This Is How You Should Think About It | 3 Stoic Exercises to Stop Taking Life for Granted

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• 1:28Speaker 00

  This is how you should think about it. It's not always going to be fun. Sometimes it's going to be the opposite of fun. There will be obligations. It will be painful. It will be obnoxious, but that is life. We have responsibilities. We are not always in control. In meditations, Marcus really has had an interesting quote. He asked rhetorically, are you afraid of dying because you won't be able to do this anymore? And we can take this to refer to any of those obligations and activities we just discussed, the ones we dislike and resent. His implication is if you're not having fun, then why are you clinging to life so hard? But another way to think about this, though, would be why don't you figure out how to enjoy these seemingly unpleasant things?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  The Stoics say that our life is dyed by the quality of our thoughts. Well, if you want to have a life that feels worth keeping, why don't you start by loving even the pedestrian painful moments? Yes, I do want to keep washing the dishes. Yes, I am glad to be at the DMV. Yeah, I know people block the sidewalk because they're distracted walking on their phones. But the miracle and absurdity of life is more salient to me than the petty annoyance. We are lucky to do these things. Let us think and act like it. Amento, moe.

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• 5:33Speaker 00

  So I've got bad news. You're all going to die. Every single one of us in this room is going to die. There's no exceptions to this rule. I'm not known for my predictions, but I feel pretty confident about this one. In fact, death is the one prophecy that has never failed. And I'm not disputing the fact that there have been all sorts of amazing, important breakthroughs in technology and in medicine. We're living longer than ever before. This is wonderful. I would never deny that. But the heartbreaking fact remains that of everyone who has been born,

• 6:14Speaker 00

  the mortality rate remains at a steady 100%. And it's not going anywhere anytime soon. It's just a reality of life. Everyone that's born dies. In 1569, a French nobleman named Michel de Montaigne was thrown off a galloping horse. It was a horrendous accident. And as he lay sort of broken and bloodied on the ground, he was more or less given up for dead. His friends carried his limp body back to his house. And he said he could feel life sort of dancing on the tip of his lips. It was coming in and out of consciousness. And he actually remembered feeling

• 6:57Speaker 00

  that if he went to sleep, he would never wake up. He was, his grasp on life was that tenuous. And somehow he lives. And this experience fundamentally changes him. He'd sort of idled through life up until this point. He'd mostly done what other people wanted him to do. Wasn't particularly motivated. And this experience, this brush with death, this reminder of his mortality, it energizes him. And a few years later, he publishes his first book of essays. He actually invents the essay. He becomes one of Europe's most celebrated writers. He becomes a confidant of the king. He serves as a diplomat. He travels all over Europe, even becomes mayor of his hometown.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  It's a fascinating sort of rejuvenation of his life. And in a way, it's kind of a timeless story, right? A brush with death changes life. We hear about someone who finds out they have cancer and they quit their job and they dedicate themselves to some cause. And it's the turning point in their lives. We hear about someone who finds out they don't have long to live and it reminds them to reach out and reconnect with someone. It rejuvenates their relationships. And sometimes I think we even think about what we would do if we found out that we had a short time to live. If we were in the doctor's office and the doctor came in and he put his hand on our shoulder and he said, you know, you have cancer. You only have a short time to live. Well, the interesting thing is we do have cancer, right? We do only have a short time to live.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  The prognosis was terminal the day you were born, right? That's the bad news, right? The bad news is you're going to die. The good news is now that I've reminded you of this fact, now that we're here talking about this uncomfortable truth, you have a choice, right? How will you live? How will you respond? Who will you be knowing that your death is an eventual reality, right? And what's so interesting is that in the modern world, we can lose track of that connection to death, right? In the ancient world, death was a fundamental reality. It was a direct part of people's day-to-day experiences. The plague could come and decimate an entire town or an entire country.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  A war could break out and everyone might lose a family member or they might have to fight it themselves and witness death up close. Death wasn't always so antiseptic and distant, right? We were familiarized. People used to die in their own homes. They had this experience, this day-to-day contact with death. But what's interesting is even though death was way more familiar to people not long ago, they built forms of reminding themselves of this fact pretty constantly. There's actually two genres of art. There's one, which is Vanitas. And if you've probably seen paintings like this or you might notice this next time you walk through a museum, like half the paintings all have a skull on them for some reason. This is a reminder of mortality. That's what that skull was supposed to represent.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  What's interesting even is there's another genre called the Dance Macabre, the Dance of Death. There's almost these comical paintings showing skeletons.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Minding people that they're mortal. There's a church in Prague that's actually decorated with the bones of the priests and the monks who serve the church, decorated and scattered throughout Europe called cadaver tombs. And they show what the person looked like in life, and then they show what they look like now. And often, they have this Latin inscription on them, which just means like, what I am, soon you will be. Montaigne actually liked to play a drinking game with his friends. They would hold up a painting or a picture of a skeleton, and they would say, drink and be merry, for when you are dead, you will look like this. Even with all the medical advancements that we have, even with all the technological breakthroughs that hopefully lie in the future, this won't help you if you get hit by a bus, right?

