For most dinners, you’d be forgiven for not properly setting the table. But for holidays, dinner parties, and other special occasions, taking the time to set a table with the right utensils and dishes lends an air of significance to the occasion — something that feels particularly rare in our modern age.

On a practical level, though, most advice on this topic goes rather overboard with dinnerware, glassware, and silverware that 99% of households don’t have. Not to mention, the majority of tables simply don’t have space for each setting to have three plates and three glasses and a handful of flatware items. 

So in the guide above we sought to strike a balance between proper and practical. We’ve put the napkin under the forks to save space; we’ve not included dessert-specific items, as those things usually come out only after dinner has been cleared; and we’ve opted for just two beverage glasses, one for water and one for wine (or, really, whatever the special drink of choice is for the evening). Also note that spoons should technically only be placed if there’s a dish that requires it, but especially when kids (who often like using spoons more than forks) are included, they can be part of the place setting no matter what. 

Finally, it’s worth noting that this is a great job for kids to do in preparation for a party. It’s straightforward and helps keep them involved rather than just sitting around and asking when people are going to arrive or when dinner will be served.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When people think of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from their bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside; it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World War II. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t just fantasy writers — they were war veterans, cultural critics, and men with firsthand knowledge of evil, heroism, and sacrifice.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Joseph Loconte, returning to the show to discuss his latest book, The War for Middle Earth. We explore how both world wars shaped the perspectives of Tolkien and Lewis, found their way into works like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, and infused their literary masterpieces with moral weight, spiritual depth, and timeless themes of resistance, friendship, and redemption. We also talk about the legendary friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the creation of the Inklings, and how the men demonstrated the countercultural power of imaginative storytelling.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Related AoM podcasts:
  • #178: The Inklings Mastermind Group
  • #272: Lewis, Tolkien, and the Myth of Progress (Loconte’s first appearance on the AoM podcast)
  • #430: Why You Need to Join the Great Conversation About the Great Books
  • #499: A Fascinating Primer on Norse Mythology 
  • #594: How Churchill (and London) Survived the Blitz of 1940
  • #723: Men Without Chests
  • #765: C.S. Lewis on Building Men With Chests
  • #951: The Hobbit Virtues

• Related AoM articles
  • The Power of Conversation: A Lesson from CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien 
  • Lessons in Manliness from Viking Mythology 
  • Lessons in Manliness: The Hobbit
  • Men Without Chests
  • “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” speech by Winston Churchill
  • 4 Classic Chapter Books to Read Aloud With Your Kids

• Related outside articles:
  • Tolkien’s Deadly Dragons 
  • Munich Agreement
  • Owen Barfield

• Tolkien books mentioned:
  • The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 
  • Beowulf translated by Tolkien
  • The Hobbit 
  • The Lord of the Rings 
  • Beren and Luthien 
  • Letters from Father Christmas 

• Lewis books mentioned:
  • The Letters of C.S. Lewis 
  • The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis 
  • The Pilgrim’s Regress
  • The Chronicles of Narnia
  • The Great Divorce
  • The Screwtape Letters 
  • The Space Trilogy 
  • The Four Loves
  • Mere Christianity 
  • The Reading Life 

• Related books by other authors:
  • Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth
  • The Somme by Martin Gilbert
  • The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
  • The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
  • The Aeneid by Virgil
  • Phantastes by George MacDonald
  • The Vinland Sagas
  • The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
  • The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  • Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory

Connect With Joseph Loconte

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

One of the most neglected virtues of our daily existence is appreciation. —Dale Carnegie 

My career has mostly played out in roles that don’t involve directly managing other people. In late 2021, though, I spent a handful of months in a management role. That short amount of time totally changed my view of a manager’s job, as well as human nature and relationships in general. 

I expected the role to be more business-focused and even scientific in nature. Management content would have you believe that if you follow a certain set of predictable steps, measure the right “KPIs,” and give performance feedback based on a standardized rubric, you’ll be all set. 

The reality, as always, is a bit more nuanced. During my time managing a small team, it was far more about wrangling personalities and aligning expectations than anything else. Above all, though, I quickly realized that what folks mostly want and need is a cheerleader. They want someone to notice their effort and encourage them when the going gets tough. 

As William James once wrote, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” 

It’s not to be managed to a set of desired ends, but appreciated. 

Dale Carnegie, perhaps the most influential self-improvement author of all-time, wholeheartedly agreed with James’ wisdom and made it one of the core principles in How to Win Friends and Influence People: 

Give honest and sincere appreciation. 

He knew that people primarily wanted to feel seen, valued, and respected — and that genuine appreciation is one of the fastest ways to build better relationships at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

The Nourishment of Sincere Appreciation

We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and employees, but how seldom do we nourish their self-esteem? We provide them with roast beef and potatoes to build energy, but we neglect to give them kind words of appreciation that would sing in their memories for years like the music of the morning stars. —Dale Carnegie 

The craving for appreciation is not merely about vanity. Human beings are wired for connection; we need it and thrive on it. In the same way our bodies need food and drink in order to function properly, our spirits need kinship. Giving appreciation is one of the most potent ways we can nourish the people around us. So when someone goes out of their way to tell you, “I noticed what you did, and it mattered,” it hits at the core of what makes us human and fills our emotional tank like nothing else. 

At work, appreciation boosts motivation more effectively than bonuses. In marriage, it fills the relationship bank account. For kids, it builds confidence faster than correction ever could.

Flattery vs. Appreciation

On the flip side of the appreciation coin, mere flattery feels disingenuous and gross. Carnegie drew a hard line between the two:

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.

Flattery is a manipulative type of praise that tries to get something in return. Appreciation, on the other hand, is grounded in sincerity. 

Fortunately, humans are generally pretty good at intrinsically noticing the difference between the two. We have a way of feeling it. It’s not easy to fake sincerity or earnestness, which is why certain people — or the certain things that some people say — just hit us as being off. 

True appreciation needs to come from a sincere and honest place or it simply won’t work.    

Making Appreciation a Daily Habit

Every morning, perhaps as part of your journaling or meditation routine, think about someone in your life that you can show your gratitude towards. Friends, coworkers, family members, even your rolodex of loose connections is fine. There isn’t anybody who would respond negatively to a bit of appreciation, even if it’s been a while.  

1. Make It Easy. No need to schedule phone calls or write handwritten letters (unless you want to); a quick email or text message is totally fine, as long as it’s sincere. 
2. Be specific. Generic compliments don’t land. Tell people exactly what you appreciated and why it mattered to you. 
3. Notice effort, not just results. In a society where ghosting of all kinds is commonplace, simply showing up and giving effort is commendable. The ol’ college try really does matter and deserves to be recognized. 
4. Don’t ignore what’s around you every day. Make a special effort to notice things around the house and express appreciation to your partner and kids. As Dale Carnegie said, “We often take our spouses so much for granted that we never let them know we appreciate them.” 

A Virtuous Cycle 

Giving honest and sincere appreciation doesn’t just strengthen relationships, it improves you too. When you make a habit of noticing what’s good in others, you start noticing more good in the wider world. You complain less. You lead better. 

Regularly offering sincere and honest appreciation takes but thirty seconds, costs nothing, and can make a world of difference. 

Be sure to listen to our podcast about Dale Carnegie’s insights for the modern world: 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This week’s episode of the podcast referenced an ancient story: “The Choice of Hercules.” If you’ve never read it, it’s really worth doing so.

The story was set down by Xenophon (430–354 B.C. ), who was an ancient Greek historian and student of the philosopher Socrates. His Memorabilia is a collection of Socratic dialogues which purports to record the defense Socrates made for himself during his trial before the Athenians. While arguing against indolence and for the beneficial effects of labor, Socrates retells “The Choice of Hercules,” a fable that originated with the philosopher Prodicus.

This story was popular throughout the eighteenth century and was frequently studied by young men and depicted by artists. John Adams used it to guide his life and wished to make an illustration of the tale the design for the Great Seal of the new nation. The allegory’s power lies in its ability to convey a profound truth: that there can be no sweet without the bitter, no growth and no true happiness without challenge, effort, and virtue.

The Choice of Hercules

From the Memorabilia

By Xenophon, c. 371 B.C.

When Hercules was in that part of his youth in which it was natural for him to consider what course of life he ought to pursue, he one day retired into a desert, where the silence and solitude of the place very much favored his meditations.

As he was musing on his present condition, and very much perplexed in himself, on the state of life he should choose, he saw two women of a larger stature than ordinary, approaching towards him. One of them had a very noble air, and graceful deportment; her beauty was natural and easy, her person clean and unspotted, her motions and behavior full of modesty, and her raiment was white as snow. The other wanted all the native beauty and proportion of the former; her person was swelled, by luxury and ease, to a size quite disproportioned and uncomely. She had painted her complexion, that it might seem fairer and more ruddy than it really was, and endeavored to appear more graceful than ordinary in her bearing, by a mixture of affectation in all her gestures. She cast her eyes frequently upon herself, then turned them on those that were present, to see whether any one regarded her, and now and then looked on the figure she made in her own shadow.

As they drew nearer, the former continued the same composed pace, while the latter, striving to get before her, ran up to Hercules, and addressed herself to him:

“My dear Hercules,” says she, “I find you are very much divided in your thoughts, upon the way of life that you ought to choose; be my friend, and follow me; I will lead you into the possession of pleasure, and out of the reach of pain, and remove you from all the noise and disquietude of business. The affairs of either peace or war, shall have no power to disturb you. Your whole employment shall be to make your life easy, and to entertain every sense with its proper gratifications. Sumptuous tables, beds of roses, clouds of perfumes, concerts of music, crowds of beauties, are all in readiness to receive you. Come along with me into this region of delights, this world of pleasure, and bid farewell forever, to care, to pain, to business.”

Hercules, hearing the lady talk after this manner, desired to know her name; to which she answered, “My friends, and those who are well acquainted with me, call me Happiness; but my enemies, and those who would injure my reputation, have given me the name of Pleasure.”

By this time the other lady came up, who addressed herself to the young hero in a very different manner.

