days right but like and and how long could that interview have taken 10 minutes 15 minutes but yeah that's everything yeah everything because he knows like i'm gonna get in mamba mode and i'll be over here no no my girls and you know my my kids are very much the same as well they're like hey dad what are you doing ah another interview oh you know they want to watch cartoons or you know we have garden and bees now and stuff you're raising bees yeah we got some bees man we they want to go see those things they want to you know get their hands dirty and have experiences and activities and it's you know through that i've gotten to live through them and with them and say wow oh man look at all this stuff is so cool just to smell the dirt and the air and stuff you know that's that's a that's a great thing to be present for there's a haunting story about montagna in 1569 he's thrown from a horse and it nearly kills him and as his friends lift his lifeless body up the ground and carry him home to die he says he can feel life dancing on the tip of his lips and he realizes when he does miraculously survive this just how tenuous our connection with life is how we have to embrace it how we have to seize it how we can't take anything for granted and this is the old philosophical idea of memento mori i carry this coin in my pocket marcus aurelius his quote on the back he says you could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think you can't take life for granted you can't assume you have a firm grasp on life because it could slip from your fingers at any moment and that's what memento mori is about why did you give the most valuable real estate in your book to death well death is the ultimate barrier for all of us not just physically but psychologically i maintain that human beings are messed up screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death it is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions that we created the idea of an afterlife you're enslaved by this fear you're not aware of it it's controlling you overcoming it is the ultimate freedom most people are going to say oh that's not me as they say and for all of these chapters of other people they're irrational not me yeah oh i'm not really afraid of death i i play video games and i'm always killing people and i watch movies and people are always dying i'm not afraid our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death your death is something physical it's going to happen to you it's a very visceral thing you are afraid of it and that fear is creates what i call latent anxiety it makes you fearful of a lot of things in life and you're not aware of it it makes you cautious about failure it makes you cautious about taking risks so i'm trying to show you that your fear of death has infected you on many many levels and so i compare it to this i use the metaphor in the book i don't use many metaphors but this is one i use is that death is like this vast ocean that we stand on the shore of most animals are not aware of their mortality we are the only species as far as we know that's aware of its mortality and here you are on the shore of this immense vast ocean you don't know what death is or what it's going to be and you're afraid of it and you turn your back to it and we humans have the ability to explore things to conquer our fear and i want you instead of turning your back to actually enter that vast ocean and explore it and i show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways you're afraid of death most of us are but mark cerrilla says are you afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore watch stupid videos like this on the internet scroll on your phone wait in a waiting room wait for your flight to board wait for your job we fear death and yet we waste so much time in our lives with things that don't matter and so much of life is frustrating and annoying and pointless so one don't cling to life as if it's this magical thing because for most of us it isn't a magical thing but i think what the stoics are really saying is focus on what does really matter on what you actually control on the life that you have it seneca says don't think of death as something in the future something to fear think of it as something that's happening right now you're afraid of death because you might die in the future but in reality you're dying right now as your life is happening wasting it on tick tock or instagram or email or fighting with someone about some nonsense right you're afraid of death because you won't do that anymore how about you just stop doing that and you magically get more life right now going back to cicero cicero says that to philosophize is to learn how to die that that's what we're all doing we're all over the course of a life learning how to do the one thing that we all have to do the one thing that all humans have shared for all time and yeah it seems like in a sense by allowing you in and the real gift that your father gave you all and then you know gives the readers by opening up to a writer is that he allowed you to experience and struggle with the struggle that we all have which is being afraid yes i mean that's the the through line of the book while in part being like life lessons that were taught through the game and then life lessons in that last year of his life as he's in the final year with als i'm trying to show a portrait of an of an athlete which is a different mentality than other mentalities it's it's very much a portrait of an athlete like you said working through the mindset of who he wants to be and how he's going to one accept death and then approach death and for much of the book and the story he is unwilling to do so because he just he sees it one as i think he sees it as failure to some degree that he's giving up yeah and then and then of course it's just it's losing it's definitely in his mind for much of the book losing and then there's just fear on a very primal base instinct of fear and it's not until the very very end that he starts to realize that surrender is what he needs to do but the complicated thing about you know the book is that by the time he realizes this he has completely lost his voice so there's there's this section of time where i i'm almost desperate to know what it's like for him because aren't we all just so curious of sure when someone is finally