Massimo Pigliucci

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.

Now, this may sound kind of depressing and morbid and all that sort of stuff.

But in fact, they're getting at something fundamental here.

The notion that what makes our life meaningful is precisely the fact that it's finite.

Right?

If we actually live forever, if you got to do the same things over and over and over ad infinitum, nothing will matter.

Because you always have a remote control and you can rewind and redo it over.

And so it will lose meaning.

The reality is by focusing, by reminding yourself that time is in fact finite.

And not only that, but that you don't know.

how much you have left, then you need to redouble your efforts to spend the time that you have in a way that it's meaningful, joyous.

It's the way you really want to spend your life.

Think about it this way.