“Hercules,” says she, “I offer myself to you, because I know you are descended from the gods, and give proofs of that descent by your love to virtue, and application to the studies proper for your age. This makes me hope you will gain, both for yourself and me, an immortal reputation. But, before I invite you into my society and friendship, I will be open and sincere with you, and must lay down this, as an established truth, that there is nothing truly valuable which can be purchased without pains and labor. The gods have set a price upon every real and noble pleasure. If you would gain the favor of the Deity, you must be at the pains of worshiping him: if the friendship of good men, you must study to oblige them: if you would be honored by your country, you must take care to serve it. In short, if you would be eminent in war or peace, you must become master of all the qualifications that can make you so. These are the only terms and conditions upon which I can propose happiness.”

The goddess of Pleasure here broke in upon her discourse: “You see,” said she, “Hercules, by her own confession, the way to her pleasures is long and difficult; whereas, that which I propose is short and easy.” “Alas!” said the other lady, whose visage glowed with passion, made up of scorn and pity, “what are the pleasures you propose? To eat before you are hungry, drink before you are athirst, sleep before you are tired; to gratify your appetites before they are raised. You never heard the most delicious music, which is the praise of one’s own self; nor saw the most beautiful object, which is the work of one’s own hands. Your votaries pass away their youth in a dream of mistaken pleasures, while they are hoarding up anguish, torment, and remorse for old age.”

“As for me, I am the friend of gods and of good men, an agreeable companion to the artisan, a household guardian to the fathers of families, a patron and protector of servants, an associate in all true and generous friendships. The banquets of my votaries are never costly, but always delicious; for none eat and drink at them, who are not invited by hunger and thirst. Their slumbers are sound, and their wakings cheerful. My young men have the pleasure of hearing themselves praised by those who are in years; and those who are in years, of being honored by those who are young. In a word, my followers are favored by the gods, beloved by their acquaintance, esteemed by their country, and after the close of their labors, honored by posterity.”

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

One of my goals this year has been to become a cinephile, so I’ve been working my way through some of the classics that have influenced generations of filmmakers. Recently, I finally got around to watching Seven Samurai.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece has been on my list for a long time. It’s the film that inspired The Magnificent Seven and influenced everything from Star Wars to A Bug’s Life. But even though it’s been imitated countless times, the original still hits the hardest.

The story’s simple: a poor farming village in 16th-century Japan is being terrorized by bandits who plan to return after harvest to steal the villagers’ crops. Desperate and outmatched, the farmers decide to hire a small band of samurai to defend them. They find seven — each with his own personality, flaws, and strengths — and together they train the villagers, fortify the town, and prepare for the inevitable assault.

On the surface, Seven Samurai is an action film about a ragtag group of warriors facing impossible odds. But underneath, it’s a meditation on leadership, honor, humility, and what it means to live by a code.

If you’ve read our earlier piece on the Bushido code, you’ll recognize many of its virtues woven throughout the film. Kurosawa shows what the code looks like in practice.

It’s been a month since I watched the movie, and I’m still thinking about it. But I haven’t been thinking about the action scenes. I’ve been thinking about the life lessons I gleaned from the film.

Here are seven lessons I took away from Seven Samurai:

1. Lead With Humility and Serve Others

The first samurai we meet, Kambei Shimada, will lead the group of samurai defenders and shows what real leadership looks like before he ever picks up a sword. In one of the film’s opening scenes, a child has been kidnapped and taken hostage in a hut. The kidnapper is threatening to kill the child. Instead of going in with guns, I mean swords, a-blazing, Kambei shaves off his topknot — symbol of status and pride for a samurai — to disguise himself as a monk to rescue the child. He didn’t ask anything in return for his services and walked out of the village like a boss.

Throughout the rest of the film, you’ll see him rubbing his head where his topknot used to be. I reckon it was a reminder to him that sometimes to live the Bushido code fully means giving up the outward trappings of prestige.

That moment rescuing the child sets the tone for everything else Kambei does in the story. He leads not by asserting dominance, but by accepting responsibility and serving others. When he recruits the rest of the team, they follow him out of respect for his example, not his rank. He earns their trust through his humility.

2. Sweat More in Preparation, Bleed Less in Battle

Once Kambei agrees to defend the village, the samurai don’t rush into heroics. They spend most of the film preparing — studying the terrain, training the farmers, fortifying walls, digging moats, and mapping out every approach the bandits might take. The villagers think the samurai are just standing around, but Kambei knows what Sun Tzu wrote centuries earlier: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war; defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”

When the attack finally comes, the outcome feels inevitable. The bandits charge straight into the traps that the samurai had laid days earlier. Their premeditated preparation beats the enemy’s in-the-moment berserkery.

While we like to think of courage as spontaneous — as a flash of bravery that arises when danger appears — the foundation of bravery is built in advance. The calm you can call up in a crisis will manifest in direct proportion to your readiness to face the challenge.

3. Be a Quiet Professional

My favorite character in the film is Kyūzō. The guy is a certified badass. He barely speaks throughout the movie, but he communicates through his actions. He’s a master at his craft with the sword. His effort looks effortless (the art of wu wei!). When a boastful samurai challenges him to a duel, Kyūzō wins with a single strike, then walks away without gloating.

One character described Kyūzō thusly:

He has the real samurai spirit. He is totally fearless. Yet, at the same time, he is gentle and modest — look how he acted after we went and got that gun. And how he went too — just as though he were going up into the hills to look for mushrooms.

We live in an age that rewards noise over skill. Kyūzō teaches us that there’s power in being a quiet professional. Real mastery is self-evident; when you’re truly good at what you do, you no longer have to announce it.

4. When You Are Strong, I Am Strong

There’s an aphorism in Latin that I love: vales, valeo.

When you are strong, I am strong.

While the seven samurai came from a different culture than the Roman centurions, they embodied this universal principle of teamwork and camaraderie.

The seven samurai come from different backgrounds. Each one has a distinct temperament and personality. One is a war-weary veteran, another a prankster, another a naïve young apprentice. They argue, joke, and occasionally butt heads. But when the bandits attack, they fight as one.

Heihachi, the humble woodchopping samurai, makes a banner for this ragtag group. It consists of six circles and one triangle. The triangle represents the non-samurai, Kikuchiyo ; the six circles represent the actual samurai on the team. It was a symbol of their unity.

You can’t win life’s battles alone. The trick is finding the right men to stand beside you and being the kind of man they can count on.

And what’s interesting is that as you make others strong, you make yourself strong. As Kambei puts it, “By protecting others, you save yourself. If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.”

Vales, valeo.

5. Honor Is Earned

Kikuchiyo, the film’s comic relief and erratic trickster, is a fraud. He carries a fake samurai pedigree, hiding the fact that he’s the son of lowly farmers — the very people the samurai are hired to protect.

But he desperately wants to be a samurai. He wants to prove himself worthy of honor in a world that says he can’t have it. Kambei sees the unbridled thumos in Kikuchiyo and, instead of rejecting him for not being a true samurai, brings him into his fold to help direct that energy toward something bigger than himself. By the end, Kikuchiyo earns his spurs, so to speak, by living the code of the samurai. He dies defending the village, becoming the samurai he so desperately wanted to be. Rather than letting his past define his life, he creates his legacy through his noble actions.

6. Keep Your Sense of Humor (Especially Under Strain)

One of the things you’ll notice throughout the film is that even in the most stressful moments, the samurai are laughing. Humor was an important part of maintaining morale.

Heihachi, the woodchopping samurai, is typically the source of that laughter. He isn’t the strongest fighter, but he’s indispensable. When everyone is grim-faced and exhausted, he cracks a joke or hums a tune to boost everyone’s spirits.

When you’re staring down impossible odds, a little levity can save your sanity. Nietzsche famously said that the spirit of gravity, of taking things too seriously, can hobble your ability to act nobly. Strength without levity is fragile and stiff. Humor makes you more flexible. Laughter elevates.

7. Live for Honor and Purpose, Not for Reward

At the film’s end, though the villagers are safe, four samurai have fallen. Kambei looks at their graves and says quietly, “This is the nature of our trade. We always lose.”

The samurai fought not for glory but for honor. They were tragic heroes. They fought even when they knew they’d inevitably incur casualties.

In a world that measures everything by return on investment, Seven Samurai shows us that some things are worth doing simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Final Reflections

Weeks after seeing this film, I still catch myself thinking about Kambei rubbing his shaved head or Kyūzō silently taking care of business. And it makes me want to be more disciplined, more humble, more useful.

I can see why Kurosawa’s story has been copied so many times. It’s about sacrifice, teamwork, and redemption. The samurai fight and die for people who can’t pay them or do anything else for them. They do good because it is good. It’s an ennobling film.

So if you haven’t seen Seven Samurai, make time for it. It’s long and slow by modern standards, but absolutely worth it. You’ll walk away wanting to be a better man.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Halloween is the one time of year when death takes center stage in the West. Skeletons hang from porches, skulls grin from mantelpieces, and giant grim reapers show up in the seasonal aisle at Home Depot. For a few weeks, the thing we spend the rest of the year avoiding becomes incredibly visible.

It’s a good time to practice a little memento mori — to remember that we’re all going to die someday.

To help you do that, we’ve put together a collection of quotes on death from writers and philosophers throughout the ages. Some are sobering and some are comforting.

So read on and take a few minutes to contemplate the fear, the hope, and the mystery that surrounds death. 

And after you’ve reflected on these quotes, make sure to check out our recent podcast interview with Joanna Ebenstein that’s all about how meditating on death can help us live fuller lives (many of the quotes below come from her fantastic book). 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance. We hide it behind hospital curtains, euphemize it in conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t want death to get in the way of living.

