Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  The idea of impermanence has resonated across human cultures, in both East and West, for more than two millennia. Like Chōmei, the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus turned to the metaphor of a river, remarking, ‘everything changes and nothing remains… you cannot step twice into the same stream’. Recognising the ephemeral nature of life and that everything is in flux offers an important way of tasting death. It suggests not just that our own lives are transient, but that they are composed of an infinite number of ‘little deaths’ or moments that pass into nothingness. A wind comes then passes, never to be felt in exactly the same way again. Our children grow up just once, and if we don’t pay attention we miss their precious early years. Like Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, our own lives are episodic: we may have our years of teenage discovery and angst, followed by our footloose twenties, which then die and pass into sensible middle age, when our mind matures but our vigour typically declines until, in the end, we are ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. We are constantly dying from the moment we are born.

  For Chōmei, viewing life in this way leads him to renounce worldly goods in accordance with the Buddhist principle of non-attachment, and to live in the absolute present as far as possible, appreciating the sublime and transient beauties of nature. I am reminded of a plumber I know who, when he sees flowers blooming by the roadside, stops his van and gets out to smell them. ‘You’ve got to stop,’ he tells me, ‘because they’re just not going to be around tomorrow.’ But a ‘little deaths’ philosophy could take us in many other directions. Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll for instance. If all is impermanence, and the past and future are mere constructs of our minds, then why not follow in the footsteps of the opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge and give yourself a one-way ticket to Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure-dome where you can drink the milk of paradise?

  I see another approach to impermanence in the many lives of David Bowie. Throughout his career he was known for his capacity to reinvent himself, especially through the creation of new public stage personas. These had complex origins, including in his study of Kabuki theatre and the influence of his first dance teacher, Lindsay Kemp.29 After starting out as a straight acoustic rocker in the 1960s, he exploded onto the stage in 1972 with his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, a bisexual alien rock superstar. He reinvented himself again with personas such as Aladin Sane and the Thin White Duke, then emerged in the 1980s as a peroxided pop idol who made albums like Let’s Dance. At the same time, Bowie turned himself into an actor, taking leading roles in films such as The Man Who Fell to Earth and theatrical productions like The Elephant Man.

  The enigmatic nature of his shape-shifting was commented on by Bowie himself in 1976 in a classically elliptical statement: ‘Bowie was never meant to be. He’s like a Lego kit. I’m convinced I wouldn’t like him, because he’s too vacuous and undisciplined. There is no definitive David Bowie.’30 Whether made from a Lego kit or not, Bowie’s many public lives can be viewed as a series of ‘little deaths’, where new Bowies were regularly being born as old Bowies died. As a performer, he was always in a state of transience, personifying the idea of impermanence – a theme reflected in his song ‘Changes’. In the end he did leave the stream of impermanence, dying of liver cancer, but not before seizing the day and making a final album, Blackstar, where he even sings about his own death. Many people have had their lives changed by David Bowie in different ways, but I think one of his legacies is to offer inspiration to those who can feel many selves bustling within their being, waiting to burst out – from the teenager who dreams of coming out into the open about their sexuality, to the frustrated accountant who wants to lead a more creative and adventurous life. The philosophy of little deaths can galvanise us to seize the moment, put an old role behind us, and invent ourselves anew.

  David Bowie becoming Ziggy Stardust in a backstage dressing room, 1973.

  THE DEATHBED TEST

  ‘What if my whole life has really been wrong?’31 These are the agonising words of Ivan Ilyich on his deathbed, tormented by the idea that he has lived his life in vain. The protagonist in Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a judicial prosecutor who has dedicated his career to rising through the legal ranks and helping his family achieve a place in respectable bourgeois society. His professional success has given him social standing, he has a beautiful home with antique furniture and gloved servants, he throws intimate and exclusive dinner parties for all the ‘right people’, and his daughter is set to marry a prosperous magistrate. What more could he want?

