Remember You Will Die

Most of us live as if the supply of ordinary days is unlimited. It isn’t. The men who accept that early in life get far more out of the days they have left.

Stoicism has been sold back to us as a productivity hack, all cold plunges and 5am alarms, with a bust of Marcus Aurelius on the podcaster’s shelf. That is the bumper-sticker version. The real thing is older, harder and far more useful. It was put together by a former slave (Epictetus), a statesman whose own former pupil, Nero, eventually ordered him to kill himself (Seneca), and an emperor who wrote private notes to himself on campaign along the Danube (Marcus). All three were writing to stay upright.

Four of their ideas have earned a permanent place in my own toolbox.

One: Memento mori

Memento mori. Remember that you will die.

The phrase usually arrives with a Roman story attached: a victorious general riding through the city in triumph, with a slave standing behind him in the chariot whispering that he is only a man. It is a great image, and a thinly sourced one. The clearest ancient reference comes from the Christian writer Tertullian around AD 200 (“Look behind you, remember you are a man”), and memento mori as a slogan owes more to medieval monks and Dutch still-life painters than to Rome.

The Stoics had the habit long before anyone had the slogan. Marcus put it bluntly in the Meditations: you could leave life right now, so let that decide what you do, say and think. Epictetus went further, and the first time I read him on it I put the book down. When you kiss your child goodnight, he said, remind yourself that this one may be the last.

It sounds morbid, but it really is the opposite.

For most of my working life I measured life by its big moments: promotions, contract awards, holidays, milestones. Everything in between was filler, the stuff you got through on the way to the next headline. Keeping the end in view flipped that ledger completely. Most of a life, and most of a marriage, is made of the banal stuff: the first cup of coffee of the day, the drive home, the low-grade argument about who left the scissors out of the drawer.

When my youngest son was growing up, I used to read him bedtime stories, and even tried my hand at voice acting as the dialogue passed from one character to the next. He’s a teenager now and I live on another continent, so those quiet evenings are gone, and I yearn for those halcyon days. I remember reading Harry Potter to him, and him laughing at my feeble attempt at Snape’s contempt for Harry, far more vividly than any pay rise or promotion in thirty years.

I can’t tell you which night was the last bedtime story. Nobody told me at the time. There will be a last ordinary Tuesday too, and neither of you will know it.

Keeping the end in view has also made my marriage stronger, and the mechanism is simple. It is very hard to keep a petty grievance alive against someone once you have honestly reckoned that one of you will, one day, bury the other. Not might. Will. That reckoning has made me quicker to apologise, slower to keep score and far better at noticing. My wife and I used to argue when one of us would overspend on groceries and break our budget (marginally) – in hindsight, it didn’t really matter so long as our family had access to nutritious, fresh food, right? We still argue, but only about things that matter. The rest doesn’t survive one question: will this matter at the end?

There will be a last ordinary Tuesday too, and neither of you will know it.

In his 101st letter Seneca tells us to balance the books of life every day. So close the account each night as if there may be no entry tomorrow, and be grateful in the morning when there is.

Two: The four cardinal virtues

The four cardinal virtues are older than Stoicism; Plato lays them out in the Republic. The Stoics made them load-bearing. To them, virtue was the only true good. Money, health, reputation and comfort were what they called “preferred indifferents”. Prefer them, by all means. Just never trade a virtue to get one.

I use the four as a north star. A compass leaves the route to you and only tells you which way is north, which is exactly what you need when the map runs out. When a situation is murky, I run it past four questions. Is this wise? Is it brave? Is it fair? Is it measured? Four yeses and I stop agonising and get on with it. A single no, and I don’t.

Wisdom is practical judgement, and plenty of clever people are short of it. It means knowing what matters, what you control, and what the evidence says as opposed to what you’d like it to say. In technical due diligence that means reading a business case for what it assumes rather than what it promises, and the habit carries straight over into the rest of life.

For men our age, courage is rarely physical. It shows up as resilience and integrity: telling a client the number they don’t want to hear, or telling a founder their assumption is wrong before they sign something they’ll regret. It also looks like moving country in your fifties and sitting in rooms where you are the least knowledgeable person present, learning anyway.

Justice to the Stoics meant fairness and duty to others, the whole web of obligations that comes with being a social animal. Hierocles, a later Stoic, pictured each of us at the centre of concentric circles: self, family, friends, fellow citizens, humanity. The job is to keep pulling the outer circles inwards. My working test is how I treat people who can do absolutely nothing for me, like the driver or the warehouse operative. The answer says more about my sense of justice than anything I could post on LinkedIn.

Temperance is self-control and moderation, applied to food, drink, screens, spending and (as you’ll see below) temper. It is the least glamorous of the four and probably does the most work, because a man who can’t govern his own appetites will undo the other three.

Three: Amor fati

Amor fati. Love of fate.