looking at death and has come to philosophize to the point that they are accepting that death is going to happen i want to know why and how and what that feels like but he couldn't talk anymore and so was trying to piece together small things that he was doing and ways in which he was communicating by blinking and trying to in my own mind as the writer of this story piece together what he must be feeling and thinking what it all means what do you learn from like how he lays there and how he holds his head up and yeah uses his eyes what do you feel like he communicated with you about the hardest thing that we all have to do the very unique way in which he died was that we decided to take him off his his ventilator his tracheostomy so but we had about 48 to 72 hours before the hospital was willing to transfer us and make this happen and have all the paperwork done so it was almost like i mean in a way he's almost like a death row right he he knows when this is going to happen but we can't do it yet so he has this chunk of time and it was really interesting to me the things he was bringing up because even though he couldn't talk he could mouth something and we could try to read his lips or we had a system where he could you know left eye was yes right eye was no and the night before we transferred him to the icu to start the morphine drip which would end his life he was really forceful about translating this one sentence and when i finally got it translated the sentence was the fight outside cvs and it was this fight that my dad and i had had 15 years prior in rhode island and it was the biggest fight we'd ever had outside of a cvs and it was about a stupid thing doesn't matter now but like we've really gotten into it and it was really compelling to me to see that the point that he brought this up the second i said the fight outside cvs you know he blinks his eye yes yes yes and then he mouthed i'm so sorry and it just i was like we all think that at the end of life we're gonna be like reminiscing about the weddings and the vacations and and deaths of other people but like that was something that had given our relationship like texture it was this thing and that's what he was thinking about in these final hours was like moments in his life that he maybe he hadn't communicated properly and he wanted to go back and just make sure i knew as i kept forward in life that i knew that he too wanted more from our relationship and that he too had made mistakes and so it was very compelling to me not that it's not common sense that we want to reconcile all these things but that very specific thing we've never talked about since the day it had happened until the day before he died well and obviously i didn't know your father so this might not be what he was trying to say but i think the other part of that is you know we think and we we say this like when you were thinking about leaving espn you know we go like am i gonna regret doing this or not chasing my passion am i gonna regret not going to this opportunity to do x y and z we think we're gonna regret things that have to do with like pleasures that we didn't take or roads that we didn't take or things that we didn't do but in reality you know i think what we end up regretting is the times we lost our temper about things that didn't matter that we regret the way we treated people that we cared about and the way we treated them wasn't a reflection of what we actually felt about him so i i wonder if what your dad didn't want that thing which is so meaningless in retrospect to mean anything years later you know what like he did he didn't want that to go unaddressed because it it didn't matter but at the same time it mattered so much yeah well you're you're definitely spot on because it was the last thing i remember it was the last element of our relationship that had been conflict that we hadn't talked about since he'd gotten sick like there had been other mistakes i'd made decisions i'd made that we hadn't talked about that over the last years of his life i brought up or he brought up and we talked through and we both got into this place where we're like that's done you know it's that is that no more holds any power in how i think about you or how i think about our relationship but the fight outside cvs had gone unaddressed yes and and it was still i assume this thorn in his mind about okay well we talked about this thing we talked about that thing i regret that i regret that and we had gotten it all out except this one thing and you're completely right and that enough in those it was such a fascinating case study of like those last 48 72 hours like the things we were talking about yeah it was just it was just reliving memories all you know reliving memories reliving stories and making sure any thorn that it existed got pulled out and it was all relationship always like i think about like with my wife like let's say i was to list like the 15 biggest fights that we've ever had i don't think there's a single one that i'm like i would still die on that hill right you know what i mean like none of the matter in retrospect right and so we get so worked up about things and then they it becomes this sort of feedback loop and then all of a sudden yeah you're having a fight outside cvs and 15 years later it remains unaddressed you know yeah and i think death puts all those things in perspective yep and that was what we were watching him do was putting everything in perspective the greatest honor that a roman could receive was a triumph through rome you would march victorious coming home from the battlefield you'd be led on a chariot but yet they also had a servant follow close behind who whispered in your ear momento mori meaning you are mortal they wanted someone at their greatest moment of triumph they wanted them to be reminded that they were still a human that life was short i actually carry this coin in my pocket says momento amore and on the back it has a quote from marcus realist that you could leave life right now he says let that determine what you do and say think in today's video i wanted to talk about the concept of memento mori in as short a time as possible to give you what i think is one of the most life-changing exercises in all of stoic philosophy again in the ancient world life was very fragile and yet even then they had to remind themselves that they