The Daily Stoic - Are You Obsessed With Living? | Ask DS

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

There is a morbid theme running through the music of Johnny Cash. His deep, haunting voice is rarely far from a lyric about death or murder or loss or grief. He has songs about soldiers killed in Vietnam, songs about dying cowboys on the streets of Laredo, about tragic rifle accidents, songs about salvation and damnation, songs about tragedy and war. Famously, he performed almost his entire career dressed in black—like he was on his way to a funeral.The memento mori medallion , memento mori signet ring And the memento mori pendant, All these were created to remind us that we must live NOW, while there is still time.--And in today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan speaks and answers questions at Sutter Health University on Stillness is the Key, Challenging people to see what's important, and Creating habits, rituals, and more stoic wisdom to 4,200 healthcare leaders. ⏳ You can view our entire Memento Mori Collection at dailystoic.com/mm✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Seruti. And we are the hosts of a Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Red Handed, we yet stuck into the most talked about cases. But we also dig into those you might not have heard of, like the Nephiles Royal Massacre and the Nithory Child Sacrifices. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behaviour. Find, download, and binge Red Handhanded wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Briden and. We are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Pailin, the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams. The list goes on, so do sit back and enjoy. Brighten and on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well on Thursdays we not only read the daily meditation but we answer some questions from

listeners and fellow stoics, we're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with daily stoic life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happen to be someone there recording. But thank you for listening.

And we hope this is of use to you. Be obsessed with living. There is a morbid theme running through the music of Johnny Cash. His deep haunting voice is rarely far from a lyric about death or murder or loss or grief. He has songs about soldiers killed in Vietnam, songs about dying cowboys on the streets of Laredo,

about tragic rifle accidents, songs about salvation and damnation, songs about tragedy and war. Famously, he performed almost his entire career dressed in black, like he was on his way to a funeral. So it's not a stretch to think he might have been a bit preoccupied with the idea of mortality. In an interview with Neil Strauss, Cash explained that this was actually the wrong way to see it. He said,

I am not obsessed with death. I am obsessed with living. The battle against the dark one and the clinging to the right one is what my life is about. In 88, when I had a bypass surgery, I was as close to death as you could get. The doctors were saying they were losing me. I was going. And there was a wonderful light that I was going into. It was awesome, indescribable, beauty and peace, love and joy. And then all of a sudden, there I was again, all in pain and awake. I was so disappointed. But when I realized a day or so later, what point I had been to, I started to thank God for life and thinking only of life.

There is a similar tendency to think that the Stoics were obsessed with death, particularly Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Seneca talks so much about death that there is a recently published collection of his writings on the topic, actually titled, How to Die. But if they were given a similar chance to comment

like cash did about their fixation with death, we might expect a similar response. They weren't obsessed with dying, but with living. They wanted to get the most out of every minute of this uncertain existence we have all been given. It happens that meditating on our mortality is a powerful way to do that. Momentumori is an exercise that makes sure we are awake, grateful, and at peace. It prepares us

for the inevitability of what is to come while allowing us to seize every second between now and then. That might seem counterintuitive, but it actually makes perfect sense. If you know death is inevitable and that there is nothing you can do about it, and you have no idea what will come, then what is the alternative? Or as Andy says to his friend Red in the Shawshank Redemption, when they're talking about what they do if they ever got out, I guess it comes down to a simple choice. Get busy living or get busy dying. Which is why we should start this morning with gratitude and urgency, with appreciation and awareness. How much time any of us have is not up to us. But what we do with that time, that's our call. That's our song to sing.

And I hope you'll check out some of the products we have in the Daily Stoke story. You can see the Memento Mori Medallion. It's one I carry with me every day. It's got a quote from Marcus Aurelius on the back. It says, you could leave life right now, but that determine what you do and say and think. And on the front, there's a skull and a flower and an hourglass, the sort of reminders of the fleetingness of our own existence. And I hope you'll check this out.

We have a poster version. There's even a necklace version. Just go to dailystow I was in high school. I had some series of political talks and I stood in the back of that room and wrote an article about it for my high school newspaper and it just hit me while I walked in here this morning that I had been here before. So this is very, very cool for me. It's awesome.