First, a correction to the internet. The phrase is often credited to the Stoics, but it belongs to Nietzsche, who used it in The Gay Science in 1882 and later called it his formula for greatness: to want nothing to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not in all eternity. The idea underneath is Stoic to the bone, though. Epictetus put it plainly in the Enchiridion: don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do, and you will go on well. Marcus compared the mind to a blazing fire that turns everything thrown onto it into flame and light. The Quran carries the same idea of enduring what you cannot control in Surah Al-Baqarah (2:286): “Allah does not burden a soul beyond that it can bear.”

Regular readers will recognise this from “Good.”, the earlier piece where I borrowed Jocko Willink’s one-word fix. That fix is amor fati in work boots. Something goes wrong, you say “Good,” and then you finish the sentence.

There are three levels to it. The first is endurance, where you grit your teeth and survive the thing. The second is acceptance, where you stop arguing with what has already happened, and that is where “Good” starts. The third is love: actively wanting the event for what it is about to give you. Finishing the sentence (“Good, because…”) is the machinery that gets you from acceptance to love, because it sends you off to find what the setback is handing you. Most of the time there is something there. Sometimes it’s thin. Take it anyway.

Engineers will get this instantly. You don’t argue with the geotechnical report. You design the foundations for the ground you’ve got, and the best engineers I know take a strange pleasure in difficult ground, because that is where the craft shows.

This idea is easy to abuse, so one caveat. Amor fati doesn’t ask you to pretend a bereavement is good news or to perform gratitude for a disaster. It asks you to stop spending energy on the past, the one thing that is completely and permanently outside your control. The argument is over. Build on the ground you have.

Four: Prohairesis

This is the one that changed my behaviour the most, and it has the ugliest name.

Prohairesis is Epictetus’s word for the faculty of choice: your will, your power to decide how you judge and respond to whatever lands on you. The Enchiridion opens with the whole of Stoicism in two lines. Some things are up to us and some are not. Our opinions, intentions and responses are up to us. Our bodies, our reputations, other people and events are not.

Epictetus was born a slave and walked with a lame leg for the rest of his life. When he wrote that a man could chain his leg but not even Zeus himself could overpower his choice, he knew what chains were.

Nearly nineteen centuries after Epictetus, Viktor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist, arrived at the same place by the worst road imaginable. Deported in 1942, he survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two subcamps of Dachau. His wife, his mother, his father and his brother did not. In 1946 he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, one of my favourite books, and in it is the sentence that sits on top of this whole article:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

That is prohairesis, almost word for word.

(A note for the pedants, of whom I am one. The famous line “Between stimulus and response there is a space…” is plastered all over the internet under Frankl’s name. He never wrote it, and nobody has traced where it came from. The idea is in the spirit of his work, but quote the real sentence above.)

Now for the confession. I have a temper. Decades ago someone cut me off whilst I was driving, and I lost control so completely that I overtook the car, blocked the driver in with my own vehicle and stood in the middle of a motorway waving my fist at him. For years I put it down to standing up for my rights. In practice it meant handing control of my day to whoever happened to annoy me first.

Frankl was the slap I needed. If a man in Auschwitz could keep hold of that last freedom, I can certainly keep hold of mine when a contractor misses a deadline, or somebody cuts across three lanes of traffic on King Fahd Road. The comparison is almost embarrassing, which is why it works on me. I still cringe when I think back to the man standing on that motorway.

The drill I now run is simple. It only works once it has been practised to the point of being automatic.

First, feel the heat and name it. The Stoics never claimed you could stop the first jolt. Seneca called these “first movements”: the flush, the clenched jaw, the pulse. They are involuntary, and they only become anger when you agree with them. So I name it: that’s anger, and it is a proposal I don’t have to accept.

Second, buy time. Seneca again, in On Anger: the greatest remedy for anger is delay. Scripture says the same: James 1:19–20 tells believers to be “quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry”. The gap between trigger and response has to be built, like any muscle, by using it. Breathe. Walk. Don’t send the email.

Third, ask the prohairesis question: is this up to me? The late contractor isn’t, and neither is the driver or whatever someone else said. My response is, and it’s the only part I answer for.

Finally, say “Good,” and finish the sentence. Good, because now I know this contractor needs a tighter programme. Good, because I just got a free rep.

These days, when someone cuts me off, I name the heat, remind myself that his driving isn’t up to me, and say: “Good, because I got home twenty minutes earlier than if I’d stopped to fight him.”

One warning for men our age, who are already world champions at bottling things up. Stoicism doesn’t ask you to feel nothing. The aim is to stay the one who decides what happens next, so feel it fully and then choose.

The clock is running

Put the four together and they form a loop. Memento mori tells you the time is short. The virtues tell you how to spend it. Amor fati stops you wasting any of it arguing with what has already happened. Prohairesis reminds you that whatever happens, the response is still yours.

You don’t need a cold plunge for any of this. You need to show up and do the work, then do it again tomorrow.

Remember you will die. Then go home and put the kettle on.