B (9:58)
There's a famous line in an Aeschylus play, Agamemnon Cassandra is the prophet that can see the future, but she's cursed that no one will ever listen. And she says when she comes home knowing that Agamemnon is going to be murdered by his wife, she says, I can smell the open grave. Meaning she can smell that death is on this person. They're marked for it, but they don't know it. I'm just sitting here in this cemetery and they just reinterred or worked on this grave. Someone who's been dead for 65 years. We all have that mark of death on us. Like, we think about this idea like, what would I do if I found out I I had cancer? If I got a terminal diagnosis? What if someone could predict my death? But you do have a terminal diagnosis. Someone can predict your death. All of us are mortal. The doctor knew with absolute certainty when we were born that we were going to die. It's just that because we feel healthy. It's just because the average lifespan is incredibly long these days in a way that the ancients couldn't have even imagined the average person living to because infant mortality then was so high. And we think we're going to live forever. We think we're the exception and we're not. It's going to happen for all of us. We have to live accordingly. We have to make the right decisions. As a result, we have to cut out the things that are wasting our time. Steve Jobs talked about this in his famous commencement address. He was talking about how life is short. It's uncertain for all of us, as it tragically was for him. He said it's too short to spend it living somebody else's life following somebody else's track. That's one of my favorite questions from Marcus. Real estate meditations. He says, you're afraid of death because you won't be able to do this. This anymore. And by this, I take it to mean all the indignities and stupid things that we spend our time doing. Like you want to live forever so you can go to the DMV more, so you can scroll on your phone more, so you can hold grudges more so you can covet more things. That's not a life worth extending. Okay? So I'm not saying that life is meaningless and you should just die. I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying you should try to live a life that is worth being long. That's the tragedy. Seneca says, how many people, at their end of their life, all they have to show for it is a large number. That's not what we're after. That's not meaningful. That's not what philosophy is. Fighting to try to make us. So this decision to cut out the inessential, to do what actually matters, to live the life we are meant to live, to be brave and to be authentic, to be real, to chase and value the right things, that's what Memento Mori reminds us. So this is the Cassilis family tomb. They came to bastrop in the 1850s, and they built a little building on Main street which housed a shop that he owned. And he built a house down the street. His son Will. Who? This is him. That's the father. This is Will carried on the business when his father died in 1901. Well, I own that building now. The building has changed hands dozens of times in the decades since it left the Kesselis family. Which, by the way, is what happens to all our possessions. The things you love, the things you care about. Eventually, someone is going to possess them. That is to say, if they don't throw them away. There's a story about Epictetus. He had this lamp that was stolen, and you'd think he'd be upset. Instead, he goes, look, you can only lose what you have. And he goes back, and he replaces it the next day with something cheaper. But the funny part is that after he died, one of his students bought it for a lot of money. He wanted to possess something that Epictetus had possessed. Of course, totally missing point of the lesson. Now, again, the lesson isn't, you should never have anything, and you shouldn't care about anything. You should give away all your possessions, like a monk. No, it's just a Reminder that as the Stoics say, we only own this stuff in trust. We have it temporarily. Not just the job, not just the house, not just the place we currently stand or operate. But everything in our life is only ours for as long as we are lucky to have it. I heard someone say. And I think about this with, with where I live on this ranch out not far from here. He says the bank is just letting me make payments on it. Like you don't even own it. You have it temporarily. And if you can think about it that way, you're not only going to be more insured against the ups and downs in life, you're going to know the proper perspective on things. It helps me relax with my children. I don't have to take everything so seriously. I don't have to stress about everything. I don't own it. We remind ourselves that we don't really own this stuff, that it's only ours temporarily. So the day when we have to give it up, whether it's while we're living or at the end of our life, we're okay with that. We're okay giving it back. I actually had a friend of mine who died not that long ago, and he wrote about the saying, I'm ready to give the gift back. That's what he was saying about his life itself. Ready to return the gift. And that's a very stoic idea, all of it. It's only temporary. We only get it for a little bit. Who was the most famous person in this cemetery? Who was this person who had this monument erected to them? How big was their obituary in the newspaper? How many people attended their funeral? How many things still bear their name in this little town or in this state? Marcus Aurelius would say it doesn't matter, right? He says those who long for posthumous famer, he says, they're chasing the wrong, he says, because one, they won't be around to remember it. And even if people do remember them, inevitably we all are forgotten. You know, there's still an enormous column in Rome in honor of Marcus Aurelius achievement. But what good does it do him? Hoping to be vindicated by history, he says that's also empty because people in the future are going to be pretty stupid and annoying and short sighted too. Even if you are remembered by the next generation or the next generation, he says, like candles lighting each other, eventually it sputters and goes out. He lists all the emperors who come before him. You know, he says, who remembers the name Vespasian or