It's awesome. So tell me, obviously, we spent a lot of time studying two dozen bread-a-lot books. I mean, tell us, like, how did this whole journey start? Like, what was the trigger for what drove this? Well, I went to UC Riverside in Southern California, and I was at a conference, a much smaller one than this, but I was also covering it at that point

for the college newspaper. And I went up to the speaker after, and I asked if they had any book recommendations. And he turned me on to the stokes. I was taking philosophy classes in college, but the stokes were just so different and so much more practical and accessible. I just remember reading it in my college apartment

going, this is the advice that I was looking for. And again, we tend to think of philosophy as abstract or theoretical. These big questions, you know, how do we know we're not living in a computer simulation or something like that. But what Marcus really is doing was living in times like the ones we are now. He's trying to manage stress, he's trying to manage difficult children and responsibilities and like we're all trying to do. And I think if we can remember that the ancient world was not that different to the one we're in now,

we can what we can take from them is advice about really practical and unfortunately timeless problems. And I think that's just what struck me. And so I got the recommendation, I read it. That's the key thing. People go, oh, I bought it. You have to read the book. And then I just went down the rabbit hole from there. So you're going into your comment. So it's different today.

Sure. It's a little busier. We've got technology. How do you respond to that? How do you make it? I mean, it's definitely busier. But in the 16th century, Blaze Pascal, a fan of the Stokes, he says, all of humanity's problems stem from our inability

to sit quietly in a room alone. And he didn't have an iPhone or a computer. He couldn't hop on a Southwest flight to anywhere he wanted. right? And even then he was finding that it's hard to be still, it's hard to focus. There's so much going on. So yes, so much has changed, you know, we don't bleed people anymore, or you know, they believe that incense, in Marcus' time, the one pandemic mitigation method that they came on was that incense would keep the plague away. Right, so obviously they had only the most rudimentary understanding of how any of these things were.

And yet, there were still people with egos, with problems, with tempers, with fear, you know, all the kind of human emotions that we have now that cause us to stress and anxiety and frustration, you know, they had. And so, lots has changed, but more things have stayed the same that have changed. Now, you can build a pretty disciplined routine. So, what's your advice? Like, how do you get started? Like, you get some out there, like, yeah, I do want to do that.

I do have something that I, like, what do I do? I'm a superstar. Yeah, I think if you, if you're like, I'm going to script out my whole life, you're probably not going to me? What do I do? I'm a superstar. Yeah, I think if you're like, I'm gonna script out my whole life, you're probably not gonna do it, right? But what's one thing you could start with? Hey, I'm gonna start getting up a little bit earlier. I'm gonna journal before I go to bed,

or I'm gonna read 15 pages a day. Like pick something and start that habit and watch what happens as you begin to practice that habit consistently. I will say I'm pretty disciplined, but one of the things I'm working on is also flexibility inside that discipline, right? Kids obviously, they blow up your life, right? And so, you know, necessarily choosing when I wake up or what time bedtime is or how much time I have here there, I have had to adjust

and get more. Like I would say today I have routines plural as opposed to a routine. So I think it's more like what are the practices, what are the foundational habits that for you help you get better or give you a little bit of peace or focus or you know help you cross things off or to do this. I think it's more about building a portfolio of those into your life as opposed to magically having a bulleted calendar that you never deviate from. And what about journey? How do you recommend people approach that?

Do you, are you trying to solve problems or are you just putting down something to have a cat? What do you do? Something that's looking to journal, or it's going to start that. Well, it's funny, all of a sudden, so it's hard to be like, okay, what journal should I buy? What pen should I buy?

What time should it, and you're just like, just do it, right? Like, you're letting sort of perfect be the enemy of good, right? One of the journals that I started with that was life changing for me, is it's called The One Line a Day Journal. And it's got five slots on each page. And you just write one thing about the day

that you're either experiencing or that you just experienced. And I'm on like my seventh or eighth year. So I can see where I was last year at this time. And I found that to be really easy, just finding something to start with. But actually for daily still if we have a journal and it's just one still at prompt every

day. So if you're someone you're like, I don't know what to write about. There's journals with prompts that say, that give you a question or give you something to meditate on or a word to think about. I promise you there is a way in for each person. But it's really just thinking about how do you create some distance from you and your thoughts? How do you create a little bit of discipline time where you're being self-reflective and self-aware? So what you're not, I always say like I'd rather put those emotions, fears, problems on the page instead of vomiting them on the people around me, right?