could go at any moment and i think death as we have become successful as a society as we become more and more insulated from tragedy has receded from the forefront of our consciousness shakespeare famously said that every third thought after he retired would be of his grave i don't know if it has to be that often but at least once a day just take a minute to think i don't know how much time i have left as seneca says we go through life afraid of some things as if we're mortal but then we treat time as if we are immortal as if we have an unlimited amount of it and we don't the tragedy is by the time we realize we've been taking time for granted it's too late [Music] one of the most life-changing exercises as far as memento mori goes for me came from seneca seneca says don't see death as something in the future that you're moving towards so see it as something that's happening right now it says you're dying every minute you are dying every day so the time that passes belongs to death so i don't think about the fact that i'm 34 and that means per actuary tables i've got 45 years left i think instead that i've died 34 years i've died however many minutes i've spent talking to you so why am i doing it because this is important to me if it wasn't important to me i shouldn't do it right since i am doing it i should do it as if it matters i should give it my best [Music] memento mori to me puts everything in perspective as mark surely says it shows you what's essential and what's in essential is this great test marcus says ask yourself am i afraid of death because i won't be able to do blank anymore and i think about that the things that we spend so much time doing then we wonder where does our time go right we spent it on frivolous stupid things so for the stoics memento mori was this humbling bit of perspective it put everything in sharp focus and i think even one of the most haunting exercises in stoicism about memento mori it doesn't just apply to you but also the people you love marcus really says as you tuck your child into bed at night save yourself they may not make it to the morning is that supposed to be detaching you from not feeling what you feel towards them it's the opposite it's telling you don't rush through this because what you're rushing towards is death slow down be present cherish the person while you have them it's not that life is short seneca says it's that we waste a lot of it [Music] the practice of memento mori the meditation on death is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is you built this memento mori calendar for daily stoke to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4 000 weeks are you gonna let those weeks slip by or are you going to seize them the act of unrolling this calendar putting it on your wall and every single week that bubble is filled in that black mark is marking it off forever have something to show not just for your years but for every single dot that you filled in that you really lived that week you made something of it you can check it out at dailystoke.comm calendar this is the most powerful part of memento mori seneca says that the person who has gone to bed doing everything that they could have done that day when you awake in the morning if you are so lucky it's a bonus you're happy in the morning because you've been given an extra try you're playing with house money and so if i can leave you this with this idea of momentum worry i think it'll make you better and that's why i carry this reminder with me it's powerful use it wisely this is the daily stoic coin i'm as proud of making this as i am of any of my books tens of thousands of people all over the world have them i see them they bring it out of their pocket they say look at this every single day it's changed my life i hope it'll do the same for you you can check it out at stuart.dailystoic.com seneca says that you can't buy more life but you can acquire fearlessness you can stop being afraid of death and when you cease to be afraid of death when you stop worrying about what looms way off in the future what you get what you get is right now you get the present moment so the stoics think about this exercise of memento mori they meditate on their mortality they envision their own death they plan for their own death they practice for their own death so that it ceases to waste their time to waste their energy it ceases to intimidate them and they can give themselves the gift of the present moment right now and you can do that don't be afraid get yourself some fearlessness don't worry about death while you're here epicurus says death is not here and when death is here he says you are not here and so we think about death because it empowers us now here in life and that's what memento mori is ultimately about how many people sort of realize that life is short after they've already wasted so much of their life right um we talk about this you know like somebody gets cancer and they go ah you know that's when i realized i was gonna die and it's like you knew from birth you were you were gonna die it was it's like it's not like this is up for debate right like every every person that's ever born it knows they're gonna die but then we deny that fact i'm gonna send you guys one of these memento mori things that we uh that i do for days do you know that expression or do you have one yeah i'm pretty sure amazing but i to me what i love about memento mori i mean on the back marcus says you could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think i think about that but i actually really love seneca seneca says he says it's wrong to think of death in the future so like you go like okay you know i'm gonna die at a hundred so i have uh how much life do i have left right that you're moving towards death he says like no the time that passes belongs to death so the way to think about it is that you guys have already died a quarter of your life right like you've died 25 years he says the time that passes belongs to death he says we're dying every day every minute and i think when you think about it that way that you're the everything you you spend time on you're paying for with life is a fundamentally different way to go through the world because then when someone tries to guilt you into doing something that doesn't need to be done or as you said when you're you're wasting time being anxious