  But as he lies dying at the age of forty-five, having mortally injured himself in a fall while hanging curtains in his aristocratic St Petersburg apartment, he comes to realise that his aspirational life has been worthless. ‘I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me,’ he reflects bitterly.32 He might have had the perfect curtains, but his marriage was loveless and he had no true friends. As a judge he was powerful and respected, but his work ultimately left him feeling hollow and bored. His best memories were far away in his childhood. And so he dies, in pain, lonely and alone in the face of death, convinced that he has wasted his life.

  Tolstoy’s story provides us with a final carpe diem death taster: if we project our mind to the end of our life, when we are lying on our deathbed, how would we feel about it looking back? Would we be proud of our achievements? Would we feel that we had sucked the marrow from life? Or might we, like Ivan Ilyich, be filled with regret?

  While fictional characters can help us ponder such difficult questions, it may be even more useful to discover what real people who are near death tend to think about how they lived. What are the most common regrets of the dying? When an Australian palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, explored this question with her patients, who had between three and twelve weeks left to live, particular themes kept recurring. One of the most common – especially amongst men – was ‘I wish I didn’t work so hard’. People deeply regretted dedicating so much time to the treadmill of work, and felt they had missed their children growing up and their partner’s companionship. Another was ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.’ Further common regrets, found in many studies of the terminally ill, include people wishing they had made more effort to stay in touch with their closest friends, and that they had been more emotionally open and honest with people they loved – in one case a young man dying of HIV/AIDS lamented that he had hidden his homosexuality from his parents all his life.33 In the end, when people look back on their lives, they are rarely concerned with worldly achievements such as career success or reputation. What seems to matter above all is intimate relationships.

  There is, however, a certain bias in these studies. By focusing on people in their final moments, this is just when they are most likely to feel frightened and alone and in need of close personal connection and comfort. It doesn’t mean that emotional attachment is unimportant, just that it might be exaggerated in relation to other issues, such as whether people felt they had ‘made a difference’ during their lives, or been able to fully pursue and express their talents and passions.

  So I think we should supplement such studies by conducting some of our own, more personal, thought explorations that help us look back on our lives. Psychotherapists sometimes refer to these as ‘guided fantasies’, which are designed to help us reflect on life (and death). One common exercise is to imagine yourself at the end of your life and to write your own obituary (or even to write two of them, one ‘real’ and one ‘ideal’). Another is to imagine your own funeral and the eulogies that people might deliver. Are they talking about someone who had lived with integrity and made a difference in the world? Or maybe, reading between the lines, a person who had been a little too self-obsessed and a bit of a slacker? A more structured approach used by some therapists is to have you draw a straight line on a sheet of paper, which represents your birth at one end and death at the other. Yo
u then place an X to indicate where you are now. The task is simply to meditate on this for five minutes.34

  These exercises can help us think seriously about our own lives in retrospect and whether we might, in the end, find ourselves consumed by regret. Although artificial, for some people they can be an incentive to reassess priorities and take new pathways. In other words, to seize the day. Out of the many ways of envisioning ourselves at the end of life, my personal favourite – which I find both playful and profound – is inspired by a thought experiment from the neuroscientist David Eagleman.35

  Imagine yourself at a dinner party in the afterlife. Also present are all the other ‘yous’ who you could have been if you had made different choices. The you who studied harder for exams. The you who walked out on your first job and followed your dream. The you who became an alcoholic, and another you who nearly died in a car accident. The you who put more time into making your marriage work. You look around at these alternative selves. Some of them are impressive, while others seem smug and annoying. A few make you feel inadequate and lazy. So which of them are you curious to meet and talk to? Which would you rather avoid? Which do you envy? And are there any of these many yous whom you would rather be – or become?

  ROLLING THE DEATH DICE

  Maintaining an awareness of death can be difficult when both our own minds and everyday culture are so good at distracting us from the stark and elemental fact that our time on earth is ephemeral, limited and brief. The various death tasters I have explored each, in its own way, acts as an enlightening aide-mémoire, reminding us to honour Horace’s carpe diem credo, and that we are like the Venerable Bede’s sparrow with just a few moments to spread our wings in the warmth and light before we fly out of the hall into the darkness.

