Dying Every Day (Stoicism in a Year)

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 154. “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion Waiting reveals what the soul believes it deserves. The delayed reply. The stalled decision. The slow line. The seas...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 153. “A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.”  — Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (1713) In the brutal winter of 1777, the Continental Army was dying at Valley Forge. Not in battle. In the cold, the hunger, the disease. Men with...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily. “He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” — Seneca, Moral Letters Much of fear is fear of losing. Losing comfort. Losing status. Losing strength. Losing the familiar structure of the life you have arranged and quietly begun to mist...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 152. There is a man almost no one talks about anymore, and a small detail in his story that is hard to forget once you have noticed it. His name was Cato—Cato the Younger. He lived in the final decades of the Roman Republic, when the whole system was rotting from...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily. In today’s episode of Dying Daily, an occasional and much more casual series on the podcast, we sit with a question that most of us already know the answer to but haven’t done anything about: Who (and what) are we taking for granted? We’ve all been there...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 151. The Meditations are usually read as the record of a man who had mastered his philosophy—reminders to himself to stay on the path he had already found. That reading is not wrong. But it is incomplete.  What Marcus does across these pages, again and again, is...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 150. “Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by the opinions about the things: for example, death is nothing terrible, for if it were, it would have seemed so to Socrates.”  — Epictetus, Enchiridion Epictetus is not making a philosophical argument....

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 149. “All men want to live happily, but when it comes to seeing clearly what makes life happy, they are in the dark. Achieving a happy life is so challenging that the more desperately one pursues it, the more elusive it becomes.”  — Seneca, On the Happy Life Sene...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 148. In 399 BC, a jury of five hundred Athenian citizens voted to convict Socrates of impiety and corrupting the youth. They were now deciding his penalty. The implicit offer was simple: stop asking questions, go into exile, live quietly, and stop examining peopl...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily. One Stoic text that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes—six ideas that seem like contradictions until you understand what the Stoics actually mean. In this Dying Daily, we sit with one of them: the claim that virtue alone is s...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 147. “Know thyself,” the words inscribed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Not know the world. Not know the gods. Know yourself—and understand that until you do, everything else you investigate is a distraction from the only question that finally...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily. In this first episode of Dying Daily, a new occasional and much more casual series on the podcast, we sit with a question that most of us already know the answer to, but haven't done anything about: Who are we taking for granted?  You may have seen Eric...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 146. There is the happiness that depends on circumstances—on getting what you want, on the day cooperating, on fortune being kind. It is real, while it lasts. And it does not last. And then there is something else. Something that does not rise and fall with the w...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 145. Epictetus identified three key disciplines: desire, action, and assent, with assent being the most crucial. He described assent as the mind’s act of accepting an impression—saying yes to it, recognizing it as real and meaningful, and responding accordingly....

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is a bonus episode. We often spend much of our lives wanting more—more time, more success, more security. But Seneca offers a different path: not more, but enough . This week’s episode is ultimately a reflection on loosening our grip and learning to meet life—and death—...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 144. Anger is among the most examined emotions in human history, yet it remains one of the least understood when we're actually experiencing it. Today, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and psychologist Albert Ellis guide us in exploring it from the inside. I hope you fin...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 143. Why is it that we can fully grasp the dichotomy of control—know exactly where the line lies and what belongs to us and what doesn't—and still find ourselves reaching across it?  Today, we’re revisiting one of Stoicism's most essential ideas, this time with E...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 142. “The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations , 2.14 Take a moment to reflect on today’s...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 141. “And so I commanded myself to live. For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live.” — Seneca, Moral Letters , 78.2 Sit with that. Not die bravely. Not endure bravely. Live bravely. Seneca writes these words to his friend Lucilius from the middle of an i...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 140. Happy Easter to everyone celebrating this weekend! Today's meditation sits inside this season deliberately. We are going to spend some time with two men who refused to look away from death: a Roman emperor writing alone in his journal, and a sixth-century mo...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 139. The alarm goes off. You reach for your phone. Not because you need to—just because it’s there.  Nothing urgent. Nothing necessary. And when you finally get up, the pull remains. Not toward stillness—but toward more stimulation. More noise. More distraction....

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 138. Most conflicts begin with a story we tell ourselves. “They meant to insult me.” “They knew this would hurt.” “They’re trying to undermine me.” The mind fills in motives. In seconds, the event feels personal, intentional, and almost malicious. Once that story...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 137. The boxes are packed. The room echoes. The keys are handed over.  Something stable disappears, and suddenly the life that made sense yesterday no longer exists today. And the question appears, quietly but insistently: Where do I belong now? This is the probl...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 136. You don’t need a skull on your desk or a Latin motto in your bio to practice memento mori . Montaigne, a sixteenth-century philosopher influenced by the Stoics, treats mortality as a human issue rather than a rare or dramatic event. He removes death from the...

📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 135. Most people build happiness like a house on sand—on approval, outcomes, comfort, and conditions. It looks solid when the weather is calm. But when circumstances change—as they always do—the foundation gives way. Seneca insists the mistake is not bad luck, bu...