Massimo Pigliucci

Suddenly, you wake up in the morning, you're about to go out, and you collapse on the floor with the very intense feeling that you have no control over your body.

Okay, what would Epictetus or Marcus have said at this point?

Well, they would have said, okay, you just run into one of those externals that is not up to you.

The only thing you can do is to accept it and see what you can do about it in order to recover, to handle the situation, etc.,

That's right.

When I was young, as a lot of young people, you kind of think that you're immortal, and

That's, of course, not true, right?

I mean, I have looked up my actuarial statistics, so to speak, sometime recently, and it turns out that for somebody my age and my ethnic background living in New York, you know, there is a certain life expectancy.

And I looked it up and said, oh, okay, so statistically speaking, I have, you know, a couple more decades left.

But that's only statistically speaking.

Of course I could die today.

I could cross the street and a car could hit me and that's the end of it.

Or again, I could contract a lethal disease and I could die.

So there is all sorts of stuff that can happen in any time in somebody's life, right?

Whether you're young, middle-aged, late, etc., etc.

And what the Stoics do is they bring that to the forefront of their way of looking at life.

Seneca and then Marcus constantly say to themselves, act as if this was the last day of your life.

Or, if you want to put it more positively, you get up in the morning and you realize that you have one more day.

Yay, celebrate that day.

Because you don't know if you're going to have a second one and so on and so forth.