Live Now, While You Still Can

We only get one life. Once time ticks by, it never comes back.🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 VIDEO EPISODES| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues— courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom—into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  We're busy, we're tired, we have so much to do. We had dreams once, sure, but they slowly deflated. The mortgage, the kids, the job, watching TV. That's how we fill our days. It's a slow downward spiral that Bruce Springsteen sang about in "Racing in the Street." "Some guys, they just give up living," he sang, "and start dying little by little, piece by piece." If you're not that guy, you at least know him or her. They're the mainstay of the modern world: overworked, undersexed, overtired, and underappreciated. Facebook is to blame, right? The capitalist pigs are responsible, yeah? It's because of the 24-hour news cycle. Certainly, none of those things help, but the truth is that this is a timeless problem.

• 1:00Ryan Holiday?

  It goes back much further than Bruce, or even this century, because Seneca spoke about those guys too. "How much time has been lost to groundless anguish," he writes. "Greed, desire, the charms of society, how little is left to you from your own store of time." "Wake up," he says, "stop sleepwalking. Stop giving away what you can never give back." That's from his essay, "The Shortness of Life," where he tries to get the reader, as Bruce Springsteen does in his best songs, to realize that you are dying before your time. We only get one life. Once time ticks by, it never comes back. Yes, each of us will die, that's a fact. But for the moment, we are alive, which is why we have to live,

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  which is why we have to protect our time, our dreams, and our spirit. We can't give it up piece by piece. We can't start dying before our time. We have to live now, while we still can.