about something dreading something that's happening or even just think during the pandemic like when this first happened that people are like oh two weeks i'll wait it out and then like oh if life's gonna go back to normal in june i'll just wait until june and it's like well here we are 13 months later and you're still waiting it out this could have been the best year of your life and and for me in a lot of ways it was one of the best years of my life not in the way that i thought but in terms of the amount of time that i spent with my kids entire in terms of the writing that i got done you know i didn't travel to finland like i was supposed to but i did go on a road trip across the united states like you know you you have to adjust and be flexible but you really can live every minute if you choose to definitely perception for sure i think it's really really interesting uh to like just think of the fact that you die as a as a good thing because i i've been talking about this a lot this last year because death has been such like in the forefront uh it's like air it's literally floating in the air you can catch it at any moment exactly uh and like i take that with like a grain of salt and but because that reason the the fact that we die is what makes everything meaningful it's like the the second today or like the relationship i make tomorrow or the occurrence that i have next week is only meaningful because i die i could have if i was immortal i could do that a million times and it wouldn't mean as much like our conversation right now wouldn't mean as much but we are we are having this in the limited time that we have and like now we are one you know hour i guess closer to death which means that it's valuable like these conversations these relationships these like experiences are valuable because you know we have that limited time to offer yeah it's uh it's interesting though i think sometimes uh people miss the idea of memento mori so momento mori is not like you're gonna die everything's meaningless like go have an orgy or go try heroin right it's not to me it's not like nothing matters it anarchy because it's not for sure that the world is going to end tomorrow right like if the world was going to end tomorrow if you for sure knew everything was being wiped off the planet that would sort of throw everything into a state of flux for the stoics i think it's that life could end tomorrow so you don't know but it could so how do you live in a way that leaves no regrets but also doesn't create regrets when you happen to be alive tomorrow so it's really i think just about as you said making every minute count so i think about it's like this could be the last email that i sent it's not life is meaningless so i'm not gonna send the email it's i'm gonna actually be here as i write the email or you know have this conversation with you or or even like eating a sandwich this could be the last sandwich i eat i'm not gonna rush through it to get to the other side because the other side could be death i'm gonna actually show up even if it's something as banal as eating a sandwich marcus really says don't live as if you had endless years ahead of you he says death shadows over you death looms over you while you're living in abel he says do good right the present is all we have the stoics say what's happened is happened we can never do that again the future the future is uncertain it is unknown but the present this moment this moment you're spending on your phone this moment is all you have for certain put the phone down put your anxiety away let your regrets go and focus on how you can use this moment while you're good and able marx really says be good while you're alive live memento mori you could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think that's the essence of the stoic way there's two words that come to us from the ancients that i think we should remind ourselves of repeat to ourself in any and every situation we're in you win the lottery you strike it rich you get recognized you get an award you say to yourself memento mori remember you will die you go through [ __ ] you go through trouble someone cheats on you someone betrays you someone lies to you someone steals from you someone gets what you earned someone gets promoted over you you say to yourself memento mori remember that i will die you could leave life right now marcus aurelius said let that determine what you do and say and think you get in a fight with your girlfriend or your boyfriend your parents say something mean or let you down your neighbor pisses you off you break your leg you blow out your knee you fall out of love with someone you're stressed out by work your kids are sick you say to yourself memento mori life is short i'm going to die and what that means is you can't take any of this seriously you can't let it weigh on you you can't hold on to it you can't let it puff you up either if you're rich you're famous you have a million instagram followers you just got hired you just got into harvard you just got nominated for a nobel prize you just got a call from the president you just got a promotion you just got a raise memento mori you will die you can't take any of this with you it pales in comparison to the idea of eternity how many people have come before you and had these same honors and where are they now they're [ __ ] dead just like you will be what marcus really said is this practice of memento mori of saying to the good things and to the bad things in life that we will die it's a reminder that helps you accept the good things without arrogance and to let the bad things go with indifference your plane is delayed you're stressed you're tired you're hungry you're frustrated you're cynical you say memento mori i'm going to die what does any of this mean why am i taking any of it so seriously why am i letting it get to me what's three hours here or three hours there remember you are going to die what you do control is whether you waste time getting upset by this whether you waste time taking it personally whether you're the best in the world at what you do or you're an unpaid intern whether your work is being beloved by the critics or savaged by the critics whether you have more opportunities than you know what to do with whether you can't get the one shot no one will even give you a chance whether you have all the money