There’s Nothing Like This | Always The Same

The rockstar Warren Zevon had been on the top of the Billboard charts. He’d been on the cover of Rolling Stone. He’d been admired by other great artists and musicians like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Petty. The heights of fame were enjoyable, but it took a jarring diagnosis of terminal lung cancer to give Zevon the kind of perspective that only a *memento mori* moment can give. And when it came, he passed it along in a very simple, very practical piece of advice:Enjoy every sandwich.✉️ 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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus really, Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  There's nothing like this. The rock star Warren Zevon had been at the top of the Billboard charts. He'd been on the cover of Rolling Stone. He'd been admired by other great artists and musicians like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty. The heights of fame were enjoyable, but it took a jarring diagnosis of terminal lung cancer to give him the kind of perspective that only a memento mori moment can give. And when it came, he passed it along in a very simple, very practical piece of advice. Enjoy every sandwich. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how to have a chill life, you have to be comfortable making less money. But isn't money a source of great experiences?

• 1:32Speaker 00

  No more so than ordinary life. The Stoics understood this. So did the Epicureans, because in the end, the two schools were not that different. It wasn't success, or fame, or banquets, or pleasure dens that made us happy. It was the simple and ordinary moments, if we could be disciplined enough and present enough, to be grateful for them. Sure, it's great to write hit songs. It's wonderful to be able to travel the world, to be able to afford fancy stuff to live in Marcus Aurelius's palace. But there's also nothing like the simple pleasure of eating a sandwich, or drinking a glass of water after a run on a hot summer day, or listening to that one song that always makes you feel good. There's something haunting about the thought of how much life people throw away because

• 2:16Speaker 00

  they think they need a lot of money, or because they're always chasing the newest, coolest, most extreme thing. They don't realize that the greatest things in life are cheap, if not free, because they don't enjoy every sandwich. And then one day, it's too late, and they'll never have another. Always the same. This is today's entry in The Daily Stoic. 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my co-writer and translator Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  As Epictetus says, "Every day and night we keep thoughts like this at hand: write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out The Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. Think by way of example on the times of Vespasian, and you'll see all these things marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, wars, holiday feasts, commerce, farming, flattering, pretending, suspecting, scheming, praying that others die, grumbling over one's lot, falling in love, amassing fortunes, lusting after office and power. Now that life of theirs is dead and gone, the times of Trajan, again, the same.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, IV, 32. And then the meditation. Ernest Hemingway opens his book, The Sun Also Rises, with a Bible verse. "One generation patheth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth..."

• 4:09Speaker 00

  To the place where he arose. It was this passage, his fascinating editor Maxwell Perkins, who I urge you to read about. Perkins would say that it contained all the wisdom of the ancient world. And what wisdom is that? One of the most striking things about history is just how long human beings have been doing what they do. Though certain attitudes and practices have come and gone, what's left are people, living, dying, loving, fighting, crying, and laughing. Breathless media reports or popular books often perpetuate the belief that we've reached the apex of humanity, or that this time, things are really different. The irony is that people have believed that for centuries.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Strong people have to resist this notion. They know that with few exceptions, things are the same as they've always been and always will be. You're just like the people who came before you, and you're but a brief stopover until the people just like you, who will come after. The earth abides forever, but we will come and go. And I mean, I think meditations itself is a remarkable demonstration of this, probably not accidentally, right? All the things that Marcus is talking about, complaining about, worrying about, you know,

• 5:31Speaker 00

  seizing on, are immensely familiar and accessible to all of us, right? 2,000 years ago, you know, sometime in the year, let's say 160 AD, Marcus struggles to get out of bed and writes a passage about how he likes to huddle under the blankets and stay warm. Exactly the same, right? You think about the struggles Marcus really has with Commodus. Maybe that's what you're going through right now. You think of Seneca trying to contain Nero, telling himself, you know, I'm, I'm one of the good guys, I'm, I'm, I'm one of the adults in the room. And you think about how politically people in the Capitol, which is named after Capitoline

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Hill, senators, right, same position as people like Seneca had, were telling themselves about The current president, right? The same thing over and over and over and over again. People are people, places are places. I did a meditation on this and actually it's in like the video like a year ago I did this. But we did this road trip and we stopped in Tombstone, Arizona, which you know is the site of the gunfight at O.K. Corral. And what's fascinating, you walk down the streets of Tombstone. This is a place that's burned to the ground, been rebuilt to look historic for the most part. Some of the buildings actually are pretty old. But the point is, these bars, what stickers do they have in the window? The sticker is new, that wasn't a technology in 1880 or whatever.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  But they've got these stickers in the window. What do the stickers say? You can't carry a handgun inside this establishment, right? Same sticker I have on the, you know, front of the painted porch. But in the 1880s, that's what the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was about. It was about whether people could openly carry guns in town. I'm not making a Second Amendment argument here. I'm saying that people were fighting and arguing about the exact same thing, just as the Earps had moved to Tombstone, Arizona. Why? To make their fortune, to make a name for themselves, to have a better life, the same reason that maybe you're moving to Arizona, or Austin, or Europe, right? It doesn't matter.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  People are people and they've always been doing the same things. And I think what's so beautiful and reassuring, but also humbling about Stoic philosophy is these reminders that not that much has changed, that the hardware issues remain the same, the software issues remain the same despite all the updates and attempts to fix the bugs. So we can calm down a little bit, right? You know, I think the last couple of years, the media's been love to say, this is unprecedented. It's very precedented, right? I recommended The Great Influenza, right?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  What he talked about 100 years ago in that pandemic would have been quite familiar to Marcus Aurelius in The Antinous Plague. People are people, places are places. History is the same thing happening over and over and over again. Time, as Matthew McConaughey's character says in True Detective, quoting Nietzsche, "Time is a flat circle." It's beautiful, as I said, haunting, humbling, all these things at the same time. And it's something we can't lose track of, and it's something we have to think about constantly. And when I hold Meditations, that's what I think of. I've actually, I've got the leather edition right here in my hands, which you should check out, which we're just

• 9:07Speaker 00

  launching it. I've so worn through my paperback edition that I wanted something a little bit more hardcore and sturdy, but it's just remarkable to me as I hold this edition. And I just went, like, I've, I've usually been, since I got my first copy of Meditations, I've been going through that one. Like, I have a very worn copy, has lots of notes in it. But when I compare this new one, because I got one of the first Meditations leather ones off the, off the presses, I went through and I've been rereading it, it's on my nightstand. As I've been going through and rereading it, what strikes me most, when I look at this new one and the old one, is that I'm still making notes in the same spots about the same things, just as other people have been doing

• 9:52Speaker 00

  for thousands of years. Maybe you have Seneca on your nightstand, just as Jefferson had Seneca on his nightstand when he died. Just as, you know, Cato died holding a copy of Socrates, right? It's, it's a timeless tradition we're a part of, both intentionally and unintentionally. And there's something beautiful and terrifying in that. That's it for today's Meditation. Enjoy. Do check out the new edition of Meditations. I'll link to it in the show notes. You can check it out at stewart.dailystoic.com as well. But I'm really proud of this one. I think you'll really like it.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  That's my Memento Mori coin. I think about it all the time. I'm playing with it on my desk right now. It's something I carry always. It's probably the thing I get asked about the most when I bump into people in public. It's just been a game changer for me. I have a bunch of different Memento Mori reminders, of course, but if you want to get this one, which we make here in the US, in a mint in Minnesota, that's been in business since 1882, you can check it out in the Daily Stoic Store, or if you're in Bastrop, you can stop by my bookstore here, The Painted Porch on Main Street, where we sell them as well. It's a game changer. Check it out.