Joy Even So (Part 2) | Pretend Today Is The End

On his way to work each day in Boston, John Adams would hear a man singing. As his great biographer David McCollough writes in John Adams, it was a beautiful, almost joyful song that inspired him as he headed to his law office in the mornings. One day, Adams decided to track the source of the music down. Inside a single room house, packed to the brim with a large family, he found a poor shoemaker. Sensing that the man was struggling, Adams ordered a pair of shoes as a gesture of charity. As they settled the transaction, Adams asked if the man had trouble getting by.✉️ 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 the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  Joy Even So, Part Two. On his way to work each day in Boston, John Adams would hear a man singing. As his great biographer David McCullough writes in John Adams, "It was a beautiful, almost joyful song that inspired him as he headed into his law office in the mornings." One day, Adams decided to track down this source of music. Inside a single-room house packed to the brim with a large family, he found a poor shoemaker. Sensing that the man was struggling, Adams ordered a pair of shoes as a gesture of charity. As they settled the transaction, Adams asked if the man had trouble getting by. "Sometimes," the man said. Yet, as soon as Adams left, the singing resumed, just as beautifully,

• 1:21Ryan Holiday?

  Adams noted, as a nightingale. The contrast of it all struck him deeply. Here was a man who was, by his own admission, struggling. Here was a man who lived in obvious poverty, in stifling conditions, but filled the world with happy music, not for the show of it, but out of his own abundance of joy. "Who is the greatest philosopher?" Adams would say as he reflected on the man's example, "Epictetus or this shoemaker?" We don't tend to think of the Stoics as joyful, happy people, but they were. They had to be. Epictetus didn't get through those years of slavery without a sense of humor. Indeed, his lectures make that clear. Marcus Aurelius could not have endured all that tragedy and struggle without an eye for beauty and art.

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  John Adams tried to follow this example also, having read not only the Stoics, but was inspired by the shoemaker on his way to work. Griefs upon griefs, disappointment upon disappointment. What then? This is a gay and merry world notwithstanding. That was his epitaph, as we said. We don't know if the Stoics like to sing, but we must imagine them happy, infectiously happy, because they were, which is a wonderful thing for you to aspire to be also.

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  Pretend today is the end. This is Seneca's Moral Letters. This is the first entry, December 1st, from the Daily Stoic. 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.

• 3:29Ryan Holiday?

  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, 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."

• 3:56Ryan Holiday?

  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. 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?

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  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. It would have been terrible had he not done that. It's thinking about the possibility, accepting the reality that tomorrow is not certain, that gives us, I think, the perspective that we need to make better decisions today. 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. I'd make a bunch of different decisions.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  But I could live into my 70s or 80s. 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 want to do, how I want to live. I don't leave that until I retire. 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.

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  So you have to make decisions accordingly. It's a helpful perspective that highlights the beating 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, that's to miss the point. And also to put you in a bad spot if it doesn't happen, right? Uh, so I, I just thought this is an important day. There's a reason this opens the month, the month's meditation on mortality that is December of the Daily Stoic. It's, it's, it's really making this point because I think it's easy to forget. It's not nihilism.

• 6:53Ryan Holiday?

  It's not little, nothing matters. It's perspective. It's perspective. And the memento mori reminders that I have, whether it's the coin or the ring I've been wearing, the memento mori poster that we've done, where you fill in how much, 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, we'll have the new year, new you challenge coming up, so stay tuned for that. But also don't stay tuned for that in the sense of if there are changes you want to make, things, improvements you want to make in your life,

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  things you want to do, do them now. Don't wait a month, don't wait for New Year's, do them now.