you need or you can barely get by you say memento mori remember i will die none of this matters in light of that whether you're having sex with a beautiful supermodel whether you're putting your kid down to bed whether you're sitting there in your pajamas eating cereal or you are standing in front of a prestigious audience memento mori you will die is this how you want to spend your time are you wasting it or are you living it are you embracing it or are you letting it escape from your grasp memento mori remember i will die you could leave life right now let that determine what you do and say and think whatever you're experiencing whatever you're going through however awesome your life is however frustrating it is right now momento mori remember you will die this too shall pass you must not forget that hey it's ryan holiday thank you so much for supporting daily stoic it means a lot and it helps us when you like and subscribe and comment on our videos when you follow us on social media we're at daily stoke on pretty much every platform you can also check out dailystoic.com store that's how we keep these videos high quality and ad free if you want to support us buy one of our awesome philosophically inspired products thank you for all the support so the the memento mori thing has been like of an unexpected vein because for myself too explain to people what that is so memento mori is is this idea just means remember death or remember your immortality and i think it's probably it's it's not only one of the most powerful themes in all of ancient philosophy specifically stoicism but in basically all of ancient art as well like the most beautiful painting painters used to paint pictures of skulls and dancing skeletons and or decaying bodies and and and so this is imagery of the the inevitable decay the entropy of life is this timeless theme that basically goes all the way up to modern art and then it's just like weird-ass shapes and stuff we like so we stopped using art as a tool to remind us of human primal things and started using it as a status symbol you know what i mean and and so what the stoics are so much of meditations and and seneca's writing is is just talking about how easy it is to forget that you'll die or to have the wrong attitude about diet like death one of my favorite things from seneca he goes like do not think that you're moving towards death he was like every second that passes is death so don't think about it as like oh i'm dying in the future and i should be prepared for that think about the fact that we're dying every day um that you're just why is that better it's just a reminder it's not like death is this thing in the future so i'm gonna dick around today it's that like the hours that i spent on the couch i died one hour of my death do you know what i mean yeah and his point is that so many people think that there's life and death but there are ways of living that are essentially a form of being dead and that this is in fact how most people die uh most people live there's this um sort of haunting messed up uh story in seneca one of the emperors is sort of like walking down this row of of you know condemned prisoners and the prisoners pleading for his life please don't kill me and the emperor looks at him anything and he's like you think you're alive you know because this man's horrible way of living was already death you know and and so that just i think it so resonates with people because it's so the opposite of of how modern life is set up people die in hospitals far from our house who spends time with old people we are so segregated even by age right um there's been so many medical advancements that death doesn't feel random it feels like it's something your fault that like if you eat healthy and you're a good person obviously you'll live a long time and on average you will but that doesn't mean that non-smokers don't get lung cancer all the [ __ ] time and you can't be one of those people that doesn't mean that people uh don't get hit with tree branches you know and die or that doesn't mean that countries don't go to war for no reason and lots of you know like life is tragic and it always has been for all of human history and so that's definitely i think the most powerful one and it's something i i mean i keep on my desk i mean so i wear this ring it's like a reminder but i have uh i bought it on online it's a chunk of a tombstone and it just like from some i don't know how this came to be i hope nobody stole it but it's from like an old victorian grave so a couple hundred years old and it just has the word dad on it and it's so that's so [ __ ] interesting yeah like i want to start asking people what is some weird [ __ ] that they have that that is so interesting especially knowing your views on death and being a dad recently yeah and so it's like that's crazy this guy was a did you seek out the word dad i was looking for something like that and when i found it and i was like that's that's it that's the reminder that i want to have all the time [ __ ] that one really hit me i'm not sure why yeah the the word dad that it's an actual tombstone because it's because what you're thinking about is what that person meant to other people yes yes and and that this is something clearly people identify he that was part of his identity and he's not here and not only is he not here i don't even [ __ ] know his name nobody does not only does nobody know his name but at some point after his death even the ground he was buried in like suffered an earthquake or somebody stole it like so it's just there's a humility in that and i think a reminder to be present right like let's say i'm working at my desk and i'm writing and my son is almost three he comes running he's like dad dad look at this you know it that's like a i'm gonna get this writing done because i'm important or it's important to me but i am not gonna ignore this thing uh i'm gonna i'm not saying i'm gonna quit my work and not focus on it at all but i am not gonna ignore this moment to be this thing that's important to me do you know what i mean so i i have an evolving sense of what my relationship to death should be so for a very long time it was patently obvious to me that i was going to die but that we're living in a period where it is conceivable that we'll be able to hit escape velocity from a health perspective and that