this emperor, that emperor and those were some of the most famous people in the world. You and I are almost certainly not those people. So to chase fame, to chase attention, to think that you can transcend death that way is silly. And it is disproven by the historical record. Even the few exceptions to that rule, like a Marcus Aurelius, it doesn't do them any good. So meditating on our mortality, it reminds us to stop chasing things that don't matter. It reminds us that legacy is not for us. We don't get to enjoy it. So what we should do is be present here in this present moment, because that's the one thing we do have for certain. And what about the wealthiest person in the cemetery who paid to put up this enormous monument? Again, does it really matter? You don't get to take the money with you when you die. There's the famous Thomas Gray poem elegy, written in a country courtyard. And he talks about how all the paths of glory lead ultimately to the grave. Everything evens out here. In this way, we're all made equal again. I'm not saying that money is bad. I'm not saying that providing for your family after you're gone isn't also important. But it's just a reminder as we chase more than we could ever possibly need as we give up the most valuable thing in the world, which is our life, which is our happiness, which is our time, in exchange for more and more and more often doing things that make us miserable. So we could have this thing that we hope to someday enjoy in the future, which is not actually guaranteed. Cemeteries remind us what's actually important. They remind us to prioritize what's actually important. No one is going to remember how much money you had. No one cares about that. You're not going to care about that in your last moments. And in fact, you would give all of that money back to have a few more minutes with the people you love, the people you neglected, the things you took for granted. The people, by the way, you said you were doing it all for. You would give everything to have a few more minutes with them. Right now you have it. That's what Memento Mori reminds us of. Your wealth will disappear. Your body will decay. Eventually, you'll be forgotten. It happens to all of us. Right outside Rome, there's the famous Appian Way. It's paved with these stones that have been smoothed over by centuries and centuries of traffic. And it's lined with the tombs and graves of some of the most famous and powerful Roman families ever. We Think, because most of them have been totally forgotten. That was something that Marcus Aurelius said about Alexander the Great. That the most powerful man in the world and his mule driver were both buried in the same earth. That death is this great equalizer and so is the merciless progression of time. The same is true for Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Even though we know their names, we do, the vast majority of people do not. Their fame, their power, their wealth did nothing to forestall the ultimate and inevitable possibility of their death. This is why they used to whisper in the ear of the emperor in his moment of greatest triumph, memento mori. Remember, you are mortal. They should also have said, sic transit gloria mundi. All glory is fleeting. None of it lasts. None of us lasts. Let's manage our egos and our ambitions accordingly. So if we all end up in the same place, am I saying that nothing matters? That you shouldn't care, that you shouldn't try, you shouldn't try to make a difference? I'm actually saying the exact opposite. I went for a run outside Philadelphia one time. It was snowy. I sort of got hopelessly lost, and I came across this old Revolutionary War cemetery. I was looking at these little gravestones, and one of them stood out. I walked up to it and what it said changed my life. It said, verses on tombstones are but idly spent. The living character is the monument. It was saying, it's not about how beautiful your gravestone is, how well attended your funeral is. It's not about how long you are remembered. It's about what you did in your life. And I think the Stoics would say, what you did with your life for the common good. Look, this is a graveyard surrounded by a fence. It's still well maintained. It's got a little historical placard. But the person who it's honoring, Joseph Sayers, is a traitor. He was a Confederate general. He was a bad person with a good chunk of his life. He raised up arms against his country, fighting for arguably the worst cause in human history. Now, some people can whitewash that, they can put up monuments to him, they can still celebrate him, but it's indisputable. He did a bad thing and fundamentally was a bad human being. That's the monument, how we live our life, what we do with our life. So that's the reminder. It's not that our life doesn't matter, our life does matter. But a good life, Marcus Aurelius tells us the fruit of the good life. It's good character. And acts for the common good. What have you done for others? How did you spend your time? What were the relationships you built? Did you leave this place better than you found it? That's the goal of Stoicism. It's not. I left it better than I found it. And I'm remembered for all time. And my kids don't have to work hard because I left them a huge legacy. No, the legacy is the example that you set. That your character was good, that you proved that you believed that. The things that you said. That's the line from Marcus Aurelius, that we don't talk about philosophy. We try to live it right. We try to put it into practice. That is the ultimate lesson of memento Mori. Not to do it later, but to do it now while we still can. So in my pocket, I carry this coin. It's a reminder. It says memento Mori on the front. There's a famous set of symbols you see in a lot of art. A skull, that's death. It's flower, that's life. And then the hourglass, that's time. We're dying every minute, as Seneca says, that we're all mortal, that we're all marked for death, and that we should live accordingly. Memento mori. Remember, you are mortal. It has a quote from Marcus Aurelius on the back. You could leave life right now. He's saying, let that determine what you do and say and think. It's not depressing, it's not demoralizing. It's invigorating. And that's what the sort of memento mori practice is all about.
