Dying Every Day (Stoicism in a Year)

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Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 136.

You donā€™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 category of ā€œspecial occasionsā€ and places it where it truly belongs: within everyday life.

Montaigne famously relies on the old saying that ā€œto philosophize is to learn to die.ā€ But his goal isnā€™t to make you morbidā€”itā€™s to make you less influenced by fear. He argues (again and again) that much of what we call ā€œlivingā€ is really just avoidance: constant busyness, constant delay, constant mental bargaining. We postpone the hard conversation. We postpone the creative work. We postpone courage. We postpone rest. We even postpone joy.

Remembering death is a way of interrupting the postponement. [...]

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What is Dying Every Day (Stoicism in a Year)?

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 ā€˜goodā€™ life. Learn more at perennial.substack.com.