by the time we're 80 90 if we're able to live that long that they can add a year and a day to every year that we live or whatever so you just live a lot longer than humans have conceived of life as being correct so i thought okay that's interesting to me because um i want to live my life in such a way where my limited amount of time does not impact the size of my dreams so it wasn't a denial of death it was just kind of a cool escape valve for me to even as i got older to continue to have big dreams that you know sort of by any stretch of the imagination would probably go on beyond me but because tomorrow was never guaranteed anyway even when i was 16 yeah that there's only that the the sort of false or maybe a better way to think of it is um from uh an actuarial table standpoint you're probably going to live long enough for you to have that 40-year dream or a six-year dream or whatever so because of that you just you do you have these long-ranging dreams and i felt like because i had long-ranging dreams i was able to do some pretty extraordinary things but only because i was thinking so long-term so okay as i get older i don't want to stop having these long-term dreams so i really allowed myself to soak in the notion of hey you might live forever so keep having these big long range dreams now hearing enough people talk about memento mori or whatever i started thinking all right people that i really respect are telling me that i need to really think closely about the notion of dying so i thought okay let me really stop and inspect how that would impact me what does that change in terms of the way that i live or how i perceive life or whatever and so far i will say because i'm already like it is at the absolute core of my being to only do things that matter to love deeply to connect to the people that i love to not waste time all that like i don't i personally don't need that reminder yeah many people do and is very useful for that that isn't the reminder that i need i find that it's actually it it feels important to acknowledge the inevitability currently of my death but at the same time i find that now i have to fight harder to have long range plans and i don't like the way that feels so i it is it's it's seemingly there's a contradiction between being present and doing or planning big things but i'm not sure that there is i don't know exactly how to solve for it but let's look at the evidence right marcus aurelius here's a guy he's reminding himself of how ephemeral the emperors who came before him were he's reminding himself of the inevitability of death he's saying over and over again the importance of being present not being driven by anger we can't say like that this guy didn't accomplish incredible things right like that he that because of that he just stayed in bed all day i think what he's saying is like let's do the right thing for the right reason you look at seneca same thing talking over and over again about the death about the import of the inevitability of death the meaninglessness of posthumous fame etc and yet still sits down and writes these essays that continue to be read by millions of people 2 000 plus years after his death i think what it's about is about stripping out the low-grade anxiety or denial or whatever we have and and being able to focus everything in that that moment so when when seneca's saying like you will die today could be the last day of your life he's not saying quit what you're doing and go have an orgy or go shoot up heroin just to see what it's like he's saying live today like a complete day so like what as i worked on stillness is the key is something i was thinking about a lot i was like okay i could die before this book gets published what happens to me if does someone finish it does it get published whatever does it sit in a drawer none of that's really my concern what nor is it in my control right even if i write in a will exactly what nabakov i i think wrote very clearly like destroy my manuscripts after my death really yeah and lots of authors have done this and nobody listened you know kafka same thing we only know about these works because they're they they would be upset that we know who they are right so what do i control what i do control is did i do everything i could today right did i leave like is the book complete as of today do you know what i mean like is it as complete up until the point i was able to complete it so i'd go you know the first two thirds are the book that it could be as of today that's what i do does that make sense it does but i don't know that it hits me emotionally so um let's try to unpack that a little bit so if you're saying like hey i'm gonna do my best and i'm gonna be present which we actually didn't address and i don't think is a self-evident realization when one thinks about their death uh which would be interesting to hear your thoughts around why that is your association i i begin to to think about um so if i were writing a book first of all i'm such a process writer that i would be the the type that's like bury the [ __ ] manuscript people would have no like they just wouldn't believe how scandalously bad my early drafts of anything are so i i wouldn't think of it in any other way than the following did i sincerely pursue making this great today yes or no that's what i totally agreement that's what it's about he's saying like live every day as a complete day and then when you wake up tomorrow you're grateful i hope you like this video i hope you subscribe but what i really want you to subscribe to is our daily stoic email one bit of stoic wisdom totally for free to the largest community of stoics ever in existence you can sign up at dailystoke.com email there's no spam you can unsubscribe at any time i love sending it i've sent it every day for the last six years and i hope to see you there at dailystoke.com email [Music] you

Channel: Daily Stoic

Views: 460,354

Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism, Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday Stoicism, Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday Interview, Ryan Holiday Stoic, Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic, Stoicism TED talk, marcus aurelius, marcus aurelius meditations, ryan holiday podcast

Id: fq8lGTBF1PE

Length: 51min 40sec (3100 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2022