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. 3d ago

    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

    5 min

  2. 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

    13 min

  3. 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

    5 min

  4. 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

    10 min

  5. 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

    9 min

  6. 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

    11 min

  7. Jun 3

    Day 150: Stoicism and CBT on Training the Mind | 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 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, EnchiridionEpictetus is not making a philosophical argument. He is performing one. He has taken the belief—death is terrible—and subjected it to a test. He has sought evidence and found a counterexample in Socrates, who faced death with equanimity.  Epictetus concluded from examination, not argument alone, that the terror lies in the opinion of death, not death itself. This activity is philosophy as a cognitive practice. A man sitting alone, identifying a distorted belief, testing it against evidence, revising it, and recording the revision. Doing it again tomorrow. And the day after. [...] #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

    11 min

  8. May 30

    Day 149: Plato's Cave and the Cost of Ignorance | 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 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 LifeSeneca is not describing the lazy or the careless. He is describing everyone. Everyone wants a happy life. Everyone is moving toward something they believe will produce it. And yet the more urgently people pursue happiness without first understanding what it actually is, the further they get from it.  The wrong road, traveled faster, does not bring you closer to the destination. It carries you further away. [...] #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

    15 min
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4.8
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16 Ratings

About

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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