"I Almost DIED" | 9 Stoic Lessons on MEMENTO MORI

While in Athens, Ryan had a near-death experience that reminded him just how short life really is. Memento Mori. 🎥 Watch today's episode on The Daily Stoic YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d3e_ymFS2I🪙 We have a collection of items in the Daily Stoic store to help you in your own memento mori practice, check them out here: https://store.dailystoic.com/📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  I almost died a few days ago, where I very easily could have died.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  I just got stung inside the mouth by a bee. So this is it for me. Tell my family I love them. Jesus Christ.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  At the very least, I had to think about my mortality in a very real and tangible way.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  I'm freaking out.

• 1:02Ryan Holiday?

  And it's an absurd story. I'm in Athens, Greece with my family. I get up early. I go for a run. I am loving life. I am feeling great. Things are going awesome. I'm watching the sun come up. I'm looking out at the Aegean. I'm maybe four and a half miles into what was supposed to be a six-mile run. And then some disgusting bug flies in my mouth. But it's not just any bug. It's a bee, and it stings me in the back of the throat. I'm not super allergic to bees, but I have had allergic reactions to them in the past. And I just read a news story a few days ago about a famous polo player in the UK dropping dead of anaphylactic shock after being stung in the mouth by a bee.

• 1:47Ryan Holiday?

  And one of the most important people in my life, my mentor, the great Robert Greene, had a stroke after being stung in the neck by a bee. So it was this surreal experience. Three days before, I'd just run from Marathon to Athens. I'd spent weeks training for this thing. I'd been running. I'd been outside. I was worried about getting hit by a car. I was worried. Worried about getting lost. I was worried, you know, maybe you end up in a bad neighborhood. I was worried, do you overexert yourself or get sunstroke? I was worried about everything but this thing. I didn't end up in an ambulance, but we had to contemplate calling one. No priest gave me my last rites. But I did have to seriously think about what the worst case scenario here is.

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  Where is this going to go? And the answer was my throat could constrict, cut off breathing. I could go into anaphylactic shock. As I'm sitting there waiting for people to get back to us, waiting for the hotel to bring ice, waiting to hear back from the doctor, I thought, of course, of philosophy. Because this is what philosophy is. The point of philosophy, Cicero said, was to learn how to die. It's for moments like this, to contemplate not just why we're here, but to face the very real and terrifying fact that at some point we go. And we don't control how, or when, or why. That's what the practice of memento mori is. And for many years, I've carried this memento mori coin with me. "You could leave life right now," it says on the back from Marcus Schrilles.

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  "Let that determine what you do and say and think." And that's what I want to talk about in today's episode. Because the Stoics, of course, talk a lot about death and this practice of memento mori. And it's something we've been talking about here at Daily Stoic for a very long time. And so that's what I thought about on my long run back to my hotel room as I tried to record a little video and text to my wife. As I sat there and waited to hear from the doctor, I thought of many of the best Stoic lessons about memento mori and about the fragility of existence. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode.

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  Why did you give the most valuable real estate in your book to death?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  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 in for all of these chapters.

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  The other people, they're irrational, not me.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, I'm not really afraid of death. I play video games and I'm always killing people. And I watch movies and people are always dying, so I'm not afraid of it. 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 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.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:01Ryan Holiday?

  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, "Memento 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. 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've become more and more insulated from tragedy, has receded from the forefront of our consciousness.

• 6:45Ryan Holiday?

  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. Memento Mori to me puts everything in perspective. As Marcus really says, it shows you what's essential and what's inessential. It 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.

• 7:29Ryan Holiday?

  So for the Stoics, memento mori was this humbling bit of perspective. It put everything in sharp focus.

• 7:39Ryan Holiday?

  A memento mori, remember you will die. Why is that something you want to wear on your person?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Because it's nice to remember that you're gonna die, right? I mean, no, seriously, I mean, I think it like causes you to live better. And there's research showing this too, right? That fast forwarding to your death, this idea of death awareness, noticing that things might go away soon, you wind up like enjoying things more. Whether it's like a local thing, like they do this with like college seniors who are about to graduate and just notice, hey, you're gonna graduate really soon. They spend their time differently when you remind them.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  Really?

• 8:07Speaker 03

  But I think for bigger things for life too, this is like, I mean, this is what the Stoics were on top of, like before anybody did these social science studies about this stuff.

• 8:14Ryan Holiday?

  Isn't it interesting how much social science studies confirm just hypotheses or arguments from ancient philosophy that they were just making up 2,000 years ago or 2,500 years ago?

