Try To See The World This Way | Why Facing Death Is The Key To Success

After serving as an officer in Vietnam, Paul Woodruff decided to dedicate his life to teaching and writing about philosophy. He’s been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin since 1973. He’s written half a dozen books. He’s translated the works of Plato, Thucydides, Sophocles, and Euripides. And as it happens, it all started when he discovered Marcus Aurelius as a teenager, after he was given a copy of Meditations. Professor Woodruff told this story beautifully on the Daily Stoic Podcast recently and more helpfully, he explained how he has applied what he’s learned ever since. “What I find most helpful from Marcus Aurelius is something I still frequently apply in my own life,” Professor Woodruff said.---And throughout history, Memento Mori reminders have come in many forms. To most people this sounds like an awful idea. Who wants to think about death? But what if reflecting and meditating on that fact was a simple key to living life to the fullest? ✉️ 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.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:26Ryan Holiday?

  Try to see the world this way. After serving as an officer in Vietnam, Paul Woodruff decided to dedicate his life to teaching and writing about philosophy. He's been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin since 1973. He's written half a dozen books. He's translated the works of Plato, Thucydides, Sophocles, and Euripides. And as it happens, it all started when he discovered Marcus Aurelius as a teenager, after he was given a copy of Meditations. Professor Woodruff told this story beautifully on the Daily Stoic Podcast recently. And more helpfully, he explained how he has applied what he's learned ever since.

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  "What I find most helpful from Marcus Aurelius is something I still frequently apply in my own life," he told me. And he used a slightly humorous example to explain.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I love bird watching, and I have a bird feeder. And for a while, I found myself getting angry at the squirrels that would try to steal bird seed from the feeder. And I know many bird lovers who are just fuming with anger at squirrels. And I thought about this, and I said to myself, you know, I'm actually very closely related to squirrels. They're mammals. They do what they need to get food. Everything they're doing is entirely natural to them.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  And as Marcus Aurelius says, "It's inappropriate to be angry at anyone for doing what's natural for them to do." And of course, it's natural for the squirrels to do this. So instead of being angry at them, I should just order a little more bird seed, which I did. And I've decided, I try to feel the same way about politicians I disagree with. They're like the squirrels. They do what's natural to them. It's their nature. And it's wrong for me to get fussy about people doing what comes naturally to them.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  This is very much Marcus Aurelius' way of dealing with people he finds objectionable.

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  People who are selfish, people who are obnoxious, people who are ignorant and egotistical, people who recline their seats on airplanes and frustrate you to no end. "When you come across these people," Marcus Aurelius writes, "you can hold your breath until you're blue in the face, and they'll just go on doing it. Or you can remind yourself that they're like squirrels, that they're doing what's natural to them. It's just their nature, and it's pointless to get mad at nature."

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  One of the interesting things about Memento Mori is like, when you hear it for the first time, you realize that you're actually not hearing it for the first time. And first off, most of us don't speak Latin, but there's something about Memento Mori where we kind of know how to say it. And then we start to recognize that it's been with us. Like, there's a store at Disneyland in New Orleans Square called Memento Mori. People were in it as a kid. There's famous art that you remember seeing and movies or...

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  In museums that are in that what they call vonitas or the memento mori format. Even the symbols of memento mori, the hourglass, the flower, the skull. This doesn't feel unfamiliar to us because it isn't. It's one of the oldest artistic and philosophical genres. You could even call it a trope. It's so common because humans for all time have been coming back to this thing, thinking about it, meditating on it, picking items to remind them of it, whether it's the skull on the philosopher's desk or a tattoo or a coin they carry in their pocket. It's just always been with us because death has always been with us. This wrestling with our mortality has always been with us.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  Memento mori just means remember you are mortal. Remember that you will die. Marcus Aurelius says, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. Never forget, you're mortal. You don't have forever. You could go at any moment, whether it's a pandemic or a car crash or a cancer diagnosis. Life is very short. Don't take it for granted. Don't assume you're going to live forever. Live as if you have limited time because you do have limited time. That's what memento mori means. And that's why I carry it with me everywhere I go.

