Every Single Day Is the Same

"As the pandemic has dragged on, you’ve probably found yourself asking one question, over and over again, to anyone who will listen—even to yourself: What day is it? It’s a simple question, but also a very revealing one."Ryan explains why the days seem to be blending together, and the Stoic insights that can help you make sense of this phenomenon, in today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good 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 at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Every single day is the same. As the pandemic has dragged on, you've probably found yourself asking one question over and over again to anyone who will listen, even to yourself. It's a simple but essential one. What day is it? With less travel, with no meetings, and for many of us, not even a commute to work, time and place seem to have slowed down or merged. The week and weekend blur, the hours both drag and go by in an instant. All is one. We're like that character in the new movie Palm Springs, trapped in some sort of space continuum where every day is the same day on repeat. And while this may seem miserable, you may also find yourself coming

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  to almost enjoy it, as the other character in that movie did. Is it really so bad to spend all this time with your family? Is it really so bad to live a quieter, slower life? Yes, it is costing you money. It's canceling your plans. It's disrupting so much. And yet, all things that go on long enough with time, even this distress, has become muted, even pleasant. Perhaps it was this very feeling that Marcus Aurelius was referring to in Meditations, as he reflected on both the current moment, going through a plague, and the decades of his youth waiting to become emperor. "Everything has always been the same," he said, "and keeps recurring. It makes no difference whether you see the

• 1:51Ryan Holiday?

  same things recur in 100 years or 200, or in an infinite period, that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all that you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose." Marcus talked about how it didn't matter what Whether you lived to be forty or four hundred, every day was the same. It was all the same in the end. So yes, this whole thing is strange and surreal. It's at times terrifying and not without its heartbreaks. But it also just is. Each day we wake up and face another, whether it will mark our ninetieth day in quarantine or the start of ninety more, who can say? And what does it matter? Today is what's in front of us, whatever day of

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  the week it happens to be. It can be wonderful. It can be enough if we choose. Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. You can sign up to get our daily email at dailystoic.com/email. I also encourage you, if you want to take your practice of Stoicism to the next level, to sign up for Daily Stoic Life, which is our members-only program. It's got all sorts of awesome benefits. You can check that out at dailystoiclife.com.