Why Thinking About Your Death Will Save Your Life

Meditating on death isn’t depressing, it’s clarifying. In this episode, Ryan explains how the Stoic practice of Memento Mori will sharpen your priorities, push you to stop wasting time, and remind you to live with character now, not later. 🪙 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/🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.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.

• 0:00Ryan 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.

• 0:14Ryan Holiday?

  You should spend more time in cemeteries. I promise, it's not depressing. And there's a reason that the ancients, like the Stoics, actively meditated on their mortality, this idea of memento mori. So here's why spending more time around dead people, thinking about death, will make you better.

• 0:33Ryan Holiday?

  It might seem like spending time in cemeteries is depressing, but it isn't. And it's not only not depressing, it's really important. Cemeteries remind us of our death, they remind us of our mortality. But in meditating on the shortness of life, the Stoics tell us, we are invigorated, we're reminded of what's important, we're given a chance to actually live.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  The big mistake is to think of death as something that's far off in the future. You understand, oh, at the end of your life, you'll end up somewhere like this. But that's precisely wrong, Seneca tells us. Death isn't this thing that happens to us once at the end. He said, "It's not that we're moving forward towards death. It's that death is happening right now. In the midst of life, we are in death." Seneca wanted us to understand that, in fact, we're dying constantly. He says, "We're dying every minute, we're dying every day. The time that passes belongs to death." It's not at the end of your life that you die once. In fact, at the end of your life, you have died all the years that you have lived. And that's one of the things that you feel when you're in the cemetery. You're reminded that death is all around you, all the time, and that what you take

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  back when you go to your actual life, when you return to the real world, is a reminder that every second that's ticking by is consequential. It matters. It's the most important thing in the world, because it's the one thing you can never get back. Even as you watch this video, you are dying. As you waste time on the internet, as you waste time chasing things that you don't need, as you get caught up in gossip or grievances, you are paying for that with the most important thing there is, which is your time, which is your life.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Death isn't the worst thing that can happen to you. The Stoics would want you to understand that. They would much rather you live a short life, one of dignity and honor and decency and value and character, than to live for a long time, but to sustain that life by compromising, by betraying, by being a bad person. And they would also say like, like, life can kick the shit out of you, and it will. This guy, this is the Will Barger tomb. This guy was scalped by Native Americans in the river here in 1832. We can put the blood feud between the Native Americans and the pioneers aside and just go, "That would be awful." He was scalped and somehow survived. Think about how much pain he would have been in.

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  Think about how hard it would have been to continue. Think about what the rest of his life was like. Seneca has this great line. He talks about how sometimes even to live is an act of courage. To not despair, to not give up, to keep fighting, to cling to life, not in a pathetic way, but in a courageous way. Obviously, it's worth remembering that all of our ancestors suffered horribly. They went through almost unimaginable ordeals and the perseverance and the fortitude that sustained them in that. It's just a good reminder in our relatively cushy, modern problems that you can get through this, that you come from people who got through this. And when you walk through a cemetery and you see the families that carried on after the loss of a loved one, you see the dates and you realize

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  they, they lived through the Spanish Flu or the Civil War or all sorts of horrible things. They kept going, they didn't give up. The Stoics talk about it's shameful to give up when, when you've still got something left, when there's still life you could live, there's still good you should do. And whenever I'm somewhere like this, that, that's something that, that always pops into my mind.

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  We protect our property, we safeguard our money, but then we're frivolous like the most valuable thing there is. Seneca said, "It's the craziest thing in the world, that we are reckless with the thing we should be most miserly about." He's talking about our time. Time is the most precious resource. It's the only non-renewable resource. You're not getting any more and it's tick, tick, ticking away every second. And yet, because you're afraid to say no, because you have trouble focusing, because you don't want to hurt someone's feelings, because your priorities are out of whack, you're wasting your time. You are paying for this thing with your life, whether we're talking about scrolling or stupid meetings or your neighbor who won't stop gossiping

• 4:44Ryan Holiday?

  or that person who's always stirring up drama in your life. You are wasting the most precious thing that you have. You are doing things that you shouldn't be doing, only going to hit you what you have paid for that at the end of your life, when suddenly you are desperate for time. Every single person in this cemetery puts stuff off, as we all do, telling themselves they would get to it later. Maybe they got to some of it, but they certainly did not get to all of it. And that is the tragedy of procrastination. That is the arrogance of procrastination. The presumption that you have later, that you will get another chance. "You could be good today," Marx really says in Meditations, "but instead you choose tomorrow, because you think you have tomorrow, because you think magically tomorrow you're going to be the person that's doing the thing that the person today is not doing."

• 5:29Ryan Holiday?

  Don't do it later, do it now. Now you have a chance. Now you can do it for sure. Don't regret not doing it later, do it now. Better at managing your time, get better at saying no, get your priorities in order, or you will waste your life.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  There's a famous line in an Eschelus play, Agamemnon. Cassandra is the prophet that can see the future, but she's cursed that no one will ever listen. And she says, when she comes home, knowing that Agamemnon is going to be murdered by his wife, she says, "I can smell the open grave." Meaning she can smell that death is on this person. They're marked for it, but they don't know it. I'm just sitting here in this cemetery and they just reinterred or worked on this grave. Someone who's been dead for 65 years. We all have that mark of death on us. Like, we think about this idea, like, what would I do if I found out I had cancer? If I got a terminal diagnosis? What if someone could predict my death? But you do have a terminal diagnosis.

