Have A Near-Death Experience Every Morning

Ryan talks about the importance of thinking about what you will do when you get thrown for a loop. Check out the Memento Mori medallion in the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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 at DailyStoic.com.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Have a near-death experience every morning. Seneca nearly died in his early twenties. He had always struggled with a lung condition, but moving from rural Spain to the congested, polluted city of Rome caused some kind of flare-up. It was so painful, he said, he had the impulse to end his life. Seneca never fully recovered. The flare-up never unflared, never died down or faded away. He said that he lived in a state of a sort of continued last gasp. All the physician could do was tell him to get really good, practicing how to die. Now, there's nothing that puts life in perspective like a near-death experience. There's also nothing, it could be argued, that has produced better art.

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  Montaigne had a near-death experience. George Lucas had one. Stephen King had one. Robert Greene had one. We recently talked to Jonathan Church on the Daily Stoic Podcast about his terminal cancer diagnosis. These experiences, as they did for Seneca, change a person. Should we seek out near-death experiences like this, then? No, you can model one. In his book, Show Your Work, Austin Kleon talks about how he reads the obituaries each morning. He says, "Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. Reading them is a way for me to think about death while also keeping it at arm's length." "Obituaries aren't really about death. They're about life. Reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live." So try that. Read the obituaries this morning, not to be depressed, but to be inspired by the people who are not so different from you, who struggled like you struggled, who feared like you feared, but who did great things in the time while they were here, like you can, who died, like you will. And then close the obits. Go live. Go do the things you hope one day will be written in your obituary.

• 2:28Ryan Holiday?

  There's one thing that I carry with me every day, and it's our memento mori coin. It goes in my left pocket of my jeans. And since we made the coin in 2016, we sold tens of thousands of them to people all over the world. And we hear from them every day that it's part of their daily routine and their daily carry. I think the reason is that it helps you keep your priorities in check. Somebody cuts you off in line, you don't get mad. You realize that we could leave life right now. And we should let that determine what we do and say and think. Suddenly, in the context of mortality, so much ceases to feel like a big deal. And the same goes with wasting time on social media or mindlessly watching TV. None of this is a good use of the very finite existence that we have.

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  And this memento mori exercise is not only one of the most important parts of Stoicism, it's one of the most important personal changes I've made in my own life over the last few years. I think you'll get a lot out of it, too. Check it out at dailystoic.com/coin if you want to learn more.