• 8:26Speaker 03

  And even still, like I have a colleague, Hedy Kober, who studies meditation and a lot of kind of, you know, ancient practice from Buddhists. And I was like, you need to go do Stoicism. So she's doing a negative visualization.

• 8:36Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Studies now to try to see if that also can like, she just studies like craving and these kinds of things. Can it reduce craving? Can it make you feel better and so on? But I'm like, still new insights from them are coming in.

• 8:47Ryan Holiday?

  So do you just kind of fiddle with the ring?

• 8:48Speaker 03

  I do, yeah. That's actually another reason I don't take it to podcasts is I would whack it, you know? Like I have to take it off. Yeah, no, it just, it just like, it, you notice it every once in a while and then you. This is another one I got, which just came from Arthur Brooks, who I know you had on your show.

• 9:03Ryan Holiday?

  I think he was wearing a very similar.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so his work with the Dalai Lama, he hangs out with these monks who.

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  Did you go on that trip?

• 9:09Speaker 03

  I did not. I, I had a wedding and I was like, can you move the wedding? But I met one of the monks who was there and because of the work, they gave me this. And so it's blessed by the Dalai Lama and it's meant to remind you that you're on the path to being a Bodhisattva. And it is true that I'll be like, like literally today, driving over here, trying to get out of the main part of Austin City. And I looked at it, it was about to road rage and I was like, no, I want a path to being a Bodhisattva.

• 9:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Control of this.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  That's funny.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the reminders help.

• 9:37Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know if people agree. I like, I think people find it, people find momentum mori morbid. People find it disconcerting, depressing. I think there, there's a reason that people don't do it. They don't want to think about it.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Oh, it's disturbing. I mean, I think it's partly the disturbingness that makes it so powerful.

• 9:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Right. It like makes me a little want to like vomit in my mouth every time I think about it. But it also makes me want to put my phone away and notice the things around me and have a conversation with someone. So yeah, I think it works because it's really discombobulating.

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  And you can get desensitized to it itself a little bit. And what I think is interesting, which has never been desensitized for me is the one that Marcus Schuris talks about in Meditations, which he's cribbing from Epictetus. He says, as you tuck your child in at night, say to yourself, they will not make it till the morning.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  So there's something about momentum mori for yourself. You just be like, yeah, of course I'm going to die. I always knew this. Hopefully, but, but it's when, if you have to meditate on losing someone or something so precious to you, that you never become desensitized to that. It is always a very powerful, sobering, humbling and a little bit terrifying thought to run through your mind. And there's something about the human mind that doesn't want to consider it precisely because of all those things.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes. But what's amazing about the human mind is that you can just instantly switch your reference point with a little bit of imagination. Right. And I think this was one of the Stoic insights, like. If you actually have a bad thing happen to you, that changes your reference point. Like I actually lose my phone like while on this trip. Oh my God, this is a pain in the butt. I gotta get, I never realized how much I appreciated my phone, but I get the new phone. It's like, oh, a phone. It's so useful. I can look at the math and so on.

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  But what's amazing is we don't actually have to go through the actual terrible thing. We can just simulate it very briefly.

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  And this is, I think Marcus Aurelius' insight, right? Like every morning you should wake up and think, I might, you know, get shunned. I might lose my job. I might lose my, my legs won't work and stuff. And I think that, that's amazing that we have the power to do that, that we don't actually have to face the real consequences, but we can psychologically reset our reference point. It's such a good hack.

• 11:56Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously the thing we all dread most is something happening to our kids. No parent ever wants to bury a child. And unfortunately it's true. One day our children will die, we ourselves will die. But the Stoics remind us that simply seeing death as this tragedy, this thing that's out there that could happen to you at some point in the future. It says you actually have to think of death as something that's happening now. It says the time that passes belongs to death. So however old your kids are, those are years that they'll never get back, that you'll never get back. So we have to spend our time wisely. We have to be with our kids when we're with our kids. When Marcus Aurelius tells himself, as you tuck your children in at night, say to yourself, they may not make it to the morning. What he's trying to do is make sure that he doesn't rush through this thing. Only get to do so many times. In the midst of life, we are in death.

• 12:41Ryan Holiday?

