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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics,

illustrated with stories from history, current events and literature to help you be better at what you do and at the

beginning of the week we try to do a deeper dive setting a kind of stoic intention

for the week something to meditate on something to think on something to

leave you with, journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing.

So let's get into it. The Earth is a boney, but pretty in sunlight. Something like a

hundred and seventeen billion human beings have ever lived. It's a little dark but

indisputably true that the vast majority of them are now dead, and that the people

alive today will one day join them.

What of all of the animals that preceded them by millions of years?

One generation path us away and the other generation cometh.

In Larry McMurray's epic novel, Lonesome Dove, Augustus McGrays out at the wide expanse of the Texas Plains and pond what has come and gone and been buried eon after eon.

Why think of all the buffalo that have died on these plains, he says.

Buffalo and other critters too and the Indians have been here forever.

Their bones are down here in the earth.

I'm told that over in the old country you can't dig six feet without uncovering skulls and

leg bones and such. People have been living there since the beginning and their

bones have kind of filled up the ground. It's interesting to think about, he says, all the bones and the ground.

In meditations, Marcus Aurelius makes a similar series of observations. He thinks about

all the emperors who have come before him, listing not just their names but the names of

...