But my guest would say that making friends with death is the key to fully embracing life. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder of Morbid Anatomy, a project that uses exhibitions, lectures, and classes to explore how death intersects with history and culture. She’s also the author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Joanna shares why we lost a more intimate relationship with death and the life-stifling consequences of that disconnect. We discuss practices for coming to terms with death and removing our fear of it, including looking at memento mori art, meditating on death, talking to the dead, and simply taking care of the practicalities surrounding our inevitable departure.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: What Man Understands That He Is Dying Daily? (This Is Your Life)
• AoM Article: Memento Mori — Art to Help You Meditate on Death and Become a Better Man
• AoM Article: A Primer on Advance Directives
• AoM Article: How To Protect Your Legacy — A 3-Step Guide to Estate Planning
• Sunday Firesides: Look Into the Tomb
• Sunday Firesides: As I Am Now
• Victorian Memorial Hairwork
• The Dance of Death
• Vanitas art
• The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by Martín Prechtel
• Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America by Stanley B. Burns
• Death: A Graveside Companion by Joanna Ebenstein

Connect With Joanna Ebenstein

• Morbid Anatomy website
• Joanna’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance while we hide behind hostile curtains, euphemizing a conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t want death to get in the way of living, but my guest would say that making friends with death is the key to a fulfilling life. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder of Morbid Anatomy, a project that uses exhibitions, lectures, and classes to explore how death intersects with history and culture. She’s also the author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life. In today’s show Joanna shares why we lost a more intimate relationship with death and the life-stifling consequences of that disconnect. We discussed practices for coming to terms with death and removing our fear of it, including looking at Memento Mori art, meditating on death, talking to the dead, and simply taking care of the practicalities surrounding our inevitable departure. After the show is over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/mementomori. All right, Joanna Ebenstein, welcome to the show.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you founded a project called Morbid Anatomy that explores the different facets of death. You also wrote a book called Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, which is about how thinking about death, meditating on it, making it a part of our lives can actually improve our lives in the West, particularly in America. I think we’re not particularly comfortable with talking about or thinking about death. But what’s interesting, and you talk about this in your book, that wasn’t always the case. There was a time in America where we did have a relationship with death, and this was largely before the 20th century. So what happened? Why did people lose this relationship to death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, that’s a great question and a really important one. And what I like to say, and I always say this to my students at the beginning of class, the idea that we can deny death at all is a luxury unique to our time and place. So until the late 19th to early 20th century, people butchered their own animals. People died in the home. The idea of a good death was to die at home surrounded by friends and loved ones. The parlor was a place to lay out the body of the dead in the home, and life expectancy was much shorter and many children died before reaching adulthood. And on top of that, we have wars and the Civil War, World War I, and the influenza epidemic. So I think this idea that death is something exotic and far away and something that is possible to ignore just wasn’t present in the 19th century.

That’s brand new. I don’t think any other culture has had that situation in our culture. When someone gets sick, they go off to a hospital, which is where they usually die. We put our old and old age homes. So these are all new developments that push the idea of death and aging further and further from our daily experience. And this was very much not the case in the 19th century. I think watching the movie Gone With the Wind, which many of your listeners out there probably have watched is a great, great example of how death was a part of everyday life in Victorian era in a very prosaic way.

Brett McKay:

My family, we just finished watching Gone With the Wind.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Ah, it’s wonderful. Right, and that scene, I think when we talk about mourning practices, I love to show that scene where Scarlet accepts the dance offer of Rhett Butler when she’s in mourning right. And shocks, everyone’s like, oh my God, you can’t possibly do that. So that shows not only death practices, but also the rigor of mourning for women especially.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about that. That’s interesting. You talk about it in the book, the rituals and culture that we had around death in 19th century America. It seems like we imported that from Victorian England.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes, I think that’s true. And from what, I’m not a specialist in this, but from what I have read, it seems to me that death practices in the West had not changed substantially between the ancient Greeks and the Victorians until the present. So this idea of anointing the deceased with oils and dressing them and laying them out in the parlor or in the home for viewing, this was also done from my understanding in the ancient Greek world. So I think in the Western world, the Victorian traditions were very, very longstanding traditions that were probably part of all of Europe is my guess. And that’s how they made their way to the United States. It’s really only with modernization, the beginning of hospitals, the rise of hygiene. And then what many historians also point out is the kind of twin mass death events of the influenza epidemic in World War I that kind of wipe out those old traditions of mourning.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So before the 20th century, death was just part of the home life. When someone died, they died in their home, and then the funeral and the body preparation, it happened in the home. It didn’t get sent off to a funeral home.

Joanna Ebenstein:

To a professional. It’s that professionalization. Absolutely.

Brett McKay:

And something I learned while reading your book, sort of this transition from the 19th century to the 20th century in our relationship to death, why living rooms are called living rooms.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Isn’t that amazing?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Tell us about that.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I read about this in, there’s a man in my community called Stanley Burns who is a collector of postmortem photography. Actually, I found his book when I was about 17, I think was a really life-changing event. So postmortem photographs are part of morning practice where people take pictures of their dead loved ones and keep them either as little keepsake say as a locket, maybe with some of their hair or maybe put it in the family photo album or maybe send out to friends, whatever. And he wrote a book on this tradition of postmortem photography where he talked about this. And so yes, I believe it was Ladies Home Journal. I can’t remember exactly the name. It was something like that. And it was in the early 20th century. Somebody wrote an article and they were basically agitating for people to change the name of the parlor to the living room because the parlor had traditionally been a place that you would lay out the bodies of the dead. But now with these new funeral parlors, the parlor was becoming a room for the living, the living room. And that’s where we get the name.

Brett McKay:

And you mentioned hair lockets another weird, I mean, not weird, but it’s interesting for us or weird for us, people would make wreaths out of the hair of dead loved ones.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes. Living and dead. So if you look up for those listeners who are curious, if you look up Victorian hair art or Victorian hair work, you will see this. There were many, many practices that, again, as far as I’ve seen women did in the wake of a death as part of mourning. And I think of it as both memorializing the dead, creating a work that keeps the memory of the dead alive, but also is a form of mourning. So one of these is working with human hair. And actually here at Morbid Anatomy, we have a teacher, Karen Bachman, who has reverse engineered how hair art was created, and she teaches it for us. And I took this class, and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried, but when you try to work with human hair, it’s really hard and it takes a lot of concentration and it’s very meditative actually.

And by doing this class, I began to think, well, I think all of these women doing this in the wake of a loved one’s death, it wasn’t just about the final product that the final product is beautiful. It’s also about this meditative act that you’re doing with the mortal remains of your loved ones. And interestingly, we think about bone and hair being the two things that live on from our bodies when we die, and these hair works to speak to what you’re saying, these beautiful wreaths that are people create flowers or designs with human hair, sometimes in lockets making different kinds of designs. This hair that was made in the 18th or 19th century still looks beautiful today. So there is this immortalizing aspect to working with hair.

Brett McKay:

So in America, there was a period when death was just part of everyday life. You saw it every day. If you worked with animals, there were sicknesses where people just died, children died. That was a common occurrence. There were wars and people would die there. And in the 20th century, we had this shift where death became something we just hid. It became professionalized. And when you’re sick, you went to a hospital and then you die in the hospital and then your body would get carried off and a professional will take care of it. And it’s all very sanitary, but also impersonal at the same time.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I am glad you brought up the sanitary because I think that’s really part of the drive too, is of course, one of the things that’s happening in the late 19th into early 20th century is changing ideas about what is hygienic and what is safe. So people start to be a little afraid of bodies where maybe they weren’t so much before. And this idea of getting rid of them as quickly as possible, which I think we continue to have today.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so death, we kind of hide it. We pretend like it’s not there. What have been the psychological consequences of having an aversion to thinking about and acknowledging death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, from my point of view, I think there are a lot of very unhappy unrealized people. I know we’re going to probably talk a little bit later more about these kind of practices of how people kept death close at hand. But in my experience, from the different practices that I have spontaneously developed or learned from history, if you are able to come to terms with the fact that your time on earth is limited, it is much easier to make decisions about what you want to do with the time that you have and to live a life that is true to you so that you don’t die with a bunch of regrets on your deathbed. So my husband is a death doula, and so death doulas are practitioners that work with the dying to help them through the dying process. And what death doulas say is that, well, they group it into four different categories.

If you have regret, if you have unfinished business, if you have grief and shame, I think those are the four major categories. But essentially these things hold you back from a good death, from an easy death. Perhaps you haven’t said the words you want to a loved one. Perhaps you’re in the middle of a feud with someone and you wish you’d resolved it, whatever. And so death doulas help work with people who are on the verge or starting to see their end in sight to resolve these things so that they can let go and die peacefully. So I think there’s this not dying peacefully thing. And also in my experience, I think many people that I have seen die suddenly realizing that they wish they had done certain things in their life that they didn’t. And this is regret. And so for me, I feel like by contemplating death and by having practices where I’m constantly saying, okay, what do I want to do with my time on earth rather than What do I want to do?

If you just phrase it with my time on earth, suddenly you can feel that immediately, right? It’s like there’s an urgency and it kind of cuts through the model where everything is clear, that knowing there’s brevity helps, at least for me to see what it is that I prioritize, what my values are, how I want to live my life on earth. So I think when we neglect to do that, we neglect living a full life which might make us bitter or angry or sad or unrealized at the very least. And I think there’s a lot of fear around it, and that fear is really easily manipulated by others, I think.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. What are the benefits of making friends with death? I mean, that’s kind of the whole premise of your book. It’s like, well, if we get more familiar with death, it’ll help improve our lives.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. Well, I’ll tell a story from my own past, which I think illustrates it. So I have always loved to travel. My family are all travelers. I really enjoy it, but I hate to fly. And anytime there’s turbulence, I freak out. And this is true to this day. And by freak out, I don’t mean jump up and down, I just mean my heart’s beating really fast. I can’t relax. And I used to be so afraid of flying that when I was waiting in line to get onto the plane, I would have these kind of intrusive thoughts where I would imagine the people around me and how they’d be acting if the plane was plummeting down. But I love travel and I wasn’t going to stop because I was afraid of flying. So the way I dealt with it, and this was a spontaneous ritual that I developed, is this is from about the time I was 13 on or something.

I would sit on the plane, I’d fasten my seatbelt, stow my overhead thing, close my eyes and think to myself, okay, if I die on this flight, what do I wish I had done differently with my life? And I’ve been doing that since I was 13. And I was really surprised to find when I was doing research for this book that Steve Jobs had a very similar ritual. So he did a commencement speech for, I think it was Stanford, right after he’d been diagnosed with a certain kind of rare cancer. And he revealed that he did exactly the same thing. He would look in the mirror every day and say, do I want to do what I’m doing today? And if the answer was “no” too many days in a row, he’d make a change. So I think Steve Jobs was saying and did say that by contemplating death, he lived this incredible life that we all remember him for. And I am no Steve Jobs, but I will say that I’ve lived a life that is true to who I am. And so although I do not want to die and I’m not seeking death, I hasten to say that if I did die tomorrow, I’d be okay with it because I did what I wanted to do. And I think that’s the gift that contemplating death gives. It helps one realize with clarity what one really wants to do with one’s time on earth, and also helps you have the courage to achieve it.