  As we kill time, as time passes, it is killing us and it is gone forever. And so is that five-year-old and six-year-old and seven-year-old and eight-year-old and 18-year-old. They'll never get that again, so be there for it while it's here.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  I'm in Lake Boeotia in Greece and one of the crazy parts of this insanely beautiful place is that there are these little fish in the water and they're eating the skin off of your feet. They're eating your dead skin. And it makes me think of that line from Seneca where he said, "Death isn't a thing that happens at the end." He says, "We're wrong to think of death as something we're moving towards." He says, "Death is happening right now." His point is that we're dying every minute. We're dying every day. And there's something about this sensation of them eating the skin off of your body, the dead skin off of your body, that makes you realize that you are covered in death. Even in life, we are in the midst of death. The getting older, that falling apart, that decay. Death, it's not a thing that happens at the end. It's happening now. We're dying

• 13:42Speaker 01

  every minute. We're dying every second. We're falling apart every minute, every second. Entropy is working on us. Old age is working on us. Death is coming for us in little tiny pieces, in the form of flesh, in the form of your hair falling out, in the form of your muscles and bones getting weaker, even though we can't always perceive it. We are always aging. We are always dying. And that's the Stoic lesson of memento mori. Not just that you could go at any moment, but that you are in fact going at every moment. And that's why we have to be so conscious of how we spend our time, because the way we spend our time is how we are spending our lives. And quite literally, we are spending

• 14:22Speaker 01

  our life, our most precious resource, on everything that we do. And to waste it is to waste the most essential thing that there is.

• 14:34Ryan Holiday?

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. We're given this precious gift, existence, and then we spend it arguing with people on the internet, responding to emails that we should delete, gossiping.

• 14:47Ryan Holiday?

  Whining, we sit in boring meetings, we stay in jobs that we should quit, or even sadder, we hide parts of ourselves because we don't think people are gonna understand or appreciate it. We hold back from pursuing the things we wanna pursue because we don't think they're that important. And in this, living is a kind of death. That's something that Marcus Aurelius points out. He says, "You're afraid of death because you can't do this anymore?" And this is the power of this exercise of memento mori. It reminds us that we only have this life that we have right now, and how we spend it is everything. It's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it. And we waste it not being and doing the things we should be doing and being.

• 15:33Ryan Holiday?

  We all wanna live a long life. None of us wanna die. Some of us wanna live forever, but then what do we spend this life on? What are our lives actually like? There's a story we hear about a Roman emperor who was walking by a criminal who was condemned to death, and the man is begging to be spared. The emperor looks at him, he says, "Oh, you're alive, are you?" And Seneca tells us this story because for many of us, the way we choose to live our lives, the things we spend our time on is, in a sense, a kind of form of death, or at the very least, it's a waste. And he says, "Life isn't short, we just waste a lot of it. We waste a lot of it on nonsense. We waste a lot of it barely even being alive."

• 16:16Ryan Holiday?

  So, instead of thinking about getting more time, instead of thinking about being a medical miracle or whatever, why don't you just think about something that's much more attainable, much more in your control, which is how you spend the time you have right now?

• 16:35Ryan Holiday?

  I get that you all want to live for a long time. That's fantastic. I hope that you all live to 180 or beyond. Although, I did become good friends with a man here in Austin named Richard Overton, who was 112 years old when he died. He was the oldest man in the world. I would come and sit on his porch sometimes. Not to spoil all your very expensive and fascinating strategies, he did smoke cigars, drink whiskey, and eat ice cream every single day.

• 17:08Ryan Holiday?

  And all the times that I spent with Richard, he never once said, "I need to live a lot longer." Look, it's wonderful to live a long time, and many of the Stoics did live into their 80s and 90s. This is all great. I wish you the best. I hope I live that long. But the question is, why? What for? Right? Why do you need to live to be 180? Why do you need all this extra time? Is it so you can spend more time on your phone? Is it so you can make more money that you won't spend? Is it so you can attend more conferences? That's one of my favorite passages in Meditations. Marcus really says, "You're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore." And I think about that every time I have to go to the DMV or I'm sitting in traffic.

• 17:51Ryan Holiday?

  I go, "This is what I need to live forever to experience more of?" Right? You want to live longer so you can spend more time being anxious and jealous and angry? Right? That's obviously not what it's about. I would like to spend more time with my kids. That would be a wonderful reason to have more time, for them to have more time, right? Spending time with family, spending time with loved ones is wonderful. But how much of that time do we waste right now? Right? I have a sign in my office. It's Dr. Oliver Sacks. And it says, him in his office, he had a sign behind him that says, "No." And I had that between two pictures of my kids

• 18:35Ryan Holiday?

  to remind myself that when I am saying yes to things, I am often saying no to them. Right? We say we want more time, and then we waste so much of that time. We want more of the thing we're terrible at managing. Seneca said that if you put all the wisest people in the world in one room, they would still struggle to come up with an answer for why we value our property and our money more than our time when one is the most ephemeral of resources. If you want to keep your Stoicism journey going, every single day at this computer,

• 19:19Ryan Holiday?

  I write one Stoic-inspired email that I give away totally for free to people all over the world. There's no spam. You can unsubscribe at any time, and you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.