• 6:35Ryan Holiday?

  Someone can predict your death. All of us are mortal. The doctor knew with absolute certainty when we were born that we were going to die. It's just that because we feel healthy, it's just because the average lifespan is incredibly long these days in a way that the ancients couldn't have even imagined the average person living through because infant mortality then was so high. And we think we're gonna live forever. We think we're the exception and we're not. It's gonna happen for all of us. We have to live accordingly. We have to make the right decisions as a result. We have to cut out the things that are wasting our time. Steve Jobs talked about this in his famous commencement address. He was talking about how life is short. It's uncertain for all of us, as it tragically was for him. He said, "It's too short to spend it living somebody else's life, following somebody else's track."

• 7:20Ryan Holiday?

  That's one of my favorite questions from Mark Schriles in Meditations. He says, "You're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this anymore?" And by this, I take it to mean all the indignities and stupid things that we spend our time doing. Like, do you want to live forever so you can go to the DMV more? So you can scroll on your phone more? So you can hold grudges more? So you can covet more things? That's not a life worth extending. Okay, so I'm not saying that life is meaningless and you should just die. I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying you should try to live a life that is worth being long. That's the tragedy, Seneca says. How many people at their end of their life, all they have to show for it is a large number? That's not what we're after. That's not meaningful. That's not what philosophy is fighting to try to make us.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  So this decision to cut out the inessential, to do what actually matters, to live the life we are meant to live, to be brave and to be authentic, to be real, to chase and value the right things, that's what memento mori reminds us.

• 8:20Ryan Holiday?

  So this is the Kesselis family tomb. They came to Bastrop in the 1850s and they built a little building on Main Street, which housed a shop that he owned and he built a house down the street. His son, Will, who, this is him, that's the father, this is Will, carried on the business when his father died in 1901. Well, I own that building now. The building has changed hands dozens of times in the decades since it left the Kesselis family, which by the way, is what happens to all our possessions. The things you love, the things you care about, eventually someone is going to possess them, that is to say, if they don't throw them away. There's a story about Epictetus, he had this lamp that was stolen and you'd think he'd be upset. Instead, he goes, "Look, you can only lose what you have."

• 9:05Ryan Holiday?

  And he goes back and he replaces it the next day with something cheaper. But the funny part is that after he died, one of his students bought it for a lot of money. He wanted to possess something that Epictetus had possessed. Of course, totally missing the point of the lesson. Now, again, the lesson isn't, "You should never have anything and you shouldn't care about anything, you should give away all your possessions like a monk." No, it's just a reminder that, as the Stoics say, "We only own this stuff in trust. We have it temporarily." Not just the job, not just the house, not just the place we currently stand or operate, but everything in our life is only ours for as long as we are lucky to have it. I heard someone say, and I think about this with where I live on this ranch out not far from here, he says, "The bank is just letting me make payments on it."

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  Like, you don't even own it, you have it temporarily. And if you can think about it that way, you're not only going to be more insured against the ups and downs in life, you're going to know the proper perspective on things. It helps me relax with my children. I don't have to take everything so seriously, I don't have to stress about everything. I don't own it. We remind ourselves that we don't really own this stuff, that it's only ours temporarily. So the day when we have to give it up, whether it's while we're living or at the end of our life, we're okay with that, we're okay giving it back. I actually had a friend of mine who died not that long ago, and he wrote about this, saying, "I'm ready to give the gift back." That's what he was saying about his life itself, ready to return the gift. And that's a very Stoic idea. All of it, it's only temporary, we only get it for a little bit.

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  Who was the most famous person in this cemetery? Who was this person who had this monument erected to them? How big was their obituary in the newspaper? How many people attended their funeral? How many things still bear their name in this little town or in this state? Marcus Aurelius would say, "It doesn't matter." Right? He says, "Those who long for posthumous fame," he says, "they're chasing the wrong thing." He says, "Because, one, they won't be around to remember it." And even if people do remember them, inevitably, we all are forgotten. You know, there's still an enormous column in Rome in honor of Marcus Aurelius's achievement. But what good does it do him, hoping to be vindicated by history?

• 11:19Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "That's also empty, because people in the future are going to be pretty stupid and annoying and shortsighted, too." Even if you are remembered by the next generation, or the next generation. He says, "Like candles lighting each other, eventually, it sputters and goes out." He lists all the emperors who come before him. You know, he says, "Who remembers the name Vespasian, or this emperor, or that emperor?" And those were some of the most famous people in the world. You and I are almost certainly not those people. So to chase fame, to chase attention, to think that you can't transcend death that way is silly, and it is disproven by the historical record. Even the few exceptions to that rule, like a Marcus Aurelius, it doesn't do them any good. So, meditating on our mortality, it reminds us to stop chasing things that don't matter.