  In the spirit of that old line ‘life is a gamble’, just for fun I’ve made myself a Death Dice, on each side of which is one of the death tasters. Keeping one of these in your pocket is a modern equivalent of the medieval practice of placing a human skull on your desk – though somewhat less conspicuous, and hardly as macabre. Whenever I have to make a difficult choice, or feel frustrated or stuck in some way, I can simply take out my dice and give it a roll. I can’t say that I always strictly follow the instruction on the side that lands up, but it does serve as a prompt to new thoughts and perspectives that help me to avoid the perils of regret. As my Death Dice is probably not yet available in your local gift shop, I have created a do-it-yourself cut-out version that you can make in your own home with nothing more than scissors, glue and a little patience.

  Make your own Death Dice. Cut out and form into a cube. Roll daily, or when making major life decisions. Follow the instruction. Parental supervision not required.

  Tossing the dice of death is only the beginning of a carpe diem journey. The death tasters do not in themselves tell us precisely how we should go about seizing the day. They could drive us toward hedonism as much as mindful presence, or might provoke us to take risky opportunities, to revel in spontaneity, or enter the fray of political action. So we still need to delve into these different ways that human beings have found to seize the day and discover what role they might play in our lives. But before doing so, we must confront a fundamental barrier that Horace could never have foreseen: the hijacking of his most famous idea.

  Notes

  1 Duncan 1964, 66.

  2 Quoted in Solomon et al (2015, 218).

  3 Ariès 2008, 132.

  4 http://deathcafe.com/what/. There is also a growing Death Over Dinner movement that is spreading internationally: http://deathoverdinner.org/

  5 Paz 1967, 49.

  6 http://www.romankrznaric.com/outrospection/2015/10/19/3935

  7 Solomon et al 2015, 8–9, 45, 104; http://fivebooks.com/interview/sheldon-solomon-on-fear-of-death/

  8 Yalom 1980, 41. My thinking on death, and other key carpe diem topics such as freedom, owes an enormous debt to the writings of Irvin Yalom, especially his book Existential Psychotherapy.

  9 Solomon et al 2015, 87.

  10 Solomon et al 2015, 97.

  11 Yalom 1980, 53–54.

  12 For this interpretation of Klimt’s painting, see Néret (2015, 71) and Solomon et al (2015, 213).

  13 http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

  14 Aurelius 2006, Book 7 Section 40.

  15 Seneca 1932, Sections 1 and 7.

  16 Irvine 2009, 200.

  17 http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/apple-creates-34-2-million-metric-tons-greenhouse-gases-n345031; http://unstats.un.org/unsd/environment/air_greenhouse_emissions.htm

  18 http://www.historyandtheheadlines.abc-clio.com/ContentPages/ContentPage.aspx?entryId=1171741

  19 Kurosawa (1952).

  20 Niemiec and Schulenberg 2001, 395.

  21 Frankl 1987, 76.

  22 Frankl 1987, 111.

  23 http://www.firstshowing.net/2013/interview-about-time-writer-director-richard-curtis-on-happiness/

  24 https://archive.org/stream/completenietasch10nietuoft/completenietasch10nietuoft_djvu.txt

  25 Loeb 2013, 645–671.

  26 Cox 2011, 101.

  27 http://gutenberg.us/articles/h%C5%8Dj%C5%8Dki

  28 http://www.washburn.edu/reference/bridge24/Hojoki.html

  29 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jan/12/lindsay-kemp-david-bowie-ziggy-stardust-interview; http://thequietus.com/articles/09927-david-bowie-is-v-a-exhibition

  30 Buckley 2005, 1.

  31 Tolstoy 1960, 152.

  32 Tolstoy 1960, 148.

  33 http://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/; Hennezel 2012, 5, 68–72.