• 10:43Speaker 00

  This won't help you if you get drafted to fight in a war. This won't help you if you go out for a walk and your heart just decides to give up, right? These things happen. So I'm interested in how we can use this. I think you should take the thing that you're most afraid of, that you're most intimidated by, that's the most uncertain and uncomfortable, and you should look at it, you should stare at it, you should take these obstacles that we face in life and use them to your advantage. That's what this idea of the obstacle is the way means. It's how do we find a way forward through the thing that is most scary and most uncertain? And the good news is actually, when you stare and think about death, that it can have an energizing effect, right? When you know that your life is short or potentially uncertain, it concentrates your

• 11:28Speaker 00

  mind, it gives you focus, it gives you priorities. What's interesting about the Stoics is that of all the philosophical schools, the Stoics probably talk about death the most, but they are also the least abstract. So they're not talking about death in the sort of theoretical sense, they're not just exploring what it means. These were people with real jobs. They were the emperor, they were politicians, they were writers, they were merchants, they were entrepreneurs, they were parents. They were thinking about how death could be used in life to have meaning, to have purpose, to have insights. I don't think the Stoics were obsessed with death, even nor were those painters we were looking at earlier. I think what they were actually obsessed with was life, not obsessed with death. That's not what this is about. This is about being obsessed with life. This is about living life.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna give you three exercises from my writing from the Stoics that I think will allow you to use this uncertain scary thing to have a more purposeful existence while you're here. The first exercise comes to us from Seneca. Seneca is an interesting philosopher, because again, he's not an academic, he's a playwright, he's a Roman senator, he actually becomes one of Rome's most influential power brokers. He's the advisor and the tutor to the emperor. And he writes in this letter to a friend, one of his dear friends, he writes a letter about how he should think about death. And he says, the mistake is that we think of death as something in the future, something we're moving towards as time is passing. In fact, he says, death is happening right now.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  The time that's passed is owned by death. Seneca says, we are dying every day, we're dying every minute, but we have to get better at managing this precious resource, Seneca is saying, that we fritter away our time. Meanwhile, we strongly and strictly guard our property and our money. But what's more renewable? You can always buy more property, you can always earn more money. What you can't ever do is find or create more time. So we waste this most precious resource, going to meetings that we don't want to go to, signing up for things we don't actually want to do. We don't say no, because we're afraid to say no, because we don't want to be the bad guy. We give up our most precious resource, we give time away to death. I think what you also take from this, it's an important caveat, is that other people's time is really valuable, too.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  When you take too long in line, when you treat family members poorly, when you go slower than you need to, when you slow other people down, you're taking away time from them that they will never get back. And so that leads us to the next lesson. This is a lesson from Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is the emperor of Rome. And what he writes in Meditations, he asks this question, he asks it to himself, he never knew that we would read it, but he says, "Stop whatever you're doing at this moment and ask yourself, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?" And by this, he means what we spend so much of our time doing. Are you afraid of death because you won't be able to play video games anymore? Because you won't be able to watch pornography on your computer? Because you won't be able to argue with people you don't know on the internet?

