Dying Every Day (Stoicism in a Year)

Perennial Leader Project
  • 4.8 (16)
  • Philosophy
  • Updated Daily

Dying Every Day is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project. Each episode turns a selected passage from Stoic philosophy into a guided meditation designed to help you (and me) contemplate what it means to live a ‘good’ life. Learn more at perennial.substack.com.

  1. Jul 22

    Dying Daily: A Stoic Lesson from The Odyssey

    📮 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. Picture a man tied to the mast of his own ship. He gave the order himself. Bind me here, he told his crew, and whatever I say, however I beg, do not untie me until we’re past. Then he had them fill their own ears with beeswax so they couldn’t hear a thing, but he left his own ears open. And then the ship sails into the most dangerous stretch of water in the world, where the Sirens sing—a song so beautiful that every sailor who’s ever heard it has steered straight for the rocks to get closer, and died there, surrounded by the bones of everyone who came before. The man at the mast hears it. And it’s worse than he imagined. He strains against the ropes. He screams at his crew to turn the ship, to let him go; he has to get closer—and they can’t hear him, and the ropes hold, and slowly the singing fades behind them, and he survives. That’s Odysseus. And if you’re anywhere near a movie theatre, you might be aware of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey in theaters (I saw it a few days ago). For this Dying Daily episode, a shorter and more casual version of the podcast, I want to talk about why the Stoics were interested in this story. [...] ---   🖇️ Stay Connected:  Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources:  Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts

  2. Jul 16

    Day 155: Resist and Persist - The Stoic Art of Self-Discipline | Dying Every Day

    📮 Want tools for the art of living? Sign up here: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribe Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 155. This week's episode is something a little different. Over the past few months, I've been building an audio course called "Resist and Persist: The Stoic Art of Self-Discipline." And I wanted you to hear the introduction. Mostly because the argument it makes stands on its own, and I think it's the most useful thing I've written this year: that if you've failed at self-discipline and everyone listening to this has, it's probably not a character flaw. It was a sequencing error. You were working on the right problem in the wrong order. [...] ---   🖇️ Stay Connected:  Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources:  Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts

  3. Jul 9

    Day 154: Epictetus on the Discipline of Waiting | Dying Every Day

    📮 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 season of life that will not resolve on your preferred schedule. Impatience is rarely just about time. More often, it is about control. The mind wants reality to move at the pace of its wishes. When it does not, irritation rises—not only because the thing is delayed but also because the self feels crossed. Epictetus gives one of the sternest and most liberating pieces of Stoic advice: “Stop demanding that things happen as you wish.” [...] ---   🖇️ Stay Connected:  Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources:  Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts

  4. Jul 4

    Day 153: Stoicism and the Founding Fathers | Dying Every Day

    📮 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 no shoes, no blankets, no reason left to believe the war could be won. Desertion was constant. The cause looked finished. And in the middle of that, George Washington did something strange.  He had a play performed for his men. The play was Cato—Joseph Addison’s tragedy about Cato the Younger, the Roman senator who stood against Caesar’s tyranny and would not bend. It was Washington’s favorite play. He quoted it throughout his life. And he chose that winter, of all winters, to put it before his freezing, starving soldiers—because he believed the play’s message was the very thing that might keep them in the field. That message was Stoic virtue. [...] ---   🖇️ Stay Connected:  Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources:  Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts

  5. Jun 29

    Dying Daily: Seneca on Learning to Die

    📮 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 mistake for permanent. Seneca’s point is severe because it reaches the root. Until you have made some peace with death, you will be ruled by lesser fears. You will delay when you should begin. Cling where you should let go. Submit where you should stand upright. To learn how to die is not to become theatrical about mortality. [...] #stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons ---   🖇️ Stay Connected:  Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources:  Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts

  6. Jun 25

    Day 152: Courage in Practice—Cato the Younger on Being Incorruptible | Dying Every Day

    📮 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 within. Bribery was everywhere. Everyone was on the take. Power went to whoever could buy the most votes. And Cato was the one man who would not play along. A group of candidates for office—ambitious, self-interested men, exactly the sort you would expect to cheat—made a pact among themselves. Each would put up a large sum of money, and anyone caught bribing voters would forfeit it to the others. An honor system among people with very little honor. And they needed someone to hold the money: someone who could not be leaned on, someone who could not be bought. They chose Cato. [...] #stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons ---   🖇️ Stay Connected:  Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources:  Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts

  7. Jun 17

    Dying Daily: "You Decide What it Means" | Dying Every Day

    📮 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: stuck in a slow line at the end of a long day, quietly frustrated at everyone and everything in our way.  In his 2005 commencement speech “This Is Water,” David Foster Wallace argued that the irritation isn't the situation—it’s a choice we don't know we're making. This episode looks at Wallace’s idea of the “default setting,” its kinship with Stoic philosophy, and the small, repeatable freedom that hides within an ordinary bad day: “You decide what it means.” [...] #stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons ---   🖇️ Stay Connected:  Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources:  Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts

  8. Jun 10

    Day 151: The Unlived Life—Marcus Aurelius and Jung on Becoming Whole | Dying Every Day

    📮 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 similar, not necessarily the same, to what Carl Jung would describe eighteen centuries later: looking directly at the parts of himself he would rather not see, naming them, and refusing to let them operate on him from the dark. [...] #stoicism #philosophy #lifelessons ---   🖇️ Stay Connected:  Newsletter: https://perennial.substack.com/subscribeInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/perennialmeditations/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PerennialMeditations---  🦉 Additional Resources:  Perennial Meditations archive: https://perennial.substack.com/archiveListen to more podcasts: https://www.perennialleader.com/podcasts

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Dying Every Day is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project. Each episode turns a selected passage from Stoic philosophy into a guided meditation designed to help you (and me) contemplate what it means to live a ‘good’ life. Learn more at perennial.substack.com.

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