Brett McKay:

Something I was struck by is how the work of the psychologist Jung has influenced your philosophy of death. Can you tell us about that?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Sure. I love Carl Jung, and when I first read Carl Jung as a, I guess in my early thirties, a friend of mine, my friend Susanna McDonald, gave me a copy of man and his symbols. And when I read it, I was just thunderstruck and I just thought, wow, this person thinks exactly like I do, but he’s way smarter than me. So what I love about Jung is I feel that Jung creates a bridge to our ancestors. He has real respect for the way people have thought about the world, and he has a wisdom. And part of his wisdom to me is about wholeness, or I would say complimentary duality rather than binary duality. So the way that Jung looks at the world, there are these archetypal polarities. And so you have on the one hand life and on the other hand, death and the mark of a balanced healthy culture would be that we give equal primacy to both sides of that polarity.

And he has this idea of the shadow, which probably everyone’s heard of, and this is the idea that there’s a part of ourselves or part of our culture that is unacknowledged, unrecognized and pushed into the unconscious, where then it can create fear and dis-ease essentially from his point of view. The important thing to do with these polarities is to find balance. And it’s important to go into the shadow and bring it to consciousness. So rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, rather than saying, oh, no, I’m not like that, that person over there is like that trying to say, where is there a part of me that is in what I recoil from? And that just speaks to me. It feels very true and very balanced and young thought that he shared my view that contemplating death is essential to being a mature adult. And that’s something that instinctively, I think I always felt this idea that there’s a real, to me, immaturity, to pretending that we’re not going to die. Everyone who has ever lived has died and every single person will die. And so rather than deny it, it just seems to make better sense to look it in the eye, and then by looking it in the eye, it ceases to be so frightening.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. It sounds like you had to come to terms with death and embrace death in order to become fully human.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Exactly. And that especially as you got older, this is one of the things he said when you were from middle age on that one of our main tasks in life was to prepare for our own death. And part of that was to figure out what we think happens after you die. And he was quick to say that whatever you believe doesn’t mean it’s capital true. And it also doesn’t mean that your opinion won’t change later, but you must have, in his opinion, you must have your own idea of what will happen after you die. And that is part of what will ease you through the death process.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Jung said you had to develop your own myth of death, and it didn’t mean you invented a fairytale about death to comfort yourself, but it was about creating this symbolic framework for yourself. It’s kind of like an inner narrative about what you think about death that will help you approach mortality with meaning rather than fear.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And it has to be what I think is so beautiful about what he said, it can’t be received wisdom. He would say, you can’t be on your deathbed and say, Dr. Yung thought this or that. You have to believe it. It has to be something that comes through your own struggle.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. What you do in your book is you offer readers, practices, exercises that they can do and also suggestions on films, books, art to look at, to help them develop their own myth of death. As you said, it’s not something you can just be told, you have to live it. You actually have to do this stuff. So let’s talk about some of these practices. Let’s talk about the title of your book, Memento Mori. This is a practice that has been done throughout the world and throughout time. For those who aren’t familiar with the practice, what is Memento Mori?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, so a Memento Mori is a practice or an artwork or a ritual that reminds you of your own mortality, your own personal death, so that you can then live the best life possible. That’s how I see it. And there are many, many forms of Memento Mori. The oldest that I know of were in ancient Rome, I’m sorry, in ancient Egypt. That’s the oldest that I’ve heard discussed where I’ve read that at the height of a feast, people would bring out a skeleton or a mummy as a reminder to those feasting that life is short. In ancient Rome, you might be gifted with a larva convivial, which were these little bronze skeletons at a banquet and also some banquet floors. I’m sure many of your listeners will be familiar with. These have skeletons of sorts. And this idea in the Roman tradition is carpe diem, like eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow, you might die.

Then in the Christian tradition, the meaning is a bit changed, right? It’s kind of the opposite. In the Christian era, you have rosary beads that are half living, half dead, or you have paintings of a skull in an hourglass, which probably many, many of your listeners have seen. And these were intended to remind the viewer that you might die, but in this case, not so you could eat, drink, and be merry, but rather so you could be ready to meet your maker. So a reminder to resist sin and resist temptation in order to live a holy life.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Memento Mori is Latin for remember, you will die. And in Roman culture and ancient Roman culture, sometimes this is used to push to enjoy life while you had it, the whole carpe diem thing. But other times, especially with the stoics, Memento Mori was more of a moral check for virtue because it was a reminder time short. So be good. And people probably heard this story, which it’s not exactly true, but I think it captures the spirit of this  Memento Mori idea that when a Roman general was paraded through the streets of Rome, after a victory, he’d have a servant next to him who would whisper in his ear, Memento Mori, remember your mortal? And the idea was that it was to help him keep humble, despite having this big victory. Later on in art, you sometimes see carpe diem and Memento Mori paired together like you’d have a skull next to a blooming flower reminding people that life’s brief. So you got to make it count. 

Brett McKay: 

And I want to talk more about Memento Mori art, which has been a theme in art at different times. Any examples of momentum, moori art that really stand out to you?

Joanna Ebenstein:

So there’s many art traditions that draw on this. One is the dance of death. So this was something that came to prominence during the Black Plague, and this is when you see this whole series of images where death is leading off people of different genders and social stations. So you have death in the maiden, you have death and the priest death and the child. Those are really amazing and often these really wonderful looks at a culture at large. There’s another tradition called Death in the Maiden, which comes from what I can understand, not just the dance of death, but also the story of Persephone in ancient Greece. And Persephone was the goddess of the dead, but she started life just as the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She was kidnapped by Hades, the king of the dead, and became his queen in the underworld, and she was basically abducted from her life.

And so this idea, again, of death in the maiden, there’s this image of a deathly figure taking a very beautiful young woman. Those are pretty amazing, and some of them are quite erotic and very strange if you’re interested in those. I have a book called Death: A Graveside Companion, and I collected as many of those as I could because they’re quite surprising. And they’re from around the 1600s or 1500s. They’re very, very graphic. But then probably my favorite Memento Mori genre are what are called Half Living and Half Dead. And these are images. If you look up half living and half dead on the Internet, you’ll find these as well, half a beautiful young man or woman with clothes that are fashionable in the time it was made and half either skull skeleton or decaying cadaver. And so the idea here is the inextricable relationship between life and death.

Brett McKay:

My favorite genre of Memento Mori art comes from the Dutch Golden Age, the Vanitas.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Oh, yes. Those are wonderful.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, tell us about that.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, so vanitas are kind of a form of still life, and I think it’s really interesting to note that still life in French is nature mort, which is dead nature. So there’s already a memento mori aspect built into the still life, which is shocking. But these are still life that are very explicitly about mortality. So you have skulls or glasses, you have decaying flowers, and you have all these symbols of things that you won’t be able to take with you into the next life. Globes and jewels and card games and all the pleasures of life. So these are beautiful oil paintings very beautifully rendered that you would hang in your home as a reminder of the brevity of all of the things you love.

Brett McKay:

And then you also mentioned that aristocrats in Europe, they would often just acquire skeletons or human skulls and just display them somewhere in their house.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely. And again, it was a sign of a memento mori. It was a reminder. And you see these in paintings of saints too. You see a saint holding a skull and contemplating it. So this idea of using human remains as a way to remind us of our death, that’s something that continues for a very long time. And I think it’s worth remembering too, that before we had these cemeteries where people would be buried forever, people would be dug up after a certain number of years so as to make more room for more people in the church. And then those bones would be kept often in artistic arrangements or in piles that would then act as a memento Mori as well.

Brett McKay:

That’s something I’m struck by whenever I read history books, even in America in the 19th century, how frequently people just unburied dead people to either move the body or sometimes just to look at the body.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, yeah. Or there’s that wonderful story of the pre-Raphaelite, was it Rosetti? I think it was Dante, Gabrielle Rosetti, who buried his favorite muse with some of his poems, and later in life decided to dig it back up to take the poems, but they decay. So yeah, I think that again, it’s coming back to this idea that I think we’re really afraid of the dead body now. We’re afraid of the dead, and that was not the case for most of human history.

Brett McKay:

An example of that, of a person in 19th century America who unburied a dead loved one that really sticks with me is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Joanna Ebenstein:

I didn’t know about that.

Brett McKay:

His wife died and he was just distraught, and he decided one day to go to her tomb and open up the casket to look at her, and no one knows why he did it, but it was after he had that encounter looking at his dead wife, and I’m sure she was decomposing at that point. That’s when he quit his job with the church he was at, and he struck out on his own and started doing his essays and lectures on self-reliance and all that stuff.

Joanna Ebenstein:

That’s such a great story. I’ve never heard that, but that speaks to everything we’re talking about. His direct contemplation with death changed the course of his life, and he left the safe comfortable world behind and became someone we remember today.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think, I mean, we’re psychoanalyzing a guy that’s been dead for almost 200 years, but I wonder if he looked at his wife and just looking at her dead body, he realized she’s not coming back. I have to move on with my life. That’s over. I have to move on.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And it also reminds me in the Christian tradition and in the Buddhist tradition, there are meditations, death meditations that revolve around contemplating the decomposition of the body as a really strong momentum mori as a reminder that you will die of the impermanence of everything that you base your life on. There’s something really profound about that.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I was speaking of cemeteries. I love going through old cemeteries that were built in the 18th and 19th century because a lot of the gravestones were Memento Mori, my favorite one. You’ll see it every now and then. A gravestone will say, here lies so-and-so, the date of birth, date of death, and then it’ll have a skull or something, and then it’ll say, remember me as you pass by as you are now. So once was I as I am now, so you will be prepare for death and follow me.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And so again, that just shows how long standing the sentiment and the idea that the sentiment is useful to us in some way is

Brett McKay:

Okay. So you recommend people make or collect their own memento mori, put it somewhere in their house and just it’s a reminder of death that you can look at. I think it’s a great practice that people can do. But you mentioned this death meditation as another way of doing Memento Mori. You mentioned the Buddhists have a death meditation, Christianity. There’s a history of death meditations. Walk us through what a death meditation looks like.

