Most of our media are owned by a handful of tech billionaires, but there's one place that still operates like the internet was never invented.

On the new season of the divided dial from On the Media, we're exploring shortwave radio, where prayer and propaganda coexist with news and conspiracy theories, and where an existential battle

for the public airwaves is playing out right now.

Listen to On the Media, wherever you get your podcasts.

Good morning to you. Welcome back to practical Stoicism. Thanks so much for being here.

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Today's meditation is the sixth from book four and reads as follows.

Death is such as generation is, a mystery of nature, a composition out of the same elements

and a decomposition into the same, and altogether not a thing of which any man should be ashamed,

for it is not contrary to the nature of a reasonable animal, and not contrary to the reason of our

constitution. Generation is an odd choice of words here, but what he means, I think, is death is

similar to the process of coming to life. It's the

same mystery, perhaps. We see this sort of advice repeated many, many times throughout the

meditations, and here we're seeing it again. You're going to die. But here, Marcus doesn't

simply remind us of it. He provides us with additional insights on how to think about our own deaths.

He's comparing it to the process of being born. And there's a nice circle of life illusion as well, right?

Your parents eat from the earth. They eat plants and animals and in the digestion and absorption of these things and their individual

...