Live A Full Life, Not A Fast Life
The wrong thing to take from the Stoic exercise of Memento Mori is that you should live today like it’s your last day on earth. The problem with that approach is that it excuses too much reckless behavior. You’ve seen the movies--an asteroid is coming and so everyone freaks out and acts like a lunatic or a libertine.
The point, Seneca says, is to live each day like it’s your whole life. His line was that he “balanced the books of life each day.” Meaning, he lived fully every 24 hours, neither rushed nor indolent, deferring nothing and doing nothing superfluous or unnecessary either. In modern terms, he was taking it day by day.
Too many people waste their time thinking about the future or trying to maintain the past. That was not Seneca. “I don’t, by Hercules, grab at [the day] as though it were my last one,” he says, “but I look upon it as though it could be my last.” What’s the distinction? It’s about being fully present in the moment, indifferent to whether there’s more or less to come tomorrow because, as we know, tomorrow is never guaranteed. “I enjoy my life thus far,” he said, “because I don’t spend too much time measuring how long all this will remain.”
And so we should do the same. This could be the last email we read. The last lunch we eat. The last quiet afternoon with a friend. Enjoy it. All of it. Completely. Live a full life today and if you’re lucky enough to make it through to tomorrow, do the same thing again.