💀 Dying Every Day
Dying Every Day is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project. Each episode turns a selected passage from Stoic philosophy into a guided meditation designed to help you (and me) learn how to live.
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A Stoic Lesson from The Odyssey
Welcome to Dying Every Day. This is Dying Daily.
Picture a man tied to the mast of his own ship.
He gave the order himself. “Bind me here,” he told his crew, and whatever I say, however I beg, do not untie me until we’re past. Then he had them fill their own ears with beeswax so they couldn’t hear a thing, but he left his own ears open.
And then the ship sails into the most dangerous stretch of water in the world, where the Sirens sing—a song so beautiful that every sailor who’s ever heard it has steered straight for the rocks to get closer, and died there, surrounded by the bones of everyone who came before. The man at the mast hears it. And it’s worse than he imagined. He strains against the ropes. He screams at his crew to turn the ship, to let him go; he has to get closer—and they can’t hear him, and the ropes hold, and slowly the singing fades behind them, and he survives.
That’s Odysseus. And if you’re anywhere near a movie theater, you might be aware of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey in theaters (I saw it a few days ago). For this Dying Daily episode, a shorter and more casual version of the podcast, I want to talk about why the Stoics were interested in this story.
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Here’s the strange part. Odysseus is not an obvious role model for a philosophy about self-control. He’s a liar. He’s a schemer. He cheats, he boasts, he sleeps with a goddess while weeping that he wants to go home, and he gets every single one of his men killed before he makes it back. Zeno and Epictetus both grumbled about his curiosity, his inability to just leave things alone. He is not a calm man. He is barely, at times, a good one.
And yet the Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius, and others—kept returning to him. Seneca called him one of the wise, a man “not conquered by effort, despising pleasure, victorious over the whole world.” There’s even a whole scholarly book about it, tracing how philosophers took this cunning, morally sketchy trickster and slowly turned him into a model of wisdom. (It’s called From Villain to Hero.)
Why do all that work? Why rehabilitate this particular man?
Probably because he’s us. The Stoics weren’t interested in Odysseus because he was perfect. They were interested because he wasn’t—because the whole poem is really a map of a person trying, and mostly failing, and eventually learning, to govern himself. Every monster he meets is a passion.
Seneca saw straight through the adventure story to what it actually is. He wrote (I love this) that we waste our time arguing about the geography, about where exactly Odysseus sailed and whether the monsters were near Sicily or somewhere past the edge of the map. Who cares, he stressed.
“We ourselves are tossed about by storms every day, and our badness thrusts us into all the ills Odysseus encountered.”
The storms aren’t out there in the ocean. They’re in you. You and I sail past the Sirens every single day.
Which brings us back to the mast and a detail I find interesting.
The crew plugged their ears. Odysseus didn’t.
Now, the easy story to tell here is that the crew took the coward’s way and Odysseus did the brave, wise thing by facing the song head-on. But be honest with yourself for a second, because I don’t think that’s right.
The crew’s move is actually the prudent one. They removed the temptation completely. Wax in the ears, heads down, row, done. Nobody nearly dies. Nobody has to be restrained. If you told me your plan for staying away from the thing that’s wrecking your life was “I’m going to remove it entirely and not go near it,” I’d tell you that’s a good approach. That’s the clean answer. Cut it off and row.
And Odysseus? Odysseus insists on keeping his ears open so he can hear the most dangerous song in the world—and the only reason he survives it is that other people physically tie him down while he thrashes and screams at them to steer for the rocks. Let’s call that what it is. That’s not obviously the wise move. It’s kind of a reckless one. Prideful, even. It only works because he happened to have a loyal crew willing to ignore a direct order from their captain.
So why does the mast still have something to teach us? Not because it’s the best way. Because of why he needed it.
What Odysseus does is the move of a man who knows his own weakness. He can’t make himself into the crew, so he binds the version of himself that the crew never had to worry about being. He set up the conditions in advance, back when he was thinking clearly, so that in the moment when he absolutely was not—when he was screaming and certain he needed this—the earlier, clearer version of him would still be in charge.
And that points at something worth holding onto. There are really two tools here, not one. Sometimes the answer is the crew’s: remove the thing, don’t go near it, row past with your ears full of wax. When you can do that, do that; it’s cleaner, and it’s safer. But some Sirens you can’t plug your ears against. Some of them are woven right into a life you can’t row away from—the person, the habit, the pull that’s built into your days and isn’t going anywhere.
For those, avoidance isn’t on the table.
And that’s when you need the mast.
And notice what the mast actually is. It isn’t “want the thing less.” Odysseus didn’t want it less; he screamed to be let loose. It isn’t “pretend the song is ugly”; he heard how beautiful it was, more clearly than anyone alive. What he did was separate the two things that usually arrive fused together: he let himself feel the full pull of the desire, and he made it impossible to act on it.
He kept the wanting and removed the steering wheel.
Because that’s the trap, isn’t it?
Normally, wanting something badly enough and being able to act on it arrive together, in the same instant, in the same weak moment.
Odysseus pried them apart. He handled the acting-on-it part in advance—bound his own hands back when he was calm and clear—so that when the wanting arrived at full force, there was simply nothing he could do about it. The decision had already been made by the wiser man he used to be an hour ago.
Every one of us has a Siren.
You probably know exactly what yours is.
And you know the two responses that don’t work—pretend it isn’t there, or sail straight at it swearing you can handle it in the moment.
Odysseus found the third way. Bind your hands now, while they’re still yours to bind. So that later, when the wanting comes, and every part of you is straining toward the rocks, there’s nothing left to do but sail past.
The Stoics actually had a name for the first move in all of this, and we’ve discussed a few times on the podcast. It’s the part where Odysseus, calm on the deck, pictures the version of himself who’s about to lose his mind. They called it premeditatio malorum. The premeditation of adversity. Rehearsing the hard thing before it arrives.
It sounds gloomy, and it isn’t.
It’s the opposite.
Odysseus knew the Sirens were coming and instead of hoping he’d handle it when the moment came, he sat with the disaster in advance. He imagined himself straining at the ropes, begging, certain he needed to steer for the rocks. He met his own weakness before it showed up, while he was still strong enough to do something about it. That’s the whole practice. Not dreading the future, rehearsing it, so that when it comes, you’ve already made your decision and the decision is waiting there for you.
Almost everything that wrecks us wins by ambush.
It arrives in a moment when we haven’t decided anything yet, and so we decide in the grip of it, which is to say we don’t decide at all—we just get pulled.
Premeditation is refusing the ambush.
It’s looking down the road at the storm you know is coming and quietly asking, before you’re anywhere near it: who do I want to be when that hits, and what do I need to set up right now so that the person I’ll be then can’t undo it?
That’s one of the lessons to carry out of the theater this week, if you go. Somewhere in your life a Siren is singing. You don’t have to stop wanting it. You just have to make sure that wanting it isn’t enough to sink you.
Bind your hands while the water’s still calm.
You already know what that means for you—the thing you set up now, with a clear head, that the version of you in its grip won’t be able to undo. The blocked app, the poured-out bottle, the honest word spoken out loud. Whatever your ropes are. Go tie them now while you’re thinking clearly.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Thank you for listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well.
J.W.
P.S. Catch up on recent (and past) meditations in the archive!