Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  Praise for

  Carpe Diem Regained

  ‘Inspiring, bracing and elegant: a timely corrective to contemporary follies, from mindfulness to workaholism. Carpe librum!’

  Sarah Bakewell, author of

  At the Existentialist Café and How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

  ‘The media tells us that we are forever young, but this wise and uplifting book is the perfect reminder that life is short and fragile, and that we need to seize the day to avoid living with regret.’

  Philippa Perry, author of How to Stay Sane

  ‘I read this book with a mixture of wonder and recognition. The sound of the galloping hooves of the horses of oblivion have always stalked me in case, for a moment, I should be distracted by the temptations of a life lived passively. In Carpe Diem Regained, Roman Krznaric has written a hugely important book for anyone who seeks to have agency in their life. It is a profound, playful book for wannabe grown-ups who love life.’

  Sir Tim Smit, Founder of the Eden Project

  ‘Stunningly good. Roman Krznaric has written a modern classic of contemporary philosophy. Seize it immediately.’

  Julia Hobsbawm, author of Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload

  ‘Insightful, inspiring and instructive. Anyone who feels like time is moving too fast and things are out of their control will be reinvigorated by this thoughtful guide.’

  John Gray, author of

  Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

  About the Author

  Roman Krznaric is a social philosopher whose books, including Empathy, The Wonderbox and How to Find Fulfilling Work, have been published in more than twenty languages. He is the founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum and of the digital Empathy Library. He is also a founding faculty member of The School of Life and on the faculty of Year Here.

  Roman has been named by the Observer as one of Britain’s leading popular philosophers. His writings have been widely influential amongst political and ecological campaigners, education reformers, social entrepreneurs and designers. He is an acclaimed public speaker, and his talks and workshops have taken him from a London prison to Google’s headquarters in California.

  After growing up in Sydney and Hong Kong, he studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, where he gained his PhD in political sociology. Roman has worked as an academic, a gardener and a human rights campaigner. He is also a fanatical real tennis player and has a passion for making furniture.

  By the Same Author

  Empathy

  The Wonderbox

  How to Find Fulfilling Work

  The First Beautiful Game

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who seized the day and made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type seizetheday in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn, and taken away from us at dusk.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Contents

  1 Carpe Diem from Horace to #yolo

  2 Dancing with Death

  3 How Carpe Diem Was Hijacked

  4 The Art of Seizing Opportunities

  5 The Hidden Virtues of Hedonism

  6 Beyond the Now of Mindfulness

  7 Recovering Our Spontaneous Selves

  8 Just Doing It Together

  9 I Choose, Therefore I Am

  Epilogue: A Carpe Diem Mandala

  Appendix: Films, Songs and Poems

  Further Reading

  Image Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Supporters

  Copyright

  1

  Carpe Diem from Horace to #yolo

  On a summer morning in 2014, eighty-nine-year-old Bernard Jordan decided to escape. The former British naval officer was determined to go to Normandy to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings with other World War Two veterans. But there was a problem: he was trapped in a care home in the English seaside town of Hove, without permission to travel. What could he do? Bernard came up with a cunning plan. He got up early and put on his best suit, making sure to pin on his wartime medals, then covered his outfit with a grey raincoat and sneaked out of the home. Now free, he tottered down to the railway station nearly a mile away, and took the next train to Portsmouth. Once there, he bought himself a ticket for the ferry to France and, on board, joined up with a party of war veterans who took him under their wing for the rest of the trip.

  As soon as the care staff realised he was missing, a frantic police search began on the streets of Hove and in local hospitals. But by then it was too late. Bernard was already across the Channel, surrounded by marching bands and dancing girls. ‘I loved every minute of it and would do it again tomorrow – it was such an exciting experience,’ he said on his return. ‘I expect I will be in some trouble with the care home, but it was worth it. I was naughty but I had to be there.’1

  The story of Bernard’s great escape took the British media by storm, knocking the sober anniversary speeches by world leaders and royalty off the front pages. The ferry company even offered him free travel to the Normandy beaches for the rest of his life. But Bernard was never able to take up that offer: six months later, he died.

