This Is How We Get Death Wrong

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You look around and you see people rushing through traffic, rushing to get their kids down to bed, rushing through work to get to the weekend. No time to talk, no time to sit, there's too much to do, there's somewhere to go. faster the better. And this was true in the ancient world as it is today.

In Rome people were rushing to get their mail, rushing to win the next public office, rushing to the next round of the games in the Colosseum, rushing to their next big accomplishment. At least that's what they thought. Seneca makes the point, however, that what we're really rushing towards, with all deliberate speed, is death. That's what he means when he says that we get death wrong. Death is not some distant thing in the future, some looming end date to which the proper response is to try to squeeze in as much time as possible before it comes.

Instead, he said, Death is something happening to you right now. It's happening to you as you listen to this episode. I hope it's been worth it. It's happening to you as you struggle to put on your daughter's shoes so you can drop her off at school, and then it's still happening as you sit down to that coffee meeting, you rush through. even though you didn't want to have it in the first place.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (3 minutes, 584 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.