Joanna Ebenstein:

There are so many different kinds of death meditations, but one thing I’ll start with by saying is my husband is a longtime meditator, which is how he became a death doula. And what he tells us is that in the eastern tradition, meditation itself is a preparation for death. So the idea is that after the death of the body part of us lives on, and it has to navigate a series of confusing spaces in order to get to the next stage of existence, whatever that might be, many cultures that believe that I should point out on some level or another. But meditation is supposed to help us keep our wits about us in a moment of complete upheaval. So I think that’s a really interesting thing to point out. First, he teaches a death meditation for morbid anatomy, which is really about leaving your body in your mind and then coming back and also talking about what happens to the body as you start to die.

There are these meditations in the Christian and Buddhist tradition in which you meditate on different levels of decomposition of the body, and the Buddhist would even go to the charnel grounds and look at these bodies as a form of meditation and have artworks around it. My personal favorite death meditation comes from the Jungian tradition, and it’s by a woman named June Singer. And I found it so calming to do it, and I still come back to it in times of stress. It’s basically a slow letting go of everything you’re attached to in your daily life. So what really stuck with me is think of your desk and all of the piles of things that you’re working on right now. You can let that go one by one. You let the things you’re attached to go. And by doing that, there’s such a sense of, for me at least, it’s not fear, it’s relief, and it’s this reminder that the things that we find important right now, there’s so many things I imagine, Brett, for you, certainly for me, I have to do this and I have to do that, and I can’t wait.

But when you start to let go, that disappears. It’s not important anymore. You’re moving somewhere else. And if you’ve ever read any near-death experiences, which I really enjoy reading, this is what these people say again and again. So near-death experiences are when people who technically are dead, their brain is dead. They’re flat lining on an EKG. These are often people that are brought back from heart attacks or put into comas for surgery. And while they’re in this state, they have these different experiences and they all, or many of them, report this kind of feeling of letting it all go. And maybe it’s painful to let it go, but then when they have to come back, they really regret it. I think there’s just something really nice to think about that all of the things we think are so important right now that we’re so attached to the feeling of letting it go is a really beautiful feeling.

Brett McKay:

I think one of the scariest things about death is that we don’t know what happens after death. It’s the biggest mystery in humanity. So yeah, we always wonder, do we move to a different realm? Do we get reincarnated or is it we just cease to exist? How have different cultures throughout time thought about what happens to us after death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, there are so many different particulars, but I’d say the overwhelming feeling of every, it seems to me, every culture until modern scientific culture is that there is some continuation where we go on in some way. And so in ancient Egypt at different time periods, there were a different number of souls, but as many as 12 different souls we had, which all went to different places, one of them goes into a statue, another goes into a mummy, another goes into an underworld. So there’s this tradition of more than one soul. And that’s pretty common. There is the tradition of reincarnation, which is really strong. The idea that we’re reborn or transmigration of souls, they also call it reborn into another human or animal form. There is the idea that we become ancestor spirits, so many, many cultures around the world continue to cultivate a relationship with the dead because it’s believed that they are in a realm where they can continue to assist the living and protect the living.

And I was just talking to a friend of mine who’s an archeologist about, I think he was talking about an African culture where they believe that if you’re separated from the bones of the dead, then you lose this vital protection that is part of how you can successfully live your life. So again, there’s different particulars, but I think the commonality is that we continue on in some way, and I think that’s what makes the last 150 or so years when this idea that I think many elites might’ve had but really trickles into the mainstream, that that’s it, that when we die, it’s zero game over. That’s when that idea really, really comes into our lives. And I think what Jung said, coming back to Carl Jung is that’s why it is our obligation to come up with our own myth of death because maybe for our great great grandparents, those questions were answered by their culture, by their religion. We don’t have that, or I shouldn’t say that. Some of us do, but more of us don’t have that than probably ever before in human history. So whether we’d like it or not, it’s our obligation to come up with our own belief and our own understanding.

Brett McKay:

And I think both beliefs, the idea that the soul continues on or it’s just you cease to exist when you die, whatever idea of death you take, both can be motivating here now as we’re living.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think another thing to that point that I include in the book is information about nurses and death, doulas who have worked with those who are dying and what their biggest regrets are. And I think that’s really interesting to think about. There’s a death doula in our community who says that when she’s working with a dying, the regret she hears the most is, I wish I had said I loved you more. And when you think about that, that’s a really simple thing to remedy if you keep in mind the fact that you’re going to die. So I think there’s so much we can do, again, using this as a God and as an encouragement to live a really good life unique to ourselves.

Brett McKay:

One of the interesting sidebars you had in that chapter about the afterlife and trying to think about what we think happens developing your own myth of death is idea psychopomps. Is that how you say it?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

What are psychopomps?

Joanna Ebenstein:

I love that word. Psychopomp is one of my favorite words. It’s from the ancient Greek, and it means soul guide, literally. And so a psychopomp could be a deity, it could be a shaman or a priest, and basically a soul pomp is someone who helps you make your way from one realm of existence to another. The figure that I end the book with is a figure called Latote, which is a new folk saint in Mexico, and she takes the form of a female grim reaper. And she is also seen as a psychopomp. She’s not the one who creates death. She’s not the agent of death, but rather she is your guide who takes you to the next realm.

Brett McKay:

We did a podcast back in 2022 with this guy named Christopher Kerr who has researched this phenomenon that happens. You talk about this in the book, I think it’s related to psychopomps, is as people get close to death, they start seeing visions or dreams of people who have passed away before them.

Joanna Ebenstein:

This is true. There’s so much anecdotal evidence or anecdotal suggestion that these old traditions are true, and that’s one of them. Yes, this is very common that people, I hear this from hospice nurses I know too. And not only that, but they say that this is partially how they determine how close to death a person is when they start to talk about loved ones coming to them and their dreams or visions, they know that they don’t have too much time longer.

Brett McKay:

And these people, they talk to them, they talk to these people in the room. And so if you’re in the room with a loved one who is dying, you might see them talking to their grandparent or their parent and you’re looking around and I’m not seeing anything but that person sees that person. This happened with my aunt. She passed away recently. She had some degenerative disease, and a week before she passed away, she started talking to herself, but she was talking to someone else. And when her sons asked her mom, who are you talking to? She’s like, well, it’s the lady in black over there. And they’d say, what are you talking about? And she’d say, well, that’s just between us and we don’t know who the lady in black was. It could have been an aunt, it could have been a grandmother. And what’s interesting is Christopher Kerr guy, he’s a doctor, and he’s not trying to explain like, oh yes, there’s life after death. He’s just trying to report on the phenomenon in an objective way. This happens. And one thing you notice when children are passing away, they typically don’t have anybody that have passed away yet, but if they had a pet that passed away, the pet will show up.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Isn’t that interesting.

Brett McKay:

And be their little guide.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think this speaks one of the main principles of my book that I start with some main principles, and one of them is, I call it practice versus belief. And this is what I love about these stories. I think there’s a way we can listen to these stories like you’re telling, which are amazing. And tell us something really interesting, and this is what I love about the union end approach as well, is we can say that those stories, whether they’re capital true, whether they reflect in actual reality, we can never know, or at least we can’t know at this realm, but we can know that they’re common and they happen to people, which means they’re real and means they mean something. So whether they’re happening in the psyche or happening with something beyond the psyche, almost doesn’t matter. It’s still a human situation, a human truth towards the end of life. And my feeling is even if that is an illusion from the perspective of science, what a beautiful illusion to have at the end of life. What a beautiful gift, right?

Brett McKay:

Oh, for sure. And it’s comforting to me, and this is something you mentioned earlier, that oftentimes when people have a near death experience, it feels so good to be transitioning out that when they’re brought back to life, a lot of times they’re really disappointed and sometimes just kind of angry, really angry about it. I didn’t want to come back. So it’s nice to know that whatever’s beyond getting there seems to be a really pleasant passage. So let’s talk about how we respond to the death of others. Do we know how long humans have been using mourning rituals when someone dies in their community?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I think that that number changes all the time. But when I was working on the book, I think at least the Neolithic era, they found graves that have different kinds of offerings for the dead and the dead put into fetal position. So this seems to suggest that we have been mourning for at least that long.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so it’s been a long time.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. I think it’s a human universal as far as I can see, that we have rituals around ushering the dead into their new realm of existence, however we perceive of that or conceive of that. So

Brett McKay:

How do these mourning rituals that we developed, how do you think they help us process the grief that comes when someone dies?

Joanna Ebenstein:

I think having a ritual that’s held in community helps create meaning around something that can seem chaotic otherwise, and also creates a place where we can share our feelings and our grief with the community, which I think is really essential. Some people think that our lack of proper grief rituals is a real epidemic in our particular culture. I talk in the book about Martine Tel, who unfortunately he’s passed away. He grew up in a Native American tradition and then end up being initiated into Mayan shamanism in Guatemala. And he wrote a book called Grief and Praise, which is really all about where he sees the shortcomings of the affluent Western world’s mourning practices, and in his traditions and indigenous traditions, the ones that he’s from, the ideas that we have to mourn fully to the extent that he says, you have to look bad when you’re done.

That’s what mourning properly means, bawling, shrieking, going through it all in order to get it out of our body, to literally express it, to push it out, because otherwise from their tradition, it can become disease, it can become tumors, which they call solidified tears. So I think there’s, between him, and then I was reading also a lot about, oh my goodness, it’s been a while since I wrote the book. I can’t remember his name, but he was an activist who was in Columbine, and he had been with his best friend when his best friend was shot, and he ended up becoming an opioid addict later in life due to prescription drugs. And he was saying the same thing in his mind, our lack of proper grieving is part of what creates the violent culture that we live in.

Brett McKay:

I’ve noticed this going back to this idea that we’ve tried to hide death in American culture, and we’ve lost a lot of the elaborate mourning rituals that we had that sometimes would take a week, two weeks, months, years even. 