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Because you won't be able to sit on your couch and get drunk or high? These are not reasons to be afraid of death. You shouldn't be afraid of death at all, he's saying, but what you definitely shouldn't do is be afraid of death, and then when you have life, sit here and waste it on things that don't matter. Seneca says it even more bluntly, he says, "You are scared of dying, but tell me, is the kind of life you lead any different than being dead?" And there are so many forms of life that are a kind of death, right? A life filled with resentment, a life filled with regret, a life that's all about you, a life that's all about chasing fame, or money, or power, a life of loneliness or isolation. These are forms of living death.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  When we think about our mortality, it wakes us up to that fact, it gives us perspective on how meaningless a lot of the things we spend our time chasing are, and the expense that those things come at, right? We put things off to the future, I'll start a family later, I'll follow my dream job later, I'll start that company later. We need more and more time, because what we're not doing is being present, we're not taking advantage of what's in front of us right now. We don't want to postpone anything, we want to balance life's books each day. The final lesson comes from Epictetus. Epictetus is a former slave who becomes an influential philosopher. He actually is one of the leading influences in Marcus Aurelius's life. And this is a controversial exercise, it's a little dark, I'll admit, but Epictetus says,

• 15:51Speaker 00

  "As you kiss your child goodnight, whisper to yourself, he may be dead in the morning." That's heavy, right? But it's important, because what that does is it makes you present, it makes you realize what you're doing, how important this thing you're doing is, and how you can't take it for granted. It was said Marcus Aurelius practiced this exercise each evening, which hauntingly was necessary. He unfortunately lost several of his children when the infant mortality rate was much higher than it is now. Life is fragile, life is short, you can't take that for granted, you can't do that. A friend of mine, his name was Seth Roberts, he sent me an email on a Friday afternoon. I saw it, I said, "I love Seth, but I'm busy, I'll get to this on Monday." The next day, he went for a hike and he fell dead of a heart attack.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  I never got to respond to that, I never got to talk to him that one last time, even though he reached out to me. Another one of my friends, a guy named Brett Barup, I remember, I was in the airport in Chicago, and I was thinking, I should send Brett a text, I haven't seen him in a while. And then I was boarding my flight, and I got distracted, and when I landed, I had another text from a different friend who said that Brett had passed away in his sleep that afternoon, and they just found him. And so I'll never get those lost conversations back, but I can learn from that mistake. One of the interesting things about being a parent, about being a busy, ambitious person, you're often rushing, right? You rush through bedtime, you rush through dinner with your spouse, you rush through your drive home, you're rushing, rushing, rushing, you've got things to do, you've got

• 17:19Speaker 00

  places to be. But what the Stoics would ask is, what are you rushing towards? They would say, you're rushing towards death, you're rushing away from the people you love, and you're doing it so you can watch more Netflix, or respond to more emails, or play apps on your phone. This is not why you should be rushing. And so when you realize this, you slow down, you appreciate, you enjoy, you breathe in, you don't take it for granted. In light of our mortality, it's arrogant to blow people off, to ignore them, to defer till later, to make plans for the distant future. It's ridiculous. And instead, you want to take advantage of what's in front of you, you want to seize it. And I think that's the essence of what I want to leave you guys with, that you get one life.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  We don't know what happens to us when we die, we don't know what happens after. Some people think they know, but we don't know, right? And so what matters is what you do now, what matters is what you do with the time in front of you, because that's the only thing that's certain. The present moment is the only thing that's certain. And so you can't delay, you can't waste, you can't assume anything, you must take advantage of what's in front of you. And we can end then with this final thought from Marcus Aurelius. Marcus, who talked about memento mori, about meditating on our mortality, he gives us one thought, and again, he might have written it here in this very city 2,000 years ago. He said, "Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly."

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Memento mori, thank you.