About this episode
Seneca lived through illness, exile, and the brutal reign of Nero. In today’s episode, Ryan shares three of the most powerful ideas Seneca learned from those experiences and why they can change the way you live.
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Full transcript
The Daily Stoic — BONUS | 3 Life-Changing Lessons From Seneca in 3 Minutes. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Three life-changing ideas from Sennaka that you need to know about. Number one is this idea of premeditashio malorma, premeditation of evils. Sennaka says that we should think about the bad things that could happen. Says if you're going on journey by ship traveling across the ocean here behind me, says you should be aware of the potential for shipwrecks, the potential for pirates, the potential for bad weather, the potential for a bad captain, the potential for delays. He says the unexpected blow lands heaviest. He says all the terms of the human lot should be before our eyes. If we think about Sennaka's life, he's talking from experience here. He suffers a crippling illness. He has to spend 10 years convalescent. He suffers an exile. He lives through the deranged reign of Nero.
Right? He goes through some stuff. And he's saying that by anticipating what could happen, we take away some of its power over us. And two, this one balances out the first one. He says though that we shouldn't let our imagination torture us. He says he who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than it's necessary. When a generalist thinking about where the enemy might advance, they're not nervous and anxious, they're prepared, they're active, they're toughening themselves up, they're doing their job. He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than it's necessary. And the third is one actually that a lot of people torture themselves in advance about. And Sennaka says this is wrong. He says you shouldn't think of death as something way off in the future that you're dreading as you move towards. This is the wrong way to think about death. Death isn't something in the future. He says death is happening right now. He says the time that passes belongs to death. We're not dying once in the future.
We're dying every minute. We're dying every day. So you want to ask yourself am I living this life that I have? Am I getting a return on the time that I am spending? Am I parting my most precious resource carefully enough?
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