Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  Although living each day as if it were your last might at first glance appear to be a wise ideal, it contains some questionable assumptions. While just a figurative expression, its framing encourages a short-termist attitude to life, directing our attention more to the present day and instant gratification than to the long view. It might, for instance, tempt some people to blow their savings in a spending spree or blow their relationship in an affair – even if this isn’t what the Stoic philosophers originally intended. And why should the unit of measurement be a single day? Why not a year, or ten years? If it were phrased instead as ‘live each decade as if it were your last’ it might lose its sense of immediacy and urgency, yet could do more to inspire us to embark on meaningful long-term projects (such as learning flamenco guitar or writing a book) that require sweat and struggle today in exchange for benefits at some distant date.

  Moreover, why should the focus be on treating each day as if it were our last? Why not live every day as if it were our first? Perhaps this would fill us with a profound sense of awe and wonder at the world, so we become like children who are astonished to touch snow for the first time or delighted to discover that giraffes are real living creatures. We might make more effort to appreciate the warmth of the sun on our skin or a kind gesture from a stranger.

  A more fundamental problem is that Steve Jobs speaks as if there is no such thing as society, just a world of individuals whose actions have no apparent impact on one another. It might be your last day but that doesn’t mean it is everybody else’s too. Living as if there were no tomorrow is exactly the kind of worldview that is sending humanity hurtling toward its own destruction. We chop down rainforests, burn fossil fuels and pollute our rivers and oceans with far too little thought for the future inhabitants of our one and only fragile planet. Apple might be one of the most innovative tech companies of our time, but it was responsible for 34 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2014 (roughly the same amount as the whole of Croatia), most of it from manufacturing plants in China.17 The tragedy of our age is that we mainly have our eyes set on the present, our imaginations trapped in a mindset of seize-the-resource plundering and partying that will leave us with a planetary hangover from which society may never recover. We might be wise to learn from the Iroquois Great Law of Peace – known as the Kaianerekowa – a set of traditional indigenous principles that advises making decisions based on thinking ahead seven generations.18 That’s more like seizing two centuries than seizing the day.

  So should we really try to live each day as if it were our last? For some people it’s a potentially attractive ideal, particularly if they are searching for the confidence to overcome fears, to challenge conventions, and to live a life of their own making. I find it most useful when I’m with my ageing father and step-mother, who I usually only see for a few weeks each year when they are visiting from Australia. I’m acutely and painfully aware that they won’t be around forever, so I try to treat each day I spend with them as if it might be our last together. It helps me to listen with more attention, to laugh with more abandon, to show my love and to receive it.

  For other people, however, the idea of living each day as if it were our last may fail to resonate, for reasons such as its excessively short-term and individualistic vision. The good news is that there are alternative and possibly more effective ways to check in with death, each with its own unique twist.

  THE HIDDEN MEANING OF A TOKYO PLAYGROUND

  A curious new term came into popular usage in December 2007: ‘bucket list’. Its origin coincides with the release of the comedy-drama film The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson as corporate billionaire Edward Cole, and Morgan Freeman as working-class mechanic Carter Chambers. These two very different characters meet while sharing a hospital room and discover that they have one thing in common: they both have terminal illnesses and less than a year to live. So they write down all the things they had always dreamed of doing before they kicked the bucket, and spend the rest of the film ticking off items on their list.

  Over the next few months, the incongruous pair go skydiving, race Shelby Mustangs around a speedway, fly over the North Pole, eat dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant on the Côte d’Azur, gaze at the Taj Mahal, ride motorbikes on the Great Wall of China, take in an African safari, and make it to Everest base camp. Finally, atop the Great Pyramid in Egypt, they both realise that having all these amazing experiences is not nearly as fulfilling as they had hoped it would be. What really matters to each of them is their personal relationships. Cole wants to be reconciled with his only daughter, who refuses to see him, and Chambers hopes to rediscover his love for his wife. In a predictably emotional yet happy Hollywood ending, this is just what happens before both men die.

  Since the film’s release, the idea of creating a bucket list has become an online craze. You can now find innumerable top 10s, 100s and even 1000s on blogs, digital magazines and YouTube. Despite the movie’s message about the ultimate importance of family relations and emotional connection, most bucket lists look like brochures for adventure holidays and exotic travel breaks, and are often plastered with advertising from travel companies. Typical items include scuba diving in Costa Rica, climbing Kilimanjaro, bungee jumping and staying in Sweden’s Ice Hotel. Some people favour more standard fare like visiting the Vatican or spending a romantic weekend in Paris, highly recommended by guides such as 1000 Places to See Before You Die. The overriding characteristic of bucket lists is to approach life as a self-indulgent shopping trip where the aim is to accumulate as many perfect experiences as possible and buy yourself the greatest sensory pleasures on offer – and without any thought to your carbon footprint. The more items you can tick off your list, the happier you will be. The bucket list phenomenon is a result of our hyperindividualistic YOLO culture that places value on fleeting novelty and hedonistic thrill-seeking above all else.

