The Only Thing New In The World | Pretend Today Is The End

We live in unprecedented times, we like to think. Our technology. Our conflicts. The state of the world. It’s all very new, it’s all very different. But is it though? Check out the Read To Lead Challenge 2022 and the Memento Mori Medallion.✉️ 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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  The only new thing in the world. We live in unprecedented times, we like to think. Our technology, our conflicts, the state of the world, it's all very new and it's all very different. But is it, though? Marcus Aurelius lived through a plague, which originated in the Far East and also civil unrest. Cato was a senator in a republic, where political dysfunction enabled a strong man to tear apart centuries-old institutions. In 1968, when Stockdale was imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton, America went through a pandemic and a massive civil rights reckoning. A couple of years later, when he was still there, the media was dominated by headlines about special congressional hearings about the alleged election-related crimes of the president.

• 1:32Ryan Holiday?

  All of this illustrates perfectly a quote from another US president, an avid reader named Harry Truman. "There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know," he said. It sounds like something Marcus would have said himself. And indeed, the idea might well have been inspired from Truman's own worn and underlined copy of Meditations.

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  History is the same thing happening over and over again, Marcus would say. There is no escape from the rhythm of events. There's nothing new in human nature. The only thing that changes are the names we give things. Is that Marcus or Harry Truman? Does it matter? The point stands. Human nature doesn't change. Gravity doesn't change. The laws of the universe don't change. If you want to understand what's happening today, if you want perspective, so it doesn't crush or overwhelm or surprise you, then you need to study the past. All leaders must be readers for this reason, Truman said. And we're lucky that he was. Will the people who follow or depend on you be able to say the same thing? And look, we actually named the Read to Lead Challenge after Truman.

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  Truman famously said that not all readers are leaders, but all leaders have to be readers. And if you want to develop a better reading practice, check out the Daily Stoic Reading Challenge at dailystoic.com/readtolead or the link in today's episode. I'd love to have you join us.

• 2:59Ryan Holiday?

  Pretend today is the end. This is Seneca's Moral Letters. This is the first entry, December 1st, from the Daily Stoic. 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon. Then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud and talk to yourself and others about them. You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold and also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com.

• 3:41Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says, let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time. Live each day as if it's your last is a cliche. Plenty of people say it, but few actually do it. How reasonable would that be anyway? Surely Seneca isn't saying that we forsake laws and considerations to find some orgy to join because the world is ending. A better analogy would be a soldier about to leave on deployment, not knowing whether they'll return or not. What do they do? They get their affairs in order. They handle their business.

• 4:25Ryan Holiday?

  They tell their children and their family that they love them. They don't have time for quarreling or petty matters. And then in the morning, they are ready to go, hoping to come back in one piece, but prepared for the possibility that they might not. Let us live today the same way. This is something that I wrestled with, right? Because I don't think the Stoics are saying, "Live as if you will die tomorrow." Right? In the sense that live as if it is certain that an asteroid is coming, that a nuclear missile has already been launched, that you're being euthanized in 24 hours. I think it's that that could happen is the way to think about it.

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. Marcus is saying, "You could leave life." Not that you will. The fact that you will, that you know for certain, it does make so many, many, many things not worth doing and pointless. Right? It makes needing to plan for the future or even thinking about the future to be totally pointless and unnecessary. Obviously, Marcus as a leader, as a ruler, as a parent, made decisions about the future all the time. He had to be. He would have been even, he would have been terrible had he not done that. It's thinking about the possibility, accepting the reality that tomorrow is not certain,

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  that gives us, I think, the perspective that we need to make better decisions day to day. If I knew for certain that I wasn't going to live tomorrow, I would stop. Or even that I knew I wasn't going to be alive 10 years from now, I'd stop saving for retirement and I'd, I'd make a bunch of different decisions. But I could live into my seventies or eighties. And so I plan and save accordingly. Right? I just also, knowing that that might not happen. I don't leave things that are important to me that I wanna do, how I wanna live. I don't leave that until I retire.

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  I take also as essential that I have to do the things that are important or interesting or exciting to me now before it's too late. And that is just a really important caveat to this whole memento mori thing. It's not memento mori, lol, nothing matters. It's on the contrary. It's that memento mori, you could leave life right now. So you have to make decisions accordingly. It's a helpful perspective that highlights the meaning of what's important, that highlights what's unimportant, as opposed to rendering everything meaningless or insignificant. We're not dancing because the world is coming to an end. That's to miss the point.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  And also to put you in a bad spot if it doesn't happen. Right?

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  So I just thought this is an important day. There's a reason this opens the month's meditation on mortality that is December of the Daily Stoic. It's really making this point because I think it's easy to forget. It's not nihilism. It's not lol, nothing matters. It's perspective. And the memento mori reminders that I have, whether it's the coin or the ring I've been wearing, you could have lots and lots and lots of bubbles left, but you could also not. And it's the tension between these two things that give us the perspective that we're talking about here. And what I wanted to leave you all with today, can't believe it's December already. I mean, time is just absolutely.

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  It's December 2022. 2023 is a month away. Seems insane. We'll have the New Year, New You challenge coming up. So stay tuned for that. Also, don't stay tuned for that in the sense of if there are changes you wanna make, things, improvements you wanna make in your life, things you wanna do, do them now. Don't wait a month. Don't wait for New Year's. Do them now.

• 8:37Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.