  Why did Bernard’s adventure capture so much public attention? It was not just nostalgia for the wartime spirit or his venerable age. People also admired his courage to seize a window of opportunity that might never come again. The chance was there, and he took it. As one person commented in an online forum just after his death: ‘RIP, am doubly glad he escaped and got to go to the anniversary…carpe diem’.2

  Carpe diem – seize the day – is one of the oldest philosophical mottos in Western history. First uttered by the Roman poet Horace over 2,000 years ago, it retains an extraordinary resonance in popular culture. The heavy metal band Metallica has rocked audiences around the world with their song ‘Carpe Diem Baby’, while the actress Judi Dench had ‘CARPE DIEM’ tattooed on her wrist for her eighty-first birthday. Ask someone to spell out their philosophy of life and there’s a good chance they will say something like ‘seize the day’ or ‘live as if there’s no tomorrow’ – even if they appear to be trapped by routine or paralysed by procrastination. It’s a message found in Hollywood films like Dead Poets Society, in one of the most successful bran
d campaigns of the last century (‘Just Do It’), and in the social media hashtag #yolo (‘you only live once’). Almost every language has an equivalent expression for the original Latin phrase. In Japanese it’s (‘enjoy now’), while wise Slovak grandmothers advise the young to ži naplno (‘live fully’). Carpe diem has been a call to arms for everyone from the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder, who in the first century BCE asked, ‘If not now, when?’, to the Rastafarian sage Bob Marley, who sang out, ‘Wake up and live!’ If Horace were transported to the present, he would probably be surprised to discover that there is a heaving nightclub in Croatia named Carpe Diem, and dozens of fashion companies with carpe diem clothing lines – including a T-shirt that commands us all to CARPE THAT F*CKING DIEM.

  It is remarkable that an expression from a long-dead language generates more than 25 million online search results. But just as striking is the fact that while most people can explain what carpe diem means to them, the answer varies greatly from one person to the next. For some, it’s about that Bernard Jordan attitude of grasping a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Yet others associate it with wild hedonistic blowouts, or immersing themselves calmly in the present moment. This range of responses is reflected in the diverse translations of carpe diem that abound: while usually rendered as seize the day, it is sometimes translated as harvest, pluck, or enjoy the day. We might casually use the term carpe diem when chatting with a friend, but how aware are we of its many personalities hidden beneath the surface?

  This book is my attempt to unravel how we think about carpe diem – to explore its various meanings and messages, its dangers and contradictions, its role in both personal life and social change. It might sound strange to talk about carpe diem as if it were an abstract noun like ‘love’ or ‘truth’, but I consider it to be a philosophical ideal that embodies a vision of how to live, similar to concepts such as happiness or freedom, and so I write about it in a comparable way. I want to understand what really motivates it, and what can make it such a difficult ideal to follow. Is carpe diem ultimately about the fear of death: a remedy for that instinctive – but often fleeting – awareness so many of us have that life is short and our time is running out? Or is it just as much about expressing our desire for freedom and being the author of our own life?

  My approach is necessarily eclectic, taking in everything from medieval carnival tradition to the neuropsychology of risk, from the history of opium addiction to existentialist thought. I will be delving into the lives of great seize-the-day practitioners, including nightclub dancers, war photographers, and committed revolutionaries. While mainly drawing on examples from the Western world, this is a journey that will take us from the streets of ancient Kyoto to the streets of contemporary Rio. To my knowledge, this is the first ever cultural and philosophical biography of carpe diem – which is astonishing given its bumper-sticker ubiquity in everyday life.

  In the course of writing this book I have made two discoveries. First, that carpe diem has been hijacked, and as a result its potential to transform our lives is rapidly slipping away from us. Second, that humanity has, over the centuries, found five distinct ways to seize the day – and if we want to win back carpe diem from the hijackers, we need to revive them. My hope is to wake us up to the promise of Horace’s maxim. The prize it offers is great: nothing less than the gift of radical aliveness or, to borrow a phrase from Henry David Thoreau, the possibility ‘to live deep and suck out all the marrow from life’.3 If, however, we fail to heed its call, we may end up reaching our final days and looking back on life with regret, viewing it as a series of paths not taken. The time has come to reclaim carpe diem.

  THE VANISHING ART OF SEIZING THE DAY

  The hijack of carpe diem is the existential crime of the century – and one that we have barely noticed. It might seem odd to claim that a phrase from a dead Roman poet has been ‘hijacked’, but the evidence is compelling. Who, or what, are the hijackers in question? First, the spirit of ‘seize the day’ has been surreptitiously hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping sprees and the instant hit of one-click online buying: in essence Just Do It has come to mean Just Buy It. Alongside this is the growing cult of efficiency and time management that has driven us toward hyper-scheduled living, turning the spontaneity of Just Do It into a culture of Just Plan It. A third hijacker is 24/7 digital entertainment that is replacing vibrant life experiences with vicarious, screen-based pleasures, and contributing to a new age of distraction. Rather than Just Do It, we increasingly Just Watch It instead. Finally – and though it might seem counterintuitive – carpe diem has been hijacked by the booming mindfulness movement. While practising mindfulness has many proven benefits, from reducing stress to helping with depression, one of its unintended consequences has been to encourage the idea that seizing the day is primarily about living in the here and now. Just Do It has become Just Breathe.