  Yet there is an interesting existential question hovering behind the film and the frenzied online cult it has spawned: what would you do if you knew you had only a set period left to live, such as six months or a year? It is, of course, a very real question for many people diagnosed with terminal illnesses. But it is also a classic carpe diem thought experiment, or ‘death taster’, that deserves serious contemplation at any stage of life.

  The most profound cinematic exploration of this question is not The Bucket List, but a much more nuanced and powerful film from the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Released in 1952, Ikiru (‘To Live’) tells the story of Kanji Watanabe, a middle-aged, mid-level bureaucrat in post-war Tokyo. For the last three decades Watanabe has been working as the Section Chief of the municipal Public Affairs Department, shuffling papers, stamping documents and saving his pennies. And he’s bored senseless. In fact, ‘he might as well be a corpse… this man has been dead for more than twenty years now,’ according to the film’s narrator.19 But his life changes in an instant when he discovers he has stomach cancer and just six months to live. So here’s his dilemma: faced with this final window of opportunity, what is he going to do?

  At first Watanabe feels the terror and isolation of his new situation. He sobs under his bed covers, contemplates suicide, and confronts the truth that he has wasted his days. The solution to his existential angst comes when he decides to do something meaningful by helping a group of poor mothers create a playground for their children. In complete contrast with his formerly downtrodden and self-serving character, Watanabe battles the petty bureaucrats with all his determination, and overcomes the intransigence of local politicians and threats from gangsters to achieve his aim. In the end, he succeeds, performing a single act for the public good that gives his life meaning. He dies happy in the new playground on a swing, singing a song whose refrain echoes through the winter air – ‘Life is brief’.20

  The movie puts a subtle twist on the Stoic slogan to ‘live each day as if it were your last’, shifting the time frame to offer a compelling alternative: ‘live as if you’ve got just six months lef
t’. This shift makes a difference. It directs our mental gaze away from short-term thinking and pleasures, and encourages us to embark on potentially significant projects that might require sustained attention and effort – but without offering so much time that we are tempted to endlessly put things off or feel no sense of urgency. I have found myself taking this death taster rather literally since first watching Ikiru: it stimulates me to try my hand at new challenges every half year or so – the most recent was to start singing lessons despite being convinced I have an irredeemably awful voice – and to pragmatically abandon those pursuits and experiments after roughly six months if they haven’t worked out.

  Kanji Watanabe deeply content in his playground, singing ‘Life is brief’ moments before his death.

  Confronting our mortality, as Kanji Watanabe did, can wake us from our existential slumber, help us reassess our priorities, and spur us to seize the day and make something more of our lives. The task we face is to invent meaningful acts and projects for ourselves without falling back on the easy option of ticking off a bucket list of hedonistic pleasures that might still leave us wondering, ‘What’s it all for?’ While the causes we choose to dedicate ourselves to might require a degree of struggle and suffering on our own part, we need to remember Nietzsche’s dictum, ‘He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.’21 The ultimate act of creation is to conjure up this ‘why’ in our imaginations. This leaves each of us with a question: What is our own equivalent of Watanabe’s playground?

  THE BENEFITS – AND BURDENS – OF LIVING MORE THAN ONCE

  ‘Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.’22

  This mind-bending advice is courtesy of the Austrian existential psychotherapist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl. He saw it as a way of confronting ourselves with ‘life’s finiteness’ and of encouraging us to take responsibility for our actions. But what does it really mean, and what light does it shine on seizing the day?

  One interpretation appears in the 2013 film About Time, directed by Richard Curtis, which at first comes across as a typical romantic comedy but turns out – in my view – to be a fascinating exploration of Frankl’s idea. It concerns a young man, Tim, who on his twenty-first birthday is told by his father that, like all men in his family, he has an inherited ability to relive (and even revise) the past by transporting himself back in time to any date and place in his memory. After overcoming his disbelief, Tim first uses his new power to get a girlfriend. But the film becomes far more interesting toward the end, when Tim’s father is dying of cancer and reveals his secret to leading a happy life: live each day as normal, with all its tensions and worries, then go back and live it again, but this time making an effort to notice all the beautiful moments and small pleasures life has to offer.

  Tim tries this himself, but then discovers an even richer philosophy that doesn’t require any time travel at all: ‘I just try to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it.’ We see him putting it into practice – kissing his wife tenderly as she wakes in the morning instead of rushing out of bed, having fun with his kids while he makes them breakfast before school, making an effort to look the cashier in the eye and smile when buying his lunch. The carpe diem lesson here is about being in the now, being attentive and present, noticing the sweetness of the world. As Richard Curtis said in an interview, the ‘movie is saying that we should relish every normal day and live it just for the day itself, not for what the day might achieve’.23

  Frankl would probably have felt uncomfortable with this interpretation of his maxim, as he believed it was important to focus on future goals in life rather than give priority to dwelling in the present moment (an issue I will explore in a later chapter). I think he treated it more as a helpful tool for avoiding regret. The message is essentially this: whatever you are about to do, imagine you are probably going to make the wrong choice and regret it, so make sure you get it right this time. You might feel tempted to repeat an old pattern of unleashing your aggressive or sarcastic side during a tense family discussion. Invoking Frankl’s idea could give you pause for thought. Or you may have a tendency to avoid taking on challenging work assignments due to a lack of self-confidence, and find yourself frequently regretting your decision. So next time this kind of opportunity arises, trying his thought experiment might inspire you to take on the task.