The very, I'll write things down and I'll go, that's insane. What am I talking about? Right, or I'll write something, I'll notice that I'm writing the same thing over and over again. Like, I am tired. And it's like, well, I think you know the solution to that problem, right?

And so there's just, there's something special. There's a reason that for thousands of years, human beings have been doing this There's something about creating a distance having a conversation with yourself that I think is really conducive to break throughs and calmness and clarity about what you're going through That's so cool for me to hear. You're here. What's the one that you love?

That's a good question. Spinal, I know. Well, of course, of course, that goes without saying. I don't know, I think as an author, one of the things I have learned is that, whatever you, one of the reasons you can't be focused on external results too much, is that whatever you, one of the reasons you can't be focused on external results too much is that it's outside your control and it always sort of humbles and surprises.

So, the book that was hardest for me to write that I'm most proud of has sold the fewest copies. And then the book that I was, that was the fastest and the easiest has sold the most copies and you just sort of go, okay, really has nothing to do with me here. I just got to do my job and sometimes it really works, sometimes it doesn't, but as long as I show up and do my best, that's the part that I control. But I think there's something about the Daily Stoic, which I don't think I had to do with me, I think it has to do with the format of visiting something day after day, and ideally coming back to it in a loop, right? The Stoke's talking about how we never step

in the same river twice. It's like the book is the same, but we're different. And so you never come back to the same thing. And so the daily Stoke has been this really cool thing. People have been reading it now for eight or plus years. The email goes out, which is free also, not for eight years. But I have found, because I think it would be weird

if I read the Daily Stoke every day. I read a book called A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy, which was his like favorite quotes every day. And so I think there's something really special about the Pager Day format that I would urge people, if you're talking about, how do you set up a nice morning routine. What is something is that a calendar on your desk or a book like the Daily Stoke, I just did this book, The Daily Dad, if you're a leadership person, there's one called The Daily

Drucker, which is Leadership Advice from Daily Drucker, because it's a whole genre of these books. But the idea of like, I'm going to spend five minutes really intentionally thinking about something, learning from someone wise or some ancient tradition, I think there's something really powerful about that medium. So I usually tell people to start there. So you know what I'm talking about parenting, maybe you tell us a little bit about that, and what's for that? Well it's a parenting version of the page day day idea. Again, the idea being that, you know,

the idea that you read what to expect when you're expecting and then that'll get you through the next 40 years is probably, you know, naive. And so I found that there's something weird about parenting books as being, you read this book and then you're good, right? Because you're being told about things that you might not experience for decades from now.

And so I think what I tried to do, what I've tried to do in the daily data, which is also in email every day, is one piece of kind of timeless parenting advice from people who are better at it than me, that you can start the morning or the evening just thinking about. And again, people have been parents for as long

as there have been people. And some of them have been really good. Some of them have not been so good. And we should learn from both of those things. And again, why are you learning by trial and error when you could be integrating into your experience some of the wisdom of people who've come before you. So that's what the daily Dad's trying to do.

Any final thoughts or any advice to this group that literally changes the save lives on a day, simply people can count on that and any advice that I'm using? You know, I was obviously I watched the Kings and the playoffs this year, it was incredible. Like the beat. Yeah, so great. We have a lot of warrior fans here too. Ah. Ah.

Ah. I just think it's such a great example of a franchise that's struggled for a really long time. And then you make one tweak, you get a different coach in, you get maybe one extra player, then the, you know, people get a different coach in, you get maybe one extra player, then the people get, like, organizations can turn around like that. Or a ceiling that you thought was unbreakable

can just be shattered in a second. The converse is true, right? You remove a key player, you mess with some part of a coacher and an organization to fall apart. But I just think, the kings had the longest playoff drought in all of sports until this year. And it feels like they are back to being the team that I was with a kid. And just it's not like it was a complete roster overall. It was a series of small tweets. And that I think that's very inspiring and exciting to me.

So I'm excited about the kids. Awesome. Right now, that way. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music,

download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.