We Face The Path Of Time

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom, designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  We face the path of time. It didn't matter that he was powerful. It didn't matter that he was wise. It didn't matter that so many people depended on him. Didn't matter that he kept the same stern and rigorous habits of his youth. Marcus Aurelius was getting old. He, like all of us, faced the path of time. Indeed, he walked it every day like we do, going in only one direction: older, further away from our younger self, never to return. We catch Marcus in meditations as the reality of this is sinking in. He had always meditated on death. That's the practice of memento mori. But now he was no longer a young man. In fact, he was a marked man. It's a painful realization, one that too many of us try to deny or distract ourselves from. We push the thought away.

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  We fantasize about breakthroughs in medicine or discovery of the fountain of youth. We think other people are old, but us? We still feel the same as we always do, so we pretend like nothing changed. Seneca was rudely awakened from this impression on a visit to his boyhood home. The sight of it was disappointing, especially the old and dying trees which ringed the house. In his youth, the house had been surrounded by lively, fresh, and green trees. In fact, he had helped plant them himself. That's when Seneca got hit with the dose of the reality he could not escape. These were the same trees of his youth, and they were coming to the end of their lives, and by extension, so was he. Again, none of Seneca's habits, his cold plunges, his strict diets, his workouts in the gymnasium could change this.

• 1:59Ryan Holiday?

  We all face the path of time. We all get older. We all eventually inevitably die. We are marked men. A memento mori.