• 5:35Ryan Holiday?

  I think the memento mori concept that hit me the hardest comes from Seneca. Seneca says, "Don't think of death as something in the future that we're moving towards. Think of death as something that's happening now." He says, "We're dying every minute. We're dying every day." He says, "The time that passes belongs to death. It's dead to us." So his point is that you don't look at an actuary table and go, "Oh, I've got 40 years left." You go, "Oh, I've already died, however many years I've been alive. That time is dead and gone and can never be gotten back." And when you realize then that as you are killing time, time is killing you, it changes your relationship with your life itself. And that's what memento mori is supposed to do.

• 6:17Ryan Holiday?

  It's not supposed to be morbid or depressing or paralyzing. It's supposed to be the exact opposite. It's supposed to be clarifying. It's supposed to give you priorities. It's supposed to give you perspective. It's supposed to help you realize how important the second in front of you right now is. And that if you ignore it, it dies and it's gone forever.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  Every time you see the sunset, every time you see the sunrise, you should stop, as the Stoics do, and remind yourself, you will never see that again. You'll never see that specific sunrise or specific sunset again, that's part of it. But the other thing is, that's one less that you will ever get in your life. The Stoics say, it's not that death is in the future, but that we're dying every minute, every day. Every time we see the sunset, every time we get a haircut, every time we watch a few seconds tick on the clock, you have to remind yourself that it's time you will never get back. Time is not just our most precious resource, but it's tick, tick, ticking away. It is non-renewable.

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  My memento mori practice, I bought on Etsy, I bought this chunk of a Victorian tombstone. Took forever to arrive, it came from Australia or something. And I don't want to think about or know how they got it. But it's a chunk of a tombstone from a very long time ago. It's just a piece, and all it says on it is "Dad", right? This is the chunk of someone's tombstone who was a father, who died, it's gone forever. And I have that chunk on my bathroom mirror. When I get up in the morning to brush my teeth, when I brush my teeth before I go to bed, I grab something from the bathroom, I look at that. And it's a reminder to me of so many things. One, that we're all gonna die, no matter how important people are to us, or we are to other people,

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  no matter how much we love life, not only are we going to die, but in short order, even our tombs will be forgotten. The marble that they put on our headstone will break apart and be forgotten and become trash that gets sold on the internet. But the other part of it is that the reason we can't forsake time, take it for granted, take time for granted, is the things that are important to us. That you're a father, you're a mother, that you're a son or daughter, whatever that is, that's what matters. I'm also just sobered by, inspired by, that that's the thing that someone chose to put on their tombstone. And so my memento mori practice, other than I got the coin in my pocket, I've got one on my desk, I've got a memento mori print on the wall in my office, all of that is great.

• 8:46Ryan Holiday?

  But this one is the memento mori that hits me the hardest every single time I look at it.

• 8:56Ryan Holiday?

  One part of my Memento Mori practice is whenever I'm cutting my kids' fingernails or cutting their hair, or mowing the lawn, or cutting my own fingernails, I try to think about the time that that is noting has elapsed. Time, as Seneca was saying, that we'll never get back, that's gone forever. Each time you're cutting your nails, that's one less time that you will ever do that. That's literally your body noting the time that has passed. And so, Memento Mori isn't just having this stuff. It's also noticing the signs that life is giving you. Mary Laura Pilpott, this writer I like, she was noting how your face shows your age. And she says, "Maybe that's the purpose of faces, to sort of remind you of your mortality, to remind you how not in control you are, to remind yourself what is happening to you as it's happening.

• 9:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's there, it stares you in the face," the Stoics would say. "There's no escaping it, no matter how powerful, or important, or rich, or successful, or much fun, or pleasure we're having. Time is passing us as we are doing this, never to return, never to come back. And if we can catch that as it's happening, it's less likely that we'll wake up one day in anger or disappointment and go, 'Where did all the time go?'"