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Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 137.

The boxes are packed. The room echoes. The keys are handed over.

Something stable disappears, and suddenly the life that made sense yesterday no longer exists today.

And the question appears, quietly but insistently: Where do I belong now?

This is the problem Musonius Rufus addresses when he speaks about exile. And unlike many philosophers, he knew the subject firsthand. A first-century Stoic teacher—and mentor to Epictetus—Musonius was exiled more than once by Roman emperors who distrusted his influence.

He lost position, stability, and home. Yet he insisted: exile is not evil. [...]

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Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 136.

You don’t need a skull on your desk or a Latin motto in your bio to practice memento mori.

Montaigne, a sixteenth-century philosopher influenced by the Stoics, treats mortality as a human issue rather than a rare or dramatic event. He removes death from the category of “special occasions” and places it where it truly belongs: within everyday life.

Montaigne famously relies on the old saying that “to philosophize is to learn to die.” But his goal isn’t to make you morbid—it’s to make you less influenced by fear. He argues (again and again) that much of what we call “living” is really just avoidance: constant busyness, constant delay, constant mental bargaining. We postpone the hard conversation. We postpone the creative work. We postpone courage. We postpone rest. We even postpone joy.

Remembering death is a way of interrupting the postponement. [...]

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Welcome back to Dying Every Day. This is Day 135.

Most people build happiness like a house on sand—on approval, outcomes, comfort, and conditions. It looks solid when the weather is calm. But when circumstances change—as they always do—the foundation gives way.

Seneca insists the mistake is not bad luck, but bad architecture. “You ask me what is the foundation of a happy life?” he writes. And his answer is not comfort, success, or favorable fortune. It is internal: “a soul that is strong, upright, under control.”

Not a life without trouble—but a soul that can meet trouble without being diminished by it.

Happiness, in this Stoic sense, isn't a mood you just fall into when things go well. It's a foundation—a way of constructing a life that doesn't fall apart when circumstances change.

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