  Confronted by these four hijackers, the art of seizing the day is vanishing before our eyes and we urgently need to do something about it, or else risk losing touch with the carpe diem wisdom of humanity that has accumulated over the past two millennia. I will be exploring in detail how this cultural hijacking has happened, and how we might best respond.

  What about my second discovery? Curious to find out more about the different meanings people give to carpe diem, I decided to dig deeper and embark on a study of the way that phrases such as ‘carpe diem’, ‘seize the day’ and ‘seize the moment’ have been used across the arts, sciences, literature, popular culture and media. This involved analysing hundreds of original sources going back to the sixteenth century, with the help of a crack research team and some big databases in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.4 A fascinating pattern soon began to emerge, revealing five essential interpretations of carpe diem through the centuries; an ensemble of ways that humankind has developed to seize the day.

  The most popular of these interpretations I call opportunity, which concerns taking windows of opportunity that may never be repeated, whether it’s the career break of a lifetime or the chance to rescue a crumbling relationship. A second strategy is hedonism, where we seize the day through sensory pleasures, from free love to gastronomic exploration. Another is presence, which includes mindfully entering the present moment through methods such as meditation, but also extends to more vigorous activities such as the intense rush of extreme sports or getting entranced in dance. Fourth is spontaneity, which involves throwing plans and routines to the wind and becoming more experimental in the way we live. Finally, there is the approach that is most often ignored or forgotten: politics. This is the realm of collective carpe diem, such as taking to the streets to topple a dictator or mobilising a social movement to tackle climate change.

  These five paths cannot be found neatly laid out in any one spiritual tradition or philosophical doctrine, and we are mostly unaware of them. Although sometimes overlapping, they represent a distinct range of cultural tendencies, each of them a strategy that human beings have invented to inoculate themselves against the reality of death and to make the most of their brief moment of earthly existence. And why do they matter? Because it is precisely these rich approaches that have been hijacked. The challenge is to reclaim our cultural inheritance by reviving this quintet of ways to seize the day and harnessing their insights for the art of living.

  This is an important historical moment for doing so. Despite living longer and more materially prosperous lives than at almost any moment in the past, and enjoying the benefits of handy iGadgets, cheap flights, and perfectly brewed gourmet coffee, Western societies seem to be failing to deliver personal wellbeing. There is an epidemic of mental illness – especially anxiety and depression – and record figures of job dissatisfaction. In most countries levels of ‘life satisfaction’ have remained stagnant even when incomes have been rising. The arrival of efficient online dating has been accompanied by divorce rates of around 40%.5 More and more of our time is taken up managing a deluge of email
s, texts and tweets that keep us checking our phones, on average, 110 times a day, and which leave us in a state of continuous partial attention.6 All this is compounded by a sense that society is malfunctioning on a broader level, visible in increasing inequality, the rise of extremism, corrupt and ineffective politicians, and impending ecological collapse.

  It is no surprise then that the self-help industry is in such excellent health, and now valued at over $10 billion annually in the US alone: the search is on for new routes to a more fulfilling and meaningful life.7 The happiness gurus have been out in force proposing alternatives to the increasingly obsolete model of consumer culture that has brought comfort and pleasure to some but left so many others wondering if it was really worth working so hard, or getting into so much debt, to taste its delights. We might turn to positive psychology or life coaching, or maybe holistic medicine or voluntary simplicity. We could join a therapy group, try a stress management course, or take solace in that ancient method known as religion. But amongst all these options, there is one that appears to have been largely overlooked: carpe diem. If we can rescue it from the hijackers, we might come to see it as a way to cut through the confusing array of possibilities by focusing our attention not so much on what we choose but that we choose.

  We should be hopeful about the power of carpe diem, yet not become ideological zealots who believe that pursuing any one of its five forms will miraculously and automatically boost our wellbeing. It’s important to find the right balance between them and recognise when not to cultivate them. Seizing the day can, at times, be reckless, dangerous, or even immoral. It might be rash to leave a steady job to open up your dream café if you’ve got a big mortgage to repay. Hedonism can easily turn into excess, evident everywhere from gluttony amongst the ancient Romans to the Neknomination online binge drinking craze, where kudos comes from being filmed downing whole pints of spirits.8 Think how many carpe diem love affairs have led to broken marriages and divided families. And what about the bankers who seized opportunities for financial speculation that allowed them to make a killing while sparking the 2008 global financial crisis?