  The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche offered an even more radical death taster. It is known as ‘eternal recurrence’, and ranks as one of the most dazzling doctrines to have emerged from the Western philosophical tradition. Nietzsche himself considered it to be the most important discovery of his career and referred to it as his ‘formula for greatness’. It is not about imagining living the days of your life for a second time, but living them over and over again forever. This is how he put the idea:

  This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence.24

  Scholars have spent decades debating whether Nietzsche believed eternal recurrence to be a reality.25 I think it is more helpful to view it as a provocative thought experiment. It initially looks like the opposite of carpe diem thinking: Nietzsche’s vision is to contemplate life as unending rather than limited, a kind of endless loop of reincarnation. But there is a powerful seize-the-day message at the core of eternal recurrence: if you are not willing to live your life over and over again, then you’re probably not living it wisely and should make a change.26 Why are you spending years staying in a job that pays well but leaves you completely stressed out and with little free time, if you would not be willing to do so again in a subsequent life, ad infinitum? Why lose yourself in jealousies, grudges or self-pity unless you are prepared to do so for eternity? Or just imagine condemning yourself to watching TV game shows for aeons.

  In Nietzsche’s view, the test of whether we are making the right choices is if we are willing to bear with their consequences in a world of eternal recurrence. For some people this might be too much of a burden, with all our suffering and selfishness coming back to haunt us. For others, it could be a liberation, offering a useful rule of thumb for making life choices. It is the very fact that life is finite and doesn’t recur (as far as I know) that makes it so important to get it right first time, and eternal recurrence is our clever device to ensure we do so.

  Nietzsche’s canny concept is part of a long intellectual tradition of playing with the theme of repetition, ranging from Camus’ antihero Sisyphus who endlessly pushes a stone up a hill only to have it roll back down once he has reached the top, to Bill Murray eternally returning to the small-town nightmare of Groundhog Day. It undoubtedly takes us in a very different direction to an adage like ‘live each day as if it were your last’. Rather than making choices as if there were no tomorrow, eternal recurrence asks us to imagine a thousand tomorrows, and to live with the consequences of our decisions throughout our lives.

  LITTLE DEATHS, MANY LIVES

  The Japanese Buddhist monk Kamo no Chōmei, born in 1153, began his career as a court poet and musician in Kyoto. But the older he became, the more he wanted to escape worldly affairs into monastic seclusion. Finally, at age sixty, he built himself a tiny wooden hut, ten feet by ten feet, at nearby Mount Hino. Like the naturalist Henry David Thoreau over 600 years later, Chōmei approached it as an experiment in self-sufficient simple living, surviving on nuts gathered from the mountainside and weaving his own clothes from arrowroot. Surrounded by the sound of cuckoos and cicadas, he wrote Hōjōki (‘An Account of My Hut’), an essay whose opening lines have become a classic statement of the Buddhist concept of impermanence or mujō:

  The current of the flowing river does not cease, and yet the water
is not the same water as before. The foam that floats on stagnant pools, now vanishing, now forming, never stays the same for long. So, too, it is with the people and dwellings of the world.27

  Chōmei’s remarkable work chronicles the disasters he witnessed during his lifetime. He recalls the devastating fire of 1177 that burned Kyoto to ashes, a typhoon that flattened everything in its path, a violent earthquake that destroyed the homes of both rich and poor, and the terrible famine of 1181 that left tens of thousands dead and so many corpses on the streets that carriages could not pass by. He ponders the meaning of all this death and destruction from the vantage point of his mountain retreat:

  Nor is it clear to me, as people are born and die, where they are coming from and where they are going. Nor why, being so ephemeral in this world, they take such pains to make their houses pleasing to the eye. The master and the dwelling are competing in their transience. Both will perish from this world like the morning glory that blooms in the morning dew… When, after a boat passes, the white waves immediately fade away, I see my own transient experience in that.28

  So we are immersed in a universe of impermanence. There is no escape from the fleeting nature of existence. We spend our lives striving to create permanence – the homes we build, the careers we pursue – but this pursuit, Chōmei believes, is ultimately futile. Why become attached to material wealth or strive for prestige when, in the end, it is all destined to disappear? Instead, he prefers to spend the remaining days of his life praying to the Buddha and playing his koto alone in his hut, trying to imitate the sound of the wind as it passes through the pines.