Joanna Ebenstein:

Look in Gone With the Wind, right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Gone with the wind. And now what we do instead is like, all right, we got to get this funeral done. And then if you’re feeling sad, well then here’s an antidepressant or sedative. And sometimes people need that for their pain, but oftentimes it seems like they take it because they feel like they have to drug themselves to interact with other people. They feel like they can’t fall apart in front of others. You definitely can’t or scream. So they feel like they have to keep their composure and just move on. And so they need to take the drug to do what’s expected just to get on with life.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think to get people back to the workforce, I think people don’t really tolerate staying out of the workforce for too long. And it’s also worth mentioning that there’s a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry that this has helped cultivate.

Brett McKay:

So grieving over a loved one feels awful, but what can that grief teach us about love?

Joanna Ebenstein:

And that’s something that I turn to other people in my community because that’s not the kind of grief I’ve experienced yet. The people that I love and have lost were older, and I got to say my goodbyes, and I was there when they died, et cetera. But there was a woman in our community called Karen Montgomery, and she would come to a lot of our meetings. She was in a lot of my classes, and she was talking about the Treasures of grief. And so I asked her, could I interview you about this? And she was going through a situation where her father was dying of a disease that ultimately meant that he would drown in his own mucus, I think, in his own fluids. And she was watching him become closer and closer to that state. And what she told me that I think was really interesting and really beautiful, that her grief at times was absolutely horrible, but it felt like a cracking open also, and that cracking open allowed in other things.

So she said that she would have these incredibly moving experiences. It felt like she was feeling emotions much more closely. She would cry when someone said hello to her on the street. There was just a sense of the beauty of the world that I think was part of her very real reckoning with knowing she had a limited time with this man that she loved so much. So I think from what I understand, as someone who has not again, experienced that kind of grief, it can be a both and, right? I don’t think it means the grief isn’t present or there’s no pain, but it’s more like that pain opens you up. And I always think of, there’s a Rumi poem that I put in there that Leonard Cohen also drew on the imagery, which is the idea that it’s the crack in us that the light gets in, that the beauty comes in through the wound, through the crack, through the pain.

Brett McKay:

The grief makes the love more poignant. It accentuates it.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes. And I think this is the other thing that we lose when we lose a contemplation of death. And going back to the vanitas paintings that you love. Part of what makes things so heartbreakingly beautiful is knowing that we will lose them. That’s our condition. That’s the earthly condition. But without that knowing, we would lose it is the beauty is intense.

Brett McKay:

You have a chapter where you talk about how humans have a tendency to communicate with their dearly departed, and even people who don’t necessarily believe in the afterlife will do this. What do you think is behind this desire to stay connected to the dead?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I love that. And I was really surprised by that research myself. So there’s a guy up at Columbia called Nando who did this research. And what he says in his book, which is called The Other Side of Sorrow, I think, or the other side of grief, which I highly recommend, is that he was a scientist studying grief. And after his father died, he found that he was talking to him and he had no belief. He didn’t believe that there was a man in the afterlife that he could talk to. It was more just like a visceral response to the death. And what he found in his interviews is many people said the same. And in fact, they said, whether it’s capital T, true or not, doesn’t really matter, but they talk to the dead and it makes them feel better. And again, this is what I always want to come back to is this idea of practice over belief.

I spent a lot of time in Mexico and I was talking to a Mexican friend about his grandmother who has died, and I said, tell me about your grandmother. What do you do on Day of the Dead? And he said, oh, on Day of the Dead and on Simon Santa, I go to the cemetery and I talk to my dead grandmother. And then he’s like, well, I mean, I don’t know if I’m really talking to her, but that’s what we do. And I heard this again and again, it’s not, at least with young, educated people, the sense I get is it’s not about belief. It’s about tradition and practice. And I think that’s something we can all learn from. I think one of the biggest challenges to living at this particular time in human history is we have this voice inside us that’s always saying, is that real? Is it not real? Is that true or is it not true? And I don’t think 300 years ago, most of our ancestors had that voice. So I think it estranges us from experience. I talk to the dead, I talk to my cats, I talk to everybody. If I had to answer, do I really think I’m talking to the dead? I don’t know, but I know it makes me feel good. And I think that’s, again, coming back to our own myth of death.

Brett McKay:

I just love the idea of just staying connected to the dead. They’re still with you, even though they’re bodies in the ground decomposing, or maybe it’s been cremated. I mean, that’s why I love the movie Coco so much.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Oh my God, right?

Brett McKay:

It’s my favorite Disney movie. That movie destroyed me when I watched it. The thing that got me was when that one skeleton ghost guy who was about to be forgotten, because there’s only one person in the living world that still remembered him, and then that person died, and then that guy, no one on earth remembered him. And so he disappeared. And I was like, I don’t want that to happen to my grandparents, my ancestors. I want them to be their memory still to be here some way. So I want to stay connected to them somehow. So that’s why I like genealogy. I like looking at old pictures of my family that have died. I just love that idea of making sure that their memory still lives on in some way.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think that’s a deep, deep human drive. Again, in an age of rationality, we might question it, but that’s what people have been doing for millennia all around the world. It’s a natural part of being human, whether again, there’s an external truth that we’re responding to or it’s just what our brain wants to do. It’s real and it’s comforting, and it’s beautiful.

Brett McKay:

So one thing you recommend people do is to start thinking about their own death. So through Memento Mori, these different practices, getting comfortable with death, coming to terms with it, but also thinking about your own death and what you want it to look like, and there’s this idea of the good death that’s out there. What is the good death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, I think that’s a very personal question. Typically, during the Victorian era, the idea how people wanted to die, what they called a good death was to die at home surrounded by their loved ones, including the children where they could then tell people what they wanted done with all of their property and things, and then dying peacefully. Now, it can be lots of things. I hear a lot of people saying that for them, a good death would be dying in their sleep without pain. So I think that’s a question one needs to ask themselves. What is a good death to you? If you could choose how to die, what would that be? For me, I’d like to be conscious. I’d like to go into the mystery with consciousness. I don’t want to be drugged. I want to experience this mystery, but I think that’s a very personal question. How about you, Brett? What’s a good death for you?

Brett McKay:

I was actually thinking about this while I was reading your book. So I’d like to be aware that I was going and I’d like to be surrounded by loved ones in my house. That’s how I’d like to die.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think it’s wonderful that more and more people through hospice, et cetera, being able to do that, right? I think that’s wonderful.

Brett McKay:

And then you also talk about different rituals that people have done on different cultures to prepare for their death. One is the Swedish death cleaning. What is Swedish Death cleaning?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. So Swedish Death Cleaning is, I think it’s amazing, and it’s part of the Swedish tradition from what I understand, where as people grow older, an act of care and love and practicality is to start to get rid of their things. And I can say as someone who’s been on the other side of death in this culture, my ex-boyfriend, his mother died when we were together and emptying out her house was terrible for him. He had an estate sale, and it was so brutal to watch people picking over and trying to bargain on the things his mother loved that are now completely worthless. So the idea is to save your loved ones, this trauma of having to deal with all of your stuff. And so my mother’s going through this right now. She’s emptying her house. She’s going through every bag and every box and getting rid of things. So I think it’s a natural part. It can be at least a natural part of getting older and preparing for knowing that you don’t have that much time left.

Brett McKay:

And then you talked about this too. Even if you’re young and healthy and death is not anywhere near you, you can start preparing, doing your own Swedish death cleaning by taking care of the practicalities of your own death. And it’s just basic stuff that people talked about, life insurance for your family and make sure they’re taken care of when you’re gone. An advanced directive,

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely.

Brett McKay:

What do you want? Want that to look like? A will. Estate planning, that practicality stuff. You don’t think about that, but it’s like the gift you can give your family before you go.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And just to piggyback on that, there’s a member of our community, John Troyer. He’s at the Center for Death in Society in Bath, and he lost his sister and his mother and his father, I believe. And he said if he could have changed anything, it would’ve been having their passwords. So I say that to all your listeners, leave your passwords somewhere for your loved ones. That’s something that I’ve done with my husband as well, a will and your password so that person can get into your bank account. And all of those things, you’d be shocked at how hard that can be once you die.

Brett McKay:

So after years of studying and teaching about death, how has your own relationship to mortality changed?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, I would say I’m not afraid of it anymore. And in retrospect, I would say that’s probably why I started this project. I started to have this obsession with looking at the way death was dealt with in different times and places as a way to understand things that could be complimentary to our own view. Growing up in a culture as many of us many are, listeners have, I’m sure, where we’re not given a whole lot of tools on how to deal with death or how to prepare or how to live our lives, really. And I think doing all this work, I’m ready to go. I mean, don’t want to, it’s not my dream, but whenever I start freaking out too much, I just go back to that Jungian dream meditation. And I imagine myself emotionally divesting myself from everything that I care about and how good that feels. And I just come back to that again and again in these times where so much is uncertain and we can only do the best we can and hope to die with the fewest number of regrets.

Brett McKay:

And it sounds like it’s improved your life now you’re happier, you’re more content. It puts things in perspective.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I would say to an even greater degree, the reason that I’m ready to die is because I’ve lived the life I want to. I’ve taken a lot of risks. I don’t have a huge bank account. I don’t have a lot of security, but I’m doing work that I absolutely love that feels important and vital and meaningful to me and to my community. And that gives me a sense of meaning and satisfaction where I feel like this is what I wanted to do with my life, and I did it. And I’m really, I don’t want to say please, because it’s almost just satisfied. I have satisfaction and I have good relationships with people that I care very much about, and I hope to hold their hand, one of their hands as I go into the next stage of existence. That’s it.

Brett McKay:

Well, Joanna, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, you can learn more at morbidanatomy.org if these are the sorts of things that interest you. I do encourage you to come. We have a really vibrant community of people from all over the world who are having conversations about this. We have classes, we have lectures, we have many books, and if you’re in Brooklyn, we have an open to the public research library. I’m sitting in it right now. You can also find us on social media at Morbid Anatomy on Instagram and Facebook.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Joanna Ebenstein, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Thank you so much, Brett. I’m so glad you enjoyed the book and it’s been a pleasure for me too.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Joanna Ebenstein. She’s the author of the book, Memento Mori. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about our work at our website, joannaebenstein.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/mementomori, where you’ll find links to resources where you can dive deeper into this topic. That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. 

Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our Art of Manless newsletter. You got your daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you could take one minute to give a review of the podcast. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. As always, thank you for the continued support. This is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

On September 9, 1965, Navy pilot James Stockdale was flying a mission over North Vietnam when his A-4 Skyhawk took anti-aircraft fire. The cockpit filled with smoke. Warning lights flashed red. He ejected, breaking a leg in the process.

As his parachute carried him toward a crowd of villagers armed with machetes and pitchforks and the certainty of captivity loomed, Stockdale had one clear thought: “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

You see, Stockdale wasn’t your typical hotshot naval aviator. He was also a philosopher — albeit an accidental one. In 1959, six years before his plane was shot down in Vietnam, the Navy sent him to Stanford to get his master’s degree. There, he met the philosopher Phil Rhinelander, a World War II veteran who introduced him to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.

Years later, when his plane was shot down and he was imprisoned in the infamous POW camp known as the “Hanoi Hilton,” Epictetus’s Enchiridion would become a survival manual for Stockdale and the men he led. It would also help birth a guiding principle that got Stockdale through seven and a half years — four of them in solitary confinement — of torture and debasement: what’s now called the “Stockdale Paradox.”

The Stoic in the Hanoi Hilton

As the highest-ranking U.S. officer in the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale became his fellow prisoners’ de facto leader. He organized secret communication systems by tapping on the walls, created a code of conduct for resisting interrogation, and encouraged a culture of courage, or what he called “hard-heartedness.”

Through all the trials and tribulations, Stockdale said, “I lived on the wisdom of Epictetus.”

Stockdale would recite lines from the Enchiridion silently to himself in the dark. He reminded himself that his captors could control his body, but not his will. They could take away everything external, but not his “inner citadel,” as the Stoics called it.

After seven and a half years in captivity and enduring excruciating torture, Stockdale’s war finally ended. On February 12, 1973, he was released as part of Operation Homecoming — the U.S. mission that brought American POWs out of North Vietnam. He was among the first group to leave the Hanoi Hilton.

The men were loaded onto transport planes and flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. As the aircraft crossed the Vietnamese coastline, Stockdale later wrote that he felt “a sense of completion — of having seen the worst that man can do, and having come through it with my honor intact.”

When the plane landed, officers and reporters saw a gaunt figure stepping carefully down the ramp, gray-haired, limping, and visibly fragile. He was 49 years old. He saluted sharply and, according to Navy accounts, his first words were characteristically dry: “I’m fine. I’ve been in worse places.”

After a quick medical evaluation, doctors cataloged the damage: a broken back, a fused knee, and other injuries that would keep him from flying again. He began the slow process of physical recovery and reintegration into everyday life. He was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1976 and devoted the next 30 years to leadership, teaching, and public service.  

From 1977 to 1979, he served as president of the Naval War College, where he developed a curriculum focused on ethics and character under pressure. He told young officers that the development of virtue was the foundation of strategy.

After retiring from the Navy as a vice admiral in 1979, Stockdale returned to Stanford as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. There, he lectured and wrote about philosophy, duty, and the discipline of command. He published a few books based on his experience as a prisoner of war and how philosophy helped him get through it, including Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior.

In 1992, Ross Perot (the guy with big ears and charts) tapped Stockdale as his running mate on the Reform Party ticket. Millions of Americans first met him on live television when he opened the vice-presidential debate by asking a pair of unusual and characteristically philosophical questions, “Who am I? Why am I here?”

It was an opener that summed up a man who’d spent his life asking those questions when the answers held the highest stakes.

After the campaign ended, Stockdale returned to teaching and writing. He never chased celebrity. He knew his mission in life: keep translating Stoic philosophy into a language sailors, soldiers, and ordinary citizens could understand.

The Birth of the Stockdale Paradox

Decades after Stockdale was released from prison, business writer Jim Collins interviewed him for his book Good to Great. Collins asked how he managed to survive when so many didn’t.

Stockdale paused and said:

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

That single sentence became known as the Stockdale Paradox.

In practice, it meant living in two opposing realities at once: facing the brutal truth of the moment while maintaining unbreakable faith in the eventual positive outcome.

Stockdale told Collins that the men who didn’t live to see the light of freedom were often overly optimistic. “They were the ones who said, ‘We’ll be out by Christmas.’ Then Christmas would come and go. Then Easter. Then Thanksgiving. And they died of a broken heart.”

Hope unmoored from realism collapses under its own weight.

Stockdale’s insight wasn’t unique to him. In another prison camp two decades earlier, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl made the same observation.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl described how prisoners who tied their survival to a specific date — “we’ll be home by Christmas” — often perished when that day came and went. Their hope snapped under the pressure of unmet expectations.

According to Frankl, the individuals who managed to survive often adopted a “tragic optimism.” It meant finding meaning in your suffering so that you could endure it.

Both men discovered that real hope isn’t naïve. You have to face reality squarely. It is only by accepting how terrible things are that the faith to endure can grow. 

Practicing the Paradox in Everyday Life

Most of us will never be POWs, but we’ll all face our own dark nights of the soul: financial setbacks, illness, loss, betrayal, uncertainty. The Stockdale Paradox can help guide you through these moments.

Here’s how to put it into practice:

1. Face the facts. Don’t sugarcoat what’s in front of you. But don’t dramatize it, either. Just call a spade a spade. Your business is tanking. Your marriage is on the rocks. Your kid is struggling. You can’t fix what you won’t look at.
2. Keep faith in the long game. Stockdale never doubted he’d go home. He just stopped pretending it would happen in the immediate future. Real hope doesn’t live on a timetable. Keep faith that things will be alright in the end, accepting that the positive outcome you desire may happen later rather than sooner.
3. Focus on your circle of control. Epictetus’s favorite idea: distinguish between the things you can influence and the things you can’t. Effort, honesty, and attitude are in your control. Outcomes aren’t.
4. Find meaning in the suffering. Frankl said that those who had a why could bear almost any how. Stockdale’s why was leading and taking care of his men and upholding his honor as a soldier. Yours might be keeping your family’s spirits up during a dark time. Find your why.

Desperate Times Call for Rational Insanity

Stockdale once joked that surviving required a form of “rational insanity” — the ability to see how bad things were and still say, “We’ll make it.”

That’s the paradox distilled. You acknowledge the ugliness of your current suffering while still believing that things will work out. You balance the realism of a soldier with the faith of a saint.

You can see the same mindset in everyday life: the single dad putting himself through night school while working and taking care of kids; the woman going through harsh chemotherapy that’s killing the cancer in her body, but also her body at the same time; the business owner scrambling to meet payroll in a struggling business. None of them pretends it’s easy. They just refuse to call it hopeless.

Practicing the Stockdale Paradox means learning to live in the tension between truth and hope, control and surrender.

So face the facts. Keep the faith. But don’t expect to be home by Christmas.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In the modern world, it often seems like it’s harder than ever to accomplish your goals.

It seems like everyone has already done the thing you want to do — that your idea is already out there, that your niche is beyond saturated.

Thinking about starting a podcast? So is everyone else and their mom. Hoping to write a book? With the advent of self-publishing, you’re not only up against authors approved by major publishing houses, but anyone, anywhere, with a laptop. Want to become a YouTube star? Better hope you get noticed next to the thousands of other folks uploading new videos every day.

There’s seemingly a million graphic designers, a million wannabe filmmakers, a million other, probably more qualified candidates gunning for the same job you want.

And that’s just in the marketplace. In your personal life, the competition can feel equally fierce. In the days of yore, you were just competing against people in your college or church to win the attention of a lady. Now you’re up against every Tom, Dick, and Harry on Tinder. The dating marketplace hypothetically stretches beyond your community to encompass your whole state, maybe even the whole country.

Yes, in both economic and personal spheres, demand seems high, and resources seem scarce. It’s enough to make you decide to give up and not try in the first place.

Yet this feeling of scarcity is just an illusion, a myth.

In truth, there’s never been a more opportune time to live. Not only because it’s never been cheaper and easier to write a book, share your art, or start a business, but because the average person’s ability to execute on the basics has never been in such short supply.

While opportunities to achieve your goals aren’t as scarce as you think, there are areas where true scarcity does exist: in common sense, in social skills, in manners, in reliability. There’s a dearth of people who know, or have the will, to do the stupidly easy stuff to be charming and successful.

Let me give you just one example. Both off the air and on, guests of my podcast will tell me, “I can tell you actually read my book before this interview and I really appreciate that. It’s so rare.” I don’t bring this up to toot my own horn, but rather to point out how ridiculous it is that this might even be something worthy of mention! An interviewer reading someone’s work before asking them questions about it would seem like the barest of bare minimum job requirements — a prerequisite rather than something above and beyond. And yet the majority of podcasters aren’t even taking care of this most basic of basics.

There are tons of people doing what you want to do, but how are they executing? In 90% of cases, not as well as they could be.

That’s your opening. And such openings are absolutely everywhere.

To take advantage of opportunities, people typically concentrate on stuff like building up their resume — going to the best school or getting the right internship. And certainly, these things can help.

But what’s missed is that it’s often doing stupidly easy stuff that’s going to allow you to make friends and land your dream job. It’s doing the stupidly easy stuff that almost no one else is doing that can most readily set you apart from the pack, and up for success.

What is some of that stupidly easy stuff? Below you’ll find a (non-exhaustive) list of the things it’s hard to believe people don’t do more often, and which have a huge ROI because most people can’t be bothered.

1. Write handwritten thank you notes, always and often. Thank you note writing has become such a lost art, and receiving snail mail is so delightful, that sending handwritten appreciation has become one of the most effective ways to set yourself apart from the pack. There’s never a bad time to send a thank you note. Received a gift? Send a thank you note. Job interview? Thank you note. Friend helped you move? Thank you note. Someone went to bat for you at work? Thank you note.

2. Edit your emails/texts before sending. No one ever catches all of the spelling and grammatical mistakes contained within their communications, but giving your texts and emails a couple reads before you hit send will tighten things up. These “clean” missives significantly contribute to making a winning digital impression.

3. Know how to make small talk. We spend so much time behind screens, that when we finally meet people face-to-face, our conversation can often be awkward and stilted. But being comfortable with small talk opens a tremendous amount of doors; sure, it starts out with the superficial, but it’s the on-ramp to deeper discussions — the pathway to relationships with potential lovers, new friends, and future employers. Fortunately, once you know the simple methodology that makes small talk flow, it’s easy to master.

