It's The Dead's Day

Yesterday was Halloween here in America, which is a fun holiday for children. It’s full of masks and candy and staying up late. In Mexico, however, today is the beginning of Día de los Muertos, a much more adult and philosophical holiday. All throughout Mexico, and places where the holiday is celebrated, people will gather not for treats but to celebrate and remember their friends and family who have died. It is, in a sense, a three day commemoration of the idea of memento mori—a kind of collective bereavement mixed with the fun of a jazz funeral.⏳ You can view our entire Memento Mori Collection at dailystoic.com/mm✉️ 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.

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  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, dailystoic.com.

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  It's the Dead's Day. Yesterday was Halloween here in America, which is a fun holiday for children. It's full of mass and candy and staying up late. In Mexico, however, today is the beginning of Dia de los Muertos, a more adult and philosophical holiday. All throughout Mexico, people will gather not for treats, but to celebrate and remember their friends and family who have died. It is, in a sense, a three-day commemoration, the idea of memento mori, a kind of collective bereavement mixed with the fun of a jazz funeral. The great Montegna, and if you haven't read his famous essays, or Sarah Bakewell's How to Live, you must, he would tell a story that had trickled back to him from the New World of an ancient drinking game where the members

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  took turns holding up a painting of a corpse inside a coffin and cheered, "Drink and be merry, for when you are dead, you will look like this." And this cheeky, but also profound observation captures the spirit of Dia de los Muertos as well, with its imagery of skulls and skeletons, the makeup, the music, the dancing, the praying, the altars set up to honor those who have left. It may seem strange to celebrate death in this way, and stranger still to involve children in it. But is it really any stranger than banishing all thoughts of death from our lives and letting it return to us only as a dreaded nightmare? Or pretending that the one thing that is guaranteed to happen to all of us doesn't even exist?

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  There is real value in taking time to process and grieve and dance with the morbidity of our mortality, of creating a ritual that allows us to come to terms with this essential part of our existence. Better to be on good terms with death than to schedule an annual checkup than to be surprised and shocked by this enemy we all share. So drink and be merry today and celebrate the day of the dead. Say goodbye to the people you have lost and enjoy the people you are lucky enough to still have with you. That's all we can do. And that's what my memento mori coin on my desk is all about. And I always love when people show me theirs. I had Morgan Wade on the podcast recently

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  and she pulled out from underneath her shirt, she pulled out her memento mori necklace. You know, that's what we've been talking about this month. And I hope you can grab one. Check them out at store.dailystoic.com.