Pub Meditations - Six Meditations, One Pint: Notes on Survival, Shadows, and Light

One meditation. One burning question. One reminder you’re not alone. Every Wednesday in your inbox — shorter, sharper, and more honest than I could ever be in a long essay.

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Some days the world is too loud, too endless. You don’t need another lecture. You need a pint, a hard truth, and a line you can actually carry into tomorrow.

This week’s episode is an experiment I’m calling Pub Meditations — three acts, two meditations per act. Six in total. Each one pulled from the episodes that hit hardest this year, reimagined as something shorter, sharper, and closer to the way the Stoics wrote: notes to survive the day.

In the cold open, I borrow the first couple minutes from Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic — a podcast I can’t recommend enough. Ryan’s voice is where I first realized Stoicism wasn’t about flatlining your emotions, it was about surviving chaos with your humanity intact. Go listen, subscribe, and keep a notebook handy.

What’s inside this episode:

• Act I: Survival as strength training (Still Here · Dim, Not Done)
• Act II: The inner fight (Your Brain Is the Biggest Dick · In the Shadows)
• Act III: Defiance through beauty (The Light Hits Back · We Work, Rome Burns)

Line you carry: Survival. Shadows. Light. Beauty. The tools haven’t changed in two thousand years — keep it short, keep it sharp, keep it honest.

Credits

• Excerpt from The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday — listen here
• Music throughout by Green Dot Sessions