  34 Yalom 1980, 173–175.

  35 Eagleman 2009, 104–105.

  3

  How Carpe Diem Was Hijacked

  It isn’t easy to steal a philosophy of life, but there is no doubt that it has been done, and from right under our noses. Carpe diem has been hijacked.

  At first glance it seems unlikely. Both ‘carpe diem’ and ‘seize the day’ remain popular everyday catchphrases with a global reach: if you go to the tiny village of Shi Ban Qiao near Guilin in southern China, you might stumble across a hostel named Carpe Diem. The original Latin motto has been joined by modern equivalents such as YOLO – you only live once – which has become a widespread lifestyle meme and social media hashtag since the Canadian rapper Drake made it fashionable in his 2011 song ‘The Motto’. Spontaneous, seize-the-day living also appears to be on the rise: more than half of British holidaymakers book short breaks with less than a week’s notice thanks to smartphone technology and websites such as lastminute.com.1

  So carpe diem looks to be in good health. But scratch below the surface and a different, more troubling picture begins to appear. We are well aware of some of the persistent barriers to seizing the day, many of which have existed since Horace wrote his celebrated ode: a lack of self-confidence that derails our resolve, our inbuilt aversion to risk that breeds cautious decision-making, burdens of debt that chain down our lives, and exhausting jobs with long hours that leave us with little leftover diem to carpe.

  More startling, however, is the emergence of a crafty triumvirate of hijackers that have – without us even noticing – distorted the way we think about and practise seizing the day, and drawn it into the realm of relatively trivial and superficial choices. The hijackers in question? The cult of efficiency inherited from seventeenth-century Christianity and the Industrial Revolution; the rogue ideology of consumer capitalism that developed after World War One; and that deceptively pleasurable cultural addiction known as television, which has colonised our lives since the 1950s and remains dominant in the era of 24/7 digital entertainment. Together, these deep-rooted forces have ousted the carpe diem ideal Just Do It and supplanted it with a new set of aspirations: Just Plan It, Just Buy It and Just Watch It. In a later chapter we will also discover that there is a fourth hijacker – the mindfulness movement, which sends us the message to Just Breathe.

  Once we grasp the extent of
this hijacking, we will have gained the insights and inspiration we need to win back the seize-the-day ethos and embrace it in our lives.

  JUST PLAN IT: HOW THE CULT OF EFFICIENCY TOOK OVER OUR MINDS

  During a recent trip to Brazil I was struck by the spontaneous, carpe diem feel of everyday life. Friends randomly drop in on each other and sit chatting for hours. A bunch of kids in a favela suddenly start up an improvised high-velocity football match in the middle of the street, seemingly oblivious to the passing traffic. Someone brings out a guitar at a community barbecue and within moments everyone is singing along to the tune. People stay out dancing until the early hours even if it means oversleeping and turning up late for work. Buses still run, shops open and children go to school, but somehow it appears to be a nation without a To Do list, where the electronic calendar has failed to cast its long digital shadow.

  I was aware that I was falling for a romanticised version of Brazilian spontaneity: I met many stressed-out, uptight people too, who were constantly rushing to meetings and spent more time looking at their phones than at the world around them. Even so, upon returning to my home in Oxford I resolved to bring a little bit of the idealised Brazil into my life. But all my efforts to promote carpe diem living failed dismally. One Saturday I tried inviting several friends over for a last-minute Sunday lunch (with Brazilian cocktails on tap), but everyone was predictably busy busy busy. I tried knocking on my neighbours’ doors to drop in for a friendly afternoon chat, but typically felt I was imposing. I attempted to arrange spontaneous playdates for my kids but discovered that they needed scheduling two weeks in advance. I called three people to join me when I found out one of my favourite musicians was playing in town that night: one of them had to do his tax return, and the other two were dealing with a backlog of work emails. There was only one conclusion to draw: I was enveloped by a culture of Just Plan It, not Just Do It.