4. Don’t be a conversational narcissist. Related to the above. The only kind of talk many people know how to make these days, is about themselves. Someone who knows how to listen and ask good questions comes off as stupidly charming.

5. Don’t look at your phone during a conversation. In an age of scattered attention, a person who can concentrate their attention on you, and fight the urge to look at their phone while you eat or talk — someone who can make you feel like the most important person in the room — is a charmer par excellence.

Can’t seem to pry yourself away? Check out our complete guide to breaking your smartphone habit.

6. Dress well for a job interview. You don’t have to show up to a job interview in a three-piece suit (unless the position calls for it); overdressing can make as poor a first impression as under-dressing. But showing up dressed just one notch above what current employees at the company wear will immediately set you apart from many other candidates. Well-shined shoes, a pressed shirt, and good hygiene will help too.

7. Come to a job interview prepared to ask questions of the interviewer. Whenever we post this article on “10 Questions to Ask in a Job Interview,” HR folks always weigh in with how “amazed” they are at the number of candidates who stare blankly when asked at the end of an interview, “Do you have any questions for us?” Know some questions to ask going in.

8. Take a woman on a real date. In a landscape of “What’s up”? texts and non-committal hang outs, taking a lady on a real date puts you head and shoulders above other suitors. What constitutes a real date? Watch this video and remember the 3 P’s: Planned, Paired Off, and Paid For.

9. Offer a sincere apology when you mess up. My generation seems to struggle with saying “I’m sorry” when they make a mistake. Numerous times I’ve had my order messed up at a restaurant, and when I bring it to the attention of the waiter or manager, they just shrug, say “Okay,” and fix it, without saying, “I’m sorry about that.” Then the other day an order of mine got messed up, and the manager took a totally different tack — comping my whole meal and bringing me a free dessert. That kind of treatment is so rare, it was unbelievably winning. I even found the manager after my meal to tell her so, and let her know I would specifically make an effort to return because of her gesture.

As it goes in the restaurant biz, so it goes with everything else. Most of your fellow employees will just say “Okay” when an error is brought to their attention. Offering a sincere apology that demonstrates you take responsibility and understand where you messed up and how it affects the company, will easily set you apart (so will immediately trying to make it right and preventing it from happening again).

And in your personal life, apologizing when you stumble is stupidly endearing. You’ll probably mess up again, and often with the same issue, but even when you can’t completely overcome your flaws, showing you’re at least completely aware of them goes a long, long way.

10. Send a thank you text when you get home from a nice party/date. In my opinion, this is the #1 easiest and best way to be a more charming texter. Yet almost no one does it. When someone has you over for dinner, or you take someone out on a date, once you part ways, they typically worry a bit as to whether or not you had a good time. And a party host wants to know their effort to throw the shindig was appreciated. So even if you thank your date/host in person at the end of the evening, once you get home, shoot them a confirming text saying, “Thanks again for the delicious dinner. We had such a good time!” Trust me on this, it’s stupidly, stupidly charming.

11. Follow through. I get a lot of emails from guys who want to do something with the Art of Manliness, like write a guest article or strike up a business partnership. They are excited! They are passionate! They are…MIA. They never follow-up or follow-through on their idea. I’ve often wondered what happens between their excited initial email, and their descent into silence. But whatever it is, it can easily be avoided by those committed to following through.

12. Be reliable. No quality today can more readily set you apart from your peers than reliability. Doing the follow-through just mentioned. Showing up on time (and just plain showing up). Meeting deadlines. Managing expectations and not overpromising. Promptly responding to emails. Keeping your word.

Are freelance graphic designers, artists, video/audio editors, app developers, programmers, contractors, etc. a dime a dozen? Surely. But a reliable creative professional or handyman? A pink unicorn. If you couple talent and skill with reliability, it’s stupidly easy to dominate your competition and your niche.

When you survey the economic and dating markets, they can seem incredibly oversaturated. Demand seems high and resources seem scarce. But when you take a closer look, you’ll find that while there are plenty of people all grasping after the same thing, there are only a few executing well on the attempt. Setting yourself apart isn’t complicated or hard; it often involves simply doing the stupidly easy stuff that everyone else overlooks.

Their obtusity is your gain; see through the myth of scarcity, take care of the basics, and the world is your oyster.

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in October 2016.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Spend a day toiling as a knowledge worker, and you can leave the office feeling mentally fried. You may not have been that busy, nor done work that was even that cognitively challenging, and yet your brain still feels positively blitzed.

The reason for this cognitive fatigue often isn’t the nature of the work itself. Instead, it’s all the switching it involves.

We’re constantly toggling between different devices, apps, tabs, tasks, and responsibilities. While each jump seems small, together they generate what psychologists call a switching cost — the hidden toll your brain pays every time it shifts gears. When you change focus, your mind must unload one context and load another: new goals, new cues, new rules of engagement. That reorientation burns mental fuel. Do it hundreds of times a day, and you end up depleted; the issue isn’t the amount of work you did, but how often you had to start over.

Paul Leonardi, a professor of technology management and the author of Digital Exhaustion, calls switching a new hidden tax of modern life, and it can have an effect not only on your productivity and the quality of your work, but on the quality of your life outside the office, too; if you’re coming home each day feeling like your mind’s been in a blender, you’re not going to have the mojo to go out with friends, read books, exercise, and pursue hobbies — the stuff that really leads to a flourishing life.

To mitigate this hidden but significant cost, let’s dive into exactly what this switching looks like, why it wears you down, and what you can do about it.

The 3 Kinds of Switching

Leonardi identifies three kinds of switching that drain our mental energy:

1. Mode Switching — Changing How You Think

Mode switching happens whenever you shift between different cognitive gears. You’re changing your mental frame — from reflective to reactive, from creative to administrative, from detail-oriented to big-picture.

Maybe you’re writing a strategic report (deep, generative thinking) when a Slack message pops up. You reply (fast, reactive thinking), then return to the presentation. Or you’re analyzing a dataset (analytical mode) and then switch to coaching a coworker (empathetic, social mode).

These brief detours feel harmless, but your brain just had to unload one mental model and load another. Then when you switch back to the previous task, you have to again change out your cognitive lens. That takes ample mental effort.  

2. Tool Switching — Changing Where You Think

Tool switching happens when you shift between platforms, systems, or interfaces. Modern work often takes place on both phones and laptops and across a dozen apps — email, Asana, Google Docs, text messages, Zoom, and on and on. Within a span of a few minutes, you may be moving between your inbox, ChatGPT, and Slack (with a quick stopover to Instagram).

Each medium has its own rhythms, layouts, shortcuts, and even social expectations; each has its own digital context. Moving between them requires mental translation. You have to remember which keyboard commands work here, which login you’re using there, what tone to strike in this other chat. Your brain must constantly reorient to different micro-environments.

Leonardi’s research shows that even “simple” tool switching can compound quickly. The average worker toggles between applications nearly 1,200 times a day! This keeps your mind in a perpetual state of fragmentation and partial engagement. You’re everywhere at once, but nowhere fully.

3. Role Switching — Changing Who You Are

Role switching happens when you move between identities. Each day you wear multiple hats — boss, teammate, parent, friend, customer, coach — and you repeatedly have to take one off and put one on. In a single hour, you might be leading a team meeting, interfacing with a plumber, and texting your wife about who’s picking up what kid.

Each role carries its own emotional tone and expectations. Each demands a different voice, vocabulary, and demeanor. Significant shifts in roles used to be buffered by space and time — you were in employee mode at the office, had some liminal downtime on your commute, and then stepped into dad mode when you got home. Today, the switches happen instantaneously, in the same chair, on the same screen. Without boundaries, the different emotions from different roles bleed into each other, and having to try to stem that bleed and compartmentalize your mindset around each role tuckers you out.

Why Switching Exhausts You

You may have noticed that while each form of switching can happen independently, they often overlap; we frequently switch between modes, tools, and roles at the same time. This only compounds their frazzling effect.

Whether engaged in separately or together, all three forms of switching draw on the same limited resource: executive control — the part of your brain that keeps priorities straight, suppresses impulses, and directs attention. When that system gets overloaded, you experience fatigue, indecision, and irritability.

You don’t just run out of energy; you run out of coherence. You start to feel scattered because, in a real sense, you are. Your attention has been shredded by a thousand tiny transitions.

How to Cut Down on Switching Fatigue

You can’t eliminate switching altogether — modern life requires it — but you can manage it. The solutions are simple, though of course harder to implement and consistently stick with:

1. Batch Similar Work

Group tasks that use the same mode of thinking. Answer emails once in the morning and once in the afternoon instead of all day long. Make calls back-to-back. Do creative work in uninterrupted blocks. Do a no-switching sprint where you commit to working on one task for something like 20 minutes with zero toggling to anything else. The goal is to stay in one cognitive gear long enough to find rhythm.

2. Minimize Tool Jumps

Audit your digital environment. How many apps do you actually need? Consolidate where you can. Keep your phone out of reach while working on your computer. Disable nonessential notifications so you’re not jerked between platforms.

If you can’t control the number of tools, control how you use them: dedicate windows of time to each rather than hopping constantly.

3. Use Microtransitions to Shift Between Roles

Re-build boundaries between your identities by creating microtransitions that can help you more smoothly segue between your different roles. After work, and before you go home, take a short walk or meditate in the driveway for a few minutes. If you work from home, go to the gym at the end of your work day or change your clothes before you shift into leisure time. Rituals help your mind switch cleanly rather than carry the residue of one role into the next.

I highly recommend listening to this podcast episode about microtransitions to learn how to create them and how they can improve your life.

Embrace Single-Thread Living

If everyone seems tired and burnt out these days, it’s often not because we’re trying to do too much, but how frequently we’re changing what we’re doing.

Every switch carries a cost. Our focus gets fragmented, our attention is pulled in too many directions, and we never fully inhabit our current context. We end up mentally blitzed and do everything in a mediocre way.

Doing our best work, and having enough surplus mental fuel to fill our lives with more than work, requires choosing fewer contexts at a time — less frenetic switching and more steady investing. It requires staying put mentally long enough for depth to form, remembering that it’s only in the deeps that the good stuff happens.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.