• 12:04Ryan Holiday?

  It reminds us that legacy is not for us. We don't get to enjoy it. So what we should do is be present here in this present moment, because that's the one thing we do have for certain.

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  And what about the wealthiest person in this cemetery? Who paid to put up this enormous monument? Again, does it really matter? You don't get to take the money with you when you die. There's the famous Thomas Gray poem, "Elegy," written in a country courtyard. And he talks about how all the paths of glory lead ultimately to the grave. Everything evens out. Here, in this way, we're all made equal again. I'm not saying that money is bad. I'm not saying that that providing for your family after you're gone isn't also important. But it's just a reminder as as we chase more than we could ever possibly need, as we give up the the most valuable thing in the world, which is our life, which is our happiness, which is our time, in exchange for more and more and more,

• 13:01Ryan Holiday?

  often doing things that make us miserable so we could have this thing that we hope to someday enjoy in the future, which is not actually guaranteed. Cemeteries remind us what's actually important. They remind us to prioritize what's actually important. No one is going to remember how much money you had. No one cares about that. You're not going to care about that in your last moments. And in fact, you would give all of that money back to have a few more minutes with the people you love, the people you neglected, the things you took for granted, the people, by the way, you said you were doing it all for. You would give everything to have a few more minutes with them. Right now, you have it. That's what Memento Mori reminds us of.

• 13:41Ryan Holiday?

  Your wealth will disappear, your body will decay. Eventually, you'll be forgotten. It happens to all of us. Right outside Rome, there's the famous Appian Way. It's paved with these stones that have been smoothed over by centuries and centuries of traffic. And it's lined with the tombs and graves of some of the most famous and powerful Roman families ever. We think, because most of them have been totally forgotten. That was something that Marcus Hurrely said about Alexander the Great, that the most powerful man in the world and his mule driver were both buried in the same earth, that death is this great equalizer. And so is the merciless progression of time. The same is true for Seneca and Marcus Hurrely and Epictetus. Even though we know their names, we do, the vast majority of people do not.

• 14:24Ryan Holiday?

  Their fame, their power, their wealth did nothing to forestall the ultimate and inevitability of their death. This is why they used to whisper in the ear of the emperor in his moment of greatest triumph, "Memento Mori, remember you are mortal." They should also have said, "Sic transit, Gloria mundi." All glory is fleeting. None of it lasts. None of us last. Let's manage our egos and our ambitions accordingly.

• 14:51Ryan Holiday?

  So if we all end up in the same place, am I saying that nothing matters? That you shouldn't care? That you shouldn't try? You shouldn't try to make a difference? I'm actually saying the exact opposite. I went for a run outside Philadelphia one time. It was snowy. I sort of got hopelessly lost. And I came across this old Revolutionary War cemetery. I was looking at these little gravestones. And one of them stood out. I walked up to it, and what it said changed my life. It said, "Verses on tombstones are but idly spent. The living character is the monument." It was saying that it's not about how beautiful your gravestone is, how well attended your funeral is. It's not about how long you are remembered. It's about what you did in your life. And I think the Stoics would say,

• 15:34Ryan Holiday?

  "What you did with your life for the common good." Look, this is a grave here. It's surrounded by a fence. It's still well-maintained. It's got a little historical placard. But the person who it's honoring, Joseph Sayers, is a traitor. He was a Confederate general. He was a bad person. With a good chunk of his life, he raised up arms against his country, fighting for arguably the worst cause in human history. Now, some people can whitewash that. They can put up monuments to him. They can still celebrate him. But it's indisputable. He did a bad thing and fundamentally was a bad human being. That's the monument. How we live our life, what we do with our life. So that's the reminder. It's not that our life doesn't matter. Our life does matter.

• 16:18Ryan Holiday?

  But a good life, Marcus Rilis tells us, "The fruit of a good life is good character and acts for the common good." What have you done for others? How did you spend your time? What were the relationships you built? Did you leave this place better than you found it? That's the goal of Stoicism. It's not, "I left it better than I found it, and I'm remembered for all time, and my kids don't have to work hard because I left them a huge legacy." No, the legacy is the example that you set, that your character was good, that you proved that you believed the things that you said. That's the line from Marcus Rilis. That we don't talk about philosophy. We try to live it, right? We try to put it into practice. That is the ultimate lesson of Memento Mori. Not to do it later, but to do it now, while we still can.

• 17:04Ryan Holiday?

  So in my pocket, I carry this coin. It's a reminder. It says "Memento Mori" on the front. There's a famous set of symbols you see in a lot of art. A skull, that's death. It's flower, that's life. And then the hourglass, that's time. "We're dying every minute," as Seneca says, "that we're all mortal, that we're all marked for death, and that we should live accordingly." "Memento Mori," remember you are mortal. It has a quote from Marcus Schubert on the back. "You could leave life right now," he's saying. "Let that determine what you do and say and think." It's not depressing, it's not demoralizing, it's invigorating. And that's what the sort of Memento Mori practice is all about.